Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum
Hannibal, Missouri

By Cindy Lovell

The best time to visit Hannibal, Missouri, is right after you’ve read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), especially if you chase it with the sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The other best time to visit is when you haven’t read these books in many years. You see, Hannibal stands ready to awaken memories, stir dormant imaginations, and welcome you to its literary folds. The question is, are you ready?

I first read Tom Sawyer in the fourth grade. I would spend the next 30 years trying to get to Hannibal as I reread Tom Sawyer and learned more about its author, Samuel Clemens, pen name Mark Twain.

Although critics claim Huck Finn as the better book, Tom Sawyer provides the gateway where Clemens initially resurrects the people and haunts of his youth. No other town has served the purpose of literature as well as Hannibal. No other author fictionalized his own childhood in such a way as to constantly be inviting all who read the book to come home, come home to Hannibal … or “St. Petersburg.” The line between fact and fiction is lovingly blurred.

My first pilgrimage was in the summer of 1996. Exiting Highway 61 past a handful of motels and diners, I steered downhill until the Mississippi River sprawled before me, a river of rafts and perils and adventures. I ditched the car and climbed across the levee to feel the power of place. Jackson’s Island loomed large. The Mississippi River may border or pass through ten states, but Mark Twain staked Hannibal’s claim on it when he wrote Tom and Huck.

Two kinds of tourists visit Hannibal: those who have read the books and yearn to feel the connection, and those who enjoy nitpicking impossible points and whining about commercialism. Yes, that’s Sam’s face on the Pepsi machines. To those lacking imagination, I say: lighten up.

At the corner of Hill and Main, Sam’s two-story boyhood home surveys the town, his bedroom windows facing the river and Cardiff Hill, scenes that presented irresistible temptation. Missing is the one-story ell upon which Sam (and Tom) landed when climbing out the window. Imagination supplies the invisible summer kitchen where the boys landed. Across the street stands Laura Hawkins’s girlhood home. Laura was the model for Becky Thatcher. Other period buildings complete the scene, such as Sam’s father’s Justice of the Peace Office and Grant’s Drug Store, where the family lived during harder times.

If you squint, power lines and cars disappear, revealing imaginary barefoot boys scampering toward adventure, eluding an unseen Aunt Polly.

Poke your head inside the replica of Tom Blankenship’s home, making sure to duck if you’re on the tall side. Blankenship was Huck’s real-life counterpart, and his house is catty-corner to the Clemens home, providing excellent proximity when the boys meowed to each other as a signal at night. Museum benefactors built this tiny abode on the site of the original home that housed the vast Blankenship clan. The house was rebuilt using period lumber and conjures enough cramped authenticity to remind modern visitors why Huck preferred sleeping in hogshead barrels. They were roomier.

A few blocks north, a memorial lighthouse, absent during Sam’s childhood, invites visitors to climb 244 steps up Cardiff Hill. The vistas of the river are worth it. Take out your copy of Tom Sawyer and reread the passages describing this “Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.” Sam got it just right.

As twilight descends, meander farther away from the river toward the Old Baptist Cemetery, where Tom and Huck found “round-topped, worm-eaten boards staggered over the graves, leaning for support and finding none.” In summer, one million lightning bugs await to enchant the devoted reader. You are forgiven if you yield to temptation and go barefoot in the grass.

In the distance a train slouches through town, each whistle unique, composed by the engineer. On Lovers Leap, out-of-towners listen expectantly.

Two miles south, the Mark Twain Cave reaffirms Clemens’s meticulous memory. In Huckleberry Finn, he provided these directions:    

We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the bushes. Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on our hands and knees. We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up. Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked under a wall where you wouldn’t a noticed that there was a hole. We went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold, and there we stopped. 

            I have followed those directions to that room. It is uncanny that young Sam knew that cave so well as to remember these directions decades later when he wrote Huckleberry Finn. The oldest cave signature is in this room, dated 1819. Young Clemens himself autographed a cave wall as did his friends. I imagine Sam pulling the pencil out from behind his ear, or maybe his pocket. The cave is sacred ground. Utterly sacred.

