10 November 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: WU, UCCL 01146)
Now one of these days you must come over here. Never mind the sea. Come over in winter, on skates. We are in our new house—& so are the carpenters— t Ⓐemendationbut we shall get the latter out, by & by, even if we have to import an epidemic to do it. My play has run close upon two months, now, in New York—a success seldom achieved in this country. We expect it to run 2 or 3 months longer.1explanatory note
Is it possible that it was Sir Chas. Dilke’s s wife whose body was burned? I wouldn’t have obeyed her dying injunctions.2explanatory note
I began writing because I meant to say something—but you wait. I’ll consider. We both send our warmest regards.
Clemens met Sir Charles W. Dilke and his wife, Katherine, in London, in June 1873. Katherine Dilke died in September 1874, after the birth of her first child ( L5 , 375–76, 386–87). The New York Times for 27 October reprinted the London Times’s description of her cremation:
The body of Lady Dilke, who died five weeks ago in London, was burned on the 10th inst. at Dresden. The ceremony was performed in the furnace recently invented for burial purposes by Herr Siemens, and the relatives of the deceased lady permitting strangers to be present, a large number of scientific men attended the experiment. When the company had complied with Herr Siemens’ request to offer up a mental prayer, the coffin was placed in the chamber of the furnace; six minutes later the coffin burst; five minutes more and the flesh began to melt away, ten minutes more and the skeleton was laid bare; another ten minutes and the bones began to crumble. Seventy-five minutes after the introduction of the coffin into the furnace all that remained of Lady Dilke and the coffin were six pounds of dust, placed in an urn. The brother-in-law of the deceased was present. (“Cremation of Lady Dilke,” 6)
The Hartford Times reprinted the same account on 2 November (“Cremation in Actual Practice—The Case of Lady Dilke,” 2). On 18 November, that newspaper excerpted a letter to the Cincinnati Commercial from its London correspondent, Moncure Conway (a friend of Clemens’s), which confirmed the fact of Dilke’s cremation but declared “apocryphal” the “sensational account” of it that “has gone the rounds in America as here”:
The furnace used at Dresden and the intense heat around it, admits of no such minute inspection of the process of combustion as is indicated in the paragraph that professes to describe it. The twelve responsible persons who were present at the event engaged solemnly not to disclose the details, and there is no reason to believe that they have broken their word. The paragraph has evidently been written by an opponent—so at least the London Lancet believes—to try and produce in the public mind a revulsion against the process. (“The Cremation of Lady Dilke’s Body,” 2)
MS, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).
L6 , 276–277; AAA/Anderson 1935, lot 57, excerpts; Brownell 1944, 2.
Norman D. Bassett, a Madison alumnus, purchased the MS at a Chicago auction sale in 1936. He donated his Mark Twain collection to WU on 9 July 1955.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.