To Olivia L. Langdon
13 and 14 January 1869 • Ottawa, Ill.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00231)

Ottawa, Ill., Jan. 13.

My Dearest Livy—

Another botch of a lecture!—even worse than Elmira, I think.1 And it was such a pity—for we had a beautiful church entirely full of handsome, well-dressed, intellectual ladies & gentlemen. They say I didn’t botch it, but I should think I ought to know. I closed with a fervent apology for my failure, just as I did in Elmira—& the apology was the only thing in the lecture that had any life or any feeling in it. It cuts me to the very quick to make a failure. I did feel so ashamed of myself. I even distressed the Committee—I touched their hearts with my genuine suffering, & real good fellows as they are, they came up to my room to comfort me. The failure was chiefly owing to an idiot president, who insisted on introducing me while the people were still pouring in,—& they kept on coming in till one-fourth of the lecture had been delivered to an audience who e were [ en exclusive[ly] ] engaged in watching the [new-comers ] to their seats—it seemed that I never would get their attention. I grew so exasperated, at last, that I shouted to the door keeper to close the doors & not open them again on any account. But my confidence was gone, the church was harder to speak in than [any ] empty barrel would have been, I was angry, wearied to death with travel, & I just hobbled miserably through, apologized, bade the house good-night, & then gave the President a piece of my mind, without any butter or sugar on it. And now I have to pray for forgiveness for these things—& unpreprared, Livy, for the bitterness is not all out of my bad, foolish heart yet.2

Took tea with Mr. Lewis—like him ever so [much. If ] you remember, he is like Twichell—you are acquainted with him as soon as you take him by the hand. It would take some time to get acquainted with his wife, though.3

Lost my baggage somewhere, day-before yesterday—heard of it today, but can’t get it before I arrive in Toledo4—am lecturing in my bob-tail coat & that makes me feel awkward & uncomfortable before an audience.

Livy, dear, I am instructed to appear & lecture in New York City Feb. 15. It is the most aggravating thing. I have to miss the re-union after all, I suppose, for no doubt I shall have to go on lecturing just the same, after that. But you must write me all that the happy re-unionists do & say, & I shall be with you all in spirit, at least, if not in the flesh. And I shall keep a sharp look-out & see if I can’t get a day or two to myself between Jan. 22 & Feb. 13, because I do so long to see you, Livy dear. So far there are only five applications in my agent’s hands for lectures during that interval, I think.5 You [ wr were ] right not to send the picture if it slandered you like the other, but it does seem to me sometimes that any ‸new‸ picture of you would be a comfort to me—one that had seen your own face lately. The old photograph is a dear old picture to me, & I love it; but still it isn’t as beautiful as you are, Livy, & I want a picture that is. I am not so absurd as to love you simply for your beauty—I trust you know that well enough—but I do love your beauty, & am naturally proud of it & I ‸ want don’t wan’t the picture to mar it.

Poor Lily Hitchcock!—see how they talk about her in print—just as generous & warm-hearted a girl as you ever saw, Livy, & her mother is such a rare gem of a woman. The family are old, old friends of mine & I think ever so much of them. That girl, many & many & many a time, has waited till nearly noon to breakfast with me, when we all lived at the Occidental Hotel & I was on a morning paper & could not go to bed till 2 or 3 in the [morning. She ] is a brilliant talker. They live half of every year in Paris—& the hearts that rascal has broken, on both sides of the water! It always seemed funny to me, that she & I could be friends, but we were—I suppose it was because under all her wild & repulsive foolery, that warm heart of hers would show. When I saw the family in Paris, Lily had just delivered the mitten to a wealthy Italian Count, at her mother’s request (Mrs. H. said Lily loved him,)6 & then—but ah me,! it was only going from bad to worse to jilt anybody to marry Howard Coit. I know him, a dissipated spendthrift, son of a deceased, wealthy eminent physician, a most worthy man. Howard “went through” the property in an incredibly short time. And this poor little numbscull Lily’s last act was to mortgage her property for [ $50,000 ‸$20,000‸ ], gold, & give the money to that calf. He will squander it in six months if he has not mended greatly. {The above was told me in Chicago by a Confidante of Lily’s who was simply under promise to keep the matter from her parents.} Until that moment I said the whole affair must be untrue, because, as detestable as some of Lily’s freaks were she could not be capable of deceiving her mother & father & marrying secretly.7 And to tell the plain truth I don’t really believe it yet. She is an awful girl (the newspaper article is written by somebody who knows whom he is talking about), but she isn’t that awful. Li She moves in the v best society in San F. Does that horrify you, Livy? But remember, there never was so much as a whisper against her good name. I am so sorry for that girl, & so very, very sorry for her good kind mother. I hold both of them in grateful remembrance because they said in their happy remembrance always—for they were your brave, [outspoken ] sort of friends, & just as loyal to you behind your back as before your face.

