Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Olivia L. Clemens
3 December 1876 • New York, N.Y.
(MS, correspondence card, in pencil: CU-MARK, UCCL 01391)
(SUPERSEDED)

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Sunday, 2.‸ 15 ‸ P. M.

slc

Livy darling, I love you more than I can tell—on a card of this size, or any other. Dined with those leddy-hets last night till 12, then went to bed. It was a delicious dinner. I have but this moment got out of bed. Used no whisky or other liquor to sleep on—was utterly tired out.1 Osgood was in 2 hours ago. Am looking for Harte, now.2 Mrs. T. B. Aldrich called—shall go presently & return it. With vast love.

Samℓ.

[enclosure:]

[newspaper clipping simulated line-by-line, underlined by SLC:]

There was certainly a touch of cynicism in
the advice he once gave Dr. Mackay, to the fol-
lowing effect: “From your position as a
journalist,” he said, “you will in all proba-
bility be very often bored by foolish people,
who will send you books of verse, which they
will consider poetry, (ninety-nine persons out
of a hundred scarcely know the difference,)
with a view of extorting your favorable opinion.
Never allow a day to pass without
acknowledging the receipt of the book, thank-
ing them for their courtesy, and saying that
‘you anticipate much pleasure in the perusal.’ ”
He had acted upon this plan himself, he said,
for many years, and had found much comfort
and relief from it.

[in left margin of clipping:] Coincidence3

[in ink:] Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Hartford | Conn [return address:] st. james hotel. broadway and 26th street, new york. [postmarked:] new-york e dec 3 4 pm

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 Nothing is known of Clemens’s dinner with the unidentified “leddy-hets” (his daughter Clara’s pronunciation of “leatherheads”). He was staying at the St. James Hotel in New York (“Arrivals at the Hotels,” New York Times, 3 Dec 76, 2).

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2 To confer about Ah Sin (see 20 Dec 76 to Perkins).

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3 The clipping was an excerpt from the New York Times’s 3 December 1876 review of Forty Years’ Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs, a memoir by the Scottish poet and journalist Charles Mackay (1814–89) (“New Publications,” 10; Mackay 1877). The author of this advice was the English banker and poet Samuel Rogers (1763–1855). Clemens’s “Coincidence” indicates that it was his own strategy as well: for an example, see 19 Oct 76 to Unidentified.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Copy-text:

MS, correspondence card, in pencil, CU-MARK, is copy-text for the letter; Clemens enclosed a clipping from “New Publications,” New York Times, 3 December 1876, 10, which survives with the letter. It is clipped from a review of Charles Mackay’s Forty Years’ Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs (Mackay 1877).

glyph Previous publication:MicroML, reel 4.

glyph Provenance:See Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.