16 November 1871 • Portland, Maine (MS: ViU, UCCL 00675)
My wife has forwarded to me from Hartford your kind note of the 10th inst., & I take great pleasure in accepting that part of the invitation which mo Ⓐemendation of offers food & shelter to me,1explanatory note but I fear that Madame & the child will have to lose their chance. We have company at home in Hartford,2explanatory note & Mrs Clemens will be obliged to remain there. I am sorry, for a little trip would be pleasant variety after house-moving & cook-hunting.
Please excuse the pencil—haven’t any ink. With kind remembrances to the members of your family3explanatory note & to yourself—I am
M. S. Beach Esq
Moses Sperry Beach, the former editor and proprietor of the New York Sun, and his then seventeen-year-old daughter Emeline were among the “prominent Brooklynites” who made the Quaker City voyage of 1867, during which Emeline became part of the “charmed circle” surrounding Clemens. Clemens stayed overnight at the Beaches’ Brooklyn home in January 1868 (and seems not to have won Mrs. Beach’s approval), and he corresponded with Emeline until February 1868; no evidence has been found that he had since improved his acquaintance with the family. Doubtless Beach’s hospitality was to follow Clemens’s lecture at Plymouth Church on 21 November ( L2 , 15, 51 n. 2, 145, 172, 181–85; Hirst and Rowles, 17, 29–30).
Olivia Lewis Langdon.
Beach and his wife, the former Chloe Buckingham, had three daughters (including Emeline) and two sons.
References
- University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
- 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
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2: 1867–1868. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Richard Bucci, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1990
- Hirst, Robert H., and Brandt Rowles. “William E. James’s Stereoscopic Views of the Quaker City Excursion.” Mark Twain Journal 22 (Spring): 15–33 1984
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L4 , 494–495.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.