2 November 1872 • London, England (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00825)
London, Nov. 2.
Dear Mother—Of course I know you are a grandmother now & I send my loving regards to the new cub & my loud & long continued applause to the parents.1explanatory note (Applause is what they want, you know, because this is a fresh thing to them, but you or me, now, would prefer not quite so much pow-wow & a little more condolence.)
How have I been received? Just the same as if I were a Prodigal Son getting back home again.2explanatory note These EnglishⒶemendation men & women take a body right into the inner sanctuary, as it were—& when you have broken bread & eaten salt with them once it amounts to friendship. With a person they don’t know, it is said, that becoming acquainted is a slow & careful piece of work—but I am speaking of per myself whom they do know—all of them. But there’s not a particle of gush, not a bit of constraint, or acting, or embarrassment, or the infliction of embarrassment upon you—with the introductory bow you appear to drop into a vacancy in that social circle as comfortably & easily as if you were a plug that had been specially made for it. You honestly do just as you honestly please, & nobody takes any offense. In about 4 weeks, here, one learns to quit questioning people’s motives & trying to hunt out slights. He finds that these folks do not doubt each other’s truth, & that it does not occur to them to ascribe ill motives to each other. Of course this is by no means universal, but it amounts to the rule, I think. So when you hear a person blackguarding everybody & impugning everybody’s motives it arrests your attention.
I have had such a gorgeous time that I am all out of order, now, & can’t digest my food any more than a tin soldier could. But I don’t mind it. I go to the dinners, public & private, & steer clear of wine & food, & so I have just as good a time as ever chaffing & talking & making little speeches.
Been out to a stag hunt at the country village of Wargrave-near-Henley-on-the-Thames (I believe that is about all of its name)—for several days. IⒶemendation hunted that stag in a wagon—but I didn’t catch him. Neither did the red-coated, pigskin-breechedⒶemendation hunters—but it was fine to see the 250 scour over the hills & fields & sail over the hedges & fences like so many birds.3explanatory note
One day we dined & breakfasted with a splendid fox-hunting squire named Broom in his quaint & queer old house that has been occupied 500 years—& on his table cutlery I noticed something like that, & presently remin figured out that it was a sprig of broom (the gentleman’s name). I knew that the broom-sprig ng (plant-à-genèt) was the cognizance & gave name to the Plantagenet kings, & I Ⓐemendation so I just asked him facetiously if he wasn’t a Plantagenet—but bless you he didn’t notice the facetiousness of it, & simply said he was.4explanatory note And his genealogical tree shows it, too. If Solon Severance will come over here we’ll make this man king— Why I it had all the seeming of hobnobbing in with the Black Prince5explanatory note in the flesh!—for this fellow is of princely presence & manners, & 35 years old. Now years ago it used to be a curious study to me, to follow the variations of a family name down through a p Peerage or a biography from the Roll of Battle-Abbey6explanatory note to the present day—& manifold & queer were the changes, too. But here within 2 miles of Mr. Broom, lives a family named Abear who still own & farm the same piece of ground their ancestors have owned & farmed for nine hundred & fifty years!7explanatory note—without ever a break in the succession or a change of ownership!—& without ever a change of the style or pronunciation of the family name from King Alfred’s8explanatory note days to these! ThereⒶemendation is but one other case of the kind in England—another small farmer—for both families were always mere plebeian, undistinguished yeomen, albeit theirs is the longest & by all odds the purest & straightest lineage in Great Britain, the queen’s not excepted. People drop in, over yonder, & say “Good morning, Abear,” just as other folks walked over the same ground & said “Good morning Abear,” in the days of the Saxon Heptarchy.9explanatory note But it is Broom, now, instead of Plantagenet.
Please don’t let a word of this letter get into print—these things are from private conversations & the footprints must be all covered up carefully before they see the light. Americans have the reputation here of not sufficiently respecting private conversations.
Now if you’ll come over here in the spring with Livy & me, & spend the “London Season” (the summer,) you will have just the loveliest time you ever had in your life, & you will come to the conclusion that rural England is too absolutely beautiful to be left out doors—ought to be under a glass case. The Mayor of Stratford-on-Avon10explanatory note would make us at home & they say he lives like a the finest of fine old English gentlemen. As I was too busy to visit him now, I reserved the invitation. Come! Will you? We’ll dig up Shakspeare & cart him over to our side a spell.
