‖To William Dean Howells
15 June 1872 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: NN-B, UCCL 00756)

Hartford, June 15.

Friend Howells—

Could you tell me how I could get a copy of your portrait as published in Hearth & Home? I hear so much talk about it as being among the finest works of art which have yet appeared in that journal, that I feel a strong desire to see it. Is it suitable for framing? I have written the publishers of H & H time & again, but they say that the demand for the portrait immediately exhausted the edition & now a copy cannot be had, even for the European demand, which has now begun.1 Bret Harte has been here,2 & says his family would not [bel ] without that portrait for any consideration. He says his children get up in the night & yell for it.3 I would give anything for a copy of that portrait to put up in my parlor. I have Oliver Wendell Holmes’s & Bret Harte’s, as published in Every Saturday,4 & of all the swarms that come every day to gaze upon them, none go away that are not softened & [humbled] & made more resigned to the will of God. If I had yours to put up alongside of them, I believe the combination would bring more souls to earnest reflection, & ultimate conviction of their lost condition, & infallible than any other kind of warning would. Where in the nation can I get that portrait? Here are heaps of people that want it, [ tha ]—that need it. There is my uncle. He wants a copy. He is lying at the point of death. He has been lying at the point of death for two years. He wants a copy—& I want him to have a copy. If it will not And I want you to send a copy to the man that shot my dog. I want to see if he is dead to every human instinct.

Now you send me that portrait. I am sending you mine, in this letter; & am glad to do it, for it has been greatly admired. People who are judges of art, find in the execution a grandeur which has not been equalled in this country, & an expression which has not been approached in any.

Ys Truly

S. L. Clemens.

P. S.—62,000 copies of Roughing It sold & delivered in 4 months.

[enclosure:] 5

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Howells’s portrait appeared on the cover of the 30 March 1872 issue of Hearth and Home (see the illustration below). (The 9 November issue would include a brief biography of Clemens and a portrait reengraved from the London Graphic of 5 October.) Hearth and Home was an illustrated household and agricultural weekly founded in 1868; its editorial staff included Harriet Beecher Stowe (briefly) and Mary Mapes Dodge. The magazine, whose readership was limited to “a leisure-class of well-to-do people, pottering with amateur horticulture and interested in literature and art,” was a “financial failure from the beginning” (Eggleston 1910, 131). It was sold to publishers Orange Judd and Company in October 1870. Edward and George Cary Eggleston took over as editor and managing editor in August 1871; the latter succeeded his brother as editor in mid-1872. The magazine advertised itself as “one of the most beautiful Journals in the world,” each volume containing “about $25,000 worth of splendid engravings, finely printed, and of a highly pleasing and instructive character” (Hearth and Home 4 {30 Mar 72}: 260). Hearth and Home was purchased by the New York Graphic in 1874 and ceased entirely in December 1875 (Eggleston 1910, 146; Mott 1957, 99–100; Hearth and Home 4 {30 Mar 72}: 243, and 4 {9 Nov 72}: 836; 5 Oct 72 to Fitzgibbon).

Portrait of William Dean Howells in Hearth and Home for 30 March 1872. See 15 June 72 to Howells.

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2 Lilly Warner mentioned Harte’s visit in a letter of 13 June to her husband: “I’ve had a short call from Mr. Clemens—Mark—on his way back from the carriage shed. He is going to the station at a quarter of 5, for Bret Harte, who is coming to visit him. I hope somehow I shall get a sight at him” (CU-MARK). The Hartford Courant of 14 June also mentioned Harte’s stay (“Brief Mention,” 2). The visit may account for the appearance of Harte’s name in the 1872 Hartford directory (published in July), where he was listed as “poet, author, b. Forest.” The Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular of 12 September drew attention to the listing and suggested that Harte was “put down as a boarder at the house of Mr. Clemens” (2:259). The false entry may have been instigated by Clemens as a joke (Geer 1872, 7–8, 25, 74). In 1907 Clemens recalled the reason for Harte’s visit:

