b[Letter-opener, at this date usually made of bone or wood—BG.]
c[It is missing—BG.]
ABOUT THE TEXTS
The following notes describe the manuscripts on which these texts are based. They also briefly identify places and events mentioned in the texts. Names printed in SMALL CAPITALS direct the reader to an entry in the Biographical Directory.
Differing approaches have been taken in transcribing the works by Mark Twain, on the one hand, and those by Livy and Susy, on the other. Livy’s and Susy’s texts are allowed to retain more of the graphical conventions of manuscript—superscript characters, for example, which are lowered in Mark Twain’s texts, as he would have expected. Mark Twain’s double- and triple-underscoring have been rendered as small capitals and full capitals, respectively, as a contemporary printer would have done; in Susy’s biography, we assume she was unaware of these printing-house conventions, and we render her double-scorings as such. In all these texts, editorial corrections are few: in Mark Twain’s, because few are needed, and in Livy’s and Susy’s, because their errors are part of the texture of their distinctively nonprofessional writings. Text printed on a shaded background represents a newspaper or magazine clipping. Full-size [brackets] are the writer’s own; subscript [brackets] enclose words or characters supplied by the editor. Footnotes in this book are “signed,” in order to distinguish those by Mark Twain or Susy Clemens from those by the editor (“BG”). The footnotes giving translations have been supplied by the editor.
The original manuscripts published here are owned by the following:
• Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: “A Family Sketch,” “At the Farm,” and “Quarry Farm Diary.”
• Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville: “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” “A Record of the Small Foolishnesses of Susie and ‘Bay’ Clemens (Infants),” and “Mark Twain by Susy Clemens.”
• • •
A Family Sketch
by Mark Twain
written 1896–97, 1901–2; revised 1906
Mark Twain began to write a memoir of Susy just after she died in August 1896. His project of commemorating his daughter eventually produced this sketch of the household at large, as described in the Introduction. The transcription renders the text as finally revised—with one exception. Probably well after the initial composition, Clemens made several substantial deletions, striking out whole paragraphs and pages while leaving them entirely legible. Because these deletions have an appearance of being “conditional,” perhaps conditional upon the desire to shorten the text or to suppress personal information, these passages are included in our text.
Mark Twain mentions: “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” for which see the Biographical Directory under James G. BLAINE; “the Century building,” the editorial offices of the Century Company in Union Square, New York; “St. Nicholas,” one of the magazines published by that company; see the Biographical Directory entry for Mary Mapes DODGE.
A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It
by Mark Twain
written 1874
The text published here has been prepared by comparing the manuscript with the first printing in the Atlantic Monthly (SLC 1874), and adopting only those Atlantic changes that are clearly necessary or that are likely to have been made by Mark Twain in the (lost) proofs. In dialect speech, the Atlantic used the apostrophe to signal every elided sound, or letter; the manuscript is far less fussy, reading, for example, might a (not the magazine’s might ’a’ ), mongst (not ’mongst), and arnest (not ’arnest). Believing, after analyzing the evidence, that Mark Twain is responsible for few of the revisions evident in the Atlantic, we follow the manuscript’s dialect closely. Little is gained by rendering it either “logical” or self-consistent; as Clemens wrote to Atlantic editor William Dean HOWELLS on 20 September 1874: “I amend dialect stuff by talking & talking & talking it till it sounds right—& I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro sometimes (rarely) says ‘goin’ ’ & sometimes ‘gwyne,’ & they make just such discrepancies in other words—& when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer’s carelessness” (L6, 233). The Atlantic expanded ‘&’ to ‘an’ ’ (instead of ‘and’) when it is Aunt Rachel who is speaking, and we have followed that practice. The first book printing (in SLC 1875) has been examined; it seems not to have received any further authorial revision.
The first page of the manuscript of “A Family Sketch.”