Hannibal itself is holy to all who fall under the spell of Sam Clemens’s pen. When Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentine writer visited, his only wish was to touch the Mississippi River in Sam’s hometown. He wept.

I have witnessed schoolteachers, students, and others respond similarly. Between my first visit in 1996 and moving there in 2007, I lost count of the dozens of people I brought to explore Sam’s boyhood home. They marveled at the cracks in the plank floors where Tom poured the dreaded Pain-killer. They peered at Becky Thatcher’s house from the parlor window and asked if Laura Hawkins stayed in Hannibal or moved away as Sam did. (She stayed.) They lingered in the kitchen imagining Sandy, a young enslaved boy whose services were rented by the Clemenses, sleeping on a rug.

Their questions attempted to discern fact from fiction. All were worthy visitors. They brought no snipe, no snark, no snide remarks dismissing the commercialization of Hannibal’s most famous resident. They brought respect, curiosity, and imagination. And Hannibal rewards such folks.

Cindy Lovell is a writer and educator. She teaches a course on Tom Sawyer for Quincy University, which is on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. She is the former executive director of both the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum (Hannibal, MO) and the Mark Twain House & Museum (Hartford, CT). Cindy wrote the narrative for Mark Twain: Words & Music, a double-album benefit project for the Boyhood Home, featuring Jimmy Buffett as Huck Finn, Clint Eastwood as Mark Twain, and Garrison Keillor as narrator. Grammy Award-winner Carl Jackson produced the project, and performers included Brad Paisley, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, and other fans of Mark Twain.

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East Hill
Elmira, New York

By Matt Seybold

Now it’s just a small, oddly-shaped clearing in a dense wood. At the top of the large pile of limestones we generously call a “staircase,” a space opens up in the trees. It feels like a good place for a pagan ritual. And every four years, on the final night of the International Conference on The State of Mark Twain Studies, that’s kind of what happens. A gaggle of scholars, creative writers, actors, filmmakers, and other Twainiacs gather in the moonlit clearing to smoke the cheapest possible cigars, their inexpensiveness a point of pride, as it had been for Sam Clemens himself. Winners of Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, and every imaginable academic fellowship scrape dry flakes of tobacco off their tongues and pretend to know the words to “Oft in the Stilly Night.”

From 1874 to 1953, in this space stood an octagonal study, designed to resemble a steamboat pilothouse, in which Mark Twain drafted the majority of the works for which he is now remembered. After too many midcentury literary tourists made pilgrimage, trapsing across the property where Twain’s in-laws still resided, the study was relocated to the campus of Elmira College, where his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, was an alumna and his niece, Ida Langdon, was a professor. Elmira College would eventually become custodian of Quarry Farm as well, and the home of the Center for Mark Twain Studies, where I work.

While I once cringed at the solemnity with which my fellow scholars sung “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” after four days of academic panels and roundtables, I’ll admit in the intervening years I have occasionally secluded myself in that clearing for a few idle minutes of, I don’t know, reverence.

When Twain was here, most every Summer from 1869 to 1890, and periodically thereafter, there were no woods. The study was, as he put it, “perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.” One can still approximate this view from the veranda of the main house at Quarry Farm, a hundred yards southeast and downhill from where the study stood. On a clear day, the blue hills are visible well across the Pennsylvania border, seven miles south.

It was this view, across the Chemung River Valley, this panorama of church steeples, lumber barges, railways bridges, and smokestacks, of commercial development buttressed by wilderness on all sides, which inspired Twain’s imaginative return to antebellum Missouri. First the early chapters of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and then the greater parts of Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were drafted here, along with dozens of other novels, memoirs, plays, essays, stories, speeches, and at least one pornographic farce solely for private circulation. Twain estimated that he wrote ten chapters in the study at Quarry Farm for every one he wrote elsewhere.

