To John Brown
22 and 25 September 1873 • London, England
(MS: Sachs, UCCL 03362)

The Langham Hotel
Monday.

Dear Doctor & Dear Friend:

Of all the multitude of pretty things we have gathered together in these past few months for the adornment of our new home, these lovely pictures are the loveliest. Mrs Clemens is carried away with [ em enthusiasm ]over them, & I am sure I am too.1 One can not even vaguely imagine the pleasure they are going to give, to in the years that are to [come], to multitudes of people whom we do not even know yet. We do thank you the very best we know how—& that is still better than we can put in words. I am very glad—I am grateful—to know that I reached so high a place with you—& all the more so because we hold you in such love & reverence. Livy, my wife, has never conceived so strong & so warm an affection for any one since we were married as she has for you—& I take as much delight in her daily references to you, affectionate as they are, as if they were love-offerings to me. You were very kind to us in Edinburgh, Doctor, & I wish we could have you with us on the other side of the water so that we could show you how entirely we appreciated it.

Thursday.—The financial panic in America has absorbed about all my attention & anxiety since Monday evening when I laid down this [pen.2 However], I feel relieved, now—of £600 sterling, & so—& so am able to take up my letter again & go on & finish it.3 You ask where you ask how long we stay, s & where to write [us?4 Till ]Oct. 24 your letters will find us here at the Langham Hotel (we sail Oct 25)5 & the more that come seeking us the better [ wil ]we shall like it. No, we didn’t see St Mary’s Church in [Shrewsbury]—we didn’t have time there; but we heard enough about it to wish we had had.6 I will be very glad & very willing, doctor, to take charge of the “collie,” & will take every care of her. I have a good general idea of how to do it, because for a good while, in Esmeralda, a little mining camp far down in California, my neighbor in the next cabin kept them, professionally, & I have often followed them about with him, for re & given him a helping hand with a riat‸ t ‸a now & then when necessity demanded. He had one that used to come at his call & eat from his hand; but she finally fell down the well, in the night, & kno nobody knowing it she was not found until morning, & then her weight was such that she could not be got out. My mother had a favorite one that kicked the breath out of me once, but she gave very good milk. I will take charge of yours with a great deal of pleasure, Doctor, & I think a collie on shipboard would be a real treat; but you because one never gets cream there; but you seem to think they will let her go in the first cabin—which they won’t by considerable; & that the baby can go around pulling & hauling at her tail—which Mrs. Clemens would never allow, I know perfectly well. But it ain’t any difference—I will look after her myself; & if the collie has got a calf, send the calf along too. There is nothing I like better than a calf. on shipboard 7

I sent to Dublin & got your letter from the Shelbourne Hotel—which reminds me that I forgot to go & see Swift’s tomb—but I read Gulliver all over again at Condover (first edition)—which is perhaps as well. Still I am sorry I forgot to see the grave.8

Miss Clara says that though her voice was not heard much, she was k doing a world of affectionate thinking—& you were the object of it. I am sure she never says such pleasant things about me; & yet I have known yet she has known me for years. However, that may be the reason.

Yrs Affectionately

Samℓ. L. Clemens

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Two of these photographs, taken at the studio of John Moffat in Edinburgh, and sent by Brown in care of Routledge and Sons in London (see note 4), are known to survive. They are reproduced in Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles. One of them, a shot of the Clemens party together with Brown, shows Clara Spaulding holding Susy Clemens in her lap, and the other is of Susy alone. In 1882, after the doctor’s death, Clemens wrote to his son, “Can you spare us a photograph of your father? We have none but the one taken in group with ourselves” (1 June 82 to John [Jock] Brown, StEdNL).

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2 On 18 September the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, a New York banking house that had helped finance the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, precipitated a financial panic that spread through the entire banking system of the country, paralyzing monetary circulation. The value of securities and stocks plummeted, and foreign exchange was temporarily suspended. “It was generally regarded as the immediate cause of the crisis, that the money market had become overloaded with debt”—debt largely resulting from the stocks and bonds issued to pay for railroad construction (Annual Cyclopaedia 1873, 279, 285). The worst of the panic was over within a few weeks, during which New York banks paid each other with loan certificates. By January 1874 the U.S. Treasury had further eased the crisis by restoring to circulation $26 million in retired greenbacks. During the six-year depression that followed, however, thousands of businesses failed and unemployment soared (Unger, 213–26).

