26 April 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00606)
My! how you startled us! And even as it is, we don’t feel altogether comfortable about you. We shall feel a good deal more comfortable when we hear that you are out again. I shall, I assure you, for I have lately had experience of sick folks who were going to come right up, & but don’t for an Ⓐemendation matter of two months. However, Livy is making progress in the last two or three days. She walks three or four steps, by holding on to a chair, & every day she rides a fl few blocks. She is bright & cheerful. We look forward to our Cleveland trip, for you will have a couple of months to get well in in the meantime, & that will do, won’t it?
I am pegging n Ⓐemendation away at my book, but it will have no success. The papers have found at last the courage to pull me down off my pedestal & cast slurs at me—& that is simply a popular author’s death rattle. Though he wrote an inspired book after that, it would not save him.1explanatory note
We send a world of love to you all. Tell us how your hurts are, now.2explanatory note
The only known “slurs” of recent date were reviews of Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance. The Boston Literary World for 1 April 1871 commented:
The prime difficulty that meets the critic is one of classification: he feels like a naturalist gazing upon Barnum’s “What Is It?” Is it “fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring”? The evidence is purely circumstantial, extraneous, and very unsatisfactory. The name of the author justifies the suspicion that the work is one of humor; but the book itself affords not the feeblest fibre of corroboration, and the suspicion is dismissed as unwarrantable. . . . We are sincerely sorry to see Mark Twain, who has done some admirable work, lending himself to a mere money-catching scheme like this. (“Mark Twain’s Autobiography,” 1:165)
Also in April, in Cincinnati, The Eclectic: A Monthly Magazine of Useful Knowledge wrote:
It is well that the publishers put “Burlesque” in brackets on the title page, else many persons would scarcely have seen that the author intended to be peculiar. This making fun for so-much a page, and grinding it out monthly to meet the demands of publishers, is not usually very laughable. Indeed, on the contrary, the material has frequently a funereal character that impresses one unpleasantly, as he wonders if the mental decrepitude does not presage early death. (“Book Notices,” 3 Apr 71: 256)
Mrs. Fairbanks’s injuries have not been identified.
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino (CSmH, call no. HM 14274).
L4 , 381; MTMF , 153.
see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.