20 September 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-B)
All right, my boy, send proof sheets here. I amend dialect stuff by talking & talking it till it sounds right—& I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro sometimes (rarely) says “goin’” & sometimes “gwyne.” & they make just such discrepancies in other words —& when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer’s carelessness. But I want to work at the proofs & get the dialect as nearly right as possible1explanatory note
We are in part of the new house. Goodness knows when we’ll get in the rest of it—full of workmen yet.
I worked a month at my play, & launched it in New York last Wednesday. I believe it will go. The newspapers have been complimentary. It is simply a setting for the one character, Col. Sellers—as a play I guess it will not bear a critical assault in force2explanatory note
The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil for a year—(which is but a poetical way of saying they are going to afflict themselves with the unsurpassable hell (bad word) of travel for a spell.) I believe they mean to go & see you, first. Ⓐemendation—so they mean to start from heaven to hell; to the other place; not from Earth. How is that? for a I think that ain’t any is no slouch of a compliment—kind of a dim religious light about it. I enjoy that sort of thing.3explanatory note
Do tell Aldrich that he has made Mrs. Clemens (nee Langdon) the happiest & proudest woman in the land by digging up & glorifying her ancestor Governor Langdon of Portsmouth. I think she would let Aldrich walk off with anything in the house, now, but the cubs. But Ⓐemendation don’t you know, I don’t feel so grateful about it; for I have no ancestor bit an Injun, & he was not a chief. I shall have this old swell flung at my head often enough, I promise you. Now if Aldrich will only resurrect a villainous fictitious portrait of the Governor that will let him down a peg or two in the Madam’s estimation (I would not mind his being a trifle drunk,) so that I can hang him again—this time where he will keep peace in a family & tone down vanity—I shall be under lasting obligations to him.4explanatory note
The present letter answered Howells’s of 8 September (see 2 Sept 74 to Howells, n. 4click to open link). It crossed in the mail with the following letter, which went first to Elmira and had not yet reached Hartford (CU-MARK):
The enclosed proofs of “A True Story” do not survive. Comparison of the manuscript (ViU) with the version in the Atlantic for November 1874 (SLC 1874) reveals only a few minor revisions that were clearly authorial. For example, the alteration of “myself” to “myse’f,” “always” to “alway”, and “hain’t” to “ain’t.” The remaining changes—such as the spacing of contractions and the styling of quotation marks—were more likely the work of an Atlantic editor or proofreader. None of the revisions can be confidently ascribed to Howells. For further discussion of these revisions, as well as those that Clemens made while writing the story, see Nagawara, 144–47, 150–54.
This was an accurate summation of the New York critical response to the Gilded Age play. The New York Herald was unreservedly positive:
The success of the play was of the most pronounced kind. . . . The principal feature is Colonel Mulberry Sellers, admirably portrayed by Mr. John T. Raymond, and this character alone, with such an interpreter, would be sufficient to make the success of any piece. . . . It is one of those characters hard to handle either by dramatist or actor without incurring the charge of exaggeration, but in this case there was not a chance for complaint. Mr. Raymond’s characterization was admirable in every respect, and Mr. Twain’s words just fitted such a character. . . . “The Gilded Age” fills a void in drama of purely American life that has been long felt, and its great success at its first representation should encourage the author to turn his talents in this direction again. (“Park Theatre—The Gilded Age,” 17 Sept 74, 10)
Other papers were more discriminating. The Evening Express congratulated Raymond for proving “how thorough and admirable an artist he is” in a performance that “will float the piece on to success,” while noting that the play itself “lacks the interest, the coherency and the symmetry that a more experienced playwright would have infused into it. It is the work of a wit and writer of magazine articles rather than the work of a writer of plays” (“Park Theatre,” 17 Sept 74, 2). The Evening Post noted:
The play was called on the bills “The Gilded Age; or, Colonel Sellers.” If the order of these titles had been reversed they would have indicated the nature of Mr. Clemens’s first dramatic effort much more truly; for Colonel Sellers is not only the central figure about which all the scenes, incidents and persons concerned revolve, but he stands almost alone in his power of commanding the attention and approbation of the audience.
