Home Arts and Leisure Samuel Clemens Puts on a Tin Halo for the Woman He Loved

Samuel Clemens Puts on a Tin Halo for the Woman He Loved

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Just one look at a miniature portrait of Olivia Langdon and Samuel Clemens was done for. Love at first sight is how he later described his feelings about the woman he’d never met.

Olivia Langden, the love of Samuel Clemens’ life

It happened in 1867 on board the Quaker City, a new, luxurious steamship anchored in the Bay of Smyrna. Samuel had befriended a wealthy young traveler named Charles Langdon, Olivia’s brother. They had been touring the Holy Land. Clemens, a journalist, was writing travel articles for two newspapers, The Alta California and thr New-York Tribune.

Smitten

In a twist on the Pygmalion myth, Samuel would remake himself into a different person—or at least a somewhat different person—to win the heart of the woman in the photograph.

Charles had painted for Samuel an appealing picture of his family life, so he already knew something about Olivia. Her father had made a fortune in coalmining, and the family lived in Elmira, N.Y. Elmira sat on the edge of the Burned-Over District, whose inhabitants were swept up in a religious fervor and a zeal for abolition, temperance and women’s rights.

The miniature of Olivia was a photograph printed on ivory, framed in gilt and resting in a purple velvet case. She wore a simple black dress with a white collar—Samuel hated frilly overdressing in women. Her smooth dark hair was pulled back from her lovely, serious face. From then on, Samuel asked to see the miniature of Olivia every time he visited Charles in his stateroom. From then on, he never looked at another woman.

If he found it easy to fall in love with Olivia Langdon, he found it far more difficult to win her heart. He complained about putting on a tin halo and pretending to quit drinking to please her. And as one would expect with the man known as Mark Twain, he had some choice comments about his long and painful courtship.

Way Too Good for Samuel Clemens

Samuel knew Olivia Langdon was much too good for him. She had wealth, education and social standing. He didn’t.

He had grown up poor on the western frontier and left school at twelve. During most of his thirty-two years he had been on the move as a miner, a typesetter, a riverboat captain and a newspaper reporter. Lately he had turned to travel writing. Seven months after the Civil War ended, a New York weekly had published his funny story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” That earned him national attention, which he parlayed into a job writing about Hawaii for the Sacramento Union. The public liked his witty dispatches, and he took his show onto the lecture circuit.

Samuel Clemens

A mania for self-improvement had taken hold in America, and Samuel found a ready audience in granges, churches, lyceums, lecture halls and small-town literary societies. He could earn good money for his entertaining talks about his life as a Mississippi riverboat captain or his visits to a Nevada silver mining camp. He liked lecturing from the platform for the two hours that he was on it, but all the rest of the time the lecture circuit ground him down. It was an exhausting way to make a living. Trains were dirty and cold, hotels wretched, the weather often bad. Lecturers were often put up in private homes, which meant staying up late to entertain the host after a performance.

Elmira was a regular stop for lecturers, as well as musical and theatrical tours. Trains connected the city with New York, Montreal, Chicago and parts in between. The Langdons often hosted lecturers, especially those who advocated temperance, women’s rights and religious revival.

Olivia had spent much of her life in Elmira, cosseted by her parents. They gave her a good education, sending her to Elmira Female Seminary. She had suffered from poor health early in her teens, which Clemens later made into a story that she’d fallen on the ice and spent two years in bed. By 22, she was well enough to take the train to New York City with her family. Her brother Charles had returned from his tour of the Holy Land, and he came, too. The Langdons went to visit friends for the Christmas holidays and to hear Charles Dickens read from his novels.

New York, New York

Sam had been working in Washington, D.C., but he came to New York on business. Over the Christmas holidays, one of the Quaker City passengers held a reunion for a few others at his home in New York. Samuel and Charles Langdon went and had a rollicking good time late into the night. Charles then invited Samuel to have dinner with Olivia and his parents at the St. Nicholas Hotel. Samuel happily accepted.

Olivia’s family called her Livy. Samuel found her to be gentle, serious, delicate and lovable. Her family worshipped her.

Livy had never seen anything like this lanky joke-teller with carrot-red hair and shuffling gait. He fascinated her with his impudent banter and his careless southern drawl.

During the Langdon family’s visit to New York, Samuel spent every minute he could with Livy. He accompanied the Langdons to the Dickens reading. Then he visited her at their friends’ house, arriving in the morning and leaving past midnight.

Livy’s father, Jervis, had a good sense of humor, and he sized up Samuel as capable, a man’s man—qualities he appreciated. He invited Samuel to stay with them for a week at their mansion in Elmira.

Samuel Clemens, Travelin’ Man

First, though, Samuel had to go west on a business matter. A publisher had offered him a deal to publish his letters from the Quaker City cruise, but he had to sort out a copyright mess. He also had to deliver a lecture about his journey to the Holy Land.

When he finally got free, he made a beeline for Elmira. But he mistakenly took a slow train instead of a fast one. He sent a telegram ahead, saying he’d been delayed. Charles took a train to meet him in Waverly, twenty miles down the line. He found Samuel in the smoking car, disheveled from travel.