Well—I simply meant to enclose the slip, with a line of explanation—I think I rather overdid. it.

Tell Miss Lewis that I think the answer is “Considerable?.” What is her notion? I have told her brother all I knew about her, & a mighty sight that I didn’t [know. I ] always like to give good measure.

The passage [ ma ] from the “exquisite” struck me at the time as a vivid echo of my own sentiments—I knew it would be of yours, without your mentioning it, dear Livy.8 No, you wouldn’t [ m ] ask me to go to prayer meeting if you fancied I was tired, & I am sure I would always try to be as thoughtful of you, & as watchful for your happiness. I think the our very chiefest pleasure would (will, Livy,) consist in planning & scheming each for the other’s happiness. Livy, I cannot conceive of such a thing as my failing in deference to you, either now or when you are my wife, (for I will not think of your being any one else’s wife, Livy,) or ever conducting myself toward you, in the world’s presence, in a manner unbecoming to your dignity. Why did you talk of not sending “this half sheet?” It delighted me more than I can [tell. I ] like all you say about marriage, for it shows that you appreciate the tremendous step it is, & are a looking at it in all its parts, & not to simply seek flaws in it.

After some littele delay, I am back & ready to go on answering your letter—but alas! it is i AM, I am tired to death & so sleepy—

And so I press this loving kiss upon your lips, my darling Livy & waft you a fond Good-night.

Sam. L. C.

[enclosure:]

An Eccentric California Belle.9

San Francisco Correspondence of the Providence Journal.

