To
James T. Fields
18? March 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (Paraphrase: James T. Fields to SLC,
20 March 1876, CU-MARK, UCCL 12953)
18? March 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (Paraphrase: James T. Fields to SLC,
20 March 1876, CU-MARK, UCCL 12953)
148 Charles St.
Boston. March 20. 1876.
My dear Clemens.
On Wednesday, I hear, the subscriber is to speak a lecture in your city. Your welcome missive is just here telling me I am to stop at your mansion of Hospitalities on that occasion. Thank you, sir. I will. My time to leave here is in the 10 A M. train that day, arriving in Hartford about ½ past one, & I will proceed to “Mark Twains House” at once. We read your Saint Patrick letter at our Breakfast table this morning, & we all agreed that no such hitting of nails on heads had been printed for a long time.
always yours,
James T. Fields.1explanatory note
Explanatory Notes
1 Clemens’s “welcome missive,” now lost, was presumably written two days before Fields’s
reply. At a later date, Clemens wrote on Fields’s envelope, in pencil, “James T. Fields
(author of ‘Yesterday with Authors’).” Fields’s book had been published in 1872. He
lectured at Seminary Hall in Hartford on Wednesday, 22 March, on Wordsworth, the first
in his series of six lectures (Hartford Courant: “Lectures by James T. Fields of Boston,” 18 Mar 1876, 2; “Mr. Field[s]’s Lecture
on Wordsworth,” 23 Mar 1876, 2). For Clemens’s St. Patrick letter, see 16 Mar 1876
to McCloud. Fields presumably saw the reprint of it in the Boston Advertiser for 20 March (“In General,” 1).
Paraphrase, James T. Fields to SLC, 20 Mar 1876, CU-MARK, UCLC 32309.
See Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.