10 and 11 January 1872 • Wheeling, W. Va., and Pittsburgh, Pa. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00714)
Livy darling, it was perfectly splendid—no question about it—the livest, quickest audience I almost ever saw in my life.1explanatory note
This was the largest audience ever assembled in Pittsburgh to hear a lecture, some say. Great numbers were turned away—couldn’t get in; stage was jam-full; three all the private boxes full— b◇ Ⓐemendation Seems to me there were three tiers of them.2explanatory note
Sweetheart I sent the $300 draft purposely for Hooker—came near having it drawn in his name——however it is no matter.3explanatory note
Am so glad you are having such jolly sociable times with our Elmira folks & the Clemenses & the neighbors.4explanatory note I would give the world (if I had another one like it,) to be out of this suffering lecture business & at home with you. Ⓐemendation—for I love you , Livy darling.
If I had been at Mrs. Stowe’s reading5explanatory note & they wanted any help, I would have read about “Fat-Cholley Aither ns” & the rest of my little darkey’s gossip. I think I could swing my legs over the arms of a chair & that boy’s spirit would descend upon me & enter into me. I am glad Warner likes the sketch. I must keep it for my volume of “Lecturing Experiences”—but I’m afraid I’ll have to keep it a good while, for I can’t do without those unapproachable names of the Aithens family—nor “Tarry Hote,”—nor any of those things—i & if I were to print the sketch now I should have the whole “fo’-teen” after me.6explanatory note
As
Well, love in abundance to you—& to the cubbie & the folks.7explanatory note
Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor Forest & Hawthorne Ⓐemendation | Hartford | Conn. Ⓐemendation return address: if not delivered within 10 days, to be returned to postmarked: pittsburgh pa. jan i◇ Ⓐemendation
According to the Wheeling Intelligencer, “The hall was crowded with the most intelligent and refined people of the city, who had a high appreciation of the lecture, if we may judge from the almost continuous laughter and applause that greeted it.” The lecturer
very much resembles the pictures that are meant to represent him in his great book, “Innocents Abroad,” except that he don’t wear the check trowsers on the lecture stand that he wore in the holy land. He is a youngish looking man of somewhere about thirty-five, not handsome, but having a bright and intelligent look, and eyes with a merry twinkle that put him at once en rapport with an audience, and that have a fashion of snapping just as he comes to the crisis of the joke. He was dressed very neatly in a black suit, the upper garment being black frock coat, closely buttoned. He is clean shaven except a heavy dark moustache; and his manner of wearing his hair, which is abundant, shows that he is his own tonsorial artist. His style of oratory is not unlike that of Artemus Ward. He has the same dry, hesitating, stammering manner, and his face, aside from the merry light in his eyes, is as grave as the visage of an undertaker when screwing down the coffin lid. He appears to labor under some embarrassment in not knowing just how to dispose of his arms and hands, but this only heightens the drollery of his manner, and may be merely a “stage trick.” (“Mark Twain,” 11 Jan 72, 4)
The reviewer for the Wheeling Register reported, “We passed an hour or two in his company after the lecture and after listening to his inexhaustible fund of stories, his exquisite humor and style, cannot but feel that the world would be better if we had more Mark Twains.” Before Clemens finally left for Pittsburgh on the afternoon of 11 January he also received a large group of Wheeling citizens who were “anxious to make the acquaintance of the man whose pilgrimage had so delighted them.” To them he mentioned his family association with Wheeling through Sherrard Clemens (1820–80), a congressman for the Wheeling district in the 1850s, as well as “other distant relatives in the city” (Wheeling Register, 11 Jan 72 and 12 Jan 72, quoted in “Mark Twain Lectured in Wheeling a Century Ago,” Richwood West Virginia Hillbilly, 21 Apr 1973, 1, 14; L1 , 346 n. 6).
For two reviews of the Pittsburgh lecture, see 13 Jan 72 to OLCclick to open link.
On 28 December Clemens sent Olivia a check for $300, but neglected to say that it was intended as payment for their quarterly rent ( L4 , 526–27 n. 3). John Hooker’s receipt, dated 5 January (CU-MARK), indicates that Olivia made the payment in any case, as she must have reported in a letter of 5 or 6 January (now lost).
Some of the “jolly sociable times” with Clara Spaulding, the Cranes, Orion and Mollie Clemens, and various neighbors must have been mentioned in Olivia’s lost letter of 5 or 6 January, which presumably also described Harriet Beecher Stowe’s reading (see the next note). The Clemenses’ Nook Farm neighbors included several interrelated households. On Forest Street, for instance, besides John and Isabella Beecher Hooker, lived their eldest daughter, Mary Hooker Burton, and her husband, lawyer Henry Eugene Burton; Francis Gillette (1807–79), senator from Connecticut in 1854 and 1855, and his wife, Elisabeth Hooker Gillette (1813–93), John Hooker’s sister; their daughter, Elisabeth (Lilly) Gillette Warner, and her husband, George H. Warner, Charles Dudley Warner’s younger brother. Charles Dudley and Susan (Lee) Warner, Hartford residents since 1860, lived across from the Hooker house, on Hawthorn Street. Calvin Ellis Stowe (1802–86), a retired professor of theology, and his wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had moved into their dream house, Oakholm, near the southern edge of Nook Farm, in 1864, but the house proved hard to maintain, and they left it in 1870; they would not again become permanent residents of the neighborhood until 1873, when they purchased attorney Franklin Chamberlin’s house at 1 Forest Street ( L2 , 146 n. 5; L3 , 143 n. 11, 407 n. 3; L4 , 313 n. 9, 456 nn. 1, 6, 505 n. 8, 523–24 n. 2>; Andrews, 5, 6; Van Why, 4, 20–21, 42, 72; “Nook Farm Genealogy,” 15, 30; “Hartford Residents,” Gillette Family, 1–2; Geer: 1870, 276; 1872, 41,44, 63, 79, 133; 1873, 129).
