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William Dean Howells

The Mark Twain House: Part Steamboat, Part Medieval Fortress, Part Cuckoo Clock

Building the Mark Twain House was not an easy task for Samuel Clemens and his wife, Olivia. But when they moved into the quirky mansion with their children in 1874, they began the happiest years of their lives.

Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, in 1871

Clemens had fallen in love with Hartford and with his wife. Of Hartford, he said, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief… You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”

In 1873, he tried to beautify the city further by building a grand home for his family. One critic called the final product “part Mississippi steamboat, part medieval fortress, part cuckoo clock.” The family lived in it for 17 years, the happiest of his life. It was in that house that he wrote his most memorable works.

Genesis of the Mark Twain House

It all started in 1867 when Clemens, 31, took a five-month voyage to Europe and the Holy Land to write travel articles. He was then known as a journalist rather than a novelist. During the journey, he made friends with Charles Langdon.

Olivia Langdon Clemens at about 24

While visiting Langdon in his stateroom, Twain caught a glimpse of an ivory miniature of his older sister, Olivia. It was love at first sight. When they returned to America, he had dinner with the Langdon family in New York City, where they were staying for the Christmas holidays. On New Year’s Day Clemens called on Olivia and prolonged his visit beyond the socially acceptable 15 minutes – by 11 hours, 45 minutes.

Charles then invited him to visit with his family at their mansion in Elmira, N.Y., for a week. When he finally made it to Elmira in August, he stayed three weeks.

Clemens knew Olivia Langdon was much too good for him. She had wealth (coal money), education and social standing. He didn’t.

Her family liked him, but he wasn’t quite what they had in mind for their shy and gentle daughter. The devout Langdons didn’t touch alcohol. Clemens admitted he was “drunk oftener than was necessary & that I was wild & Godless, idle, lecherous & a discontented & unsettled rover.

He capitalized on his travel articles by turning to the lecture circuit, frequently finding excuses to visit Elmira. His fame as Mark Twain grew as his audiences swelled.

All the while he wrote Olivia – 180 letters, in fact. She sent him the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher. The tone of his letters grew meeker and more submissive. Finally, no doubt aware of his growing success, the Langdon family gave their approval to his marriage in 1870. Not only that, his father-in-law bought them a mansion with servants – in Buffalo.

Moving Out of Elmira

The newlyweds worked together on the manuscript of Innocents Abroad, a compilation of his travel articles. It was a monster hit, allowing him to quit his job as a Buffalo Express reporter. While visiting his publisher in Hartford, Clemens decided in 1873 he needed to move there. A dozen publishers operated out of the city, which attracted such prominent writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford

The Clemenses commissioned Edward Tuckerman Potter to design the three-story brick mansion in the Nook Farm neighborhood, essentially a writer’s colony. The property included a two-story carriage house and greenhouse. Twain wrote to his mother-in-law about his frustration with the building process:

I have been bullyragged all day by the builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified. Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I am a man who loathes details with all my heart.

The House

Nevertheless, great attention to detail went into the opulent, 11,500-square-foot house. It had high ceilings and massive amounts of carved wood. Clemens insisted on a window over the fireplace so he could see snowflakes meet the flames. He added a patch of tin to the roof so he could hear the rain drumming on it. Around the house he had rambling porches built like riverboat decks. And he had a massive carved mantle brought over from a Scottish castle installed in the library.

The house had modern conveniences available only to the upper crust: a bell system, central heating, lots of indoor plumbing, a burglar alarm, a shower and a telephone, hidden away in a telephone booth in the entryway.

Floor plan of the Mark Twain House. Courtesy Library of Congress.

No one seems to know quite what to call it: “Continental Picturesque,” “High Gothic” or just “Mississippi Steamboat.” Today the Mark Twain House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as “an asymmetrical polychromatic brick structures, with sweeping wood cornices and gables and flamboyant patterns of black and vermilion brick.”

The Good Life

The Clemenses moved into the house in September 1874 with their two daughters, Susy, a toddler, and Clara, an infant. Jean would follow in 1880.

