per Telegraph Operator
27 January 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (Transcripts: Jervis Langdon, 3, and CU-MARK, UCCL 01186)
Congratulations from all the household but I suggest in the friendliest spirit that a lad who takes this sort of advantage of his father so early in life is a party that will bear watching. Our love to the mother and babe.
Held for correction till 5:00 P.M.2explanatory note
Doubtless by telegram, the Clemenses had received word that Langdon’s wife, Ida, had given birth to their second child, Jervis (d. 1952), on 26 January. When he published these congratulations in 1938, Jervis explained: “Mr. Clemens was suspicious of me from the very first as shown by this telegram to my father, who was away from home when I was born” (Jervis Langdon, 3). Charles Langdon and his mother registered at the Windsor Hotel in New York on the morning of the birth. Probably they were en route to Hartford—where Mrs. Langdon visited until 23 February—and had left Elmira not expecting that the baby’s arrival was imminent (20 Feb 75 to Howells, n. 4click to open link; “Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 26 Jan 75, 3).
This notation indicated that the number of words in the message originally received did not match the number recorded by the transmitting operator; company policy recommended that a telegram “not be delivered until corrected,” provided it was not urgent (Western Union, 26–27).
A printed transcript in Jervis Langdon, 3, is copy-text for everything but the sentence ‘Our . . . babe.’ (1.6), for which the copy-text is a TS in the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), which was copied from a now lost handwritten note by someone who saw the original telegram.
L6 , 363.