Harriet Beecher Stowe read selections from her latest book, Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories (1872), at Hartford’s Seminary Hall on the evening of 5 January to “an exceedingly friendly and appreciative audience,” according to the Hartford Courant. “No writer has so well portrayed the life of a rural New England town, and Mrs. Stowe is entirely familiar with the appropriate pronunciation and inflection.” The reading was a benefit for the reconstruction of a church in Mandarin, Florida, where Mrs. Stowe maintained a winter home (Hartford Courant: “Readings by Mrs. Stowe,” 1 Jan 72, 2; “Mrs. Stowe’s Reading,” 6 Jan 72, 2).
Clemens’s projected “volume of ‘Lecturing Experiences’” never materialized, at least in part because of the inherent difficulties of the theme, which he had recognized as early as 1869:
Lecturing experiences, deliciously toothsome and interesting as they are, must be recounted only in secret session, with closed doors. Otherwise, what a telling magazine article one could make out of them. I lectured all over the States, during the entire winter and far into the spring, and I am sure that my salary of twenty-six hundred dollars a month was only about half of my pay—the rest was jolly experiences. (SLC 1869)
He waited almost three years to publish his sketch; it appeared in the New York Times on 29 November 1874 as “Sociable Jimmy,” with the following preface:
I sent the following home in a private letter, some time ago, from a certain little village. It was in the days when I was a public lecturer. I did it because I wished to preserve the memory of the most artless, sociable, and exhaustless talker I ever came across. He did not tell me a single remarkable thing, or one that was worth remembering; and yet he was himself so interested in his small marvels, and they flowed so naturally and comfortably from his lips that his talk got the upperhand of my interest, too, and I listened as one who receives a revelation. I took down what he had to say, just as he said it—without altering a word or adding one. (SLC 1874)
The “certain little village” was Paris, Illinois, where Clemens lectured on 30 December, and stayed over, probably until the morning of 1 January ( L4 , 527–30). The extensive “Aithens family” was undoubtedly that of Josiah F. and Catharine Athon of Paris. Josiah Athon, listed as a fifty-three-year-old “hotel keeper” in the 1870 county census, then had nine children (five boys and four girls) living at home. William, the eldest, aged thirty-one, was listed in the census as a “hotel clerk” and further identified by an 1879 local history as the “accommodating clerk” at the Paris House hotel, where Clemens stayed. Charles, aged eight, was probably the “Fat-Cholley” mentioned in Clemens’s letter. In the published sketch, “Sociable Jimmy” himself may have been young William Evans, whose family—one of the few black families in Paris—lived next door to the Athons. William was six or seven years old at the time of Clemens’s visit (information courtesy of Nicole Remesnick; Hammond, 239–40; History of Edgar County, 590). Clemens had “Jimmy” explain that “Dey’s fo’-teen in dis fam’ly ‘sides de ole man an’ de ole ‘ooman—all brothers an’ sisters. But some of ’em don’t live heah.” He also conflated the landlord father and his son William, the clerk, and disguised both family and place names: “the landlord—a kindly man, verging toward fifty”—was “Bill Nubbles,” and the fictional towns of “Ragtown” and “Dockery” were named rather than the boy’s “Tarry Hote” (Terre Haute, Indiana, about twenty-five miles east of Paris). Clemens also indicated that he had written the names of the Athon family on the flyleaf of his copy of Longfellow’s New-England Tragedies, one of the books he said on 10 January had already been “sent home” (SLC 1874; 10 Jan 72 to OLC, n. 4click to open link; (Redpath and Fall, 9–10; L4 , 128–29 n. 3).
A copy of the “Lyceum Circular” that Redpath and Fall recently distributed for Clemens (2 Jan 72 to Redpath, n. 1click to open link) has been housed with this letter at least since it was purchased from Jacques and Clara Clemens Samossoud in 1952. The letter does not mention the document, but Clemens probably enclosed it. Redpath and Fall sent Clemens a small supply of circulars on 22 January, care of William A. Sherman, corresponding secretary of the New York Mercantile Library Association (CU-MARK), but the folds in the copy with this letter show that it was never part of that later package (Mercantile Library, “Officers ... for 1871–72”). For the full text of the enclosure, see Boston Lyceum Bureau Advertising Circularclick to open link.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L5 , 18–21; 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.