To Charles Warren Stoddard
1 February 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: MB, UCCL 01187)

Hartford, Feb. 1, 1875.

Dear Charley:1

All right about the Tichborne scrap-books; send them along when convenient. I mean to s have the Beecher-Tilton trial scrap-booked as a companion. At present I believe I would rather go down in history as the Claimant than as Mr. Beecher. Both men’s fame will outlast yours & mine.2

I was very sorry to hear of your fearful accident in Rome. How in the world did it happen? Lady Hardy spoke of it in a letter, but gave no particulars.3 And tell me—who did Mulford marry? Was she English? Had she money? For when we saw him last he was surely in no condition to marry.4

By the way, Bierce is writing some exquisite things for “f Fun”—a school-boy’s compositions upon natural history—& they do lay a long way over any body else’s attempts in that line that ever ventured into it. They are just delicious.5

I hope you will remember me kindly to your friend (& mine) Rev. John Kreger of Loreto, when you write him. This reminds me that Rev. Jo. Twichell (my pastor) & I are going to Worcester, Mass., to have “a time” with a most jolly & delightful Jesuit priest who was all through the war with Joe. Jo was chaplain of a regiment & I suppose the padre was also.6 I sent the padre word that I knew all about the Jesuits, from the Pr Sunday school books, & that I was well aware that he wanted to get Jo & me into his den & skin us to make religious parchments out of, after the ancient style of his communion since the days of good Loyola, but that I was willing to chance it & trust to Providence.

I am writing a series of 7-page articles for the Atlantic at $20 a page; but as they do not pay anybody else as much as that for prose, I do not complain, (though at the same time I do swear that I am content.) However the awful respectability of the magazine makes up.

I have cut your delightful article about San Marco out of a New York paper (Joe Twichell saw it & brought it home to me with loud admiration) & sent it to Howells. It is too bad to fool away such literature in a perishable daily journal.7

Do remember me kindly to Lady Hardy & all that rare family—my wife & I so often have pleasant talks about them.

Ever Yr friend

Samℓ. L. Clemens

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK):

UCLC32076

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While in England in 1873, Clemens had followed the celebrated perjury case of the Tichborne claimant, an Australian butcher who claimed to be the rightful heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and estates. Stoddard, then acting as Clemens’s secretary, was charged with preserving the newspaper reports of the trial for Clemens, who intended to “boil the thing down into a more or less readable sketch some day” (L5, 456). Stoddard compiled six large scrapbooks of clippings from the London Standard, covering the period from 23 April to 13 October 1873, which are preserved in the Mark Twain Papers. After Clemens left England in January 1874, Stoddard visited Stratford-on-Avon, where he saw Clemens’s signature among those in the visitors’ book (see L5, 157 n. 9). He then “chummed” in London with Wallis Mackay, an artist for Punch who had illustrated his Summer Cruising in the South Seas, the newly published English edition of his South-Sea Idyls (Charles Warren Stoddard 1873, 1874). Mackay lived with his brothers William (a writer) and Joseph (an actor). With Stoddard, they formed “a community of confirmed ‘stags,’” whose rooms on Charlotte Street were forbidden to women (Charles Warren Stoddard 1903, 322; William Mackay later published an account of visiting Clemens at the Langham Hotel in 1873: see Mackay, 39–41). In March 1874 Stoddard joined Joaquin Miller in Rome, where he continued his series of weekly travel letters for the San Francisco Chronicle. Tom Hood, who had previously forwarded Stoddard’s letters, died on 20 November 1874 (Charles Warren Stoddard 1903, 321, 333; Grenander 1960, 268–69; Austen, 67–71; L5, 157 n. 10). For the others Stoddard mentioned, see notes 3–5.

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2 Clemens followed the Beecher-Tilton trial throughout its long course, but did not have it “scrap-booked” (see 29? July 74 to Twichell, n. 2, and pp. 446, 448).

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3 The Clemenses had grown fond of Lady Mary Anne Hardy, her husband, Sir Thomas, and their daughter, Iza, in London in 1873 (L5, 399 n. 2, 403, 408 n. 14). Lady Hardy’s letter with news of Stoddard is not known to survive. For Stoddard’s full account of his injury see 17 Mar 75 to Stoddard, n. 1.

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4 Prentice Mulford (1834–91) was born in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. In 1855 he shipped on a clipper as a cabin boy and deck hand, and spent nearly two years at sea before settling in California. After ten years as a miner, school-teacher, and comic lecturer, he began to write poems and humorous stories for the Sonora Union Democrat under the pseudonym “Dogberry.” In 1866 the editor of the Golden Era, Joseph Lawrence, invited him to San Francisco to write for that journal, and there he became friends with the city’s other journalists and authors—among them Clemens, Stoddard, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce. In 1872 he went to London with a scheme to promote emigration to California, financed by several wealthy San Franciscans. In addition, he was engaged to write travel letters for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. His scheme was not successful, and his letters from England—which concentrated largely on the London slums and other unpleasant aspects of England—were not well received. By December 1873, when Stoddard and Clemens saw him in London, he was depressed and impecunious, and seeking Clemens’s recommendation to the Routledge publishing firm. For the story of his marriage, see 17 Mar 75 to Stoddard, nn. 1, 5 (Mulford 1889, passim; “It Was Prentice Mulford,” New York Times, 1 June 1891, 1; AD, 13 June 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 261–62; Walker 1969, 143–44, 178–82, 334–36; Mulford to SLC, 6 Dec 73 and 7 Dec 73, CU-MARK).

