13 March 1869 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, damage emended: CSmH, UCCL 00276)
What a time of it you do have with your fires! It was too bad—too bad that after all your pains, all your hard work refitting & furnishing the house after the other calamity Ⓐemendation, this new one should come and Ⓐemendation spoil it all. Still, you do not Ⓐemendation seem cast down by it, & I hope cheerfulness will continue Ⓐemendation to abide with you. Only Ⓐemendation Six o’clock in the morning! Only to think—if I had been Ⓐemendation there, I would have been so drenched with water, & so vexed with smoke, & so annoyed with the rushing & shouting of the firemen all about me, that I would have had to cover up my head with the bedclothes, & even then I doubt if I could have Ⓐemendation slept at all. By George, I would have had to got up mighty early. It is dreadful to think of.1explanatory note
No—I would have got up at the first alarm, & helped—that is what I would have done—& you know it.
I sent your whole letter to Livy, just as it was.2explanatory note Formerly, I would have had to cut it, but now she takes an interest in everything that I do. Wonderful girl—I just like her. She is just counting the minutes till I come again, I expect. {Well, she is—you needn’t laugh.} I shall be there next Wednesday evening, & stay till she & I read 500 or 600 pages of proof together—two or three weeks. Think of it! Splendid girl. She’ll take to you, easy enough. Don’t be afraid about that.3explanatory note So you see I am publishing a book—but don’t ask any more dog-goned questions about it! You ought to see the pictures—they are very gay—& they are ingeniously drawn & daintily engraved, too. I have examined proofs of eighty of them, so far, and like them all. I would have sent you some if your letter had come two hours sooner—but I only could keep a dozen (cut them out of the pages while reading proof,)—mailed them to Livy at noon. The others I cannot get yet. They want to put a Ⓐemendation stell steel portrait of me in, for a frontispiece, but I refused—I hate the effrontery of shoving the pictures of nobodies under people’s noses in that way, after the fashion of paten Ⓐemendation quacks & negro minstrels. Told them to make a handsome wood engraving of the Quaker City in a storm, instead. We’ll have Ⓐemendation Dan in (copied neatly from his photo.)—& Jack with his buckskin patch—& far-fetched Ⓐemendation imaginary cuts portraits of old Andrews, Cutter & Greer., the “Interrogation Point.” There are some imaginary “Old Masters” that are good.—rich, I should sh say Ⓐemendation. Because I am down on them fellers.4explanatory note What shall I call the book? I want a name that is striking, comprehensive, & out of the common order—something not worn & hackneyed, & not commonplace. I had chosen “The New Pilgrims’ Progress,” but it is thought that many dull people will shudder at that, as at least taking the name of a consecrated book in vain, & perhaps burlesquing it, within. I have thought of t Ⓐemendation “The Irruption of the Jonathans—Or, the Modern Pilgrim’s Progress”—you see the second title Ⓐemendation can remain, if I only precede it with something that will let it down easy. Give me a name, please.5explanatory note
Nasby called on me the other night, & we sat up talking all night. Like him first rate—liked his lecture, too—think it is a lecture to be proud of. I Ⓐemendation go to Boston to-night to have a bit of a time with him & the literary nobs—he promises a good time. But shall be in Elmira Wednesday.
No, ma’ am—I won’t make Cleveland only a way station for Elmira—I mean to come Ⓐemendation there & stay just as long Ⓐemendation as I can, when I start to California. Because Ⓐemendation I want to see you, the worst kind.
What do you think of Livy? Makes me feel awful to think of that first letter she wrote me—remember it?6explanatory note And that poem in the Atlantic—representing her out of reach—
“And all my life shall lift its hands In earnest longing toward thy face”7explanatory note—I wasn’t going to regard her at that distance.
I send my love to all the good old household.
Dutifully & Lovingly
On Saturday, 6 March, the Cleveland Herald reported that a fire had broken out in the attic of the Fairbanks home “at six o’clock, on Friday night.”
Owing to the secluded position of the fire a hole had to be cut through the roof before the water could be brought to bear upon it, but once when this was done the firemen made short work with their natural enemy. Everything was admirably managed, not an article was removed from the house or lost, though the furniture and ceiling suffered a good deal from the water. ... The loss cannot yet be estimated, though it is considerable. The building and its contents were fully insured. This is the second fire at the same place within a few weeks. (“Fire,” 3)
The previous fire occurred on 1 February (see 5 Feb 69 to Fairbanks, n. 3click to open link).
