4 February 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CCamarSJ, UCCL 01044)
Welcome home—I didn’t know you had returned.1explanatory note
I had intended to lecture in New York, Brooklyn & Boston, but I have been gone away so long that Mrs. Clemens disliked the idea & so I gave it up at once. She You see we live out here in a lonlely part of the town & it is not cheerful for her when I am away.
If I lecture at all, it will be only in Boston, since Mrs. Clemens wishes to go there for a while to have the child’s portrait painted. I cannot lecture elsewhere because even short journeys are not only irksome to her, but rather exhausting.
I have just received from Dan Slote the enclosed, bringing the saddening news that another of our thinning band of pilgrims has gone the way of all flesh while in a far land among a strange people.2explanatory note I have always held Dr. Birch in grateful memory because he stood by me so stanchly when I was dangerously ill in Damascus. Will you kindly return Denny’s letter to Dan Slote, 121 William street?3explanatory note
With kind remembrances to all your household,4explanatory note
Beach, daughter of former New York Sun editor and proprietor Moses S. Beach, had been among Clemens’s few close friends on the Quaker City voyage to the Holy Land in 1867. Clemens wrote the last of a series of flirtatious letters to her on 10 February 1868. It is unlikely that he had written to her subsequently, particularly after his marriage, but he had accepted her father’s invitation to stay at the family’s home in Brooklyn while lecturing in November 1871 and might have seen her then ( L2 , 181–86; L4 , 493–94). The letter Clemens answered has not been found, and nothing has been learned of the travels it described.
Clemens’s pastiche, combining a proverbial phrase dating from at least the Middle Ages (“the way of all flesh”) with an echo of his favored Exodus 2:22 (“I have been a stranger in a strange land”).
Slote, Woodman and Company, the blank-book and stationery firm in which Daniel Slote was a partner, was at 119 and 121 William Street, in New York. The letter from William R. Denny had brought news of the death of Dr. George B. Birch. Beach must have returned it to Slote, for it does not survive with the present letter. All three men were Clemens’s companions during the Quaker City excursion. Only Slote is known to have stayed in regular touch with him afterward, although Denny probably saw him in New York in late June or early July 1874 (see p. 171). In The Innocents Abroad, when Clemens described how William F. Church stood by him in Damascus after he became ill on 15 September 1867 with “a violent attack of cholera, or cholera morbus,” he made no mention of Birch (SLC 1869, 465, 499; N&J1 , 419; L2 , 52 n. 4, 132 n. 6; Hirst, 6–7).
That is, Beach’s parents and siblings. She did not marry until 1891 ( L4 , 494 n. 3; Booth, 230).
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was formerly in the Estelle Doheny Collection at The Edward Laurence Doheny Memorial Library of St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo, California (CCamarSJ), the source of the photocopy in the Mark Twain Papers.
L6 , 25–26; Booth, 229–30.
sold to the 19th Century Shop (Baltimore, Maryland) in 1988 (Christie 1988, lot 1186).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.