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5 This series—“Essays in Natural History,” by “Little Johnny”—appeared in sixteen issues of Fun, from 12 September to 26 December 1874. For Clemens’s opinion of some of Bierce’s earlier work, see 8 Apr 74 to Chatto and Windus. As Stoddard’s letter noted, Bierce had two sons, both born in England: Day (b. December 1872) and Leigh (b. April 1874). His wife was the former Mary Ellen (Mollie) Day (Carey McWilliams, 90–92; Grenander 1960, 264, 276).

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6 John Kroeger was from Indiana. According to Stoddard, writing in 1906, the church sent him to Loreto after he had “stirred up the community in that town of his, in the conservative Middle states.” Father John, who was “quite unnecessarily good-looking” and “had more shape than he knew what to do with,” talked with Stoddard about “Mark Twain and Bret Harte and A. Ward and the luckless Henry Ward Beecher” (Charles Warren Stoddard 1906, 259–62; Austen, 72). Twichell’s close friend Joseph B. O’Hagan (1826–78) was born in Ireland, but joined his brother in Nova Scotia while in his teens. He entered the Society of Jesus in Boston in 1847 and began his studies for the priesthood there. He taught in Washington, D.C., from 1852 to 1857, then went to Belgium, where he continued his studies and was ordained. During the Civil War, he served for two years as a chaplain of the Excelsior Brigade, which Twichell served as Protestant chaplain (for details of their friendship, see Strong, 25–34, 48–49). Since 1872 he had been the president of Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He died in late 1878 of “poor health caused by his efforts in the war” (Lucey, 402–3). In a letter of 2 January 1879 to the Hartford Courant, Twichell recalled him as “one of the best and kindliest of men and one of the most delightful of comrades. He had a bright, happy wit; no discomforts could overcome his cheerful temper, and his generosity was boundless” (“Father O’Hagan,” 4 Jan 79, 4, clipping in Twichell, 3:113). In November 1874 Twichell had hoped his and Clemens’s “pedestrian excursion” to Boston would include a stop in Worcester, so that O’Hagan and Clemens could meet. He wrote to O’Hagan to propose a visit and O’Hagan “responded by telegraph ‘Come, Mark will find an Innocent at Home’” (Twichell, 1:14). Worcester was not on their route, however. On 26 January, O’Hagan wrote to Twichell:

I am very sorry that you did not come—Can it be possible that your friend Mark is afraid of the Jesuits? Tell him in my name and from your own experience that they are innocent as any people he ever met abroad. The sleighing is splendid and I had a spanking pair of horses engaged to give you & Mark a good ride. The fact is, I had a big spin roughly sketched for the occasion, but am disappointed. I don’t think that I can be home next Monday. If I can, I will telegraph you in time. (CU-MARK)

The visit may not have taken place as tentatively rescheduled, on Monday, 1 February, the date of the present letter. Twichell’s journal entry for that day reported only that he lectured in Hartford’s Warburton Chapel, and does not mention a trip to see O’Hagan. Furthermore, Clemens may not have been well enough to travel (Twichell, 1:53; 26 Jan 75 to Howells; 3 Feb 75 to Barnum). It is not known when Clemens and O’Hagan met, if not on 1 February.

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7 Stoddard had left Rome in the fall of 1874 and traveled to Venice, where he arrived by 30 November and remained until February 1875. Over the winter he wrote nine sketches about that city for the San Francisco Chronicle. One of them, published on 17 January, he devoted entirely to a description of the cathedral of San Marco, consecrated in 1111 and alleged to house the saint’s relics, which the Venetians had removed from Alexandria. It was reprinted in the unidentified newspaper that Twichell brought back on 29 January, after two days in New York. The clipping from that newspaper that Clemens sent to Howells, by 1 February, and the letter that presumably enclosed it have not been found. (The text of Stoddard’s article is transcribed in Enclosure with 29 January–1 February 1875 to William Dean Howells from the original San Francisco printing.) Clemens soon qualified his favorable reaction when Howells failed to concur (10 Feb 75 to Howells; Austen, 72–74; Murray, 301; Twichell, 1:52).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Boston Public Library and Eastern Massachusetts Regional Public Library System, Boston (MB).

Previous publication: L6, 363–68; MTL, 1:248–49, excerpts; Anderson Galleries 1924, lot 215, brief excerpts; AAA/Anderson 1934, lot 125, brief excerpts.

Provenance:Dana S. Ayer made a handwritten transcript of the MS, and a 1942 Brownell TS of that transcript is at WU (see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance). When offered for sale in 1924 the MS was part of the collection of William Harris Arnold (1854–1923). MB purchased it in April 1939 with funds bequeathed by Boston lawyer Josiah H. Benton (1843–1917).