To Olivia L. Clemens
3 December 1871 • Homer, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00684)

llc

Homer, Dec 3.1

Livy darling, send Larned’s notes to me at some town where they will have plenty of time to get there—& then the day I get there telegraph me that you have sent them—so when I get the dispatch I will ask the Secretary for the letter.2 Maybe the notes have gone to Elmira, however—I telegraphed Bowen & Rogers to send them to me there, but they hadn’t arrived when I was there.3

It is all right, honey,—had already sent Ma $300 on Thanksgiving Day—or rather, the day before.4

Tell the Brooklyn writer that the Artemas Ward poem is in Littell’s Living Age for March,1867. Artemus died January [ 187 1867].5

Let the bill for the shirts be sent to Redpath & Fall. They’ll attend to the payment. What a fool the man was to send it to Hartford. Didn’t tell him to.

I am very, very, glad you have given the nightly care of the cubbie into Margaret’s hands.6 Now darling please don’t ever take charge of him again at night. I make this as a loving & special request.

Thank you most kindly for writing all those letters to people for me.

Answered Plummer’s letter—told him I was glad he was safely delivered of his first child—the tape worm—but advised him in future to attend to his readings & let his new bride attend to the census.7

Indeed it would be nice to have Mother Fairbanks with us next spring—be sure & invite her—urge her—command her.8

Ah my darling, people will come in just when I am going to write you a long letter—& here they have been hour after hour till at last I must throw down this pencil & rush to bed—probably the only man now awake in this whole town.

With a whole world of love to you & kisses for mother & the splendid cubbie.—

Samℓ.

Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor Forest & Hawthorne | Hartford | Conn [postmarked:] [homer n.y. dec 3]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Clemens performed before a “large assemblage at Barber Hall” in Homer on Saturday, 2 December. According to James P. Foster, a clergyman whom he met two days later, the Artemus Ward lecture was “unexceptionably delightful; the stories were told in a masterly manner, and were chaste and delightful; the envelope of pure humor often covering a touching moral” (Foster). Clemens spent Sunday, 3 December, in Homer and then took the train to Geneva, New York, the following day.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 That is, the secretary of the association sponsoring Clemens’s lecture.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 The notes were for $3,000 that Josephus N. Larned had borrowed in April 1870. The loan was to have been repaid in one year, but had evidently been extended. Dennis Bowen and Sherman S. Rogers were Clemens’s Buffalo lawyers (16 and 17 Apr 70 to the Langdons). The Elmira visit probably occured on the weekend of 25–26 November, in between lectures at Reading, Pennsylvania, and Bennington, Vermont, at which time Clemens would have seen his newborn niece, Julia Olivia Langdon, mentioned in his letter of 27 November to Olivia.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

4 This 29 November payment to Jane Clemens was the latest in the series of more or less regular, but generally smaller, payments Clemens had been making since 1868 (L3, 120, 121 n. 1, 425 n. 2 bottom; 7 Jan 70 to Fairbanks, n. 7; 17 Feb 71 to JLC and family, n. 4).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

5 Artemus Ward died on 6 March 1867. Littell’s Living Age reprinted the poem on 20 April 1867 (15 Nov 71 to OLC, n. 4). The “Brooklyn writer” has not been identified.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

6 This nursemaid had been with the household since early in 1871 (14 Mar 71 to Crane, n. 2).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

7 Olivia had enclosed C. B. Plummer’s letter in her own of 28 November. Plummer was a minor platform performer who was a friend of Joseph T. Goodman’s in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1867–68, and had admired Clemens since seeing him lecture there in April 1868. He later became a book agent in Lowell, Massachusetts. His repertoire included selections from Shakespeare, Dickens, Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier, as well as Mark Twain. On 13 December the American Publishing Company sent Plummer a copy of The Innocents Abroad, at Clemens’s expense. In San Francisco in January 1872, he “brought down the house” with the following passages from it, which he read in “Mark Twain’s drawling twang”: the discovery of the corpse by moonlight and the “skinned man” sculpture, both from chapter 18, and the tomb of Adam, from chapter 53 (SLC’s account statement from the American Publishing Company for 15 Apr 72, CU-MARK; “Plummer’s Entertainment,” San Francisco Evening Post, 6 Jan 72, 3; “Amusements,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Jan 72, 3; “Professor Plummer,” San Francisco Morning Call, 6 Jan 72, 3; Plummer to SLC, 25 Mar 86, 14 Nov 90, both in CU-MARK; L2, 213 n. 4; Doten 1973, 2:962, 971).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

8 Olivia had written Clemens on 28 November, sending her letter to Homer, New York (CU-MARK):

UCCL00681

Click to add citation to My Citations.

The postscript clearly anticipated Olivia’s approaching confinement. Mrs. Fairbanks, her husband, Abel, and their daughter Mollie visited the Clemenses in Elmira in the week following the birth there of Olivia Susan Clemens on 19 March 1872 (“Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 26 Mar 72, 3; Fairbanks to OLC, 1 Apr 72, CSmH).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

Previous publication: L4, 503–6; LLMT, 362, brief paraphrase.

Provenance:See Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

187 1867 • 18767

homer n.y. dec 3 • [hom] er [n.] y [] dec [3] [badly inked]