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3 Six hundred pounds sterling were equivalent to about three thousand dollars. Clemens’s New York bank, Henry Clews and Company, had been forced to suspend payments to depositors on 23 September after paying out “over a million and a quarter of dollars in cash” over the previous four days (“The Financial Crisis,” New York Times, 24 Sept 73, 1; “The American Commercial Crisis,” London Times, 25 Sept 73, 5). The Clemenses learned of the suspension on the evening of 24 September: see Olivia’s letter to her mother about the crisis (25 or 26 Sept 73 to Lee, n. 1). On 4 October Clews announced that “as soon as the market grows more favorable for the negotiation of securities he will be able to tend to the demands of all his depositors,” and by early January the company was able to resume business “with the ability to pay all obligations in full” (New York Times: “Affairs in Wall Street,” 5 Oct 73, 1; “Local Miscellany,” 6 Jan 74, 8). Nevertheless, Clemens persisted in believing that Clews had cheated him, as he wrote to Charles L. Webster on 17 November 1886: “He choused me out of a good deal of money, 13 years ago as coolly as ever any other crime was committed in this world” (NPV, in MTLP, 208–9).

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4 Since beginning this letter on 22 September, Clemens had received the following note from Brown, also written on 22 September:

UCLC31889

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John Forsyth (1810–86), a scholar and clergyman of Scottish ancestry, had been a chaplain and professor of geography, history, and ethics at West Point since 1871. He may have become acquainted with Brown while studying theology in Edinburgh in the early 1830s. Brown and his sister Isabella also made a home for Brown’s son, John, known as “Jock” (John Brown, 135; John [Jock] Brown to SLC, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK). An envelope addressed by Brown to Clemens in care of the Routledges and postmarked 20 September survives in the Mark Twain Papers. It now contains only a sentimental poem, possibly by Brown himself, about a couple recalling their dead baby daughter, which is printed on a folder of stationery imprinted with his letterhead. This envelope may have contained a letter, now lost, but is almost certainly too small to have enclosed any photographs.

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5 The Clemenses had decided by 2 September to return home on 25 October, but in fact left four days earlier. Although Clemens’s announced objective—to secure a British copyright on The Gilded Age—had thus far been thwarted by delays in the typesetting of the American edition, Olivia was growing homesick (OLC to Olivia Lewis Langdon, 31 Aug and 2 Sept 73, CtHMTH).

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6 The Clemenses had been guests at Condover Hall near Shrewsbury in early September. St. Mary’s Church, in the center of the town, exhibits several architectural styles, “ranging from Norman to late-Perpendicular” (early sixteenth century), and contains “fine stained glass” (Baedeker 1901, 276).

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7 Brown responded to Clemens’s teasing on 6 October:

That was a joke about the Colly! you are an Innocent still. I have heard nothing of the doggie—& if it goes in the same vessel with you you must take no trouble with it—only let Susie just keep it in society by poking her forefinger into its eye. I have got the £5 for it from the good Professor. (CU-MARK)

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8 Clemens had read Gulliver’s Travels as recently as 1869 (L3, 132). The first edition was published in 1726 by Benjamin Motte. Swift, who died in 1745, was buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, of which he had been appointed dean in 1713.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned in 1981 by Charles W. Sachs of the Scriptorium (Beverly Hills), who provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers.

Previous publication: L5, 439–42; Christie 1981, lot 69, excerpts; Kelleher, lot 19, excerpts.

Emendations and textual notes:

em enthusiasm • emnthusiasm

come • com[e] [torn]

pen. However • pen.—|However

us? Till • us?—|Till

wil we • wile [‘l’ partly formed]

Shrewsbury • [‘ws’ conflated]