29 September 1873 • (1st of 2) • London, England (MS: ViU, UCCL 00966)
Ou We concluded to take a drive for an hour with the baby—that is how we came to be here after saying we couldn’t come.1explanatory note
Clemens wrote this note on the front and back of his calling card, as he had done on 17 May, with his letter to Warner (reproduced in Photographs and Manuscript Facsimilesclick to open link). Louisa MacDonald (1822–1902), the former Louisa Powell, had married George in 1851. Although her time was largely occupied with rearing her eleven children (see the next letter), in 1870 she published Chamber Dramas for Children, a collection of pieces she had adapted for family theatrical performances. Since 1867 the MacDonalds had lived in the Retreat, in Hammersmith (the westernmost of London’s inner boroughs), a large late-Georgian house with a long drawing-room facing the river and an orchard and vegetable gardens in the rear. Neither the invitation to the Retreat which Clemens alluded to, nor his response to it, is known to survive. Louisa MacDonald replied to the present note immediately, however, proposing an alternative:
My dear Mrs Clemmans
I am so sorry we cannot have the pleasure of seeing you today—as we shall be going to Hastings on Tuesday, but as you are going to Paris we do not lose you that way only but I write now to beg you to come to us at Hastings on your way back just for a day or two— You could so easily come from Dover to Hastings it isn’t much round to come that way back to London, and we could give you two rooms one for your nurse & a lot of young misses will be delighted to have a visit from that lovely little Princess that we saw just once—only once! we must see her again— Telegraph from Dover when you come & we will be in readiness for you— I know you’d like Hastings. (29 Sept 73, CU-MARK)
Since 1871 the MacDonalds had leased Halloway House, a brick house on Old London Road in Hastings, as a second home (MacDonald, 101, 561; Weinreb and Hibbert, 353; Raeper, 234–35, 270–71, 333, 335).
MS on calling card, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU). The card was enclosed in an envelope, on which nothing was inscribed.
L5 , 444–445.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.