Samuel L. Clemens to Etta Booth, 10 September 1877 · Hartford, Conn

Source: CU-MARK ([CU-MARK])

Cue: "Your letter has"

Source format: "MS"

Letter type: "[standard letter]"

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To Etta Booth
10 September 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01479)

slc farmington avenue, hartford.

Sept 10/77

My Dear Etta:

Your letter has almost made a grandfather of me, it carried me so far back into the wasted centuries. It is now fourteen years since I first saw you in Virginia City. It was at a ball—but that does not indicate your age, for children attended balls there, & you were a child then—8 years of age, I think.

But fourteen years is a long time, & brings memorable changes. You are young, yet, & are willing to talk about them; but I have reached the age where one puts such things out of his mind & keeps them out—for they remind him, not that he is growing old, but that he is old. However, I mean to keep your address in mind, & the next time I am in New York, with a visiting hour to spare, I will call & we will go over that old ground & sow gray hairs.1explanatory note

Remember me most kindly to your mother, & believe me yours in the affection of a friendship unimpaired.

S. L. Clemens

Textual Commentary

Source text(s):

MS, CU-MARK.

Previous Publication:

MicroML, reel 4.

Provenance:

See Appert Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.

Explanatory Notes

1 The letter to which Clemens replied has not been found. He last saw Etta Booth in Paris in the summer of 1867, while on the Quaker City excursion (12 July 1867 to JLC and family, L2, 72–73). He did not see her again until 1906, when he encountered her by chance in New York City. In 1906, in his autobiography, he noted that she had become “a fat little woman, with a gentle and kindly but aged and homely face, and she had white hair, and was neatly but poorly dressed.” He then recalled the ball “in some ramshackle building in Gold Hill or Virginia City, Nevada” at “the beginning of the winter of 1862,” when she was “in the bloom and diffidence and sweetness of her thirteen years, her hair in plaited braids down her back and her fire-red frock stopping short at her knees” (AutoMT2, 24).

References

University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
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
Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Manuscript Letters Now in the Mark Twain Papers. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 11 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
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
SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Edited by Benjamin Griffin, Harriet Elinor Smith, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, and Leslie Diane Myrick. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2013

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