A Record of the Small Foolishnesses of Susie and “Bay” Clemens (Infants)
by Mark Twain
written 1876–85
This record of the children’s sayings was written in a bound composition book with ruled pages. This record was kept by Mark Twain (and, in three entries, by Livy) starting in August 1876; the latest entry is dated June 1885. Some entries, written on versos, are clearly additions made out of sequence; if reproduced exactly where they stand, they would be chronologically out of place. They have been silently moved to their temporally correct locations. The text has been ordered according to Mark Twain’s directions in the manuscript, and the directions themselves are not printed—e.g. “Skip the next 2 or 3 pages, for I wish to say a further biographical word or two about these children.” This edition does not reproduce the author’s memory-jogging notations of subjects he means to record; most were expanded in due course into full entries. The newspaper article “An Actor’s Fatal Shot” is from the Hartford Courant of 1 December 1882; the obituary of Jacob H. Burrough is from the St. Louis, Missouri Republican, on or around 3 December 1883.
The ornaments separating the entries have been editorially supplied.
The epigraph—“And Mary treasured these sayings in her heart”—is an adaptation or recollection of Luke 2:19: “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” The “Modoc war” was fought in 1872–73 between United States troops and members of the Modoc tribe of Oregon and California. For Mark Twain’s explanation of “the ombra,” see page 33. “Vöglein” is German for “little bird.”
At the Farm
by Mark Twain
written 1884
This supplement to “Small Foolishnesses” is transcribed from an almost-complete manuscript in Mark Twain’s hand. Written between 1 June and 7 July 1884 at Quarry Farm, the manuscript consisted originally of eleven leaves; leaf 10 is missing. Leaf 11 became separated from the rest of the manuscript and has only recently been reunited with it. Despite the missing leaf, the text has no appearance of discontinuity, thanks to an added passage, written in shorthand by Mark Twain’s stenographer Josephine S. Hobby, “completing” leaf 9, where his longhand text breaks off. The shorthand passage, rendered in natural language, concludes the anecdote in words that are clearly Mark Twain’s; these words also appear in his Autobiography, where this text was partly quoted (AutoMT2, 223). The added passage was inscribed in 1906 when this manuscript was revised by Mark Twain. Two further authorial revisions in the manuscript, dating from that time, are not followed in the present text because they were made specifically as adaptations for the Autobiography.
Quarry Farm Diary
by Livy Clemens
written 1885
Livy’s manuscript diary is written in a blank book with ruled pages. She made entries fairly frequently in the summer of 1885, and very intermittently thereafter, with the latest being written in June 1902. The text printed here consists of selections from the diary’s 1885 entries; omitted text is signaled by bracketed ellipses. The title is editorially supplied.
Livy mentions: Cadichon, the donkey, named after the donkey in Les Mémoires d’un âne (1860) by Sophie, comtesse de Ségur; Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy about Joan of Arc; Arabella B. Buckley’s Life and Her Children (1880), a popular b
iology text; The Betrothed (1825), novel by Sir Walter Scott; Thomas à Kempis, fifteenth-century German mystic, author of The Imitation of Christ.
Mark Twain by Susy Clemens
written 1885–86
Susy’s biography of her father was written between March 1885 and July 1886, in a ruled composition-book. Mark Twain quoted and commented on substantial extracts from Susy’s text in his Autobiography, parts of which saw publication in the North American Review in 1906–7 and in later editions. A transcription of the entire biography was published on the 100-year anniversary of Susy’s beginning to write it (Neider 1985). All these versions printed Susy’s text interspersed with the added comments and digressions of Mark Twain; the present edition is the first to publish Susy’s work without the mediation of her father. The title is editorially supplied.
Transcribing Susy’s juvenile writing presents an editor with some challenges. Transcription is done with reference to the writer’s norm, and Susy’s norm is elusive. There are many places where it is uncertain what character is intended, and whether it is intended as upper- or lower-case. Susy, her mind racing ahead of her hand, sometimes omits whole words, which we supply in [subscript brackets]. The word missed is usually obvious; if it is not, we offer the reader our best guess. Sometimes we avail ourselves of Mark Twain’s own guesses, written into the manuscript years afterward. Outright corrections of the manuscript text have been kept to a bare minimum, but they do occur—on page 131, for example, where Susy distractedly wrote “flowers” instead of “flies.”
