27 February 1869 • Lockport, N.Y. (MS, damage emended: NPV, UCCL 00262)
I enclose $20 for Ma (No. 10,.) I thought I was getting a little ahead of her little assessment of $35 a month, but find Ⓐemendation I am falling behindhand instead Ⓐemendation, & have let her go without Ⓐemendation money.1explanatory note Well, I did not mean Ⓐemendation to do it. But you see when Ⓐemendation people have been getting ready Ⓐemendation for months, in a quiet way to Ⓐemendation get married, they are bound to grow stingy, & go to saving up money against the awful day when it is sure to be needed. I am particularly anxious to place myself in a position Ⓐemendation where I can carry on my married life in good shape on my own hook, because I have paddled my own canoe so long that I could not be satisfied, now, to let anybody help me—& my proposed father-in-law is naturally so liberal that it would be just like him to want to give us a start in life. But I don’t want it that way. I can start myself. I don’t want any help. I can run the institution without any outside assistance; & I shall have a wife who will stand by me like a soldier Ⓐemendation through thick & thin, & never complain. She is only a little body, but she hasn’t her peer in Christendom. I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion imperatively demands a two- hundred dollar diamond one—& told her it was typical of her future lot—namely, that she would have to flourish on substantials rather than luxuries. {But you see I know the girl—she don’t care anything about luxuries, for and although she has a respectable fortune in jewels, she wears none of any consequence. One seldom sees a diamond about her.} She is a splendid girl. She spends no money but her usual year’s allowance, & she spends nearly every cent of that on other people. She will be a good sensible Ⓐemendation little wife, without any airs about her. I don’t make intercession for her beforehand & ask you to love her, for there isn’t any use in that—you couldn’t help it if you were to try. In Ⓐemendation fact, you had better, in self-defence, take warning by Mrs. Brooks & all of Livy’s other friends, & try to learn to hate her—for I warn you that whosoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is her willing slave forevermore. I take my affidavit on that statement. Her father & mother & brother embrace Ⓐemendation her & kiss her & pet her Ⓐemendation constantly, precisely as if she Ⓐemendation were a sweetheart, instead of Ⓐemendation a blood relation. She has unlimited Ⓐemendation power over her father, Ⓐemendation & yet she never uses it except Ⓐemendation to make him help people who Ⓐemendation stand in need of help, & lavishes Ⓐemendation
seven lines (about 40 words) missing 2explanatory note
allowance. Ⓐemendation
But if I get fairly started Ⓐemendation on the subject of my bride, I never shall get through—& so I will quit Ⓐemendation right here. I went to Elmira a little over a week ago, & staid four days & then had to go to New York on business. Now Lockport wants a Ⓐemendation lecture—shall talk to-night & Ⓐemendation Monday night,3explanatory note & then I shall go Ⓐemendation to Hartford, avoiding New Ⓐemendation York city if possible so as to Ⓐemendation save time. I will
thirteen lines (about 75 words) missing 4explanatory note
Since March 1868 Clemens had been sending his mother an average of forty dollars per month, slightly more than she had requested, and therefore he was in fact “a little ahead” on his commitment to her. Since early December 1868 he had sent the money in twenty-dollar increments, which she recorded and numbered consecutively on the blank pages of one of his old piloting notebooks. Most of the letters enclosing these payments have not survived, but her record, kept in Clemens’s 1860–61 notebook, shows that she received twenty dollars from Clemens on 18 and 26 January 1869 (payments she numbered 7 and 8), on 3 February (numbered 9), and on 3, 6, and 30 March (numbered 10, 11, and 12) (JLC, 4).
If, as seems likely, the missing passage included some further remarks about Olivia which Clemens asked be kept private, it was probably excised by his immediate family before the remaining text was passed on to other, less intimate, relatives and friends. Whatever the motive, Clemens’s family were much the most likely persons to have removed both this and the later passage as well, for by the time Albert Bigelow Paine first published the letter ( MTB , 1:378–79), the damage had already been done.
That is, Saturday, 27 February, in Lockport, and Monday, 1 March, in Geneseo, New York—but the Lockport lecture had to be postponed (see 28 Feb 69 to OLLclick to open link).
Although paper sufficient for only thirteen lines is demonstrably missing (the bottom two-thirds of manuscript page number 6), it is likely that more of the original letter was destroyed or removed. For on the evening of 28 February, Clemens told Olivia that he had written “quite a long letters home & to Mrs. Fairbanks last night & this morning.” If he had concluded this letter home at the bottom of page 6, it would have been only two-thirds as long as the letter to Fairbanks.
MS, damage emended, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L3 , 120–122; MTB , 1:378–79, MTL , 156–57, with omissions; MTMF , 101, brief quotations; Harnsberger, 56, excerpts.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 583–85.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.
The letter was written on six half-sheets of flimsy paper that has badly deteriorated. Several words, characters, and punctuation marks are wholly or partly missing from pages 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, but most are readily conjectured from the context. Two substantial passages are missing from pages 5 and 6. The manuscript has been mounted on backing sheets; upon the backing sheet of page 1 Albert Bigelow Paine has supplied several missing words, but his conjectures are not completely sound, although some may have been based on the manuscript when it was in a less damaged state. Readings in the present text that were first supplied by Paine on the manuscript backing sheet are followed in the table below by ‘(ABP)’; readings first supplied by Paine in MTL are followed by ‘( MTL )’; the remaining readings are conjectures by the present editors. See below for illustrations of damaged pages 1, 5, and 6, editorially reconstructed.