Mrs. Fairbanks and three of her children had met Olivia in 1868, when they spent the week of 10–16 June with the Langdons in Elmira—well before Clemens’s momentous visit that August. Although the two women had since exchanged letters, they did not meet again until Olivia’s wedding in February 1870 ( L2 , 231 n. 9, 351 n. 2).
The book eventually had a double frontispiece: “The Quaker City in a Storm” at Clemens’s suggestion, and “The Pilgrim’s Vision” at Bliss’s (see 20 Apr 69 to Bliss, n.2click to open link). Daniel Slote’s portrait (“Dan”), obviously drawn from a photograph, appeared in chapter 27; John A. (“Jack”) Van Nostrand was depicted in chapter 57 wearing buckskin-seated trousers (“Rear Elevation of Jack”). The ostensible portraits of the other Quaker City passengers mentioned were indeed “far-fetched” and “imaginary”: Dr. Edward Andrews (“The Oracle”) was caricatured in chapter 7; a picture of Bloodgood Haviland Cutter (“Poet Lariat”) in chapter 10 was a recognizable likeness of Clemens himself; and the illustration of Frederick H. Greer (“Interrogation Point”) in chapter 7 looked suspiciously like Charles J. Langdon. Five imaginary “Old Masters,” sketches of “monks and martyrs,” appeared in chapter 23 (Hirst, 210–13).
Fairbanks’s reply to this request survives only in Clemens’s response: see 24 Mar 69 to Fairbanksclick to open link. His search for a title to replace the one he had chosen in the fall of 1868 may have been prompted by a confrontation with the president of the American Publishing Company, Sidney Drake, sometime during the week Clemens had just spent in Hartford ( L2 , 275 n. 1; Geer 1869, 495). In 1906 Clemens recalled that as soon as he had gotten “free of the lecture field,” he hastened to Hartford, only to find his book at a standstill:
Bliss said that the fault was not his; that he wanted to publish the book but the directors of his Company were staid old fossils and were afraid of it. They had examined the book, and the majority of them were of the opinion that there were places in it of a humorous character. Bliss said the house had never published a book that had a suspicion like that attaching to it, and that the directors were afraid that a departure of this kind could seriously injure the house’s reputation; that he was tied hand and foot, and was not permitted to carry out his contract. One of the directors, a Mr. Drake—at least he was the remains of what had once been a Mr. Drake—invited me to take a ride with him in his buggy, and I went along. He was a pathetic old relic, and his ways and his talk were also pathetic. He had a delicate purpose in view and it took him some time to hearten himself sufficiently to carry it out, but at last he accomplished it. He explained the house’s difficulty and distress, as Bliss had already explained it. Then he frankly threw himself and the house upon my mercy and begged me to take away “The Innocents Abroad” and release the concern from the contract. I said I wouldn’t—and so ended the interview and the buggy excursion. Then I warned Bliss that he must get to work or I should make trouble. He acted upon the warning, and set up the book and I read the proofs. (AD, 21 May 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE , 147, and AMT , 158–59)
Charles Dudley Warner, later Clemens’s Hartford neighbor and his collaborator on The Gilded Age, recalled that Bliss secured permission to proceed only after addressing the company’s board of directors, as follows:
“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “you have all had an opportunity to express your opinion as to whether or not our company should publish this work, and your collective decision, based upon your individual views, seems to be decidedly against the publication of it. Now that you have had your opportunity to publish this book, and have rejected it, I want to say to you that I shall immediately enter into negotiations with Mark Twain for the purpose of publishing the book on my own personal account. The humor of it is new, I’ll admit, but I am positive that it will be cordially welcomed by the American people for this reason, if for no other. To me the reading of the manuscript has been a delight. I am willing to risk a considerable amount of my personal means to publish it, for I am satisfied that it will prove a most profitable venture for me. That is all, gentlemen.” (E. J. Edwards, 8)
Olivia’s initial rejection of Clemens’s proposal of marriage, no longer extant. For his reply to it, see L2 , 247–49.
From William Winter’s “Love’s Queen,” published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1868:
But all my life shall reach its hands Of lofty longing toward thy face. (22:475)The poem’s speaker expressed enraptured contentment with his loved one’s sun-like inaccessibility.
MS, damage emended, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. CSmH, call no. HM 14246.
L3 , 168–171; MTMF , 83–86.
see Huntington Library, pp. 582–83.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.
Portions of the MS are torn (the right margin of MS page 1, a lower left portion of page 4, and the left margin of page 6), obliterating some characters or portions of characters. See below for illustrations of damaged pages 1 and 4, editorially reconstructed.