10 March 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CLjC, UCCL 11635)
Yes I remember the pleasant occasion well & also the gentleman & the lady. And I wish the three of us might have another opportunity to assemble around the festive lunch table after another Albany lecture—but it may can not be,Ⓐemendation for I have no present I Ⓐemendation idea or intention of ever standing on a lecture platform again.
With many thanks, for the compliment of the invitation I am
Clemens delivered “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” in Albany on 10 January 1870, and “Artemus Ward, Humorist” on 28 November 1871. He may not have known McElroy (one of several McElroys in Albany in the early 1870s), who seems to have hoped that Clemens’s recollection of a “pleasant occasion” and its participants would be sufficient entrée for a lecture invitation. The “gentleman” conceivably was one of the lecture committee members who served as Clemens’s contacts in 1870 and 1871: Robert W. C. Mitchell, a bookkeeper, or Charles H. Burton, a dealer in vinegar and groceries. The “lady” has not been even tentatively identified ( L4 , 16 n. 2, 19 n. 1, 481 n. 9, 558; Albany Directory: 1870, 124; 1871, 33, 131–32; 1872, 40, 139; 1873, 40, 143; Redpath and Fall, 5–6).
MS, James S. Copley Library, La Jolla, California (CLjC).
L6 , 65; Swann, lot 206, MS facsimile.
John L. Feldman purchased the MS from Swann Galleries in early 1990; CLjC purchased it from Joseph Rubinfine in May 1990.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.