9 June 1873 • London, England (MS: MB, UCCL 00920)
P I see that it isn’t your fault that you do not know me, & I’m sure it isnt mine that I do not know you. Plainly, then, nobody the party to blame is Providence, & therefore damages cannot be had in this vale. But we shall be glad to see & know you & likewise Lady Dilke;2explanatory note & since you give us the privilege of naming the time, shall we say Wednesday about 5 PM? I do not know that we have another day disengaged day or hour for some little time to come, or I would of course offer a larger latitude. My small family of sight-seers keep themselves pretty busy—they never have been abroad before.
Miss Kate Field.
Clemens replied to an invitation from Kate Field and her London hostess, Lady Dilke (see note 2). He must have written on 9 June—the first Monday that Field, who had arrived at Southampton on 4 June, was in London. Monday, 16 June, is not possible because the gathering Clemens proposed would then have come on Wednesday, 18 June, when both he and Field were to be in Ostend, reporting on the shah’s visit. Monday, 23 June, is ruled out because Clemens and Field dined together at the Dilkes’ the day before (see 23 June–18 July 73 to the Dilkes and Fieldclick to open link). And all later Mondays are ruled out because after 24 June the Clemenses were no longer at Edwards’s Hotel. Clemens had briefly met Field, a well-known author and lecturer, in Buffalo on 29 January 1871. Her most recent book, a collection of newspaper letters entitled Hap-Hazard, had just been published by James R. Osgood and Company. She had long corresponded for the New York Tribune, which in July published six of her letters about the shah’s visit. On 17 July Whitelaw Reid complimented her on these letters, which he found superior to Clemens’s: “You do not need to be told that most of the stuff he has done for The Herald is very poor, because you have seen it. It won’t hurt you to know that your letters, on the other hand, have received more praise than any you ever wrote for us before” (Whitelaw Reid Papers, DLC; Smalley 1873; Wilkie Collins to Anthony Trollope, 9 June 73, Trollope, 2:589; “Departures for Europe,” New York Times, 25 May 73, 8; “Foreign Ports,” New York Tribune, 5 June 73, 2; Whiting 1900, 306, 308, 312, 314; L4 , 322, 323–24 n. 3; “New Publications,” Hartford Evening Post, 23 June 73, 1; Field 1873a–f).
Lady Dilke, formerly Katherine Mary Eliza Sheil, had married Sir Charles Dilke in January 1872 (see 23 June–18 July 73 to the Dilkes and Field, n. 2click to open link). The orphaned daughter of an army captain, she was known for her “extreme attractiveness of appearance, her singing, and her wonderful power of mimicry,” but also for “a violent temper” and “extraordinary powers of sarcasm” (reminiscence by Sir Charles, quoted in Roy Jenkins, 78). She died in September 1874, shortly after bearing her first child (Burke 1904, 483).
MS, Boston Public Library and Eastern Massachusetts Regional Public Library System, Boston (MB).
L5 , 375–376; Whiting 1900, 289.
donated to MB in 1898 by T. Sanford Beaty, Field’s chief legatee.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.