1
Clemens evidently replied to a telegram (or even a letter), now lost, which was sent
and received on the same day, asking why he
had failed to appear at a breakfast hosted by Seaver that morning. He must have previously
accepted the following invitation, for a
breakfast that was to take place on “Wednesday”—that is, 10 November (CU-MARK):
adriatic ins. co 187 b’way n. york
Nov. 6th 1875.
Clemens, dear:—
Are you coming to N.Y. next week? If so make it Wednesday. I’m going to do a little
breakfast at the
Union Club at 9½ a.m. sharp, on that day, to Frederick Lehmann, who bears to me stationery from
Wilkie Collins. It’s not to be a gorge of joints, gin, gush and spout, but simply
hash, mackerel, a shrimp, and a feeble cup
of go’long tea. The bill of company will be Harte, Hay, Brady, Cox, you, and your
little friend the host.
Youll come?
“Thanks!”
Cordially,
Wm. A. Seaver.
P. S.
LIFE OF F. LEHMANN.
chap. 1. Great iron swell. Firm of Naylor & Co.
chap. 2. Has house in Berkeley Square described by Moncure Conway in Harpers Mag.
Nov 1874. Which see.
chap. 4. Married a daughter of Robert Chambers, the Edin. pub.
chap. 5. Executor of Charles Dickens’s will.
chap. 5. Gentleman and ———h good fellow.
chap. 6. Income $150,000 a year.
The End.
Frederick Lehmann (1826–91) was born in Hamburg to an artistic and musical family.
Through his brother-in-law he
entered the English firm of Naylor and Vickers, which supplied much of the steel used
by the North during the Civil War. His wife,
Nina, was the eldest daughter of Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh scholar and publisher.
In their elegant home in Berkeley Square, they
entertained London’s most talented musicians, artists, and writers (
Browning, 9–11). Harte was scheduled to lecture in Providence, Rhode Island, on the evening
of 10 November, but
that would not have precluded his being in New York that morning, particularly since
he canceled his lecture “on account
of a sudden and severe illness” that was suspected of actually being “a case of shirking”
(“Personal,” New York
Tribune, 11 Nov 75, 4; “Personal Gossip,”
Hartford
Courant, 11 Nov 75, 2). By the late spring of 1875, Hay had left the New York
Tribune and moved to Cleveland, his wife’s home city, but he might well have been visiting
New York in November.
The meaning of Clemens’s joke about Hay’s “belly” would have been clear to his friends,
since he was notably thin. Moncure Conway’s “Decorative Art and Architecture in England”
devoted
about three pages to a description of Lehmann’s house (780–83). The Union Club, founded
in 1836 as
“the representative organization of members of old families,” was housed in “a beautiful
structure
of brown stone ... completed for it on the corner of Twenty-first Street and Fifth
Avenue, at a cost of
$250,000” (Lossing, 434–35; “William A. Seaver,” New York
Times, 8 Jan 83, 5;
Thayer, 1:388;
Wilson 1875, 24, 1206, “City Register,” 26; Brady has not been identified). The month
and year assigned to this letter are based, in part, on the inference that Clemens
was apologizing for his nonappearance on the same
day of the missed appointment. Given that assumption, it is highly improbable that
the date he wrote (“10
th.”) and the date of the breakfast are the same by coincidence. But the month and year
are also
consistent with his use of this relatively rare type of monogram stationery (see
16 Dec? 74 to Gratz, n. 1).
MS, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).
L6 , 588–89.
Norman D. Bassett, a Madison alumnus, owned the MS by October 1942. 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.