Visitors joke, often enough for it to become something of a cliché amongst our staff, that Twain’s productivity must have been fueled by boredom. His other regular haunts during the Gilded Age – Hartford, New York City, London, Vienna, Berlin – are so cosmopolitan and Elmira so provincial by comparison. It must have been easy for him to avoid distraction up there on East Hill. I have myself sometimes described him as looking down on Elmira like the Grinch over Whoville. But there is no evidence that Sam Clemens disdained or eluded the social scene of Elmira. To the contrary, some of his most cherished friendships were developed here, with Thomas K. Beecher, Charley Langdon, John T. Lewis, and John B. Stanchfield. And he did not vegetate at Quarry Farm, waiting for them to come to him, either.

One of Twain’s most healthful habits was his near-daily constitutionals. He was a “pedestrianist,” as he put it. Often accompanied by friends, often chain-smoking, he would walk shocking distances over tough terrain. During the seasons he spent here, downtown Elmira was connected to Quarry farm only by what one visiting reporter described as “a winding road, which is steep, very steep, and at times is really a dangerous driveway.” Twain was well aware of the danger, having witnessed the occasion in 1877 when a runaway carriage containing his sister-in-law and niece nearly careened into a deep ravine, saved only by the heroic efforts of Lewis.

The “dangerous driveway” no longer exists. It has been replaced by a pair of paved two-lane surface roads, still very steep, and treacherous when icy. This commute should be considered as essential to Twain’s writing process as the porch where he read each day’s work aloud to the assembled family and maybe even as the study itself.

Throughout his forties and fifties, Twain tripped his way down (and back up again) to visit the barber shop of Henry Washington, the self-emancipated man whose mother is the narrator of Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It”; to play pool with Beecher in the makeshift billiard parlor the radical theologian had created in the southwest corner of the Park Church; to gossip with other men of his guild at the newspaper offices of the Elmira Advertiser, Gazette, and Telegram;and to wet his whistle at Klapproth’s Tavern.

Far from being a recluse during the three or four months he spent in Elmira every year, Twain was someone you were likely to bump into during a summer stroll, a fixture of the downtown scene. When Twain died, legions of well-wishers gathered for a public viewing in New York City of the celebrity who Robertus Love, in his obituary, deemed “the most famous man on earth.” But Twain’s eulogy, written by the first woman ordained in this state, Beecher’s protégé, Annis Ford Eastman, was read at the Park Church in Elmira, and he was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery, next to his wife, son, and the two daughters who preceded him.

Frank Gannett, the newspaper magnate who was then the publisher of the Elmira Star-Gazette, noted in his obituary that though Twain’s celebrity and works belonged to the whole world, his “personal attributes, idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of disposition, temperament and moral attitude” felt like they were peculiar to Elmira. Nearly every Elmiran could recount secondhand stories, if not personal memories, of the famous author’s local exploits, and could testify to his “labors in the path of universal education,” his “insistence on an exchange of absolutely honest and honorable relations in every business and social enterprise,” and his “domestic life full of examples of faithfulness and devotion.”

That steep, winding, hazardous road between Quarry Farm and downtown Elmira connected the pastoral idyll — which was undoubtedly good for Twain’s productivity — to a diverse cast of quirky characters and social dynamics, which were also, I contend, generative for his art. Part of what I have elsewhere called the “Quarry Farm Style” is its dialectic of romance and realism. The novels written under these conditions move from King Arthur’s Court to scathing critiques of feudal and industrial society, from vivid naturalist descriptions of the Mississippi River to violent scenes of crisis and collapse along the banks, from prevailing American myths to reportage which debunks them, from the lifestyles of deluded princes to those of grasping paupers (equally deluded).

