28 October 1871 • Great Barrington, Mass. (MS: Slotta, UCCL 00667)
Midnight.Ⓐemendation
Livy Darling— the lecture went off very handsomely, to a crowded house1explanatory note—& now I’m going to bed—for I love you very very very much & am sleepy & stupid. Love to mother & the cubbie—
Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor Forest & Hawthorne | Hartford | Conn. uncanceled, preprinted three-cent stamp
In reviewing Clemens’s 27 October performance, the Great Barrington Berkshire Courier of 1 November “maintained that of the crowd of four hundred, ‘at least three hundred and ninety . . . went away dissatisfied and disappointed. . . . we can only account for his plagiaristic lecture by the . . . same charge he lays upon Artemus Ward—laziness’” (Fatout 1960, 156).
MS, collection of Robert T. Slotta.
L4 , 482–483; Chester L. Davis 1977, 1–2; Christie 1991, lot 200, excerpt.
The MS, part of the Samossoud Collection in the late 1940s when it was transcribed by Dixon Wecter, was acquired before 1952 by Chester L. Davis, Sr., from Clara Clemens Samossoud (see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance). After Davis’s death in 1987, the MS was owned by Chester L. Davis, Jr. In 1991, it was bought by the present owner.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.