To Olivia L. Langdon
27 December 1869 • New Haven, Conn.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00394)

New Haven, Dec. 27.

Sweetheart, it is after supper, & I shall have a few minutes to spare before the committee come for me, I suppose.

I forgot to thank the man with the umbrella for assisting you to the streetcar, but I thank him now, sincerely., Livy darling.

I stopped two hours in Hartford today & Twichell & I bummed around together—(I had telegraphed him to be at the [depot.) I] told him he must come a day or two before the wedding, & he said he would arrive Tuesday evening, Feb. 1st, with Mrs. T. (leaving the children behind. I said we would have him at the house if we had any room—otherwise he would have to go to the hotel (which he said he would probably have to go there because we would be sure to be crowded.) I said I meant to write you about it anyhow, before the house party should be permanently decided on.

You & I & the Twichells leave for the Adirondacks, old fellow, the first day of August (D.V.)—& if all the folks will go, so much the better. We spend the month there.1

Twelve thousand copies of the book sold this month. This is perfectly enormous. Nothing like it since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I guess.2

To-day we came upon a democrat wagon in Hartford with a cargo in it composed of Mrs. Hooker & Alice (who looks as handsome as she ever did in her life,) Mrs. Warner & another [lady. They] all assailed me violently on the Courant matter & said it had ceased to be a private desire that we take an ownership in that paper, & had become a public [demand. Mrs.] H. said Warner & Hawley would do anything to get me in there (this in presence of Mrs. W. who did not deny but it by any means,) & Mrs. H. said she had been writing to [ Mrs. Mr.] Langdon to make us sell out in Buffalo & come here. (It afforded me a malicious satisfaction to hear all this & contrast it with the insultingly contemptuous indifference with which the very same matter was treated last June, (by every one of them.)3

Revenge is wicked, & unchristian & in every way unbecoming, & I am [not] the man to countenance it or show it any favor. (But it is powerful sweet, anyway.)

I have read several books, lately, but none worth marking, & so I have not marked any. I started to mark the Story of a Bad Boy, but for the life of me I could not admire the [volume] much.4 I am now reading Gil Blas, but am not marking it. If you have not read it you need not. It would sadly offend your delicacy, & I prefer not to have that dulled in you. It is a woman’s chief ornament.5

Well, these people are a long time coming. The audience must be assembling by this time—in Boston three-fourths of them would be in the house at this hour.

Good-bye my loved & honored Livy, & peace be with you.

Sam.

[in ink:] Miss Olivia L. Langdon | Elmira | N.Y. [postmarked:] new haven ct. dec 27 [docketed by OLL:] 166th

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 These plans were not realized. On 1 August 1870 Clemens and Olivia, then pregnant, were in Elmira, at the bedside of Jervis Langdon, who died from stomach cancer five days later. Soon after, the Clemenses returned to Buffalo, where Olivia was slow to recover from the loss of her father.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 While in Hartford Clemens had gotten a sales report on The Innocents Abroad from Elisha Bliss. The December 1869 figures, representing gross receipts of about $50,000 and an author’s royalty of about $2,500, proved to be the best monthly result in the book’s spectacular sales history. Nevertheless, even with the 15,500 volumes sold during the first quarter and the 6,204 ordered from the bindery in November, the first five months’ sales of Innocents did not approach the 100,000 volumes that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel sold in a comparable span in 1852 (MTMF, 114; L2, 421; Hirst, 313–16; APC 1866–79, 50, 93; Hart 1950, 110–11).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 See 21 June 69 and 24 and 25 Nov 69, both to OLL.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

4 The Story of a Bad Boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) was serialized in monthly installments in Our Young Folks throughout 1869 and issued in book form in December. Fields, Osgood and Company of Boston published both the journal and the book, as well as Every Saturday, the weekly journal edited by Aldrich (“New Publications,” New York Tribune, 14 Dec 69, 6; Mott 1957, 175, 357). Clemens first corresponded with Aldrich, who became a close friend, in January 1871.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

5 Probably Clemens read Alain René Le Sage’s picaresque romance (originally published 1715–35) in an 1868 reprint of Tobias Smollett’s 1749 translation from the French, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane—either the volume published in New York by D. Appleton or the one issued in Philadephia by J. B. Lippincott and Company (Gribben, 1:407). Le Sage’s tale became the standard by which Clemens judged his own first novel about a “bad boy.” On 5 July 1875, after finishing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he wrote William Dean Howells that he “didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but autobiographically—like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person” (MTHL, 1:91). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn adopted the autobiographical mode.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK); written on four leaves of the same notebook paper as 30, 31 October, 1 November to Olivia Langdon.

Previous publication: L3, 439–441; LLMT, 131–32.

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.

Emendations and textual notes:

depot.) I • depot.)— |I

lady. They • lady.— |They

demand. Mrs. • demand.— |Mrs.

Mrs. Mr. • Mr. s.

not • no not [corrected miswriting]

volume • vo volume [corrected miswriting]