1–2 October 1867 • SS Quaker City en routefrom Jaffa, Syria, to Alexandria, Egypt (MS book inscription, damage emended: CtHMTH, UCCL 00154)
on back flyleaf and facing page:
This rose has a history.1explanatory note
pressed rose, now lost
Read this book carefully, Sammy, & study its precepts well. In urging this, I am inspired by the hope that you will derive as much satisfaction from its perusal as I have done. No words can express the comfort this little book has been to me. Often, in lonely nights at sea, I have taken her down & tackled her, first at one end & then at the other, & finally sailed in at the middle & waltzed out at both ends., while tears of gratitude suffused my eyes for the blessed missionary brick that3explanatory note
on a sheet affixed to the front flyleaf:
up to four lines of inscription (about 20 words) lost 4explanatory note
arabic new testament
printed at the
american mission press.
presented by the american mission
to
(Sam. L.Ⓐemendation Clemens)
passenger by the steamer
quaker city, Ⓐemendation the ship.
beirut, syria, september 1867.
written in pencil by Moffett on the page facing the title page: To Sammy Moffett | From his uncle
Probably Clemens’s caption for a rose pressed between the back flyleaf and facing page of this Arabic book (see note 3). The history to which it alludes has not been explained. Clemens’s decision to begin his inscription at the back (which to Western readers would appear to be the front) was deliberate.
Clemens was at sea for three different periods during October: in addition to 1–2 October (the one that seems the most likely for this letter), from 7 through 17 October (en route from Alexandria to Gibraltar), and from 25 through 31 October (en route from Gibraltar to Bermuda, where he arrived on 11 November). If, as also seems likely, he intended the book as an amusing gift for his nephew’s seventh birthday on 5 November, he could expect timely delivery in St. Louis by that date only if he sent it on or shortly after his arrival at Alexandria (2 October). But no evidence has been found which would positively exclude a letter date within the second or third October periods at sea.
This word falls at the end of the page facing the back flyleaf (originally blank) of the book, an Arabic translation of the New Testament printed in 1866 by the American Mission in Beirut and bound by F. Rosenzweig in maroon leather with gold tooling and brass corner pieces. It was the first such translation ever made: begun in 1847 by missionary Eli Smith, it was completed in 1865 by Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck. Seventy copies of this New Testament in Arabic were evidently prepared as gifts for the Quaker City passengers, presumably from a passenger list sent in advance of the ship’s arrival at Beirut. Each contained a printed presentation sheet pasted onto the front flyleaf (i.e., at what would seem to be the back of the book), with the passenger’s name inscribed in Arabic. Captain Duncan recorded that on the morning of 10 September, the day the Quaker City arrived in Beirut, the Reverend Henry Harris Jessup (1832’1910) came aboard and “invited all our party” to visit the boarding school for girls maintained by the mission at 5:00 that afternoon. Although a party of thirty or forty excursionists accepted the invitation and were presented with their Arabic testaments at the school, Clemens was probably not among them, and must therefore have received his copy later, aboard the ship, possibly that same evening or the next morning (Isham, 1; Severance, 152–53; Charles C. Duncan 1867, entry for 10 Sept).
This estimate of missing text is highly conjectural. It assumes that Clemens continued his remarks about beginning “first at one end & then at the other” by completing his last sentence and signing the letter in about an inch of space at the top of the printed presentation sheet. He clearly did write on this sheet, only a fragment of which survives, containing several of the printed words and two insertions in his hand. The printed text here has been supplied from the presumably identical printed sheet pasted onto the front flyleaf in the copy given to Charles Langdon; Clemens’s name in Arabic has been redrawn. (Four of these gift copies are known to have survived: Clemens’s and Langdon’s copies are now at CtHMTH, and are the only ones that have been examined; the existence of Gibson’s is established by Leamington Book Shop, description of lot 131; and Jackson’s copy is described in L. H. S. Robson to Cyril Clemens, 12 Mar 1935, PH in CU-MARK.) Both the text of the printed statement and Clemens’s glosses on it may be incompletely recovered.
MS, damage emended, Jonathan Goodwin Collection, Mark Twain Memorial, Hartford (CtHMTH). Clemens inscribed this now-incomplete letter on the back and front flyleaves of his copy of an 1866 Arabic translation of the New Testament (Beirut, Syria: American Mission Press). Some seventy copies of this book were given to the Quaker City passengers by the American Mission. Each copy presumably included a printed presentation sheet, with the passenger’s name inscribed in Arabic, pasted to the front flyleaf (see pp. 96–97 nn. 3–4). Clemens wrote a single line—‘This rose has a history.’ (95.2)—on the back flyleaf; he began his letter proper (‘At Sea, October, 1867.’) on the page facing this flyleaf (95.4); and he probably continued and signed his letter near the top of the printed presentation sheet, almost all of which has since been cut away and lost, leaving only two holograph insertions partly visible, plus the final line of type (see the illustrations below). On the assumption that the printed presentation sheet in the copy of the book given to Charles Langdon (also at CtHMTH) was identical with the one in Clemens’s copy—save only the Arabic names inscribed on each—the missing part of the printed text has been supplied from Langdon’s copy. The books themselves measure 4 13/16 by 7 ¾ inches (12.2 by 19.7 cm); the presentation sheets measure 4 ¼ by 5 5/16 inches (10.7 by 13.5 cm). (A second Arabic inscription below the last printed line in Langdon’s copy transliterates “Nizam Mushaqa,” a proper name or possibly “rule of Mushaqa,” a modification of the printed date. This second Arabic inscription is absent from Clemens’s copy, but the difference should not affect the reconstitution of the printed lines above it.) Clemens’s name in Arabic (a transliteration of “Samu’il Clemens”) has also been recreated—in this case, by relying on the expertise and generosity of Michael Fahy in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and professors Mounah A. Khouri and Muhammad Siddiq in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who analyzed the transliterated name in Langdon’s copy (which reads “Karlus Landon”) and wrote out Clemens’s name in a comparable style (that of a Western missionary, not a native speaker) for reproduction in this transcription of Clemens’s letter.
L2 , 95–97; City Book Auction, lot 88; Brownell 1945.
It is not known when the damage to this letter occurred, but the earliest description of it now known was published in 1945 in an auction catalog (City Book Auction, lot 88). The letter was donated to CtHMTH in 1972 by Connecticut collector Jonathan Goodwin as part of a large gift of Mark Twain books and manuscripts.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.