To Olivia L. Clemens
21 November 1873 • London, England
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00985)

Nov. 21.

Livy my darling, I have found the porcelain picture & am delighted. It stands open on the parlor clock, & the Modoc’s picture is a background for it. You see the extra pictures from Edinburgh have come.1 I bought an overcoat & some [merschaum] pipes, & have laid aside the seal-skin & cigars. I bought a ni particularly nice [ upb ] umbrella, a fancy merschaum for visitors to smoke, a hat, a hatbrush, a couple of razors, lost 2 games of billiards & ordered some patent leather shoes at a considerably higher price than one pays in Hartford for such things. And I have had my dress suit ironed by the tailor. Edmund Routledge sent in his card but I was out shopping.2 Livy dear you must tell me all the gossip—everything the neighbors say about each other, & all that sort of thing. I mean our friends, mainly, though gossip of any kind, & about anybody is one of the most toothsomely Christian dishes I know of.

“James” is to sleep in the house 2 months, & then get some good reliable man to take his place. Mr. Hall recommends his man, & recommends him with all his whole might—so I said told him I wanted him to take James’s place as soon as James left;3 I said I would pay him $50 a month rather than run the risk of your sleeping a single night alone in the house—& mind you, I [ w ] command you, my dear, to pay whatever that man asks, clear up to $50 a month, but see that you secure [him. Mr] Hall’s recommendation is entirely sufficient, & you must bear in mind that there will be such hard times this winter that there will be a multitude of tramps & prowlers about. Send Father Hawley a cheque for $50; have all [ trea tramps] treated kindly but sent to Hawley; give them soup-tickets when they ask for food.

But my! I must not write all [day. Good] bye my darling.

Samℓ.

Mrs Samℓ. L. Clemens | Forest street | Hartford | Conn [in upper left corner:] America. | [flourish] [postmarked:] london-w zb no20 734 [and] li [and] [new york paid all]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 The only known surviving images of Olivia for 1872 and 1873, one of which might have been the “porcelain picture” Clemens mentions, are reproduced in Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles. The “Modoc’s picture” was presumably the one taken in Edinburgh in August by John Moffat (see 22 and 25 Sept 73 to Brown, n. 1); it too is reproduced in Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles.

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2 Edmund Routledge (1843–99), the second son of George Routledge, became a partner in his father’s publishing firm in 1865. In 1862, at age nineteen, he founded Every Boy’s Magazine, a highly successful publication devoted to the interests of “boys of cultivation and intelligence” (Mumby, 136). He edited this journal (which changed titles several times) until 1889. From 1867 to 1873 he was also the editor of the Routledge house journal, The Broadway: A London Magazine, which had printed an original article of Clemens’s (“Cannibalism in the Cars”) in November 1868 (SLC 1868; ET&S1, 551; Mumby, 97, 98, 136–38, 147; Boase, 6:504–5).

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3 Ezra Hall (1835–77) was a neighbor of the Clemenses’ on Forest Street, and a partner, with Franklin Chamberlin, in the law firm of Chamberlin and Hall. In 1863, and again in 1871, he was elected to the Connecticut State Senate (Geer 1873, 44, 74; Trumbull, 2:275). James has not been identified.

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4 This postmark is probably erroneous; the possibility remains, however, that Clemens misdated his letter.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

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

Previous publication: L5, 479–480; MFMT, 53, brief excerpt; LLMT, 363, brief paraphrase.

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

merschaum • [sic; also at 479.13]

upb • [‘b’ partly formed]

w • [partly formed]

him. Mr • him.—|Mr

trea tramps • treaamps

day. Good • day.—|Good

new york paid all • [new yor] k [ ] paid [] [badly inked]