To Olivia L. Clemens
10 January 1872 • Steubenville, Ohio
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00712)

Steubenville, Jan. 9.

Livy Darling, I am stopping at the Female Seminary—70 of the girls were at the lecture last night, & a mighty handsome lot they were.1

These windows overlook the Ohio—once alive with [steamboats ] & crowded with all manner of traffic; but now a deserted stream, victim of the railroads. Where be the pilots. They were starchy boys, in my time, & greatly envied by the youth of the West. The same with the Mississippi pilots—though the Mobile & Ohio [Railroad ] had already walked suddenly off with the passenger business in my day, & so it was the beginning of the end.2

I am reading “The Member from Paris” a very bright, sharp, able French political novel, very happily translated. It is all so good & so Frenchy that I don’t know where to mark.3 I have read & sent home The Golden Legend, The New England Tragedies, Edwin of Deira, Erling the Bold, & a novel by the author of John Halifax—forgotten the name of it.4

Did my canvassing book, full of lecture MSS reach you from Paris? You do not mention it.5

There is no life in me this morning—have slept too long & hard. Love to all those dear fellows under the roof, & cords & cords of love to you, Livy my darling.

Samℓ.

Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor. Forest & Hawthorne sts | [Hartford ] | Conn. [return address:] if not delivered within 10 days, to be returned to [postmarked:] steubenville o. jan 11

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 Clemens wrote on 10 (not 9) January, the morning after he lectured to a “large audience” for the YMCA course in Steubenville (Steubenville Gazette: “Here and There,” 12 Jan 72; “New Advertisements,” 5 Jan 72, both no page). Clemens noted in his lecture appointment book that his Steubenville hosts wanted him “to stop at Seminary like Gough” (Redpath and Fall, 12). The Steubenville Female Seminary (1829–98) occupied several buildings on an extensive landscaped site overlooking the Ohio River. It offered its students an unusually strong academic program, and was regarded as the “educational and social center of a large community. Statesmen, authors, musicians and lecturers of international fame were frequent guests” (“The Steubenville Female Seminary,” Steubenville Herald, 29 Sept 1926, no page; Weisenburger, 174).

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2 Competition between railroads and steamboats on the Ohio was first joined in 1854; by 1857, with the advent of daily passenger trains between Cincinnati and St. Louis, the railroads had won. During the same period the Mobile and Ohio Railroad and the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad were extended northward paralleling the Mississippi. Continuous rail service between Cincinnati and New Orleans was in place by 1859 and was expected to “take a large passenger business from the steamers,” according to a Cincinnati report on commerce. With the interruption caused by the war, however, “rail service improved so slowly on this route that twenty years were to pass before the position of steamboats on the Mississippi below Cairo was seriously threatened” (Hunter, 485–86). Clemens dealt oriefly with the same events in chapter 15 of Life on the Mississippi:

First, the new railroad stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern railway centres, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during several years ...; and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights; so straightway some genius from the Atlantic coast introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past! (SLC 1883, 191–92)

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3 The Member for Paris: A Tale of the Second Empire by “Trois-Étoiles” (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co., 1871) was not a translation; it was written by English journalist Eustace Clare Grenville Murray (1824–81), who was living in exile in Paris to avoid prosecution in an 1869 libel case (Griffiths, 430–31).

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4 Besides Alexander Smith’s Edwin of Deira, mentioned previously (4 Jan 72 to OLC), Clemens listed Longfellow’s Golden Legend (1851) and New-England Tragedies (1868), which he is known to have owned, respectively, in an 1862 and a first edition. His library would also include the 1870 American edition of Robert Michael Ballantyne’s Erling the Bold: A Tale of the Norse Sea-Kings (1869). The novel by Dinah Maria (Mulock) Craik, author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), may have been Christian’s Mistake (1865), which Clemens owned in an 1871 reprint by Harper and Brothers (Gribben, 1:43, 162, 420). Olivia had already received The Golden Legend. On 7 January she had written Clemens the following letter (CU-MARK), directing it to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, where she expected him to lecture on 15 January (see 17 Jan 72 to Redpath, n. 3):

UCCL00709

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Olivia mentioned lawyer Charles E. Perkins and his wife, Lucy, who lived on Woodland Street, just beyond the Nook Farm neighborhood (30 L3, 294 n. 4; (Geer 1872, 108; (Van Why, 7). For the book given to the “Syracuse City Missionary,” James P. Foster, see L4, 507–8 n. 3.

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5 Clemens had lectured in Paris, Illinois, on 30 December. From there he may have sent home the manuscript for any of three lectures used on his tour—“Reminiscences,” “Artemus Ward,” or even “Roughing It”—protected by the nearly seventy leaves of a “canvassing book” (salesman’s prospectus) for Roughing It, a copy of which he had received from Bliss by 27 November. No manuscript for “Reminiscences” and only one page of the “Artemus Ward” lecture are known to survive; about two dozen pages of miscellaneous notes for the “Roughing It” lecture are in the Mark Twain Papers (L4, 479 n. 2, 500 n. 2; SLC 1871). It is barely possible that Clemens was referring instead to manuscripts for a projected “volume of ‘Lecturing Experiences,’” one of which he sent home at this time, either from or shortly after leaving Paris (see the next letter, n. 6).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

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

Previous publication: L5, 15–17; LLMT, 172–73.

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

steamboats • steam-|boats

Railroad • Rail-|road

Hartford • Hartfodrd