3 July 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: Karanovich, UCCL 01105)
Livy darling, I told Margaret about the cherries.1explanatory note Telegraphed Mr Potter & he came from Boston & we have talked over everything that needed talking. I have reminded Garvey to obey Potter’s orders. Have blown up Mr. McCray & told him not to offend again by taking orders from anybody but Mr. Potter.2explanatory note
Small processions of people continue to rove through the house all the time. You may look at the house or the grounds from any point of view you choose, & they are simply exquisite. It is a quiet, murmurous, enchanting poem done in the solid elements of nature. The house & the barn do not seem to have been set up on the grassy slopes & levels by laws & plans & specifications—it seems as if they grew up out of the ground & were part & parcel of Nature’s handiwork. The harmony of size, shape, color, —everything—is harmonious. It is a home—& the word never had so much meaning before. The money actually expended on Ⓐemendation grounds, architect, & house & barn, & groun thus far, is $31 $40,000 Ⓐemendation 3explanatory note (and the grounds). & the architect) —Mr. Goodwin’s palace hast cost $250,000; & I would be $250,000, & he is worth several millions; but I would be sincerely & honestly sorry to if we had to swap houses & fortunes with Ⓐemendation him. You will say the same.4explanatory note
The house will be lovely inside, of course, & we shall live inside, but we shall be forever looking out of the windows.
You have passed $47,000 through Perkins’ hands, but ha he Ⓐemendation has paid bills of many kinds out of it; but the money actually paid on house, grounds, barn & architect is only $40,000 & he has about $3,000 still in bank. They all say that Without consulting us Mr. Potter has modified his original plans in many places & reduced the expense in every way he could. Everybody is charmed with the house.
But I enter into no descriptive details, & I don’t want to. I want your own eyes to furnish your impressions.
Margaret & Kate5explanatory note are charmed with Patrick. He puts in every moment helping the men in the heaviest work (I have been noticing) & Margaret says if he finds a man loafing he puts him to work. & “talks back” when he grumbles.
Our mulberry tree is flourishing6explanatory note —so are the flowers, Pat Ⓐemendation & also a wonderful ivy that has been made to follow the old rough fence 12 feet in 3 luxurious strands—not an imperfect leaf on it.
Mrs. Perkins had a bad miscarriage, but is recovering fast.
I love you my darling.
I do hope the poor Modoc is well again—I’ll be kind to her next time she is unwell & refractory.
in ink: Mrs. Samℓ L. Clemens | H Elmira | N. Y. return address: return to box 671, hartford, conn., if not delivered within 3 Ⓐemendation days. postmarked: hartford conn. jul Ⓐemendation ◇ ◇◇
Clemens answered the following letters from his wife, the first written on 29 June—the day he left Elmira—and the second on 1 July (CtHMTH). She sent her letters in care of Charles Dudley Warner, at the office of the Hartford Courant, presumably because the postman had instructions to forward to Elmira any mail directed to the Clemenses’ Forest Street address.
Dear Youth,
We have been having a terrible thunder storm and severe very high wind—Sue says it was the hardest storm that she has seen here since one when she and Father spent a night here more than four years ago, you see it came as soon as you went away. Sue came and brought her lunch in from the dining room Rossa came bringing Susie from the nursery—
Sara Coleridge says in writing to her husband of one of their children “Don’t fancy that children will listen to lectures either in learning or morality. Punish a child for hurting his sister and he will draw the inference that it is wrong, without a lecture sermon on brotherly affection” and more that I would like to quote but will wait and read it to you—
Susie has been a good girl today and had no tantrum, but I shall be truly thankful when I get strong and get her settled at home
Don’t forget to have Rossa’s brother shave you if you get time so that you may tell him how well she does—
I love you and shall be truly glad when you return— Pick up all the gossip that you can to retail to me and remember it—
Allie has not come yet but I suppose she will in the course of an hour as it is past five—
I shall direct this care Mr Warner fearing the postman may not deliver it—
Livy—
Evening—
Allie and Theodore have come and had their tea and now we are sitting much as we did last night I am sitting inside the window, Sue & Allie outside but darling I do miss you as night comes Allie sits just where you did when Aunty Cord was telling us of her son but I don’t hold her hand as I did yours, oh how I love you, & long for your return when you are away absent