Mrs. Ellet, in her recent book on “Famous American Women,” makes mention of a California lady remarkable for her ability to entertain twenty gentlemen at once by her vivacious conversational powers.10 If this were the only, or chiefly, remarkable thing about Miss Hitchcock, she would be a far less remarkable personage than she is. But she is a character, and such a character as this age cannot and need not duplicate the country over. As Americans, we have long boasted of the versatility of our climate, soil and people. Perhaps Miss Hitchcock was a necessary national production, that the world may be convinced of the truthfulness of this boast. She is a public character—an actress requiring a far broader stage and larger house than other actresses of the time. She is an only daughter, an only child, I believe, of a wealthy and most respectable family, her father, Dr. Hitchcock, having come to this coast as an army surgeon during the Mexican war. He is now a retired physician and among the most substantial and worthy of San Franciscans.11 His accomplished daughter has long been one of the belles of this city, without whom no social gathering of the ton was complete if she was in the country. When a child she was rescued from a burning building by some members of Knickerbocker Engine Company, No. 5, since which time she has never forgotten them—wearing conspicuously, at all times and in all places, a neat gold “5” upon her dress, and at times making the company, of which she is a duly elected member, costly presents, ranging from the cherished “5” to the gold-mounted fire-horn.12 She is eccentric to an extent that would shock our New England notions of propriety, showing her eccentricity, now by presenting [the ] “Fives” a barrel of brandy, now by staking a thousand on a favorite horse at the races, again by riding on the cowcatcher with the constructing engineer over the entire length of the Napa Valley Railroad, to which ride she challenged said engineer, and still again by some of the noblest deeds of philanthropy and charity. She has upwards of $50,000 in her own right, and of course is expected to inherit the hundreds of thousands of her [father’s ] estate. From her own purse she supplies the wants of many needy objects of charity, being generous to the extreme and of noble impulses. She vibrates between San Francisco and Paris, taking New York and London in her way, and astonishing the natives of each of these quiet (?) intermediate cities by what she does and what she does not do. She [defies ] all rules and conventionalities of society, dresses and acts as she pleases everywhere, selects her company from all classes at will, and yet commands the confidence and good-will of all. She is conspicuous at the grand balls of the Empress at the Tuileries,13 [attends ] annually the Derby in England, where, it is said, she amuses herself by winning or losing a few hundred pounds a day at the hands of the young sprigs of nobility. A few days since she started in company with her parents overland for New York, and thence to Paris. Two days after her marriage notice appeared as evidence of the last of her eccentricities; she in a quiet way, with the personal knowledge of but two human beings besides herself and the fortunate (?) groom, having suddenly experimented in the role of bride. Another admirer was with her all the afternoon of that day, until 6 p. m., when she went, as he supposed, to dinner. At 8 p. m. he met her again by appointment and went with her to the theatre, after which he accompanied her and the family as far as Sacramento on her overland journey, quite ignorant of the fact that from 8 p. m. he had been in company with Mrs. Howard Coit instead of Miss Hitchcock.14

[in pencil on wrapper:]

Miss Olivia L. Langdon

Present.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens had delivered the “American Vandal Abroad” in Elmira on 23 November 1868, giving less than his best performance before an audience that included Olivia Langdon and her family (L2, 285–86 n. 1, 288).

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2 Sponsored by the Ottawa Young Men’s Christian Association (whose “idiot president” has not been further identified), Clemens’s 13 January lecture in the Methodist Episcopal Church drew only brief reviews. The Ottawa Free Trader thought it “certainly most amusing and droll. ... Mark’s stories are [i]nimitable, and when he tries to be eloquent he succeeds beyond almost any speaker we ever heard” (“Lectures,” 16 Jan 69, 1). The Ottawa Republican reported that members of the “large audience in the M. E. Church” had expressed “various opinions.” “One man said it was ‘very funny and at times eloquent,’ another, equally as well prepared to judge, thought ‘the lecture was mostly nonsense and stale at that’” (“On Wednesday evening ...,” 21 Jan 69, 3). Clemens’s experience on this occasion helps account for this 1871 assertion to James Redpath, then his lecture agent: “I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can’t be made to do it, in any possible way” (10 July 71 to Redpath [2nd of 3], Friedman, in MTL, 1:189). Nevertheless, Clemens performed very successfully in at least three churches during the present tour and once in 1871 recommended using a church as a lecture hall. See 29 and 30 Jan 69 to OLL, n. 1; 17 Feb 69 to Goodman, n. 2; 28 Nov 69 to OLL, n. 2; and 3 Dec 69 to the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, n. 2.

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3 Olivia had not yet met Twichell, but Clemens must have earlier characterized him in such a way that she would understand this comparison of him to her uncle. Nothing further has been learned of Lewis’s formidable wife.

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4 Where Clemens lectured on 20 January (see 20 and 21 Jan 69 to OLL).

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5 Clemens lectured in Alliance, Ohio, on 15 February, and never lectured at all in New York City during the present tour. His midwestern agent was G. L. Torbert, of Dubuque, Iowa, secretary of the Associated Western Literary Societies, which coordinated requests for lecturers from member societies (L2, 62 n. 4, 241 n. 3, 254–55 n. 2). Torbert left a break in Clemens’s schedule that permitted him to visit Elmira from 3 to 12 February (see the Lecture Schedule, 1868–1870). The “reunion,” which Olivia was planning for around 18 February at the Langdon home, was to be a gathering of her brother’s special Quaker City friends: see 14 Jan 69 to OLL, n. 8.

