20 March 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 02468)
You or Aldrich or both of you must come to Hartford to live. Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe’s (just where we drive in to go to our new house,) will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.1explanatory note The lot— a is 85 feet front & 150 deep—long time & easy payments on the purchase. You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can’t you? Come, will one of you boys buyⒶemendation that house? Now say yes.2explanatory note
Mrs. Clemens is an invalid yet, but is getting along pretty fairly. We send best regards.
Ezra Hall was a prominent Hartford attorney. His partner, Franklin Chamberlin, had sold the Clemenses the Farmington Avenue property on which they were building their house. Hall’s house was at 3 Forest Street, and Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s was at 1 Forest Street; both were near the intersection with Farmington Avenue. John and Isabella Beecher Hooker’s house, which the Clemenses were renting, was an easy walk away, at the opposite end of Forest, near its intersection with Hawthorn Street. It does not seem to have been numbered ( L5 , 271 n. 6, 480 n. 3; Geer 1873, 74, 80, 129; Van Why, 4–5).
Howells’s response is not known to survive, but neither he nor Aldrich accepted Clemens’s invitation. On 21 March Howells gave a glowing account of Hartford in a letter to a friend:
Did I speak in my last of the charming visit I’d had with Warner and Mark Twain at Hartford. It seemed to me quite an ideal life. They live very near each other, in a sort of suburban grove, and their neighbors are the Stowes and Hookers, and a great many delightful people. They go in and out of each other’s houses without ringing, and nobody gets more than the first syllable of his first name—they call their minister Joe Twichell. I staid with Warner, but of course I saw a great deal of Twain, and he’s a thoroughly good fellow. His wife is a delicate little beauty, the very flower and perfume of ladylikeness, who simply adores him—but this leaves no word to describe his love for her. (Howells 1979, 56)
Warner’s home, apparently unnumbered, was on Hawthorn Street, near the Hooker house. Twichell lived at 6 Atwood Street, not in Nook Farm but only about three blocks away (Geer 1873, 135, 137, map; Van Why, 4–5).
References
- New York Public Library, Albert A. and Henry W. Berg Collection, New York
- 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 6: 1874–1875. Edited by Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2002
- Paine, Albert Bigelow. “Mark Twain: Some Chapters from an Extraordinary Life. Eighth Paper.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 125 (June): 104–19. 1912
- Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 3 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. [Volume numbers in citations are to this edition; page numbers are the same in all editions.] 1912
- Paine, Albert Bigelow. “Some Mark Twain Letters to William Dean Howells and Others.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 134 (May): 781–94. 1917
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- MTHL. Mark Twain–Howells Letters. Edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, with the assistance of Frederick Anderson. 2 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1960
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5: 1872–1873. Edited by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1997
- Geer, Elihu, comp. Geer’s Hartford City Directory, for 1873–74: Containing Every Kind of Desirable Information for Citizens and Strangers; Together with a Classified Business Directory. Hartford: Elihu Geer. 1873
- Van Why, Joseph S. Nook Farm. Edited by Earl A. French. Rev. ed. Hartford: Stowe-Day Foundation. 1975
- Howells, William Dean. W. D. Howells, Selected Letters, Volume 2: 1873–1881. Edited and annotated by George Arms and Christoph K. Lohmann. Textual editors Christoph K. Lohmann and Jerry Herron. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1979
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L6 , 85–86; Paine 1912, 114, excerpt; MTB , 1:503, excerpt; Paine 1917, 783; MTL , 1:217; MTHL , 1:15–16.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.