“Did you bring some other clothes?” Charles asked.

“Oh yes,” Samuel said. “I have a fine new outfit in this bag, all but a hat. I won’t see anyone tonight, for it will be late when we get in, and in the morning we’ll go out early and get a hat.”

The next day a trip to the haberdasher solved the problem of the hat, and Samuel was ready to see his true love again.

Her family liked him, but he wasn’t quite what Charles had in mind for his shy and gentle sister. The devout Langdons didn’t touch alcohol.  Clemens not only drank to excess, he smoked like a chimney. He also swore unashamedly.

The Langdons were also abolitionists. Their house had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and Olivia’s father had offered sanctuary to Frederick Douglass. Samuel, on the other hand, had volunteered for two weeks with a Confederate militia during the Civil War.

Honesty the Best Policy

But he adored Livy. He decided honesty would be the best way to overcome her disapproval, so he told her he was drunk oftener than was necessary. He admitted he was wild and godless, lazy and lecherous, a discontented and unsettled rover.

Samuel ended up spending two weeks with the Langdons. And then he embarked on another lecture tour. Fortunately, he had speaking engagements in central New York, and he had a standing invitation to visit the Langdons. He took them up on it. Once he arrived unannounced for breakfast. “The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?” he said.

During one visit, he asked Olivia to marry him. She said no, she could never love him and she never would.

But she offered him some consolation. She said she would make a Christian out of him. He replied that she would succeed, but in the meantime, she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit and end by tumbling into it.

Before he left to continue his lectures, he asked if he could write to her. She said yes. But, she said, they would correspond as brother and sister.

That was better than nothing. And it allowed Samuel to court her the best way he knew how—through his writing.

Over 17 months, Samuel wrote Olivia nearly 200 letters. They took on a meek and submissive tone. He told Livy he needed her guidance to improve himself. And he started to go to church and to cut down on his drinking. He called it putting on his tin halo and his heavenly warpaint to play archangel.

Henry Ward Beecher

Olivia began sending him the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher. He hated them, but he didn’t tell her. Later, when he was famous, he told Beecher himself how he hated them.

Livy caved about a year after they first met. He wrote to her about their engagement from the road.  “I love you, Livy,” he wrote. “And I am happy in the possession of half your heart. I would rather hold half of your heart than all of anybody’s else—and so I am tranquil and satisfied.”

Her parents gave the union their conditional approval. Jervis liked Samuel, his wit and his manliness. But he wanted references. So Samuel wrote to some ministers who knew him in San Francisco. Transcontinental mail was slow then, and it took two months for the ministers’ reply to reach Jervis Langdon.

Two years after Samuel met Livy in New York, he returned to Elmira to find out what the ministers had said about him. When he met with Jervis alone, he sensed right away that the reviews had been poor. Jervis told him they’d said he was a brilliant, able man with a future, and that he would make about the worst husband on record. One minister described him as “a humbug—shallow & superficial—a man who has talent, no doubt, but will make a trivial & possibly a worse use of it.” Another said he’d rather bury his daughter than have her marry such a fellow.

There was a long uncomfortable pause. Then Jervis held out his hand. “I believe in you. I know you better than they do,” he said.

Not a Serious Word

Samuel had turned his dispatches from his Quaker City cruise into a book. He asked his publisher to send the manuscript to Elmira. When it arrived, he and Livy worked on it together. He discovered she had a keen literary eye and a sense for what was appropriate and what wasn’t.

“I never wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens,” he later wrote. “She is solely responsible—to her should go the credit—for any influence my subsequent work should exert. After my marriage, she edited everything I wrote.”

Samuel Clemens’ summer home in Elmira

Innocents Abroad was published shortly before they married in February 1870 at the Langdon home. But Livy didn’t want to leave her parents. Samuel decided to buy a third interest in a newspaper, the Buffalo Express. Buffalo was one hundred forty miles away from Elmira, but readily accessible by train. Jervis not only loaned him the money to buy his share of the paper, but he also bought them a mansion as a wedding present, complete with servants.

More happiness awaited Samuel Clemens. Innocents Abroad was a monster hit. It brought literary fame to Samuel Clemens, now known throughout the country by his pen name, Mark Twain.

He was no longer a journalist but a literary lion. A year later, he and Livy moved to Hartford to be nearer his publisher. On her thirtieth birthday, he wrote her another letter.

Olivia and Samuel Clemens built this house in Hartford, now one of the city’s most visited attractions.

A Love Letter Straight From the Heart

Livy darling,

Six years have gone by since I made my first great success in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world.

Every day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we can never any more wish to be separated than that we can ever imagine a regret that we were ever joined. You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were upon the last anniversary of this birth-day; you were dearer then than you were a year before—you have grown more and more dear from the first of those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression will continue on to the end.

Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their gray hairs without fear and without depression, trusting and believing that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.

So, with abounding affection for you and our babies, I hail this day that brings you matronly grace and dignity of three decades!

Always Yours, S.L.C.

***

This story was an excerpt from the New England Historical Society’s book, Love Stories From History. You can order your copy by clicking here. 

Images: Summer home in Elmira By Lvklock – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5027612

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