To Elinor M. and William Dean Howells
14? February 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: NN-B, UCCL 02485)

[top one-third of page torn away] 1

Dear Mrs. Howells:2

Mrs. Clemens is delighted to get the pictures, & so am I. I can perceive, in the group, that Mr Howells is feeling as I so often feel, viz: “Well no doubt I am in the wrong, though I do not know why or how or know where or how or why—but anyway it will be safest ‸saf‸est‸ sest ‸ to look meek, & walk circumspectly for a while, & not discuss the thing.” And you ‸look‸ exactly as Mrs. Clemens does just after she has said, “Indeed I do not wonder that you can frame no reply: for you know only [ tw too] well that your conduct admits ◇ of no excuse, palliation or argument—none!”

I shall just delight in that group on account of the good old human domestic spirit that pervades it—bother these family groups that [put] on a state aspect to get their pictures taken in.3

We want a heliotype made of our eldest daughter. How soft & rich & lovely the picture is. Mr. Howells must tell me how to proceed in the matter.4

Truly Yours

Samℓ. L. Clemens.

P. S. The physician5 is ‸has‸ commanded that Mrs. Clemens lie abed today—so she begs you will excuse her deputing me to deliver her thanks for the pictures.

My Dear Howells:

Two weeks ago I was writing several anecdotes about Strother Wiley’s delicious impertinences to steamboat captains (to go in No. 6 or 7) & wondering if he were still alive & if we might have the good luck to go to New Orleans with him (he is brim full of river reminiscences,) & behold he turns up in a letter to me from St Louis yesterday. You can con his happy orthography & then consign him to the waste basket.6

Ys Ever

Mark.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 It is not clear when or by whom the top of the page was torn away, but Clemens might have done it to delete a marginal postscript. A remaining small ink mark suggests that a dateline was also deleted.

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2 Howells answered this letter on 16 February (see 20 Feb 75 to Howells, n. 1). Since he normally responded promptly to Clemens, 14 February seems a likely date for Clemens’s letter.

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3 The actual photographs of his family which Howells sent (and which, on 26 January, Clemens had reminded him to send) have not been found. One of the images was almost certainly the family portrait reproduced on p. 678. It included—in addition to William and Elinor—Winifred, John Mead, and Mildred Howells.

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4 The heliotype process was a modification of an earlier process called “collotype,” invented in the early 1850s, in which a glass plate covered with bichromated gelatin was exposed to light under a negative, processed, and coated with ink to make a direct impression. Unlike lithography, however, the collotype gelatin attracted or repelled ink in proportion to the amount of light exposure and therefore could reproduce varied tones of the original. In the heliotype process, invented by Ernest Edwards of London, the gelatin was removed from the glass plate before exposure to a negative. It could then be hardened and attached to a metal plate for use in an ordinary printing press, providing an economical, and therefore profitable, way to reproduce photographs. In 1872, Osgood, Howells’s publisher, had purchased the exclusive American rights to the process; it was he who had reproduced the photographs for Howells (Jones, 124, 292; 20 Feb 75 to Howells, n. 1; Weber, 138).

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5 Probably Cincinnatus A. Taft (L4, 333 n. 3).

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6 Wiley’s letter to Clemens, enclosed here, does not survive—Howells presumably disposed of it. See the previous letter for Clemens’s reply. In the sixth (June) and seventh (August) installments of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Clemens described an impertinent character named “Stephen W——,” clearly based on Wiley: “He was a gifted pilot, a good fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him.” Clemens recalled a steamboat captain’s report that when he complained of Wiley’s whistling “Buffalo gals, can’t you come out to-night” while negotiating a dangerous stretch of the river, Wiley “smiled down on me as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to be good, and not be meddling with my superiors” (SLC: 1875 [MT02544], 722–24; 1875 [MT02545], 194–96).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B). The first page—which is missing the top portion—may have been written on letterhead.

Previous publication: L6, 385–387; MTB, 1:525, brief excerpt; MTL, 1:250–51, with omission; MTHL, 1:63–65 (addendum to Howells treated as a separate letter).

Provenance:see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

tw too • twoo

put • [‘t’ written over miswritten ‘ut’]