13 February 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS and MS facsimile: ViU and Schulson, lot 98, UCCL 01048)
Won’t you kindly name a day & hour that I may meet you & yours at the station here & bring you up to our house for a few days’ visit?1explanatory note
Mrs. Clemens is a trifle scared, but no matter. You are neither ferocious nor sanguinary. I asked her what there was to be afraid of, & she said that meeting such a personage as a Canon Ⓐemendation of Westminster is something like encountering a king or a colossal Grand Duke. Possibly she thinks a Canon of Westminster is a new & peculiarly desctructive sort of artillery. But if you will come, I will protect her. My wife (this long, long time a most appreciative & admiring reader of yours), is very anxious to have the visit, notwithstanding her honest terrors.2explanatory note
Do try to come—& bring all of your family that are with you.
An earlier call to Boston (a dinner to Mr. Wilkie Collins on Monday)3explanatory note has debarred me from the pleasure of meeting you at the Lotos tomorrow night (which invitation only came this moment.) I am so situated that I cannot well be away from home on both occasions.4explanatory note
Mem. The best train to come to Hartford by, is the one which leaves New York at 10 AM—but if you’ll send me a telegram or a postal card, I’ll be on hand at any train you come by.5explanatory note
Rev. Chas. Kingsley | Lotos Club | 2 Irving Place | New York. | Please deliver. | “Mark Twain.” postmarked: hartford ct. feb 13 12m Ⓐemendation
Clemens had met Kingsley in London in November 1873 ( L5 , 485–87). On 11 February 1874, Kingsley, accompanied only by his unmarried elder daughter, Rose Georgiana (1844–1925), had arrived in New York for a six-month pleasure excursion and lecture tour (under the management of James Redpath) that was to take him across the United States and to Canada. The Kingsleys visited the Clemenses on Saturday, 14 March, and also spent the following day in Hartford as the guests of Clemens’s friend and lawyer, Charles E. Perkins. Although the New York Evening Post announced that Kingsley would preach twice in Hartford on Sunday, he did not do so (Frances Eliza Grenfell Kingsley, 2:419, 421–22, 427; Charles Kingsley, 3–8, 11, 15; Hartford Courant: “Brief Mention,” 13 Mar 74, 2; “Canon Kingsley,” 16 Mar 74, 2; New York Evening Post: “Personal,” 14 Mar 74, 2).
Only one of Kingsley’s works that Olivia had read by 1874 has been identified: The Water-Babies (Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1870), which she acquired in August 1871 (Gribben, 1:374).
Wilkie Collins, whom Clemens had met in England in the early summer of 1873, was preparing to return home after an American lecture tour. (He sailed on the Parthia on 7 March.) In Boston on the evening of Monday, 16 February, he
received a select company of his most intimate friends at the St. James Hotel. . . . The reception was under the direction of Mr. William F. Gill, and, though informal in its character, was an elegant and refined affair. The invited guests were Messrs. Henry W. Longfellow, John G. Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wilson, Josiah Quincy, Samuel L. Clemens, T. W. Higginson, E. P. Whipple and J. T. Trowbridge. The company met in a private parlor early in the evening, and after due formality went down to supper in one of the cosey little dinning halls to be found at the St. James.
Clemens’s contribution to the after-dinner speechmaking was “a brief description of his reception in England, saying that he thought he was very successful in the object of his visit there, which was to teach the people good morals, and to introduce some of the improvements of the present century” (“Wilkie Collins,” Boston Evening Transcript, 17 Feb 74, 1). In addition to Collins and the three eminent poets who headed the guest list, Clemens’s dinner companions were United States Vice-President Henry Wilson (1812–75); author and historian Josiah Phillips Quincy (1829–1910); Unitarian minister and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911); lecturer and literary critic Edwin Percy Whipple (1819–86); journalist, novelist, and poet John Townsend Trowbridge (1827–1916); and Boston author, editor, and publisher William F. Gill, who in 1875 became one of Clemens’s nemeses (see 12–28 Feb 75 to Blissclick to open link; “Departure of Steamer Parthia,” Boston Evening Transcript, 7 Mar 74, 1; Boston Directory, 384; L5 , 402, 405 n. 7).
Clemens had been a member of the Lotos Club for exactly a year. His decision not to attend the 14 February reception for Kingsley may have been influenced by his angry estrangement, since the spring of 1873, from the Lotos Club’s current president, Whitelaw Reid. Reid presided over the reception, which followed the club’s regular Saturday dinner and was attended by “some seventy or eighty members” as well as prominent guests, among them Clemens’s friends John Hay, Bret Harte, and William A. Seaver, a columnist for Harper’s Monthly, Weekly, and Bazar (“Charles Kingsley,” New York Tribune, 16 Feb 74, 5; Elderkin, 29–32; L5 , 150–51 n. 3, 292 n. 2, 367–69).
See 31 Jan 74 to Fuller, n. 2click to open link. Clemens was as yet unaware that he would soon see Kingsley in Boston (13 Feb 74 to Redpath, n. 1click to open link).
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU), is copy-text for the letter. MS facsimile in Schulson, lot 98, is copy-text for the envelope. The editors have not seen the envelope flap, which was probably imprinted with a monogram matching the one on the stationery.
L6 , 31–33; University of Virginia, 72, letter only; Sotheby 1925, lot 200, brief excerpt; Parke-Bernet 1945, lot 158, brief excerpt.
When offered for sale in 1945 the MS was part of the collection of James B. Clemens; in May 1949 it belonged to H. George Bloch. It was deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 15 May 1962.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.