The 17 years the family spent in the house were the happiest of Sam Clemens’ life. “”To us, our house was not unsentient matter — it had a heart, and a soul … It was of us, and we were in its confidence,” he wrote.

The window above the fireplace

The Godless, idle, lecherous rover turned into a devoted family man. Olivia home-schooled the children in the classroom, later hiring a governesses. Their father played with them in the conservatory and told them bedtime stories at night.

The family led a busy social life with the neighborhood influentials, hosting dinner parties, teas, charades and stag billiard nights. Guests included included the actor Edwin Booth, author Thomas Bailey Aldrich, political cartoonist Thomas Nast, explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley, Gen. William T. Sherman and writer Rudyard Kipling.

Where Tom Sawyer was born.

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived next door and often came over to play the piano.

The lavish living cost Clemens almost as much as he earned.

He earned quite a lot during his time in the Mark Twain House. He wrote his most notable fiction in his billiard room. Clemens sat at a desk facing the wall so the billiard table and the outdoors wouldn’t distract him. It worked; he wrote Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper and Life on the Mississippi.

That fireplace from Scotland

In 1881, the Clemenses hired Louis Comfort Tiffany to redecorate the mansion’s public rooms. Tiffany stenciled the elaborate entryway and painted patterns on the walls and ceiling in red, black and silver. His firm decorated the walls and ceilings with wallpaper and stencils. The result: “A circuit of the ground floor went from the Moorish front hall to a pink and silver drawing room evoking India to an Asian dining room and ended in a green and gold Persian library,” according to the Mark Twain House website.

Leaving the Mark Twain House

Clemens was as bad a businessman as he was good as a writer. He made some bad investments and in 1891 moved to Europe where the cost of living was cheaper. He lost more money in 1893 and went on the lecture circuit to earn it back. “The lack of money is the root of all evil,” he wrote.

Daughter Susy died suddenly of spinal meningitis in 1896, and the Clemenses couldn’t bear to return to the house. Olivia never set foot in it again. But they hung on to it until 1903, when he sold it for one-sixth the amount he’d put into it. It then became a library, an apartment house and a school. Finally the house was going to be torn down, but preservationists saved it in 1929.

The Mark Twain House is now a museum open to visitors. It has the only Louis Comfort Tiffany rooms outside of New York City.

If you go to the Mark Twain House:

The only way to see the house inside is to go on a guided tour. Visitors are advised to buy tickets in advance. A trip led by a re-enactor costs a few extra dollars and generally gets good reviews. There is also a modern, handicap-accessible museum wing which has a 23-minute film on Twain running continuously, a couple of exhibit spaces, a gift shop, a cafe and two parking lots.

351 Farmington Ave., Hartford.

Images: The Mark Twain House in Hartford by Ken Zirkel via Flickr, CC By-SA 3.0. Scottish fireplace By EGryk – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72993335

All other images courtesy Library of Congress.

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Seven Fun Facts About John Hay, Winner of All of Life’s Great Prizes

The name “John Hay” pops up frequently in American history, especially during the second half of the 19^th century.

John Hay was one of President Abraham Lincoln’s two secretaries, or “Lincoln’s boys.” A John Hay also ran the New York Tribune, the biggest and most influential U.S. newspaper of its day. Another John Hay served as U.S. secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. And still another belonged to an elite literary circle, an author of bestselling fiction and poetry.

Actually, they were all the same person.

John Hay, by John Singer argent

John Hay during his lifetime won political influence, great wealth, literary renown and the love of his family and friends. With the exception of a tragedy that befell him in 1901, everything went his way. Shortly before he died in 1905, he acknowledged that he had won “all of the great prizes” in life.

He may, in fact, have spent more time in the White House than any of his contemporaries, first as Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and last as Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state.

Though he grew up in the Midwest, John Hay had a foot in New England. He graduated from Brown University, where the library bears his name. He also had a summer home in Newbury, N.H., called the Fells.

