13 February 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: DLC, UCCL 01049)
I am very proud of my “Modoc” (the baby) & am glad to distribute her among appreciative people in photographs.1explanatory note And I would so like to do the same with her mother (whom I am still prouder of) but I can’t get that woman to sit—anywhere but at a dinner-table. But you shall have a picture whenever I get one.
I am coming to the St. James Hotel, Boston, late Monday afternoon, to a Wilkie Collins dinner; but as I return early next morning, I shall not have a chance to hunt you up, as I should otherwise do.2explanatory note However, I & the family are coming presently to remain a week, & then you’ll be so good as to come & see us, I promise myself.3explanatory note
Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton | 28 Rutland Square | Boston. on flap: slc postmarked: hartford ct. feb 13 6pm docketed by Moulton: Samuel L. Clemens—Mark Twain.
The “Modoc,” Susy Clemens, would be two years old on 19 March. Moulton, the Boston literary correspondent of the New York Tribune, had a daughter, Florence, and had lost a son in infancy. She was among the first to express sympathy after the death of Langdon Clemens on 2 June 1872 ( L5 , 108–9, 409 n. 19; NAW , 2:595). No photograph survives with the letter, but Clemens’s enclosure may have been a print of the image reproduced here. The only copy located is inserted in Olivia’s photo album (CSmH). Clemens wrote “Susie” on the photograph itself; Olivia wrote “About 2 years old” on the album page. The imprint of the photographer, if any, is obscured by the album page, but he may have been Isaac White, at 15 Pratt Street in Hartford, who took the only other known photograph of Susy at age two, also preserved in Olivia’s album, possibly about the same time (see p. 683).
Clemens’s friendship with Moulton apparently began when he sent her a review copy of Roughing It and then thanked her for praising it in her column. He also sent her The Gilded Age, which she did not review ( L5 , 90–91, 108–9, 462, 467 n. 18).
Clemens hoped to have Olivia and Susy accompany him to Boston when he lectured there in early March, but they did not do so (1 Feb 74click to open link and 28 Feb 74, both to Redpathclick to open link).
MS, Papers of Ellen Louise Chandler Moulton, Library of Congress (DLC).
L6 , 33–34.
After Moulton’s death in 1908, her daughter gave the “bulk of her correspondence,” comprising autograph letters from a great many distinguished persons, to DLC (Whiting 1910, 292–93).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.