Susy mentions (or the various texts she incorporates in her work mention): “mugwump,” slang term for a Republican voter who withheld his vote for the party’s 1884 presidential candidate James G. BLAINE; “the F.F.V’s,” or First Families of Virginia; “Gen. How,” a mistake for “Gen. Hood” (Confederate general John Bell Hood, 1831–79); Morte Darthur, romance by Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471); Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), and his Arthurian poem cycle Idylls of the King; two public readings by Mark Twain: “A Trying Situation,” adapted from chapter 25 of A Tramp Abroad (SLC 1880), and the folk-tale “The Golden Arm,” eventually collected in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (SLC 1897); Ananias and Sapphira, proverbial liars (Acts 5:1–11); The Mikado, operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, which in April 1886 was about to close its successful first American run in a production by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), novel by William Dean HOWELLS. The German phrase on page 117 may be translated “Loving gift to Mamma”; that on 141, “I kiss you my darling.” On page 124, “T. S.” is Susy’s abbreviation for “tortoise-shell.” The word “anc-anifertent” (page 157) has not been satisfactorily explained.
Page 87 from the manuscript of “Mark Twain by Susy Clemens.”
In Andrew LANG’S birthday tribute to Mark Twain (pages 160–61), “the Ettrick Shepherd” refers to James Hogg, the Scottish poet and novelist; “the Laureates Markes” alludes to a line in “The Last Tournament” by British poet laureate Alfred Tennyson: “‘Mark’s way,’ said Mark, and clove him thro’ the brain.” Lang’s “like Gargery Wot larx!”—not obvious in Susy’s transcription!—alludes to Joe Gargery in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and to this character’s repeated phrase “What larks!”
Detailed annotation to much of Susy’s text—all of it that was quoted by Mark Twain in his own autobiography, which is most of it—may be found in the first two volumes of the Mark Twain Project edition (AutoMT1; AutoMT2).
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Unless otherwise noted, the images are from photographs in the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley.
Frontispiece: Mark Twain at desk. Photographer and date unknown.
Page 12: The Clemens family on the “ombra” of their Hartford house, 1884. From left to right: Clara, Samuel, Jean, Livy, and Susy. Photograph by Horace L. Bundy.
Page 17: The Clemenses’ Hartford house. Photograph courtesy of the Mark Twain House and Museum.
Page 19: Photographs of the Clemenses’ family servants Katy Leary and Patrick McAleer courtesy of the Mark Twain House and Museum; photograph of Rosina Hay, around 1874, from Livy’s photograph album, courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Page 41: Mark Twain’s study at Quarry Farm. Photographer and exact date unknown.
Page 44: Mary Ann Cord. Leon Washington Condol Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
Page 49: Henry Washington. Leon Washington Condol Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
Page 52: From left to right: Clara, Jean, and Susy; Hartford, 28 March 1881. On the back of this print Mark Twain noted the date and the children’s ages: Susy was nine years old, Clara six years and nine months, and Jean eight months. Photograph by Horace L. Bundy.
Page 56: Susy, 1873. Photograph by John Moffat, Edinburgh.
Page 59: Hearth in the library of the Hartford house, from “A Model State Capital” by George Parsons Lathrop, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1885. Engraved from a photograph by R. S. De Lamater.
Page 72: Illustration by William Page from his article “The Measure of a Man,” in Scribner’s Monthly, April 1879. Mark Twain’s sketch from the “Small Foolishnesses” manuscript is reproduced courtesy of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Page 89: Jean, 1884. Photograph by Horace L. Bundy.
Page 94: The Crane family home at Quarry Farm, 1903. Photograph by T. E. Marr.
Page 98: Livy in a railway carriage, July 1895. Photograph by James B. Pond. Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell.
