28 October 1871 • Great Barrington, Mass. (MS: Slotta, UCCL 00667)
Livy Darling— the lecture went off very handsomely, to a crowded house1explanatory note—& now I’m going to bed—for I love you very very very much & am sleepy & stupid. Love to mother & the cubbie—
Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor Forest & Hawthorne | Hartford | Conn. uncanceled, preprinted three-cent stamp
In reviewing Clemens’s 27 October performance, the Great Barrington Berkshire Courier of 1 November “maintained that of the crowd of four hundred, ‘at least three hundred and ninety . . . went away dissatisfied and disappointed. . . . we can only account for his plagiaristic lecture by the . . . same charge he lays upon Artemus Ward—laziness’” (Fatout 1960, 156).
References
- Admirable Books, Hilliard, Ohio
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- Davis, Chester L., Sr. “Family Letters of the 1870’s.” Twainian 36 (July-August): 1–4. 1977
- Christie. Printed Books and Manuscripts Including Americana and Bookbindings. . . . The Estates of Chester L. Davis, Augustus Maxwell, and from Various Sources. Sale no. 7378 (5 December). New York: Christie, Manson and Woods International. 1991
- Fatout, Paul. Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1960
MS, collection of Robert T. Slotta.
L4 , 482–483; Chester L. Davis 1977, 1–2; Christie 1991, lot 200, excerpt.
The MS, part of the Samossoud Collection in the late 1940s when it was transcribed by Dixon Wecter, was acquired before 1952 by Chester L. Davis, Sr., from Clara Clemens Samossoud (see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance). After Davis’s death in 1987, the MS was owned by Chester L. Davis, Jr. In 1991, it was bought by the present owner.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.