By the time he first came to Elmira, 33-year-old Mark Twain well knew what it was like to climb. How hard. How irrational. How unlikely. And I expect every time he contemplated those two miles back up East Hill, he was reminded again. The bootstrappers, the strivers, the grinders, the scrapers, the self-title entrepreneurs: all the lunks in the streets blindly hustling some mirage of success in a society structured to ensure their defeat; aren’t they ridiculous?

Well, so am I.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. He is executive producer and host of The American Vandal Podcast and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018) and (with Gordon Hutner) of a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” His work has appeared in dozens of publications.

Photo of Samuel Clemens looking out from the study window, Quarry Farm, East Hill, Elmira, New York, 1903. By T.E. Marr, courtesy of the Mark Twain Archive at Elmira College.

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Mark Twain House & Museum
Hartford, Connecticut

By Jacques Lamarre

In 2008, with no ceremony, I was handed a simple brass key to Mark Twain’s Hartford home. Having just been hired as the director of Marketing and Special Programs, I was given a few rules: do not touch anything, do not sit on the furniture, and, for God’s sake, don’t enter the house after the alarm has been set. The key went onto my keychain alongside those for my house, my Jeep Liberty, and my shed, and I began my efforts to lure visitors into the Clemens family’s house and its adjacent museum.

Up until that time, I only had been to the Twain House on an otherwise unmemorable date. I don’t know who chose the house tour for a date activity, but it likely had to do with my being a resident of the West End of Hartford, and, at the time, without a car. I cannot remember my date’s name, but the house made an immediate impression. That was the Clemenses’ intention.

One can track the trajectory of Twain’s life, work and gathering sophistication by visiting his homes. I have visited Samuel Clemens’ childhood home in Hannibal, Missouri as well as his birthplace, a humble two-room shack in Florida, Missouri. Both homes lay bare his Lower Midwest roots and illustrate the elements that would feature heavily in several of his most popular works. He left Missouri a Clemens and found his pen name of Mark Twain when he went out west.

His time in the rough-and-tumble, Wild West atmosphere of Nevada would find him living in a variety of frontier structures. In California, his accommodations ranged from mining camps to boarding houses. Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, engaged his services as a traveling correspondent to cover the first transatlantic pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. This trip on the steamship the Quaker City would not only expose him to a rich world of antiquities and awe-inspiring sights — all chronicled with a wry cynicism in his first major work, The Innocents Abroad (1869) — it would also introduce him to his future brother-in-law, Charley Langdon.

Twain experienced love at first sight after seeing an ivory miniature picture of Charley’s sister Olivia “Livy” Langdon. After meeting in New York City in 1869, an ardent courtship ensued, much of it conducted in the Langdon family home in Elmira, New York. The Langdons’ wealth and social prominence, along with Twain’s burgeoning success as an author and lecturer, allowed him to graduate into a new circle of society and a heightened level of ambition. After their marriage, Livy and Sam two moved into a gorgeous, fully-furnished home on a highly-desirable street in Buffalo — a gift from Sam’s father-in-law. Their time in Buffalo was brief, only one year. Twain set his sights on a move to Hartford. It wasn’t his first visit to a city that would loom large in his life.

In 1868, Twain visited Hartford — at the time the wealthiest city per capita in the United States — to meet with the publisher of the forthcoming The Innocents Abroad. Always one to economize efforts, Twain used the visit to file one of his ongoing travelogues to the Alta California. “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief…. Everywhere the eye turns it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”

Sam, Livy, and their first child Langdon moved to Hartford in 1871 to be close to the American Publishing Company. They rented a home in Hartford’s West End, then known as Nook Farm. Named after a bend in the Hog River, Nook Farm was and would be home to many of Hartford’s cultural and political elite, including author Harriet Beecher Stowe, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, journalist, Charles Dudley Warner, actor and playwright William Gillette, Senator Joseph Hawley, and, eventually, Katharine Hepburn.

