per Telegraph Operator
4 March 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, copy received: MH-H, UCCL 01061)
blank no. 1.
the western union telegraph company.
the rules of this company require that all messages received for transmission, shall be written on the message blanks of the company, under and subject to the conditions printed thereon, which conditions have been agreed to by the sender of the following message.
thos. t. eckert, gen’l sup’t,
new york.
william orton, pres’t,
geo. h. mumford, sec’y,
new york.
dated Hartfrd Ct 4 187
received at
to W. D. Howells.
Editor Atlantic Monthly
C A.
We ought to leave Boston ten oclock Friday morning 1explanatory note therefore wont it be better to get Aldrich to defer his lunch not let him shirk out of the lunch altogether but simply defer it, 2explanatory note I arrive at Parker House tomorrow evening answer paid 3explanatory note
43 pd
For the trip to Hartford that had been under discussion since mid-February (27 Feb 74 to Howells, n. 2click to open link). In the event, Clemens returned to Hartford alone on Friday, 6 March, and the visitors deferred their arrival until the following day. The party consisted of Howells, Osgood, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich and his wife, Lilian. Previously it was believed that Elinor Howells went along (see MTHL , 1:15 n. 1 bottom, and Howells 1979, 57 n. 3). It is clear, however, that her initial meeting with Olivia occurred during her visit to Hartford the following year, in late March (see 17 Nov 74click to open link and 1 Mar 75, both to Howellsclick to open link, and 14 Mar 75 to Langdonclick to open link). Lilian Aldrich’s 1920 account of the 1874 visit, which further confirms Elinor Howells’s absence then, provides details of the travel arrangements. The visiting party took the train from Boston to Springfield, where Clemens and Warner were waiting on the platform to “join their guests, and go with them the rest of the short journey.” Clemens, “with his waving, undulating motion,” approached and said:
“Well, I reckon I am prodigiously glad to see you all. I got up this morning and put on a clean shirt, and feel powerful fine. Old Warner there did n’t do it, and is darned sorry—said it was a lot of fuss to get himself constructed properly just to show off, and that that bit of a red silk handkerchief on the starboard side of the pocket of his gray coat would make up for it; and I allow it has done it.” (Lilian W. Aldrich, 143–44)
The visit lasted until Tuesday, 10 March. Howells and Osgood stayed, as planned, with the Warners, while the Aldriches stayed with the Clemenses (see also 24 Mar 74 to Aldrich, n. 13click to open link, and Lilian W. Aldrich, 143–48, 157–60).
On 2 March Aldrich wrote from Elmwood, James Russell Lowell’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, which the Aldriches leased from July 1872 until July 1874, while Lowell was in Europe (CU-MARK):
On 6 March, Edward Askew Sothern (1826–81), an English comedian, was one day short of completing a three-week engagement at the Boston Theatre, most of the time in his famous role of Lord Dundreary (a witless peer) in Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin, which he had been playing and elaborating since 1858. By 5 March, when he was one of Clemens’s competitors for the attention of the Boston public, he had switched to another of his regular roles, Sam Slingsly in John Oxenford’s Brother Sam. (That morning Sothern gave a breakfast at the Parker House for Aldrich and Howells, among others.) It is not known whether Clemens attended Aldrich’s lunch before returning to Hartford on Friday (Greenslet, 102–3, 109; “Amusements,” Boston Evening Transcript, 13 Feb–7 Mar 74; “A Breakfast by Mr. Sothern,” Boston Globe, 6 Mar 74, 4).
Howells’s answer, if any, is not known to survive.
MS, the copy received, a telegram blank filled out by the receiving telegraph operator, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).
L6 , 61–62; MTHL , 1:15.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.