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6 Clemens had become well acquainted with Eliza (Lillie) Wychie Hitchcock (1843–1929), the belle of San Francisco society, and with her parents, Dr. Charles McPhail Hitchcock (1812–85) and Martha Hunter Hitchcock (1818–99), in 1864, when he was a reporter for the San Francisco Morning Call. He had last seen the mother and daughter in Paris in July 1867 (L2, 72–73; “Deaths,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 4 Apr 85, 3; Green, 1, 2 facing, 32).

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7 Lillie Hitchcock had dismayed her parents with her marriage—on 19 November 1868, at San Francisco’s St. James Church—to Benjamin Howard Coit (1840–85), the son of Benjamin B. Coit (1801–67), a prominent physician who had come to San Francisco from the East Coast in 1849. Howard Coit had grown up in Buffalo, New York, and in Norristown, Pennsylvania, before leaving his mother and journeying to California in 1857. After about three years in Los Angeles, doing telegraphic and clerical work, and about seven years in Arizona, working as a mining superintendent, he settled permanently in San Francisco in 1867. In November of that year he became a member of the San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board, which had been created in 1862 to facilitate the purchase and sale of mining stock. In December 1869, with assistance from his influential father-in-law (see notes 6 and 11), he won election as the board’s “caller”—the chairman responsible for calling out the daily list of stocks for bid—a position he held, by annual re-election and at a salary of $1,000 a month, until illness forced his resignation only weeks before his death. An 1878 biographical sketch of Coit noted that “it would be almost impossible to find another man that could exactly fill his place. It is not profound scholarship, great shrewdness as a ‘mining sharp,’ or knowledge of stock manipulations, nor a good pair of lungs, a handsome, manly form, or imperturbable good humor, or even inflexible integrity that fit a man for the office of caller of the San Francisco Stock Board. Howard Coit has all these and something more, which inspires such respect and confidence that although he has sold more stocks than any other living man, both buyers and sellers—those who have lost and those who have won fortunes through his ministrations—are satisfied with his fairness and impartiality” (Pacific Coast, 46–47). That encomium and others like it suggest that Coit “mended greatly” from the profligate whom Clemens describes. He did not reform entirely, however; his philandering led Lillie to separate from him several years before his death (“Married,” San Francisco Examiner, 27 Nov 68, 3; Green, 27; “Death of Howard Coit,” San Francisco Morning Call, 15 May 85, 2; “Sudden Death of Dr. B. B. Coit,” San Francisco Alta California, 17 Apr 67, 1; “Men We Know,” California Mail Bag 9 [June 76]: 94; Joseph L. King, 4, 6–7, 9, 43–48, 50, 74, 275, 294, 336; Holdredge, 115, 252, 274–76).

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8 The “exquisite” apparently was all or part of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854–62), an uplifting four-part verse narrative about two pairs of lovers. Clemens and Olivia read the work in late 1868 and discussed it in their correspondence (see L2, 274, 310, 313–14, 343, 369).

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9 Although the clipping that Clemens enclosed does not survive and therefore cannot be positively identified, it is apparent that its text derived ultimately from a newspaper letter from the West Coast, signed “Vallejo,” published on 28 December 1868 in the Providence (R.I.) Journal. The portion of this letter that dealt with Lillie Hitchcock Coit was reprinted in the Chicago Tribune on 11 January (4), three days after Clemens left Chicago en route to other Illinois towns. The likelihood is great, therefore, that he took his clipping either from the Tribune, or from some recent reprinting of it. The text of the enclosure is reproduced verbatim from the Tribune.