When Harte had been living in New York two or three months he came to Hartford and stopped over night with us. He said he was without money, and without a prospect; that he owed the New York butcher and baker two hundred and fifty dollars and could get no further credit from them; also he was in debt for his rent and his landlord was threatening to turn his little family into the street. He had come to me to ask for a loan of two hundred and fifty dollars. I said that that would relieve only the butcher and baker part of the situation, with the landlord still hanging over him; he would better accept five hundred, which he did. He employed the rest of his visit in delivering himself of sparkling sarcasms about our house, our furniture, and the rest of our domestic arrangements. (AD, 4 Feb 1907, CU-MARK, in MTE, 273–74)

Harte wrote to Clemens on 17 June (CU-MARK), after his Hartford visit, apparently in response to a letter from Clemens which has not been found:

UCLC31811

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Clemens’s old Quaker City friend Daniel Slote (of Slote, Woodman and Company of New York City), who sometimes acted as his banker, had evidently given Harte a “cheque” for the promised loan. “Butterworth” was probably Harte’s importunate butcher: George G. Butterworth was listed in the 1872 New York directory as a purveyor of game. Harte slightly misquoted a remark of Daniel Peggotty’s from chapter 63 of David Copperfield. Clemens was serving as an intermediary between Harte and Elisha Bliss in negotiating a book contract. The “Barmecide” provided the illusory feast to the beggar in the Arabian Nights (L4, 6 n. 6, 248–49, 397–98 n. 1; George R. Stewart, 197, 206–7, 209; Duckett, 51, 76–78, 87–89; H. Wilson 1872, 173; see 28 July 72 to Bliss, n. 2).

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3 Harte had married Anna Griswold in 1862, and by this time they had three children—Griswold (b. 1863), Francis King (b. 1865), and newborn Jessamy, born on 31 May 1872 (L2, 40 n. 2; Jesse Benton Frémont to Thomas Starr King, 16 Oct 73, CSfCP, in Frémont, 356; Duckett, 81; Harte to “Zander,” 5 June 72, CU-BANC).

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4 Holmes’s portrait, engraved by William J. Linton, appeared on the cover of Every Saturday on 30 December 1871, supplemented inside by a graceful appreciation of his work. Harte’s portrait, also executed by Linton, had appeared on the cover nearly a year earlier, on 14 January 1871. The accompanying biographical sketch made much of the “delicacy and cultivation” captured in the portrait: “The writings of Mr. Harte must account to all tolerably sensible people for such a face as this; and acquaintance with this face cannot but heighten the enjoyment with which they will turn again to his stories and poems” (42; Hamilton, 169). Both portraits are reproduced on the next page.

Portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes, engraved by William J. Linton, in Every Saturday for 30 December 1871.

Portrait of Bret Harte, engraved by Linton, in Every Saturday for 14 January 1871.

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5 Clemens enclosed a clipping from the front page of the Salt Lake City Tribune of 27 May 1872, presumably sent by a western friend. The Tribune had reproduced Clemens’s portrait to illustrate “A Nevada Funeral,” an extract reprinted from the Buck Fanshaw episode in chapter 47 of Roughing It. The poorly executed engraving was apparently based on an 1869 photograph by Gurney and Son of New York (L3, 503). Someone, possibly Clemens, drew double underlines under the first eight words of the introductory paragraph. Patrick H. Lannan, mentioned in the paragraph, was the proprietor of the City Market in Virginia City in 1863. From 1883 to 1901 he was one of the owners of the Salt Lake City Tribune. Nevada journalist Alf Doten described him in 1899 as “one of the best and most popularly known former Comstockers” who had dabbled in journalism in Virginia City (Doten, 3:2228; Malmquist, 73–74, 202; Kelly, 247). Clemens’s early Territorial Enterprise article on Lannan’s slaughterhouse has not been identified.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B). The enclosed clipping was cut from the Salt Lake City Tribune (27 May 72, 1); it survives with the letter, glued to the top of the first page—probably not by Clemens—and is photographically reproduced.

Previous publication: L5, 102–8; Paine 1917, 781; MTL, 1:194–95; MTHL, 1:11–12; enclosure omitted from all.

Provenance:The MS belonged to lawyer and corporate official Owen D. Young (1874–1962), whose collection NN acquired in about 1940 through purchase and donation.

Emendations and textual notes:

bel • [‘l’ partly formed; possibly ‘t’ or ‘h’]

humbled • hum- | humbled [rewritten for clarity]

tha • [‘a’ partly formed]