Raymond was “from first to last as nearly perfect as any performer we have seen for years in the domain of low comedy,” but the scenes without him were “usually tedious.” The play was
not without merit, but requires careful remodelling in many scenes in order to give it permanency on the New York stage. In its present form it is carried into public favor almost wholly on the shoulders of the principal actor. It is now, however, well worth a visit from any one desirous of seeing a choice bit of farce admirably played. We wish Mr. Clemens every success, and trust that he will find among the ranks of American playwrights some coadjutor competent to reduce the serious business of the piece to more presentable shape. (“Park Theatre,” 17 Sept 74, 2)
The Times thought the play “by no means a model drama,” but “tolerably interesting. . . chiefly on account of a character not at all essential to the main story. The comicalities of Col. Sellers kept the spectators merry throughout the whole four acts. . . . Mr. John Raymond assumed this rôle with an earnestness which insured his success” (“Park Theatre,” 17 Sept 74, 6). The Tribune, which pronounced the play “to a certain extent a success” though “excessively thin in texture,” said of Raymond that a “more delightful performance rarely is seen,” and concluded: “Mr. Raymond won a genuine success, and certainly Mr. Clemens’s drama is not a failure” (“The Park Theater,” 18 Sept 74, 4). Raymond received a special endorsement on the evening of 28 September (see 3 Oct 74 to Howells, n. 1click to open link). Advertisements for the Gilded Age promised five acts, but the Times’s allusion to “the whole four acts,” if not a slip, indicates that the first act was still a prologue. The play ran at the Park Theatre through 9 January 1875, then went on tour. Howells himself gave an 1875 Boston performance a long, favorable review (see 12 May 75 to Howells, n. 1click to open link, and Reviews of the Gilded Age Playclick to open link; “Amusements,” New York Herald, 11–16 Sept 74, various pages; “Amusements,” New York Tribune, 8 Jan 75, 11).
In “An Old Town by the Sea,” an article about Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in Harper’s Monthly for October, Aldrich wrote:
The house of Colonel Langdon, on Pleasant Street, is still an excellent specimen of the solid and dignified abodes which our great-grandsires had the sense to build. The art of their construction seems to have been a lost art these fifty years. Here Governor John Langdon resided from 1782 until the time of his death in 1819—a period during which many an illustrious man passed between those two white pillars that support the little balcony over the front-door; among the rest Louis Philippe and his brothers, and the Marquis de Chastellux, a major-general in the French army, serving under the Count de Rochambeau, whom he accompanied from France to the States in 1780. The journal of the marquis contains this reference to his host: “After dinner we went to drink tea with Mr. Langdon. He is a handsome man, and of noble carriage; he has been a member of Congress, and is now one of the first people of the country; his house is elegant and well furnished, and the apartments admirably well wainscoted” (this reads like Mr. Samuel Pepys): “and he has a good manuscript chart of the harbor of Portsmouth. Mrs. Langdon, his wife, is young, fair, and tolerably handsome, but I conversed less with her than with her husband, in whose favor I was prejudiced from knowing that he had displayed great courage and patriotism at the time of Burgoyne’s expedition.”
It was at the height of the French Revolution that the three sons of the Duc d’Orleans were entertained at the Langdon Mansion. Years afterward, when Louis Philippe was on the throne of France, he inquired of a Portsmouth lady presented at his court if the old mansion of Governor Langdon was still in existence. (Thomas Bailey Aldrich 1874, 642)
John Langdon (1741–1819), a native of Portsmouth, was a member of the Continental Congress (1775, 1776, 1787), a Revolutionary War soldier, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention (1787), a United States senator (1789–1801), and a New Hampshire legislator (1801–5) and governor (1805–8, 1810–11). His family traced its ancestry to Tobias Langdon (d. 1664), who came from Exeter, England, around 1656. Olivia’s family has been traced to Thomas Langdon (1620–63?), also of England. No connection between Tobias and Thomas Langdon has been established (Mayo, 2, 26; Hebb, 1–3).
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L6 , 233–36; Paine 1912, 118, brief excerpt; MTB , 1:517, brief excerpt; Paine 1917, 784; MTL , 1:227–28; MTHL , 1:26–27.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.