John Hay

His mother’s family came from Assonet, Mass., and her father had graduated from Brown. He died while moving his family west, and Hay’s mother taught school in Salem, Ind. There she met and married Hay’s father, a country doctor. Their son John was born there on Oct 8, 1838, but they moved to Warsaw, Ill., when he was a young boy.

By sheer chance, John Hay got the job as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary. After Lincoln’s assassination, he embarked on a diplomatic career. He traveled widely, learned four languages and made influential friends.

John Hay in 1862

Hay kept his hand in politics and in writing. He and John Nicolay, Lincoln’s other secretary, wrote a 10-volume biography of the president that no one has surpassed.

In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes named him assistant secretary of State. Two decades later, President William McKinley named him U.S. secretary of state. Theodore Roosevelt kept him on in the job after McKinley’s assassination. John Hay died on July 1, 1905.

Here are seven fun facts about John Hay

John Hay, A Great Wit

His contemporaries called him the best letter writer and best dining companion they knew. His letters ‘come nearer than any others to Byron’s, which are the best in English,’ wrote William Roscoe Thayer in The Life and Letters of John Hay. “He was at his best at a dinner table or in a drawing room, and in neither place have I ever seen anyone’s best that was better than his,” wrote Roosevelt.

A sampling of his letter reveals a playful and sophisticated wit.

“Of all vices I hold patriotism the worst when it meddles with matters of taste,” he wrote to William Dean Howells in 1882.

In criticizing French writer Alphonse Daudet to Henry James, Hay wrote, “The “Evangeliste” is dreary, the work of a genius smitten with locomotor ataxia; (if I had known that word was so long, I should never have begun upon it).”

”Dear Reid,” he wrote to his former editor Whitelaw Reid, “It is painful, but I must tell you. My wife says, when you come to the house, that you have got to hold the baby.”

Hay-Adams Hotel

Hay’s best friend was John Quincy Adams’ grandson, historian Henry Adams. Together with their wives and geologist Clarence King (who led a double life married to an African-American woman in New York City), they socialized frequently and called themselves the Five of Hearts.

When Adams in 1880 anonymously published a best-selling novel called Democracy, people speculated that the Five of Hearts had collaborated on it.

Adams and Hay were so close they built adjoining mansions on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. Eventually, a luxury hotel known as the Hay-Adams replaced the two houses.

Henry Adams lived on the left, John Hay on the right. Image courtesy Colgate Public Library.

Three Funerals

John Hay attended the vigil of three presidents, all of whom he knew well. He stood next to Lincoln on his deathbed.

John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln, John Hay

His friend James Garfield, when elected president, had asked him to serve as his private secretary. Hay chose instead to work as an editor for the New York Tribune, supporting Garfield’s policies. Then a deranged office seeker shot the president in a Washington, D.C., railroad station. Hay covered Garfield’s 79-day slide into death.

Twenty years later, an assassin killed another presidential friend. When William McKinley ran for president, Hay gave his campaign $4,000 a month. McKinley named him his secretary of state, and trusted him implicitly in foreign affairs.

When an anarchist shot McKinley in Buffalo, John Hay visited him at his bedside. After McKinley’s funeral, Hay wrote to a friend, “what a strange and tragic fate it has been of mine—to stand by the bier of three of my dearest friends, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, three of the gentlest of men, all risen to be head of the State, and all done to death by assassins.”

The Great Chicago Fire

John Hay was working for the New York Tribune in 1871 when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow allegedly kicked over a lantern and started the Great Chicago Fire.

His editor, Whitelaw Reid, sent him to Chicago. Two days after the fire broke out, Hay arrived after in the devastated city after a 38-hour train ride. He described the smoldering ruins, interviewed the victims and visited Mr. O’Leary as he watched the cow through the window.

The Great Chicago Fire by Currier & Ives

Hay’s versatility as critic, reporter and editor pleased Reid so much he gave him a raise to $65 a week. That made him one of the highest paid editorial writers in the country, which annoyed Mark Twain, who also wrote for the New York Tribune.