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10 “Miss Lillie Hitchcock was celebrated in San Francisco for brilliant accomplishments and personal graces. She would entertain at one time a circle of twenty gentlemen,” according to Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, The Queens of American Society (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1867), 451. Ellet (1812?–77), a poet, essayist, and translator, is best known for her popular histories of American women, particularly The Women of the American Revolution (3 vols., 1848–50) and Pioneer Women of the West (1852).

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11 During eighteen years as a surgeon in the United States Army, Charles McPhail Hitchcock served at West Point, on the Canadian border, in Indian Territory, and in the Mexican War of 1846–48, before being posted to San Francisco in 1851, with the rank of major, to serve as medical director of the Pacific Division. In 1853 he resigned from the army to go into private practice. Upon his death in 1885 he left an estate valued at $250,000 (Green, 2 facing, 3–4; Heitman, 1:532; “Death of Howard B. Coit,” San Francisco Morning Call, 15 May 85, 2).

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12 John Boynton, the fireman who rescued Lillie Hitchcock early on 23 December 1851, recalled that afterward Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5 received “a barrel of brandy, sent to us by Dr. Hitchcock with a thousand dollars toward a new engine. His was a grateful heart for a life saved from destruction. But it was Lillie Hitchcock’s heart which throbbed with eternal love for the members of Number Five. From then on she belonged to us as much as we belonged to her” (Holdredge, 66–68; “Fire,” “The Fire on Bush Street,” San Francisco Alta California, 23 Dec 51, 2, 3). Floride Green, a friend of Lillie’s, reported:

Knickerbocker Number 5 became so attached to her that they admitted her to honorary membership October 3, 1863, and her certificate of membership was her most prized possession. After this she was expected to go to all fires that occurred in the day. And at night, if her light was not burning until her engine was housed she was fined. ... She always wore a little gold 5 pinned to her dress, and signed herself Lillie H. Coit 5. She asked that this 5 be left on her at the end. Everything she had, even her linen, was marked—L.C.H.5. Lacemakers even worked it into her monogram on her fans. (Green, 19–20)

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13 The palace in Paris that was the principal residence of Emperor Napoleon III (1808–73) and the Empress Eugénie (1826–1920).

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14 The Chicago Tribune omitted about the final third of the Providence Journal article, which included these closing remarks about Lillie Hitchcock Coit:

This is the same youth whom she dared to drive down an embankment on the Cliff House road a few years ago, which he did at the small cost of $1200. Her husband is left behind, she not having seen him, it is said, since they left “Saint James’ Free Church.” Doubtless ere this she has informed her loving pa and dearest ma of her last romantic experiment, and is now enjoying some other innocent amusement.

But while this heroine is thus eccentric and romantic in her composition, and thus reckless in her demeanor, as before remarked, there are in her character many of the noblest traits possessed by any. She speaks evil of no one, but has a kind word and warm heart for all. Were that heart, these talents and her means consecrated to her God, and her life restrained by the religion of Jesus, she would have almost unlimited capacity for usefulness. (Vallejo)

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), is copy-text for the letter. The original enclosure, which does not survive, was most likely a clipping from the Chicago Tribune (“An Eccentric California Belle,” 11 Jan 69, 4). Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Newspaper and Microcopy Division, University of California, Berkeley (CU-NEWS).

Previous publication: L3, 30–37; LLMT, 49–52, without the enclosure.

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.

Emendations and textual notes:

en exclusive[ly] • enxclusive

new-comers • new-|comers

any • [‘y’ partly formed; possibly ‘amn’]

much. If • much.—|If

wr were • wrere [‘r’ partly formed]

morning. She • morning.—|She

$50,000 ‸$20,000‸ • $5 20,000

outspoken • out-|spoken

know. I • know.—|I

ma • [‘a’ partly formed]

m • [partly formed; possibly ‘w’]

tell. I • tell.—|I

the • []he [badly inked]

father’s • fa[]her’s [badly inked]

defies • defie[s] [badly inked]

attends • att[]nds [badly inked]