Explanatory Notes        Apparatus Notes (Ⓐ)

Source: CU-MARK ([CU-MARK])

Cue: "I got the tribe here all safe, Ma, & only lost my"

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Published on MTPO: 2022

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To Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett
22 June 1876 • Elmira, N.Y. (Typed transcription by or for Albert Bigelow Paine: UCCL 12738)
Elmira, June 22.1explanatory note

I got the tribe here all safe, Ma, & only lost my temper once—for 2 minutes.Ⓐemendation I found they had provided a very nice parlor, bath-room & one bedroom for us—so I was as mad as possible till another bedroom was added.2explanatory note

We are at Mother’s yet—shan’t go to the farm for a week or more. I celebrated your birthday by going to church the day before, Ma. I mean to go again on your next birthday. This is much better than making presents, I guess.3explanatory note

We left George at home in good health & hard at work. His wife is getting well.4explanatory note Our babies are in excellent health. I have to put the Bay to sleep every night, because she won’t mind anybody else—wants to be rocked or sung to, & we can’t allow that.

Pamela, read the Life of Bishop Patterson , by Charlotte Yonge. The first volume will probably show you that a boy [who] attends Eton school is a gentleman when he finishes; is also a manly man; & is also more thorough in what he knows than Yale College could make him. I believe Eton is the place to send Sammy, & then to an English University—& never an American College.5explanatory note

American schools & colleges must of necessity be tainted with the moral & political laxities of the present American atmosphere—whereas English schools & colleges turn out great & good & perfectly pure men.Ⓐemendation This latter is more important than erudition itself. Get an American taint in an American College, & will you ever get it entirely out again in an English college?

I doubt it. Of course there are impurities wherever there are boys, but they can be better resisted in English colleges than in ours. Read Ticknor’s diary & you will perceive (what you perhaps already know) that real scholarship is a thing almost unknown in America.6explanatory note We are never thorough in anything. Just the reverse in Europe. I am very glad indeed that you had a good time in New York, but am sincerely sorry you did not remain there a week longer & go with Hutchings7explanatory note to some sea-side place. Livy & I join in love to you all.

Affly
Sam.
Textual Commentary
Source text(s):

Typed transcription by or for Albert Bigelow Paine, CU-MARK.

Provenance:

See Paine Transcripts in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.

Explanatory Notes
1 The year is established by process of elimination. Clemens’s duties in putting to sleep the younger of the family’s “babies,” Clara (“the Bay,” born on 8 June 1874), would seem to eliminate 1874. In 1875 the Clemenses did not summer in Elmira. In 1877 they were already at Quarry Farm by 14 June, a week before the day in June this letter was written from the Langdon home in Elmira. And in June 1878 and 1879 they were in Europe. References to Samuel Moffett’s education and to Jane and Pamela’s visit to Hartford, which ended on 10 June 1876, confirm 1876 as the only possible year.
2 The outburst occurred in New York, at the St. James Hotel, on Broadway at Twenty-sixth Street, where the Clemens family stopped en route to Elmira for the summer. They had left Hartford on 15 June (3 June 1876 to Fairbanks; “Arrivals at the Hotels,” New York Times, 16 June 1876).
3 In 1876 Jane Clemens’s birthday, 18 June, fell on a Sunday: she was seventy-three. Clemens’s saying that he celebrated the event by going to church “the day before” might suggest that the year was actually 1877, when 18 June fell on a Monday. But that seeming oddity is just part of the teasing going on throughout, with the ostensibly dutiful son promising to go to church, again, next year, while boasting that his annual attendance was “much better than making presents.”
4  George Griffin had been the family’s devoted and well loved butler since 1875. He and his young wife, Mary Washington Griffin (1857-1937), moved sometime during 1876 from 132 Wells Street to 59 Farmington Avenue, about six blocks from the Clemenses (although he at that time or soon after maintained a third-floor room in the Clemens household where he regularly stayed and boarded). The nature of Mary Griffin’s illness is not known (4 Nov 1875 to Howells, L6 , 583 n. 5; “State of New York Certificate and Record of Birth” for Lucius Griffin, dated 27 Mar 1897, New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Municipal Archives; Geer 1876, 70; Geer 1877, 80; Overland 2000).
5 Clemens recommended Charlotte M. Yonge’s Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands (Yonge 1874). He elaborated the proposals for Samuel Moffett’s education he had made in January (see 6 Jan 1876 to Moffettclick to open link) and probably again during Pamela Moffett’s recent visit to Hartford.
6 

Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (Ticknor 1876). In his youth Ticknor believed

the best plea it seemed possible to make before the bar of Europe for the intellect of America was, that the raw material was abundant, but the appliances for education so imperfect that originality had no chance of obtaining justice, for want of scholarship to place it well before the world. Mr. Ticknor felt this want; but before he sought to supply it abroad he had proved, that, when the eager thirst was accompanied by certain moral attributes, attainments were possible, even here, sufficient to place their possessor in full communion with the more fortunate inhabitants of countries which offered every means of mental training. (2:496)

7 Possibly George L. Hutchings (1844-1937), a New York banker. Clemens had known him since 1868, when he first lectured for the Clayonian Society of Newark, New Jersey, of which Hutchings was then lecture committee chairman (see 15 Oct 1868 to Hutchingsclick to open link, Appendix G, “Newly Discovered Letters, 1865-1871,” L5, 682-83 n. 1). It is not known when Pamela Moffett might have made his acquaintance.
Emendations and Textual Notes
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Ⓐ  men. ●  ~‸
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