Layabout

His diplomatic career began when he was in his 20s and lasted until his death at the age of 66. He negotiated 50 treaties, including the treaty that gave the United States canal rights to the Isthmus of Panama. He also gets credit for fashioning the Open Door Policy.

Despite his many accomplishments, he had a tendency to laziness and hypochondria. After he married Clara, he wrote a letter to a friend saying, “I do nothing but read and yawn.” He complained to John Bigelow, U.S. ambassador to France, that he was ‘growing more indolent and scatterbrained day by day.’ And in a letter to Henry Adams, he wrote in 1895 that ‘time goes by imperceptibly in indolence and solitude, and there’s nothing to do, or think, or write about. I have developed two or three more mortal disease…’

Hay’s best friend, Henry Adams

He also visited doctors frequently for advice about his imagined illnesses. When doctors prescribed rest, he readily followed their orders.

Lucky Fellow

He had an abundance of luck throughout his life. The best stroke of good fortune that befell him was to graduate from Brown without an idea of what to do with his life. So he went to work for his Uncle Milton, a lawyer with an office next door to Abraham Lincoln’s.

Along with his good friend John George Nicolay, Hay threw himself into Lincoln’s campaign for president. Lincoln then brought them both to Washington, where they roomed together in a shabby bedroom in the White House. Lincoln visited them at all hours of the day and night. The unparalleled access to the president informed the 10-volume biography the two “Lincoln’s boys” wrote together.

Clara Stone

His luck continued in love. He courted and in 1876 married Clara Stone, daughter of a wealthy Cleveland industrialist. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one, and they had four healthy children. His father-in-law gave him fabulous mansion and a job in Cleveland managing his considerable investments, which Hay, it turned out, was good at. The job gave him plenty of money and freedom to travel.

The only time his luck ran out was in 1901, when his son Adelbert died at the age of 24. The young man had just been appointed McKinley’s personal secretary when he fell 60 feet to his death from a New Haven hotel window.

Grandchildren of John Hay

Two of his grandchildren achieved fame in their own right. His daughter Helen married Payne Whitney, son of another Cabinet member, William Whitney. President Eisenhower named Helen’s son John Hay Whitney ambassador to the United Kingdom, 60 years after his grandfather held the post.

Helen’s daughter Joan Whitney Payson in 1962 bought an expansion baseball team, the New York Mets, and brought Willie Mays back to New York.

Joan Whitney Payson

With thanks to All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt by John Taliaferro, Also to The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism by Mark Zwonitze and William Roscoe Thayer in The Life and Letters of J0hn Hay, Volume 2.

Images: Joan Whitney Payson By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49601215. This story was updated in 2023.

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Mark Twain Refuses To Succumb to the Silken Dainties of Isabel Lyon

Mark Twain made a painful confession that didn’t come to light until 100 years after his death, in 2010. He’d been flattered, manipulated and fleeced by a seductress: his personal secretary, Isabel Lyon.

Twain included the confession as part of his 5,000-page autobiography and ordered that it not be published for a century after he was “dead, and unaware, and indifferent.” He wanted to speak his “whole frank mind.”

Mark Twain

He wrote a scalding, often funny, 429-page attack on Isabel Lyon, who had been in cahoots with Twain’s self-appointed business manager, Ralph Ashcroft.

Scholars disagree about Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft. Was she Twain’s best friend, a devoted employee who relieved him of every care only to be attacked by a jealous daughter? Or were they really, as Twain called them, “a pair of degraded & sufficiently clumsy sharpers?”

Whatever the case, the 429-page screed, written as a letter to his friend William Dean Howells, had a specific purpose. A few months after Twain died in 1910, the letter accomplished its purpose.

Mark Twain Meets Isabel Lyon

Mark Twain met Lyon at a party in 1892, when she was 29 and working as a governess for a Hartford family. Paired with her at cards, he found her charming. At the end of the evening he was invited to return. “I’ll come only if I can play with the little governess,” he said.

She was the daughter of a Columbia University classics professor who died when she was 19. His death forced her to support herself and her mother.

