3 December 1871 • Homer, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00684)
Livy darling, send Larned’s notes to me at some town where they will have plenty of time to get there—& then the day I get there telegraph me that you have sent them—so when I get the dispatch I will ask the Secretary for the letter.2explanatory note Maybe the notes have gone to Elmira, however—I telegraphed Bowen & Rogers to send them to me there, but they hadn’t arrived when I was there.3explanatory note
It is all right, honey,—had already sent Ma $300 on Thanksgiving Day—or rather, the day before.4explanatory note
Tell the Brooklyn writer that the Artemas Ward poem is in Littell’s Living Age for March,1867. Artemus died January 187 1867Ⓐemendation.5explanatory note
Let the bill for the shirts be sent to Redpath & Fall. They’ll attend to the payment. What a fool the man was to send it to Hartford. Didn’t tell him to.
I am very, very, glad you have given the nightly care of the cubbie into Margaret’s hands.6explanatory note Now darling please don’t ever take charge of him again at night. I make this as a loving & special request.
Thank you most kindly for writing all those letters to people for me.
Answered Plummer’s letter—told him I was glad he was safely delivered of his first child—the tape worm—but advised him in future to attend to his readings & let his new bride attend to the census.7explanatory note
Indeed it would be nice to have Mother Fairbanks with us next spring—be sure & invite her—urge her—command her.8explanatory note
Ah my darling, people will come in just when I am going to write you a long letter—& here they have been hour after hour till at last I must throw down this pencil & rush to bed—probably the only man now awake in this whole town.
With a whole world of love to you & kisses for mother & the splendid cubbie.—
Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor Forest & Hawthorne | Hartford | Conn postmarked: homer n.y. dec 3 Ⓐemendation
Clemens performed before a “large assemblage at Barber Hall” in Homer on Saturday, 2 December. According to James P. Foster, a clergyman whom he met two days later, the Artemus Ward lecture was “unexceptionably delightful; the stories were told in a masterly manner, and were chaste and delightful; the envelope of pure humor often covering a touching moral” (Foster). Clemens spent Sunday, 3 December, in Homer and then took the train to Geneva, New York, the following day.
That is, the secretary of the association sponsoring Clemens’s lecture.
The notes were for $3,000 that Josephus N. Larned had borrowed in April 1870. The loan was to have been repaid in one year, but had evidently been extended. Dennis Bowen and Sherman S. Rogers were Clemens’s Buffalo lawyers (16 and 17 Apr 70 to the Langdonsclick to open link). The Elmira visit probably occured on the weekend of 25–26 November, in between lectures at Reading, Pennsylvania, and Bennington, Vermont, at which time Clemens would have seen his newborn niece, Julia Olivia Langdon, mentioned in his letter of 27 November to Oliviaclick to open link.
This 29 November payment to Jane Clemens was the latest in the series of more or less regular, but generally smaller, payments Clemens had been making since 1868 ( L3 , 120, 121 n. 1, 425 n. 2 bottom; 7 Jan 70 to Fairbanks, n. 7click to open link; 17 Feb 71 to JLC and family, n. 4click to open link).
Artemus Ward died on 6 March 1867. Littell’s Living Age reprinted the poem on 20 April 1867 (15 Nov 71 to OLC, n. 4click to open link). The “Brooklyn writer” has not been identified.
This nursemaid had been with the household since early in 1871 (14 Mar 71 to Crane, n. 2click to open link).
Olivia had enclosed C. B. Plummer’s letter in her own of 28 November. Plummer was a minor platform performer who was a friend of Joseph T. Goodman’s in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1867–68, and had admired Clemens since seeing him lecture there in April 1868. He later became a book agent in Lowell, Massachusetts. His repertoire included selections from Shakespeare, Dickens, Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier, as well as Mark Twain. On 13 December the American Publishing Company sent Plummer a copy of The Innocents Abroad, at Clemens’s expense. In San Francisco in January 1872, he “brought down the house” with the following passages from it, which he read in “Mark Twain’s drawling twang”: the discovery of the corpse by moonlight and the “skinned man” sculpture, both from chapter 18, and the tomb of Adam, from chapter 53 (SLC’s account statement from the American Publishing Company for 15 Apr 72, CU-MARK; “Plummer’s Entertainment,” San Francisco Evening Post, 6 Jan 72, 3; “Amusements,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Jan 72, 3; “Professor Plummer,” San Francisco Morning Call, 6 Jan 72, 3; Plummer to SLC, 25 Mar 86, 14 Nov 90, both in CU-MARK; L2 , 213 n. 4; Doten 1973, 2:962, 971).
Olivia had written Clemens on 28 November, sending her letter to Homer, New York (CU-MARK):
llc
My Dear Heart,
It is too bad to give you the last end of my day when the life and energy are rather gone out of me—
This morning soon after breakfast I went over to Mary Burtons, had a very pleasant call, spoke to her about moving the piano which she says she will do at once, I am glad because I can make the room seem more settled—
Mary says she feels badly to think she is growing old, her last birth day was her 26th and she says she was really low spirited about it— I told her if she had a little one she would not feel so, she said she had no doubt of that— I had not hesatation about making the remark to her because she prefers not to have children is the reason that she does not have them— I never think about feeling badly to think that I am growing older— I hope that age will make me more worthy the respect of my husband and children— I do long (you would not allow me to say aspire I suppose) to be worthy of them, to be worthy of such a dear sweet baby as mine is, I hope that as he grows older I shall be thoroughly in sympathy with him in all ways—
Today I took him down town, he rode on the front seat in Margaret’s arms, he was painfully afraid of Patrick, he would begin to cry when P. got onto the seat, then would look up to Margaret for reassurance— Oh Youth he is such a delight to me I am so thankful for him— If anything happens to me you must love him awfully—
Mother and I have finished The United Netherlands, and commenced Dickens’ Childs History of England, it is written in the very simplest style, we read this evening only one chapter of 6 or 7 pages and it went over all the time of the rule of the Romans, the Druids and so on, I am afraid if that chapter is a fair sample that it is almost too condensed, I am fond of that time of the Druidical religion, and wanted to hear more of it— There is more in the Cyclopedia than is given there—
But I presume after the Norman Conquest that it will not be quite so condensed—
I hope that I shall get a letter from you tomorrow morning, I do like to hear from you little man, because you know—well you know all about it—
I send you a letter of C. B. Plummer, if you could tell me what to write him I would write for you— I will send him one of your photographs— He sent one photograph of himself in his natural character and fourteen of himself representing other characters.
I love you and want to see you, oh how I shall long to look on the dear face before I can see it again, but then in the meantime I will read new and old love letters, and be as content as possible—
All is going well at home, I like Ellen just as well as at first—
Mother sends love and I know the Cubbie wants to, but poor little fellow he cannot speak yet—though he certainly has a speaking face—
Do you pray for me Youth? oh we must be a prayerful family—pray for me as you used to do— I am not prayerful as of old but I believe my heart prays——
P. S. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Mother Fairbanks with me next spring?—
The postscript clearly anticipated Olivia’s approaching confinement. Mrs. Fairbanks, her husband, Abel, and their daughter Mollie visited the Clemenses in Elmira in the week following the birth there of Olivia Susan Clemens on 19 March 1872 (“Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 26 Mar 72, 3; Fairbanks to OLC, 1 Apr 72, CSmH).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L4 , 503–6; LLMT , 362, brief paraphrase.
See Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.