Page 101: Clara and Jumbo, Hartford, 1884. Photograph by Horace L. Bundy.
Page 106: Susy, Hartford, 1884. Detail of a photograph by Horace L. Bundy.
Page 112: Langdon Clemens, Elmira, 1871. Photograph by John H. Whitley. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Archive, Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira College, New York.
Page 124: Cats at Quarry Farm, 1887. Their names, as given in the caption, come from Mark Twain’s 2 April 1890 letter to Edwin Wildman, a magazine editor who had asked for further particulars of the cats. Photograph by Elisha M. Van Aken.
Page 129: Illustration by Emlen McConnell from “The Autobiography of Mark Twain,” Sunday Magazine, 24 May 1908.
Page 132: Illustration by Emlen McConnell from “The Autobiography of Mark Twain,” Sunday Magazine, 26 April 1908.
Page 143: Clara and Daisy Warner costumed for the Prince and the Pauper play, 1886. Photograph by Horace L. Bundy.
Page 148: Mark Twain in his Quarry Farm study, 1874. Photograph by Elisha M. Van Aken.
Page 167: First page of the manuscript of “A Family Sketch.”
Page 171: This leaf of “Mark Twain by Susy Clemens” is reproduced courtesy of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY
AINSWORTH, William Harrison (1805–82). English author of historical novels.
ALDRICH, Thomas Bailey (1836–1907). Author; editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1881–90). A poet and a wit; Mark Twain said that “Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and humorous sayings” (AutoMT1, 229). He lived in Boston and in Ponkapog, Massachusetts, with his wife, Lilian (whom the Clemenses disliked), and their two children.
ATWATER, Dwight (1822–90). An employee of the Langdon family business; in Mark Twain’s words, “always useful in humble ways, always religious, and always ungrammatical” (AutoMT1, 374).
“BARONESS IN MUNICH, A.” During the Clemenses’ 1878–79 sojourn in Munich, they met a Baroness Freundenberg, “who” (Livywrote) “has lost her property” (15 December 1878 to Mollie Clemens; Mark Twain Papers). She subsisted by taking in boarders and giving German lessons. Among her boarder-pupils were Clara SPAULDING and Mark Twain’s nephew, Samuel E. Moffett.
BARRETT, Lawrence (1838–91). Prominent actor, famous in Shakespear
ean roles.
BEALE, Edward F. (1822–93). Union Civil War general. His eulogistic remarks about Ulysses S. GRANT were made for the Chicago Tribune in April 1885, as Grant lay dying.
BEECHER, Thomas K. (1824–1900). Minister. Half-brother of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher STOWE. He lived in Elmira, where he was the controversial pastor of Park Congregational Church. A friend of Livy’s family, he officiated at her marriage to Samuel Clemens in 1870; and he habitually wore a cap made for him by Susan CRANE.
BLAINE, James G. (1830–93). Republican candidate for President in 1884. Late in the campaign, a Blaine supporter, the Rev. Samuel D. Burchard, vilified the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” The resulting defection of indignant Catholic Republicans was believed to have swung the election for the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland.
BROOKS, Fidele A. (born 1837). A friend of Livy’s family. Her husband was New York leather merchant Henry J. Brooks.
BROWN, John (1810–82). Scottish physician and popular author; the Clemenses had met him in Edinburgh in 1873.
BUEL, Clarence Clough (1850–1933). An assistant editor of the Century Magazine.
BUNCE, Edward M. (1841–98). Hartford friend of the Clemenses. After Bunce’s death Mark Twain said he had been “in some particulars . . . nearer and dearer to the children than was any other person not of the blood” (2 December 1898 to Mrs. Edward M. Bunce; Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford).
BURROUGH, Jacob H. (1827–83). A St. Louis boardinghouse acquaintance of Clemens’s in the early 1850s, when Clemens was a journeyman printer and Burrough a journeyman chairmaker.
A Family Sketch and Other Private Writings Page 16