It was during this time that four significant events occurred. The first, the tragic death of their young son in 1872, a devastating blow for the family. This was followed by the joyful births of their daughters Susy in 1872 and Clara in 1874. The fourth, Sam and Livy purchased a plot of land on Farmington Avenue to begin construction of the first home that they could properly call their own.

Positioned overlooking the Park River (the new and much nicer name for the Hog River), the property sat on the edge of Hartford adjacent to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s final home. Sam and Livy engaged architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design a house that would be both a family home and a jaw-dropping showstopper that reflected the Clemenses’ growing social importance. The construction of the massive Victorian Gothic home with its ornate brick and woodwork would cause tongues to wag around the conservative town. The Hartford Times wrote, “The novelty displayed in the architecture of the building, the oddity of its internal arrangement and the fame of its owner will all conspire to make it a house of note for a long time to come.” They weren’t wrong.

The seventeen years that the Clemenses lived in their beloved home were to be their happiest and were Sam’s most prolific and productive. Ironically, it was during his time that he wrote three of the works that would lean most heavily on his Midwest roots: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Of his Hartford home, Twain wrote in 1897, “To us our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome—& we could not enter it unmoved.”

Over my years at the Twain House, that simple brass key would grow in weight and import in my pocket. Every day when I left, I would swing by the bust of Twain in the lobby and say (quietly, so no one would question my sanity), “I hope I did right by you today.” In 2016, I left the Mark Twain House for another job. I still live in the Hartford area and can visit, but I feel acutely the loss of that key and my access to the bewilderingly beautiful and eccentric home that I too could not enter unmoved.

Jacques Lamarre is a playwright and a marketing specialist who consults for The Mark Twain House & Museum.

Photo by Frank Grace Photography, courtesy of the Mark Twain House & Museum.

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Dollis Hill House
London, England

By Thomas Ruys Smith

It’s the first real day of spring and I’m in Dollis Hill — an unremarkable suburb of North London that sits just inside the North Circular, the multi-lane road system that encircles the centre of the capital and is synonymous with traffic congestion and an entrenched atmosphere of urban decay. Still, in Gladstone Park, the sun is out and so are the local residents: in the ruins of what was once Dollis Hill House, a children’s birthday party is winding down just as a group of women begin an impromptu karaoke session; our miniature schnauzer Winifred is making the acquaintance of a fluffy white pomeranian apparently named Snowflake. This might seem an unlikely location for a ghost-hunt, but that’s why we’re here.

If you wanted to seek for the restless spirit of Mark Twain, there would be worse places to begin, at least according to the man himself. Interviewed in 1907 as he embarked on what he knew would be his final trip across the Atlantic, Twain was clear that he intended to spend his afterlife in the modern Babylon that had often served him as a second home: “I may never go to London again until I come back to this sphere after I am dead,” he told a reporter, “and then I would like to live in London.”

As an academic based in the UK, I’ve spent much of my career exploring Mark Twain’s relationship with the Mississippi River, tracing the way that the river wound its way through his life and work. In surprising ways, that muddy water often washed up at my own front door across the Atlantic: British writers had a surprising influence on the creation of the Mississippi as a powerful global emblem of America. Now, though, I’m reversing that transatlantic equation. It seemed time to pursue the traces of Mark Twain in my own backyard — in London, the city in which he spent roughly three crucial years on numerous trips, from his inaugural visit in 1872 to his final victory lap in 1907. A number of Twain’s London residences still exist, most famously the Langham Hotel which hosted his early visits and the house he rented at 23 Tedworth Square in affluent Chelsea, which bears a blue plaque erected by English Heritage to announce to passers-by that Mark Twain, American writer, had once lived there in 1896-7.

For me, though, there is something especially evocative about Dollis Hill House, occupied by Twain with his wife Olivia and daughter Jean in the summer of 1900. Compared to the glamour of his first trips to London as a literary lion ensconced in the Langham, or the awful gloom of his secluded residence in Tedworth Square after the death of his daughter Susy, there is an appealing softness to Twain’s time in Dollis Hill: after years of personal turmoil, including bankruptcy, the months he spent in the house were a relatively sunny sojourn. By 1900, his fortunes had been largely restored, enough for his family to return to America after a period of financial exile in Europe, and Dollis Hill House was a final hiatus before the end of this odyssey.

