Brittingham family. A large family, originally from Maryland, that settled in Hannibal by 1840. Thomas E. Brittingham (b. 1798?) ran a drugstore on North Main Street with his two sons. Clemens worked directly over Brittingham’s drugstore in 1848–49 when he was a printer’s apprentice on the Missouri Courier. And he may [begin page 308] have been briefly employed by the druggist: in chapter 42 of Roughing It (1872) he recalled that one of his boyhood jobs was as a clerk “in a drug store a part of a summer.” Clemens probably was remembering Thomas when he alluded to a Brittingham in “Clairvoyant” (32). Possibly, however, he was thinking of James S. Brittingham (b. 1816?), a clerk in Tilden Russell Selmes’s store from 1844 to 1858. The exact family relationship of the two men is unknown (Marion Census 1840, 89; Marion Census 1850, 308, 310; Holcombe, 909; T. P. McMurry to SLC, 16 July 72, CU-MARK; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 56).
