Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Olivia Lewis Langdon
per Telegraph Operator
7 November 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS, copy received: CtHMTH, UCCL 00526)

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[the western union telegraph company].

dated1 Buffalo 7th‸Novr ‸ 1870

received at 2-50 PM 7—

to Mrs J Langdon

Elmira

Langdon Clemens was born at eleven this morning mother & child doing well.2 Mr Fairbanks3 is coming.

Saml L Clemens

17 DH Paid–

J/n

[telegram docketed:] Theodore | Please preserve this | O. L.4

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 “Novr” was added in pencil by an unidentified hand.

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2 The baby had not been expected until around the first week in December. Mrs. Langdon replied to Clemens’s telegram with a telegram of her own, later the same afternoon: “The Mothers and Grandmas blessing on mother and child”—referring to herself and to her mother-in-law, Eunice Ford. Olivia Clemens preserved her mother’s telegram in her commonplace book (CU-MARK).

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3 The telegrapher’s error: Clemens had summoned Mrs. Fairbanks. On 8 November, clearly replying to a 7 November cable from him, she sent a telegram that Olivia preserved in her commonplace book (CU-MARK): “Heres to you & your family may they live long & prosper’ hope to Dine with you saturday next at six Pm will arrive on five oclock train.” Then—presumably responding to a letter, now lost, that Clemens wrote in Langdon’s voice (see 11 Nov 70 to Eunice Ford and 12 Nov 70 to the Twichells)—Mrs. Fairbanks sent the following letter, which Olivia also preserved in her commonplace book:

UCLC31702

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The allusion to Langdon’s “over-coat” suggests that Clemens’s lost letter included a drawing, probably like the ones sent to Susan Crane on 19–20? November. Mrs. Fairbanks arrived on Saturday, 12 November, and returned to Cleveland before 19 November (12 Nov 70 to the Twichells; 19 Nov 70 to Fairbanks).

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4 Langdon Clemens was Olivia Lewis Langdon’s first grandchild. Susan (her foster daughter) and Theodore Crane, married since 1858, were, and remained, childless.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, copy received, telegram blank filled out in the hand of a telegraph operator, Mark Twain House, Hartford (CtHMTH).

glyph Previous publication: L4, 225–26.

glyph Provenance:Donated to CtHMTH in 1965 by Mrs. Eugene Lada-Mocarski.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

the . . . company. • Blank No. 1. | THE WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH COMPANY. | [¶] The rules of this Company require that all messages received for transmission, shall be written on the message blanks of the Company, under and subject to the conditions printed thereon, which conditions have been agreed to by the sender of the following message. | THOS. T. ECKERT, Gen’l Sup’t, New York. WILLIAM ORTON, Pres’t, O. H. PALMER, Sec’y, New York.