Twain’s description of this time exudes a warmth and peace that was rare in his later years: “Dollis Hill House comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I have ever occupied. … It is within a biscuit-toss of solid London; yet it stands solitary on its airy hill, in the centre of six acres of lawn, and garden, and shrubbery, and heavy-foliaged ancient trees.” His only complaint was the lack of a telephone. Today, of course, London has swallowed up Dollis Hill and what had been “country, pure and simple” to Twain is now surrounded by urban sprawl. Even on a warm spring day, “paradise” seems a stretch. However, as Twain himself noted, the land around the house had just been “bought for a park, to be for all time a memorial to Mr. Gladstone” — a frequent visitor to the house during his time as Prime Minister — which meant that, to some extent, the landscape that Twain loved really would “remain as it is.” Unlike hotels or his other residences that still function as private homes, this Twain-imprinted place remains immediately and freely accessible to all.

There’s also something about Dollis Hill House’s ruin that adds a poignancy, and a piquancy, to its association with Twain. A series of fires in the late 1990s left it a derelict shell. Though money was earmarked for its restoration, it became a casualty of austerity when former Prime Minister Boris Johnson canceled the funding during his time as London Mayor. A final fire in 2011 precipitated its demolition. Now, it remains an absent presence in Gladstone Park: a short course of bricks marks out the building’s floorplan and a fragment of one wall remains. People make their own use of this liminal space — like today’s birthday party.

An absent presence is also how I’ve come to think about Mark Twain as I search for him in London. Today, I can’t swear that the park-goers in Dollis Hill are thinking much about its famous former resident, but across the closing decades of the nineteenth century London was infatuated with the writer who seemed to embody their dreams, and sometimes nightmares, about America. In 1907, local newspaper The Hendon and Finchley Times proudly claimed him, “Our friend Mark Twain, who is associated with this district owing to his residence at Dollis Hill House.” Another paper judged that Twain’s connection to Gladstone Park would “add a certain … literary flavour in the public mind to its natural attractions.” These are vivid and hyperlocal examples of what Twain’s some-time associate Ralph Ashcroft declared in 1907: the English — and Londoners in particular — were “part-owners with the American nation of Mark Twain.”

In turn, Twain himself was infatuated with an urban space that was like no other on the face of the planet. “Everything in this monster city interests me,” Twain announced during his first time in London. And it always did. I would argue that outside of America, there is no other location that meant as much to him, or that had as much influence on his sense of self. Just as this ruined corner of London will always be a little paradise for Twain’s ghost, so London should always be a part of our understanding of this iconically American writer. And for me, there is something particularly significant about having this enigmatic shell on my doorstep, a short drive away from my own home along the grey river of the North Circular. Tracing the outlines of the rooms of Dollis Hill House as my daughters eat an ice cream purchased from the old stable block and modern life buzzes throughout this liminal shell, I can conjure up Twain as a near-neighbour, a fellow suburbanite, a Londoner, available for afternoon calls. In Gladstone Park, the sun is shining, and Mark Twain is lounging in a deckchair beneath the trees, forever.

Thomas Ruys Smith is an academic and writer who specializes in the study of nineteenth-century America. He is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and co-editor of the journals Comparative American Studies and New Area Studies.

“Gladstone Park, at Dollis Hill, to Be Opened on May 25.” The Illustrated London News, 1901.