Ten years after that card game, Twain’s wife Olivia hired Isabel Lyon to handle his correspondence, as she was too frail to do it herself anymore. Twain described her as “slender, petite, comely, 38 years old by the almanac, and 17 in ways and carriage and dress.” At first, she rarely saw the great man.

In 1903, Isabel Lyon and her mother traveled with Twain’s family to Italy and stayed in a cottage on the grounds of their villa outside Florence. Olivia then died in Italy in 1904.

Grieving, Mark Twain returned to the United States. Isabel moved in with the family in New York City, summering with them in Dublin, N.H., at the house of artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Twain had sold the house in Hartford because the family found it too painful to live where his daughter Susy had died in 1896.

The Main Chance

Isabel Lyon in a 1904 newspaper photo

Isabel Lyon realized the opportunity presented by her closeness to Twain as his secretary. She revered him, calling him the ‘King’ in her diary. She grew closer to him and gained more authority over his affairs.

Eventually, Lyon ran the household, handled his finances, edited his writing and acted as his social secretary. She also chaperoned his two surviving daughters, Clara, rebellious and difficult, and Jean, seriously ill with epilepsy.

Everyone, Twain later wrote, knew Isabel Lyon wanted to marry him. He knew it too. He described how she tried to seduce him in her silken dainties:

She would get herself up in sensuous oriental silken flimseys of dainty dyes, & stretch herself out on her bepillowed lounge in her bedroom, in studied enticing attitudes, with an arm under her head & a cigarette between her lips, & imagine herself the Star of the Harem waiting for the eunuchs to fetch the Sultan.

Touchy-Feely Isabel Lyon

She was always touching him, he complained to Howells:

…Miss Lyon is good company, agreeable company, delightful company … but there is nothing about her that invites to intimate personal contact; her caressing touch –& she was always finding excuses to apply it–arch girly-girly pats on the back of my hand & playful little spats on my cheek with her fan — & these affectionate attentions always made me shrivel uncomfortably–much as happens when a frog jumps down my bosom. Howells, I could not go to bed with Miss Lyon, I would rather have a waxwork.

“In all my (nearly) seventy-four years I have seen only the one person whom I would marry, & I have lost her,” he wrote. “Miss Lyon compares with her as a buzzard compares with a dove. (I say this with apologies to the buzzard.)”

Twain, calling himself “a born ass,” blamed himself for liking the attention.

Stormfield

Stormfield

By 1907, Mark Twain wanted to move out of New York. His biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, lived in Redding, Conn., and persuaded Twain to buy land, sight unseen, in the town. The property included a two-story saltbox house called the Lobster Pot. Twain gave it to Lyon in gratitude for her service.

Twain was touring, and left it to Lyon and an architect to build and furnish an 18-room Italianate mansion called Stormfield. (See a video of Mark Twain with Clara and Jean taken by Thomas Edison at Stormfield here.)

It was at Stormfield that Isabel Lyon met her Waterloo. She grew increasingly high-handed, spent Twain’s money lavishly and grew intimate with Ralph Ashcroft. Ashcroft had insinuated himself into Twain’s life as his business manager. But Lyon managed to alienate Clara and the servants.

Biographer Laura Skandera-Trombly, who is sympathetic to Lyon, writes:

… the most likely explanation for Clara’s ending Clemens and Lyon’s relationship was that it was beginning to resemble, much too closely for her comfort, a type of permanent union.

Putrescent Pair

Karen Lystra, though, writes that an audit showed Lyon had used Twain’s money to renovate the Lobster Pot without his permission. Lystra also had evidence that she and Ashcroft duped him into granting her power of attorney in November 1908.

Matters came to a head in 1909 when the family doctor told Twain to ask Lyon and Ashcroft to account for their stewardship. Twain was indignant. Ashcroft was indignant. Clara persisted in the accusations. Finally Twain grew suspicious when he broached the subject of an audit and Ashcroft and Lyon resisted.

Twain had an audit done.

Isabel Lyon then married Ralph Ashcroft in March 1909. The next month, Twain fired her and evicted her from the Lobster Pot.

