Stevens family.
Thomas B. Stevens (b. 1791?), mentioned in “Clairvoyant” (27) and “Villagers” (96), was a Hannibal jeweler and watchmaker. He had four children whom Clemens knew: John, Richard C., Edmund C., and Jenny (Marion Census 1850, 306; SLC to Pamela A. Moffett, 2 Apr 87, NPV, in MTBus, 379).
Richard C. (Dick) Stevens, as Clemens notes in “Villagers” (96), became a pilot on the upper Mississippi (Kennedy 1857, 302).
Edmund C. (Ed) Stevens (b. 1834?), Clemens’s friend and classmate, became a watchmaker. In 1861 he was a corporal in the Marion Rangers, the inept band of Confederate volunteers Clemens described in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). Stevens, he recalled, was “trim-built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat; bright, educated, but given over entirely to fun. . . . As far as he was concerned, this military expedition of ours was simply a holiday.” In 1901 Clemens wrote: “I had a good deal of correspondence with Ed a year or two before he died. . . . We were great friends, warm friends, he & I. He was of a killingly entertaining spirit; he had the light heart, the care-free ways, the bright word, the easy laugh, the unquenchable genius of fun, he was a friendly light in a frowning world—he should not have died out of it” (SLC to John Stevens, 28 Aug 1901, CU-MARK). Clemens recalls Stevens in his “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and in “Villagers” (96). Working notes show that he considered portraying him as Jimmy Steel in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as watchmaker Ed Sanders in “Schoolhouse Hill” (HH&T, 383; MSM, 432), but those characters do not appear in the stories (Marion Census 1850, 306).
