6 or 7 January 1874 • London, England (MS: DLC, UCCL 01016)
I have just written Routledge to send The Gilded Age to you at the Herald Bureau 46 Fleet street, because I forgot the name of the hotel where we have just dined. I think it is the Golden Cross,2explanatory note but I drank a glass of water just before I left, & that is fatal to memerory Ⓐemendation, you know.
The pipe smokes mighty well. Many thanks.
Young, former managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Clemens’s friend since 1867, had been a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald since 1872, reporting chiefly from London and Paris. Clemens wrote the present letter very shortly after the preceding one—as midnight struck, and therefore probably on 7 January, although it is possible that he wrote both letters at midnight on 6 January ( L5 , 383 n. 1).
Built in 1832, the Golden Cross Hotel, at 452 Strand, replaced an earlier inn of the same name, which had figured in The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield (Kent, 398; Baedeker, 8).
MS, John Russell Young Papers, Library of Congress (DLC).
L6 , 15.
donated in 1925 by Young’s son, Major Gordon R. Young.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.