She fought back in the press and in the courts. They battled until Twain settled out of court in 1909. Ashcroft got some money and Twain got the Lobster Pot. Just before he died, Twain sent a letter to John Hays Hammond:

First & last, in one way & another, that putrescent pair cost me $50,000 — & yet I have come out ahead. For they are tied together for life, & I was the unwitting reason of it.

And he denounced Isabel Lyon bitterly. Twain called her “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction.”

Father’s Weapon

Twain penned his 429-page attack on Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft between May and October 1909. The Ashcrofts moved to Chicago. Twain died on April 21, 1910.

Clara Clemens

Three months later, Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft tried to sell a manuscript they had taken from him. They wrote a letter to Clara threatening to blackmail her if she stopped the sale. Lyon knew about Clara’s affair with her married accompanist. Clara wrote to a friend:

But Father left me one weapon to use in case they troubled me any more & I used it. –He wrote out a full description of their entire story of dishonesty which I was to publish if there was no other way to keep them quiet.

Clara sent an attorney to Chicago, who retrieved the other manuscripts they’d stolen.

The Ashcrofts moved to Montreal in 1913 and separated in the 1920s. They divorced in 1927. Isabel Lyon died December 4, 1958 in New York City.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image: Portrait of Mark Twain ca. 1905 owned by the Mark Twain Library in Redding, Conn. From Terry Ballard via Flickr. CC By 2.0.

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Lilla Cabot Perry Paints With Monet

When Isabella Stewart Gardner wanted to meet Claude Monet, her first thought was to wrangle an invitation from Lilla Cabot Perry.

Lilla Cabot Perry, self portrait

Lilla, a Boston artist, lived abroad with her husband and three girls. She moved in the same social circles as Gardner, a natural intermediary for Gardner, an avid art collector.

Lilla Cabot Perry

She was born Jan. 13, 1848 into a Boston Brahmin family. Her father, Dr. Samuel Cabot III, was a prominent surgeon. Her mother, Hannah Lowell Jackson Cabot, was a cousin to James Russell Lowell. Family friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.

In 1874 she joined another prominent family when she married Thomas Sergeant Perry, grandnephew of U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry. He was a Harvard professor described as ‘the best read man in Boston.’

Thomas Sergeant Perry

Lilla Cabot Perry began painting at the age of 36 years. She may have gotten interested in art through her husband’s brother in-law John LaFarge, an artist famous for his stained glass windows.

The Perrys had family money, but they weren’t rich. They lived abroad for years, partly because it was cheaper to live in Europe and partly to escape Boston society, which they found stultifying.

‘The Trio’ (Alice, Edith and Margaret Perry)

They lived with their three daughters mostly in France from 1887 to 1909.

For nine summers they stayed in a small expatriate art colony with American artists such as Theodore Robinson and John Leslie Breck. Lilla became good friends with Giverny’s most famous resident artist, Claude Monet, as well as with Camille Pissarro and Mary Cassatt.

‘Apres mide d’automne. Giverny’

She began to paint like Monet, creating landscapes with impressionist brushstrokes and a pastel palette.

She was also inspired by Japanese art when her husband got a teaching job in Japan from 1897-99.

Lilla Cabot Perry, ‘In A Japanese Garden’

Return to Boston

When she was back in Boston she promoted Monet’s work, but had more luck with her own. Seven of her paintings drew raves at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Word got round Boston of the Perry family’s connections in France, and their friends and acquaintances tried to take advantage of them. In November 1906, Isabella Stewart Gardner visited France and badgered Lilla for a meeting. Suspecting Gardner was just using her, Lilla put her off.

Finally they ran out of excuses to avoid her and Lilla brought the letter to Monet. He groaned and said, “Well, my friend Pissarro is in trouble…I’ll see if I can’t sell some of his paintings for him.”

Gardner didn’t buy a Pissaro, but she did manage to meet Claude Monet.

‘Portrait of William Dean Howells’

As her inheritance dwindled, Lilla Cabot Perry had to rely more on portrait paintings for income.

