10? July 1873 • London, England (MS: NjP, UCCL 00951)
first 2 MS pages (about 150 words) missing
Livy says—& I endorse it—that you cannot have our mother1explanatory note at any price—but you can have an interest in her for nothing—which is cheap enough. But if you want to negotiate for our baby, any suggestion proposition (addressed to me) will meet with prompt attention. I am offered two twins & a cow by an English gentleman in Stratford & on Avon with whose family we have been staying a day or two,2explanatory note & I am ready to trade but Livy continues to consider & is a good deal of an obstruction.
For goodness sake let no artist make of Sellers anything but a gentleman—he is always genial, always gentle, generous, hospitable, full of sympathy ies with anything that any creature has at heart—he is always courtly of speech & manner & never descends to vulgarity. Even his dress (vide the scene where Washington first visits him at HawkeyeⒶemendation) is carefully kept & has the expression about it of being the latest charm in excellency of that kind. He always wears a stovepipe hat. He is never awkward in attitude or gesture, & is never ill at ease even in the company of the illustrious. He must not be distorted or caricatured in any way in order to make a “funny” picture. Make him plain & simple.3explanatory note (The originalⒶemendation was tall & slender.) 4explanatory note in margin: However, I believe we have hinted that Sellers is portly, in one place—which is just as well.
I have not lectured here & do not think I shall. One has no time to prepare. We only dine. We do nothing else.
Joaquin Miller & I are going to prowl through rural England “unbeknowns” to anybody, leaving Livy & the child in London.5explanatory note However, Livy & I will “do” Scotland first. One can accomplish absolutely nothing when one is known.
With stores of love for Susie6explanatory note & all of you.
Olivia Lewis Langdon.
The Clemenses’ host was Charles E. Flower. On 7 July Moncure Conway had provided specific instructions for their trip (CU-MARK):
By the evening of 10 July the Clemenses had returned to London (11 July 73 to unidentified; for details of the Stratford visit see 25 June 73 to Conway, n. 2click to open link; 14 July 73 to Flowerclick to open link; and Clemens’s dictated remarks in N&J1, 561–64). It is possible that Clemens wrote this letter to Warner while still in Stratford, since he was vague about the length of their stay. It seems somewhat more likely, however, that he wrote it soon after returning to London, where he would have found Warner’s letter reporting on the progress of the Gilded Age illustrations (see the next note).
Warner was reviewing the initial drawings submitted to him as illustrations for The Gilded Age. The artists that Bliss had assigned to work from the manuscript were chiefly True W. Williams, Augustus Hoppin, and Henry Louis Stephens. The first illustration of Colonel Sellers in the body of the book, probably drawn by Williams, appears in chapter 5, followed by five more (two initialed by Williams) in chapters 7 and 8; all of them accord with Clemens’s instructions (Hamilton, 155, 210, 221, 224; David, 168–69; SLC 1873–74, title page, 58, 77, 81, 85, 89, 91). The scene Clemens mentioned here occurs in chapter 7:
The Colonel’s “stovepipe” hat was napless and shiny with much polishing, but nevertheless it had an almost convincing expression about it of having been just purchased new. The rest of his clothing was napless and shiny, too, but it had the air of being entirely satisfied with itself and blandly sorry for other people’s clothes. (SLC 1873–74, 78)
Several months after The Gilded Age was published, Clemens complained that it was “rubbishy looking” because it suffered, like Roughing It, from the “wretched paper & vile engravings” typical of subscription books (24 Mar 74 to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, MH-H, in MTLP , 81).
The “original” of Colonel Sellers was James J. Lampton (1817–87), a first cousin of Jane Lampton Clemens’s ( L1 , 135 n. 10; Lampton 1989). Clemens described him in an autobiographical reminiscence written in 1897–98:
The real Colonel Sellers, as I knew him in James Lambton, was a pathetic & beautiful spirit, a manly man, a straight & honorable man, a man with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be loved; & he was loved by all his friends, & by his family worshiped. (SLC 1897–98, 21–22)
Lampton was also a kinsman of Henry Watterson’s (see 29 May–15 June? 73 to Watterson, n. 1click to open link). Watterson recalled:
Just after the successful production of his play, The Gilded Age, ... I received a letter from him Clemens in which he told me he had made in Colonel Mulberry Sellers a close study of one of these kinsmen and thought he had drawn him to the life. “But for the love o’ God,” he said, “don’t whisper it, for he would never understand or forgive me, if he did not thrash me on sight.” ...
The original Sellers had partly brought him up and had been very good to him. A second Don Quixote in appearance and not unlike the knight of La Mancha in character, it would have been safe for nobody to laugh at James Lampton, or by the slightest intimation, look or gesture to treat him with inconsideration, or any proposal of his, however preposterous, with levity.
He once came to visit me upon a public occasion and during a function. I knew that I must introduce him, and with all possible ceremony, to my colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, wearing a black, swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, and a silk hat, bound with black crepe to conceal its rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his linen as spotless as new-fallen snow. Happily the company, quite dazed by the apparition, proved decorous to solemnity, and the kind old gentleman, pleased with himself and proud of his “distinguished young kinsman,” went away highly gratified. (Watterson 1919, 1:121–22)
Clemens had thought of using Lampton as a character as early as August 1870, when he wrote to his sister, Pamela Moffett, asking her to
get all the gossip you can out of Mollie Clemens about Cousin James Lampton & Family, without her knowing it is I that want it. I want every little trifling detail, about how they look & dress, & what they say, & how the house is furnished—& the various ages & characters of the tribe. ( L4 , 185)
Thompson recalled that Miller and Clemens “wanted to take a tour together on English country roads. But he wanted to walk and Clemens wanted to ride horseback” (Thompson, 87). The plan was not fulfilled, but apparently was still alive on 15 August, when Olivia mentioned it to her mother in a letter from Edinburgh: “When I get back to London if Mr Clemens does some traveling through rural England with Mr Miller I shall go into apartments and live just as cheaply as possible so that I can have the money to spend” (10–15 Aug 73, CtHMTH).
Warner’s wife, Susan.
MS, Sinclair Hamilton Collection, Princeton University (NjP). Published with permission of the Princeton University Libraries.
L5 , 411–13.
The MS, which lacks the letter’s first two pages, is laid in a first edition copy of The Gilded Age (American Publishing Company, 1874). Sinclair Hamilton (1884–1978) donated much of his collection (primarily woodcuts and wood engravings) to NjP in 1945, and continued to supplement his gift until shortly before his death (Dickinson, 148–49).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.