Livy
The storm on Monday, 29 June, drew passing notice from the Elmira Advertiser of 1 July: “In Monday’s storm which swept over the country, the wind sometimes registered a velocity of ninety miles an hour” (untitled column, 1). Among those Olivia mentioned were: Susan and Theodore Crane, her sister and brother-in-law; Jervis Langdon, her late father; Alice (Allie) Spaulding, her close Elmira friend and Clara’s sister; Rosina Hay, Susy’s nursemaid (see 4 Sept 74 to Brown, n. 8click to open link); William E. Hay, evidently Rosina’s brother, listed in the Hartford directory as a “hairdresser” (Geer: 1873, 77; 1874, 80); and Mary Ann Cord, the source and subject of Clemens’s dialect sketch “A True Story” (see 2 Sept 74 to Howells, n. 2click to open link). The book Olivia alluded to was the Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter, published in London and New York in October 1873 (the American edition is dated 1874 on the title page). It is not known which edition she owned. The passage she quoted was from a letter that Sara Coleridge wrote in October 1833 to her husband and cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge (Coleridge, 57, 59, 74; Gribben, 1:153; “New Publications,” New York Times, 22 Oct 73, 2; OLC to MEC, 11 and 14 Jan 74, NPV; L5 , 641 n. 4). Of Susy’s tantrums, Clemens remarked in 1876:
From early babyhood until she was 3½ years old, she was addicted to sudden & raging tempests of passion. Coaxing was tried; reasoning was tried; diversion was tried; even bribery; also, deprivations of various kinds; also captivity in a corner; in fact, everything was tried that ever had been tried with any child—but all to no purpose. Indeed the storms grew more frequent. At last we dropped every feature of the system utterly & resorted to flogging. Since that day there has never been a better child. We had to whip her once a day, at first; then three times a week; then twice, then once a week; then twice a month. She is nearly 4½ years old, now, & I have only touched her once in the last 3 months. “Spare the rod & spoil the child” was well said.—& not by an amateur, I judge. (SLC 1876–85, 2)
Olivia wrote her second letter on 1 July:
Darling Youth—
Did you send the money for our gas bill to Mary Burton? If you see her will you tell her that we shall probably not want the carrage for Susie—
Susie’s bowels were so bad yesterday that I sent for remedies to Mrs. Wales. She is better today— She is sweet and lovely in here with me but is naughty and full of cry with Rossa. I think she feels today the exhaustion of her trouble caused by her trouble even more than yesterday. She lay in Sue’s lap and rocked for an unusually long time today— How I do love our babies and how I do desire to have wisdom given me for their guidance— There is much in this life of Sara Coleridge that is suggestive on this subject—
Little Clara slept better than usual last night, the milk of Magnesia seems to make her food digest much better—
We all miss you and have strong hope that Sat. will return you to us— I wish that we need never be seperated again even for a night—
Give my love to all the dear friends—
I wish you would tell Margaret that she may do up can some sour cherries for pies—about ten or twelve cans—
Among those Olivia mentioned were Nook Farm neighbor Mary Hooker Burton, daughter of John and Isabella Beecher Hooker and wife of lawyer Henry Eugene Burton, and Margaret Cosgrave, the Clemenses’ cook. Clemens was not able to return to Elmira on Saturday, 4 July, as Olivia hoped. His return may have been speeded, however, by the following letter from Theodore Crane, directed to the St. Nicholas Hotel in New York, where Clemens registered on 4 July and the letter arrived on 5 July (CU-MARK):
Dear Mr Clemens
Livy is quite nervous about the children and about your being away—was quite low spirited yesterday—and I thought if you could get through in time to come here on Monday night’s Express, arriving here Tuesday morning, and surprise her, it would do her good.
Nothing serious the matter— The children are doing well
Clemens returned to Elmira on Tuesday, 7 July ( L5 , 19–20 n. 4; Schwinn, 1:41; “Personal Intelligence,” New York Herald, 5 July 74, 6; “Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 6 July 74, 3; 8 July 74 to Aldrichclick to open link).
John Garvie was the general contractor. Potter designed the landscape as well as the house. The plantings—a lawn, trees, and a round flowerbed in the carriage turnway in front of the stable—were installed by Charles C. Macrae, a Hartford florist and gardener (Lesser and Toole, 7–9; Geer 1874, 98, 230).
