7 January 1869 • Rockford, Ill. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00219)
Hoping to see you Jan. 22, I shall merely drop you a line—must write to Livy to-night yet. She wants me to thank you from her heart for proposing to publish that extract from my Christmas letter to you, & she wants a copy of the paper—poor girl, anybody who could convince her that I was not a humorist would secure her eternal gratitude! She thinks a humorist is something perfectly awful. I never put a joke in a letter to her without feeling a pang. Best girl in the world. So Ⓐemendation please send me that letter Ⓐemendationif you can find it, & I will fix the extract for publication & return it to you. Anything that will please her, suits me, though it exasperate all the world beside.2explanatory note
Tell Miss Allie3explanatory note not to think hard of me for being so stupid & useless at the party New Year’s night—I could not help it, I was so tired & miserable & felt so out of place among so much sparkle & animation. I will make it all up next time by being just & as attentive & thoughtful of her welfare as ever I can. She knows I would have done better il if ⒶemendationI could. Love & the kindest remembrances to all of you there at my pleasant home in Cleveland. Ⓐemendation—Love to Severance, also, & his “Bevy.” 4explanatory note
On 6 January, just a few hours before he wrote this letter, Clemens lectured in Brown’s Hall, which seated a thousand (Wallace, 7–8). The Rockford Register described the performance and its reception:
We never saw an audience so determined to laugh “out loud,” in all our experience, and we confess to having laughed ourselves until our sides fairly ached, and we could see several speakers swimming in the tears in our eyes. Mr. Twain’s dry humor and inimitable drollery we never saw equalled, and he conducted his hearers from one laugh into another with such rapidity that scarce a breathing spell was afforded between the outbursts which, as a friend remarked after the lecture, followed each other like the reverberations of thunder. Mr. T. also gave his audience several specimens of his descriptive ability. His account of the Sphynx, being our ideal of poetic thought embodied in the choicest language. It was certainly one of the finest bits of description that we have met with in many a day.
We congratulate those who were present, and we feel deep sympathy for those who remained away and missed a grand opportunity of hearing a speaker who, as a humorist and wit, stands unrivaled on the American stage. (“Mark Twain Is Coming,” Galena [Ill.] Gazette, 26 Jan 69, 3, reprinting the Rockford [Ill.] Register, 9 Jan 69)
Olivia “was rich, beautiful and intellectual,” according to her cousin and close friend Harriet Lewis, “but she could not see through a joke, or see anything to laugh at in the wittiest sayings unless explained in detail” (Paff, 2). In part to please her Clemens was about to allow the Cleveland Herald to present him “favorably to the public, in another role than that of humorist” by publishing the following “charming extracts” from his “private correspondence”:
“Christmas is here—eighteen hundred and sixty-nine years ago the stars were shedding a purer lustre above the barren hills of Bethleham, and possibly flowers were being charmed to life in the dismal plains where the shepherds watched their flocks, and the hovering angels were singing, peace on earth, good will to men—for the Savior was come. Don’t you naturally turn in fancy now to that crumbling wall and its venerable olives, and to the mouldy domes and turrets of Bethleham? And don’t you picture it all out in your mind as we saw it many months ago? And don’t the picture mellow in the distance and take to itself again the soft, unreal resemblance that poetry and tradition give to the things they hallow?
And now that the greasy monks and the noisy mob, and the leprous beggars are gone, and all the harsh cold hardness of real stone and unsentimental glare of sunlight are banished from the vision, don’t you realize as in other years, that Jesus was born there, and that the angels did sing in the still air above, and that the wondering shepherds did hold their breath and listen as the mysterious music floated by? I do. It is more real than ever, and I am glad, a hundred times glad, that I saw Bethlehem, though at the time it seemed that that sight had swept away forever every pleasant fancy and every cherished memory that ever the City of the Nativity had ever stored away in my mind and heart.” (“Mark Twain,” Cleveland Herald, 16 Jan 69, 4)
For Olivia’s thoughts on the publication of this passage, see 14 Jan 69 to OLL, n. 8click to open link. For an account of the changes Clemens may have imposed on its original version, which was part of his 24 and 25 December letter to Mrs. Fairbanksclick to open link, see L2 , 583–86.
Alice Holmes Fairbanks (b. 1847), Mrs. Fairbanks’s stepdaughter ( L2 , 132 n. 10).
Solon and Emily Severance’s three young children: Julia, the eldest, and twins Allen and Mary Helen ( L2 , 139 n. 5).
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14236).
L3 , 8–9; Wecter 1947, 66, and LLMT , 12, brief quotation; MTMF , 63–64.
see Huntington Library, pp. 582–83.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.