Make Charley study drawing. Don’t fool away a good artist trying to make an inferior something else of him. Send my love to Mollie—& pray, you & all of you, the heads of the house & the household,11explanatory note accept of measureless quantities of the same.
Fairbanks’s stepdaughter, Alice, married William H. Gaylord in January 1871. On 25 August 1872 she gave birth to a son, Paul Fairbanks Gaylord, who died on 8 September 1873 ( L2 , 132 n. 10; L4 , 301 n. 1; Fairbanks, 552).
Upon his return from “a far country,” the Prodigal Son was fed on “the fatted calf” (Luke 15:11–32).
The picturesque village of Wargrave, in Berkshire about thirty miles from London, was so small that it was evidently identified by its proximity to Henley-on-Thames, three miles down the river (Page and Ditchfield, 3:191; Vincent, 296–97, 433). Clemens’s host for the hunt is unidentified. Clemens could have attended either of two recent staghunts in the area, both within twelve miles of Wargrave: on 29 October “the hunting season with her Majesty’s staghounds was opened with the first public meet at Salt Hill, near Slough,” and on 1 November a second hunt took place at Maidenhead. The opening-day hunt was a colorful event, overseen by Sir Richard Boyle, the earl of Cork, master of the queen’s staghounds. The road in the vicinity was “thronged with equestrians of both sexes, carriages, traps, and pedestrians, and presented a lively spectacle” (London Morning Post: “Her Majesty’s Staghounds,” 30 Oct 72, 3; “Hunting Appointments,” 26 Oct 72, 3; Burke 1904, 374).
The name “Plantagenet” derived from planta genista, sprig of broom, the emblem of Geoffrey, count of Anjou and son-in-law of Henry I. The Plantagenets succeeded to the English throne with the accession of Henry II in 1154; their royal dynasty ended with the death of Richard III in 1485. According to at least one source, the “sign of the Planta genista originated the surname of Broom” (Baring-Gould, 96), and, in accord with Clemens’s sketch of the family device, the crest of the Brome, Broom, and Broome families is described as “an arm couped at the elbow and erect, ... holding in the hand ... a bunch of broom vert” (Fairbairn, 1:77). One possible (but somewhat unlikely) candidate for the “splendid fox-hunting squire named Broom” is Captain Arthur Broome, listed in an 1877 Berkshire directory as the tenant (but not the owner) of Remenham Lodge near Henley-on-Thames (Berkshire Directory, 672). Captain Broome was the author of History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army, published in Calcutta in 1850, and therefore must have been older than Clemens’s Broom, described below as thirty-five years old. The Broom family is not mentioned in A Concise Topographical Account of . . . Berkshire (Lysons and Lysons), in Return of Owners of Land, 1873, or in The Victoria History of the County of Berkshire (Page and Ditchfield), which describes in detail the ownership history of all the manor houses in the area.
Edward (1330–76), eldest son of Edward III and father of Richard II, so called because he wore black armor.
A list compiled in the fourteenth century (the original of which is no longer extant) of families that came over to England with William the Conqueror.
The manor of Bear-Place, in the parish of Wargrave, “is said to have been formerly in the A’Bears, a family still existing, and supposed to be of great antiquity; but their names are not to be found at the Heralds’ College, nor among the Tower Records” (Lysons and Lysons, 411).
Alfred the Great (849–?901), king of the West Saxons.
A name given by sixteenth-century historians to the seven kingdoms of Angles and Saxons in England during the fifth through ninth centuries.
Edward F. Flower, a former mayor of Stratford (6 Oct 72 to Conway, n. 1click to open link).
Fairbanks’s son, Charles, wanted to become an artist (2? Mar 72 to Fairbanks, nn. 2, 3click to open link; 10 Dec 72 to Nast, n. 2click to open link). Clemens also sent greetings to her sixteen-year-old daughter, Mollie; their father, Abel; and presumably to her stepchildren, Frank and Alice, both of whom had married and set up their own households ( L2 , 134 n. 1, 259 n. 1; Fairbanks, 552, 754–55).
MS, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino (CSmH, call no. HM 14279). Clemens’s drawing is photographically reproduced.
L5 , 204–208; MTMF , 165–68.
see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.