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23 Tedworth Square

London, England

By Susan K. Harris

When Mark Twain reached England at the end of his 1895–96 lecture tour around the British Empire, he first sojourned in Guildford, 25 miles southwest of London, where he began work on what would become Following the Equator (British title, More Tramps Abroad), his record of that trip. However, shortly after he and his travel companions — his wife Olivia, and their middle daughter Clara — moved in, his oldest daughter, Susy, died in the family home in Hartford, CT, and, according to Twain legend, the family fell into a period of deep mourning from which Olivia, at least, never fully recovered. In October, after their youngest, Jean, joined them, they moved to 23 Tedworth Square, London, a five-story townhouse where they would dwell for the next nine months. There, the story goes, the family lived in almost complete seclusion: Olivia grieving, the two girls faithfully attending her, and Twain alternately railing against God and knuckling down to writing. As he bitterly told his old friend Joseph Twichell, “I am working, but it is for the sake of the work — the ‘surcease of sorrow’ that is found there. I work all the days, and trouble vanishes away when I use that magic.”

Tedworth Square is in Chelsea, a leafy section of London. In Twain’s day it was a modest neighborhood; today it shows all the signs of upscale gentrification, with apartment sales starting at over a million pounds. I made London my final stop when I followed Twain’s route around the world in 2013-14. Like Twain, I was relieved to have my journey finished. Although I had visited Australasia, India, and South Africa in separate trips, interspersed with teaching and other domestic duties, the collective undertaking had proven far more exhausting than I had anticipated — in part because I was always conscious of being an outsider, especially in cities where the sight of a lone woman triggered outspoken commentary from male spectators. In contrast London seemed welcoming and strangely safe. It was, I realized, a transitional space for me: familiar — I had visited often and lived there one summer — though still distant from domestic stress; a place to tie up loose research ends at the British Library, stroll through parks, and collect myself before I hit home and the myriad responsibilities awaiting me.

I suspect Twain and Livy felt the same way, despite — or perhaps because of — their bereavement. At least the family had been spared the shock of hearing about Susy’s death while surrounded by strangers and unknown tongues, and London was old stomping grounds for them, too. Chelsea also afforded some distractions, even for a grief-stricken writer living in (relative) seclusion. Tedworth Square enters obliquely into Following the Equator, in the India portion of the book. There Twain compares the flawless beauty of black and brown skins to “the white ones which are streaming past this London window now.” Not only are his neighbors’ skin colors “fish-belly,” “sallow,” and “mustard yellow,” one passer-by sports a “boiled-cauliflower nose in a flabby face veined with purple crinklings.” Not a generous assessment, but an early marker of the angry misanthropy that Twain developed in the wake of Susy’s death, I suspect. 

Today’s London complexions are generally better — for all our urban pollutants, at least we don’t struggle with coal dust — but my journal reminds me that while I was sitting across from #23 a man stumbled by who did look like the people Twain described. Disheveled and unshaven, he was drinking beer at 11 am and smelled like a horse. Even upscale Chelsea isn’t entirely shut off from London’s outcasts.

Nor was the Clemens family entirely shut off from London’s social life. The story that the mourning family isolated themselves is, like many Twain stories, largely a myth, probably originating in Twain’s attempts to fend off interviewers by claiming sequestration. In fact all four had contacts with the world beyond the house. Although Livy rarely went out, she did see close friends at home, and Barbara Snedecor’s edition of Livy’s letters shows that she quickly resumed responsibility for family correspondence, including paying bills and (because Twain had shifted ownership of his copyrights to her prior to declaring bankruptcy) dealing with Twain’s contract negotiations. Clara and Jean certainly supported their mother, but not 24/7; David Frears’ Mark Twain, Day by Day, notes that they acquired bicycles and learned to ride them in the Square, and Clara’s memoir My Father, Mark Twain recounts long Sunday walks around the city with their father. With friends, both girls also attended concerts and theater performances.

Twain always gregarious, visited friends, including Poultney Bigelow, John Hay, Bram Stoker, and Rudyard Kipling, and he willingly attended the theater and social/public events, including a Zangwill reading, at least one meeting of the Savage Club, a Parliamentary session, and the Queen’s Jubilee. Letters also show him keenly following the McKinley/Bryan presidential race in the U.S. Moreover, though resisting most demands for lectures and interviews, he allowed his friend Adele Chapin to persuade him to “tell stories” to patients at the London Hospital, an event that delighted the patients and forced Twain out of his self-absorption.

