21? May 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: Bowen, UCCL 02136)
e. h. paige,
no. 446 main street,
buffalo, n. y.
Been too busy & too frightfully lazy to write, Bill—do you pity me?
Clemens probably sent this carte de visite at about the same time he enclosed one in the previous letter. Possibly he was replying belatedly to Bowen’s most recent known letter to him (CU-MARK):
Sallie was Sarah Robards Bowen. Catherine (Kitty) Hawkins was the older sister of Annie Laura Hawkins Frazer. Lucy Davis was a Hannibal schoolteacher (23 Apr 70 to Bliss, n. 6click to open link; 6? Feb 70 to Frazerclick to open link; Inds , 95, 322). Bowen’s allusion was to As You Like It, act 2, scene 7, perhaps especially to these lines: “. . . The sixth age shifts / Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, / With spectacles on nose and pouch on side.”
References
- Collection of R. B. Bowen
- 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
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians, and Other Unfinished Stories. Foreword and notes by Dahlia Armon and Walter Blair. Texts established by Dahlia Armon, Paul Baender, Walter Blair, William M. Gibson, and Franklin R. Rogers. The Mark Twain Library. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1989
MS facsimile, front and back of a carte de visite photograph of Clemens. The editors have not seen the MS, which is owned by William Bowen’s grandson, Royden Burwell Bowen, Jr., who provided a photographic copy in 1993.
L4 , 136–37; Hornberger, frontispiece.