To William Dean Howells
25 November 1874 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: MH-H, UCCL 01155)

Hartford, Nov. 25.

My Dear Howells:1

Your amendment was good. As soon as I saw the watchman in print I perceived that he was lame & artificial. I wrote him up twice before sending him to you, but couldn’t get Mrs. Clemens to approve [ f ]of him at all. Dam the watchman—as Twichell’s ostler would say—& as Mrs. Clemens [ thinks ], though she seldom expresses a thought of ‸that‸ nature—never, indeed, unless strongly moved.2

Oh, that letter wasn’t written to my wife, but to you. 3 Twichell only saw it because he knew I would naturally write you when I got home & he asked me not to mail the note when written, until he could inspect it, because he would be a party concerned.

No, I detest Lamb—even the modern addition of mint sauce does not beguile me. I am named after more obscure but nobler beings.4

You Atlantic people spell well enough, & you plainly improve one’s grammar, but you don’t divide good.5

I am seriously afrai◇d to appear in print often—newspapers soon get to lying in wait for me to blackguard me. You think it over & you will see that it will doubtless be better for all of us that I don’t infuriate the “critics” to[o] frequently.6

With kindest regards to Mrs. Howells & the children—7

Ys Ever

Mark

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens answered Howells’s letter of 23 November as well as the following one (CU-MARK):

UCLC32072

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Clemens must have returned the proofs in the present letter.

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2 Since the manuscript and proofs of “Old Times” are lost, Howells’s amendment, and any revisions Clemens may have made in the account of the night watchman in the first installment, cannot be identified. In 1883 Clemens reused the passage as published, without revision, in chapter 5 of Life on the Mississippi. For “Twichell’s ostler,” see 12 Nov 74 to OLC (from Ashford), n. 1.

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3 See 20 Nov 74 to Howells (1st).

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4 Clemens was named for his grandfather, Samuel B. Clemens (1770–1805), of Virginia, and for “an old, dear Virginia friend of his father” who belonged to the prominent Langhorne family, also of Virginia (Lampton 1990, 79, 96; MTB, 1:13). For a discussion of Clemens’s dislike of Charles Lamb, see Gribben, 1:393.

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5 The objection was to the way the Atlantic printers were hyphenating words at the end of a line of type. Two instances of irregular, or at least unconventional, end-of-line hyphenation survived in the first installment of “Old Times”: “pict-|ure” and “vent-|ured,” which Clemens would have divided as “pic-|ture” and “ven-|tured” (SLC 1875, 70, 73).

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6 Clemens may have had in mind items like the following, from the New York Evening Express of 19 October 1874: “An Indiana race-horse has been named ‘Mark Twain;’ not that Mark was ever fast, but then he has a way of walking off with the purses of a too-confiding public” (“Facts and Fancies,” 1).

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7 Winifred (1863–89), John Mead (1868–1959), and Mildred Howells (1872–1966) (Howells 1979, 462).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).

Previous publication: L6, 295–97; MTHL, 44–45.

Provenance:see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

f • [partly formed; doubtful]

thinks • thin thinks [corrected miswriting]