‘A Snowy Monday’ (Hancock, NH)

She continued painting landscapes at her summer home in Hancock, N.H., until her death on Feb. 28, 1933.

With thanks to The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters by Mark Rennella. This story was updated in 2022.

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When Mark Twain Bombed Giving New England’s First Roast

Mark Twain bombed in a very big way when he poked fun at America’s most august literary lights during a 70th birthday party for John Greenleaf Whittier. He later said he was never in his life so miserable as he was on Dec. 17, 1877, when he delivered an after-dinner speech that fell flat.

Whittier had achieved fame and honor as one of the five Fireside Poets, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They had distinctly American voices, and they were called the Fireside Poets because their poems could be read and memorized by the whole family as they sat around the fire. Lowell, at 58, was the youngest of the group; Bryant, at 82, the oldest.

Several years before Mark Twain bombed in Boston, he looked like this.

Twain had achieved fame as a fresh new voice from the West — too fresh, it turned out.

Mark Twain Bombed

The Atlantic Monthly hosted the dinner in part to showcase the intellectual and literary firepower of its contributors. The magazine had invited 58 distinguished writers. Holmes and Longfellow were there, as was the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, then 74 years old and suffering from dementia. The Boston Daily Advertiser called the assemblage “without doubt the most notable that has ever been seen in this country within four walls.”

The Hotel Brunswick

Twain, who at 42 was much younger than the august group gathered before him, thought he’d have some good-natured fun at their expense. He launched into a story about a lonely old miner in southern California who’d been visited by three disreputable tramps: Mr. Emerson, Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Holmes. The miner described Emerson as “a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed,” while Holmes was “as fat as a balloon” and Longfellow was “built like a prizefighter.”

John Greenleaf Whittier

Twain recounted how the poets quoted apposite selections from their own poetry at the miner, while drinking his whiskey and cheating at cards. “They swelled around the cabin and spouted,” said Twain. Then they fought and made the miner sing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” In the end, he reveals the three tramps are imposters.

The humor lay in the pretensions of the drunken tramps. Mr. Holmes, for example, enters the shanty and exclaims, “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!” When served whiskey, he exclaims, “Flash out a stream of blood-red wine.” The miner tells him he’ll drink his whiskey straight or he’ll go dry.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

When the miner discovers the Longfellow imposter making off with his boots, he shouts, “Hold on, there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with them?” Longfellow replied, “Going to make tracks with ’em; because:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unsmiling

As Twain later told the story, 50 or 100 people attended the banquet.

“Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light first one way and then another—a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to other people).”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868

They listened with attentive interest, he wrote. After the first 200 words, Twain began to expect laughter, but heard none.

Black Frost

“Now, then, the house’s attention continued, but the expression of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what the trouble was. I didn’t know.” He went on, he said, but with difficulty. In the end, he didn’t know enough to just give up and sit down.

His friend William Dean Howells also attended the dinner. Howells described the speech as “the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe.”

William Dean Howells

“After the first two or three hundred words,” wrote Howell, “those Atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end.”

Several days later, newspapers across the country reported on the speech. Many proclaimed it in bad taste. The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin claimed sales of Twain’s books had dropped off, and it was even suggested he moved up his planned departure for Europe to avoid the negative publicity.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union even weighed in, passing a resolution objecting to the number of boozy beverages served with the seven-course meal: Sauterne, sherry, Chablis, Champagne, claret and Burgundy.

Smart and Humorous. Or Not.

Twain wrote in his autobiography that he tried to forget about the dinner for years. In 1906, an acquaintance he called “Mrs. H.” wrote to him about it, saying her family found humor in his story about the miner.

Twain dug the speech out of his files, and found it didn’t have a single defect.

“It is just as good as good can be,” he wrote. He called it “smart” and “saturated with humor.” “There isn’t a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere,” he wrote.

Several days later, he looked at it again and called it “offensive and detestable.’ And then he reversed his opinion again.

Whatever it was, the speech was memorable. It is still, to this day, being discussed by scholars and historians.

This story last updated in 2022.

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