To Olivia Lewis Langdon
20 July 1873 • York, England
(MS: Tollett, UCCL 00955)

York, July 20.

Mother Dear—

I shall only just write a line to say that for full 24 hours no one has called, no cards have been sent up, no letters received, no engagements made, & none fulfilled. [ That ] All which is to say, we have been 24 hours out of London, & they have been 24 hours of rest & quiet. Nobody knows us here—we took good care of that. In Edinburgh we are to be introduced to nobody, & shall stay in a retired, private hotel, & go on resting.1

For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with its crooked, narrow lanes that remind us tell us of their ‸their‸ ‸old‸ day that knew no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-&-timber dwellings with upper stor‸ies‸ es far overhanging the street, & thus marking their date, say 300 years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble & picturesque ruin of St. Mary’s Abbey, suggesting their date, say 500 years ago, in the heart of Crusading times & the glory of English [chivalry] & romance;2 the vast cathedral of York, with its worn carvings & quaintly pictured windows preaching of still remoter days;3 the outlandish names of streets & courts & [byways] that stand as a record & a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here & there of King Arthur & his knights & their bloody fights with s Saxon oppressors round about this old city more than 1300 years gone by; & last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins & sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch & a hoary tower of stone that still remain & are kissed by the sun & [ carr caressed] by the shadows every day just as the sun & the shadows have kissed & caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor’s soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary walked the streets of Nazareth a youth with no more name or fame [ that than] this Yorkshire boy that is loitering down this street this moment.

We are enjoying it, & shall go on enjoying it for several days yet (for we have a delightful little hotel,) but we would like it ever so much better [ of if] you & the rest of you were only with us. Goodbye, mother dear.

Yr loving son

Samℓ.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 On 19 July the Clemenses left London for Edinburgh, stopping for several days in York. While there, Clemens purchased and annotated a copy of William Combe’s History and Antiquities of the City of York, from Its Origin to the Present Times (3 vols., York: 1785), perhaps for use in his English book. By 25 July the Clemenses had arrived in Edinburgh, where they settled at Veitch’s Hotel (Anderson Galleries 1920, lot 10; Gribben, 1:155; OLC to Alice Day, 25 July 73, CtHSD; 31 July 73 to unidentified, n. 1).

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2 St. Mary’s Abbey was one of the first monasteries founded in Yorkshire after the Norman Conquest; its principal remains date from about 1300. The seventh (and last) Crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land took place in 1270–71 (Murray, 476; Smith, 294).

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3 York Minster, one of England’s chief cathedrals and the seat of an archbishopric, was originally of Norman construction but was completely rebuilt in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries (Smith, 1077).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, collection of Robert Tollett.

Previous publication: L5, 419–420; MTB, 1:485–86; MTL, 1:207–8; Jervis Langdon, 8–9; Jerome and Wisbey, 206–7, all with omissions.

Provenance:The MS probably remained in the Langdon family until at least 1938, when it was published by Jervis Langdon (Olivia Lewis Langdon’s grandson). Robert Tollett purchased it in the late 1960s from an unidentified owner.

Emendations and textual notes:

That • [‘t’ partly formed]

chivalry • chivalu ry

byways • by-|ways

carr caressed • carressed

that than • thatn

of if • o if