Of this amount, the Clemenses had spent $13,000 for land: in 1873 they made two purchases totaling $11,000 from Hartford lawyer Franklin Chamberlin, and on 6 February 1874, they paid Chamberlin $2,000 for an additional strip of land on their eastern boundary, measuring 40 feet on the north, 33.3 feet on the south, and 300 feet on the east and west. Including this quarter-acre parcel, used for the driveway and the carriage house with stable, the Clemenses’ property consisted of “about an acre in total of buildable land above the escarpment and flood plain.” Between 1876 and 1881, they made four more purchases of land ( L5 , 271 n. 6; Lesser and Toole, 7, 128–34; Land Records, Town of Hartford, 152:281, 169:108, 176:404, 179:146, 184:371).
James Goodwin (1803–78), originally the proprietor of a mail stage line and then a director of the Hartford and New Haven Railroad, was one of the incorporators and twice president (1848–65, 1869–78) of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company. This was the largest of Hartford’s insurance firms and one of the largest in the United States, with assets of over $40 million by 1875. Goodwin was also active in the management of numerous other Hartford businesses. His house on Woodland Street was
one of the most extensive private houses in the city, and one of marked architectural importance. . . . It is constructed of Westerly granite with rock-face ashlar, the finish being of the same material dressed and relieved by belts and courses of rose granite. The design is Gothic, and all the details are carefully executed. A characteristic feature of the principal floor plan is the wide hall, forty-five feet in length, extending entirely through the house from east to west, and displaying midway upon one of the side walls a lofty hooded fireplace built of Ohio stone enriched by carving. The stable and coachman’s quarters are so connected with the main building as to form part in the same general design. The prominent feature of the house is a square tower finished at its upper portion in timber-work. (Trumbull, 1:476, 511–12, 666–67)
The Clemenses’ housekeeper, otherwise unidentified (Schwinn, 1:41).
Planted from a slip given to the Clemenses by Charles E. Flower, their host when they visited Stratford-upon-Avon in July 1873 ( L5 , 411–12 n. 2, 415–16). In “The Shakspeare Mulberry,” written in November 1880, Clemens described their frustrated attempts to make the slip flourish:
I brought her home & set the experts to work on her. They tried her in a green house, but she wouldn’t go; they tried her in the back yard; in the front yard; in the stable; in the cellar, on top of the house; in the kitchen; in bed—everywhere, dear, sir, but she was calm, she was indifferent, she gave no sign. We even set her in that apartment of ours which we call the “department of household expenses”; but even there, by a superhuman struggle, she made out to not to grow. We tried different kinds of earth—all the different kinds there are, sending to the remote islands of the sea & the far lands of the globe for supplies; but they roused no more emotion in her than prayer would in a cat. We fed her with common manure; with guano; with ashes, hair restorative, gold filings, milk breast milk, cow’s milk, condensed milk, imperial granum, whale oil, whisky, Pond’s Extract, blue mass, vasiline, kerosene, Epsom salts, government bonds—in fact everything in the nature of a persuader that could be thought of; but it was of no use; she still slumbered on, holding along all aloft her stiff little limbs, as leafless & expressionless as those of a dead daddylonglegs. But mind you, she was not dead; no, during all that time she had never once been dead; during all those months & years of rebellion against nature & constituted authority, she was clandestinely alive. Yes, every June she would put out five or six pallid little buds, about the size of seed pearls, & leave them so till we had called witnesses & verified the fact, then she would take them in again & save them for next year. (SLC 1880, 5–8)
Clemens called this recalcitrant tree “the wayward child of Shakspeare.” The mulberry that Shakespeare reportedly planted at New Place, his final home in Stratford, was cut down in 1756, however. The slip Clemens brought back was probably from another tree at New Place, alleged to be from a cutting from the original mulberry (Trewin, 33–34; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 2000).
MS, collection of Nick Karanovich, seen at Christie’s, New York City, while awaiting sale (Christie 1991).
L6 , 173–77; Christie 1991, lot 189, excerpts.
Chester L. Davis, Sr., probably acquired the MS from Clara Clemens Samossoud sometime between 1949 and 1962 (see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance). After his death in 1987, the MS was owned by Chester L. Davis, Jr., who sold it through Christie’s in December 1991. In 1999 the MS was owned by Nick Karanovich, who provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.