We associate sprawling cities with loneliness and alienation. But their small neighborhoods and parks can also provide shelter, quiet places to harbor while learning how to shift from one stage of life to another. London proved transitional for the Clemens family, furnishing them the physical and social spaces they needed to navigate their lives without Susy. For them as for me, the city served as interstitial space, between the upheavals of travel and the resumption of familiar routines. They could mourn together inside the five-story house, but they could also venture beyond it: a bike ride around the square, tea with a friend, an afternoon concert, dinner at a social club. Day by day, month by month, 23 Tedworth Square harbored Livy, Clara, Jean, and Samuel Clemens while they worked through their initial shock and relearned the social skills they would need for the remainder of their lives.

Susan K. Harris’s studies of Twain’s life and works incorporate many perspectives, from his yearning to escape human time and space, through his courtship days, to his later anti-imperialism. Her most recent book, Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now (2020), follows Twain on his journeys through Australia, India, and South Africa, exploring the cultural phenomena that he noticed (and those he ignored) and discussing her own relationship to one of America’s most powerful writers. 

Photo by Becky Dale.

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Mark Twain Cave

Hannibal, Missouri

By Avery Gregurich

It was said that one might wander days and nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never find the end of the cave; and that he might go down, and down, and still down, into the Earth, and it was just the same labyrinth underneath labyrinth, and no end to any of them. No man “knew” the cave. That was an impossible thing.

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Dear Mark,

I haven’t written in a while. By now it’s August in Missouri, and I’m driving on the Avenue of the Saints, destination: Hannibal. I’m told this highway runs from St. Paul to St. Louis, eventually. You had to take the river between, but I’m able to take this avenue through the land of the Park-N-Ride. It’s mid-morning, and the first leg of the commutes are already done, measured in time out from the country roads into the cities which hold the jobs and back again into the country which hold a lot of anger, as they always have. Also, melons. The painted cardboard signs turned towards the highway announce that melon season is here. They’re all thump-ripe, I’m sure of it. At least that much is the same from both of our formative years spent here along the Mississippi.

Here are my credentials: I’m from Pike County, just south of here on the Illinois side of the river. Like you, I too had the sandbagging summers and the mayfly hatchings and the infinite boredom watching the river pass, knowing it was going somewhere and I wasn’t. In the introduction to Huck Finn, you warned that you had written the text employing a number of dialects, including “the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect, and four modified varieties of the last.” I suppose that I have used this dialect by default, confounding the rich suburban kids at college when my vowels all came out the same. I never could feign their language, so I sat real still, mostly with my mouth shut.

At the gas station, we fill up behind a hearse flanked by bare-faced men in suits that have become well-worn by this point in the pandemic. Back on the highway, we are passed by a car careful to merge, as its back window is covered with conspiracy theory paraphernalia. (There’s too much to tell, Mark. I’m sorry. Suffice to say people are now as they always have been: vain and afraid to apologize.) Just outside the highway hunting camp with tall fences penning in the game, a truck hauling a grain auger had an elk head propped up in its truck bed. It was just the head, and a blue tarp covered its face, but the antlers couldn’t be corralled. Past all this, the speed trap towns and firework stands and corn mazes and the round bales wrapped in red-white-and-blue plastic along the edges of the fields, we finally make it, announced by your face on the welcome sign. Hannibal: America’s Hometown™.

By now, all the remaining river towns look like one another. That is, if there’s any money left in them. If there is, then the train depots downtown are always turned into history museums, the former factories get big murals painted on their brick that make the locals cry foul, and the habitable real estate still left down by the water can be had at worrisome prices. In the time since I grew up, Hannibal opened up a brewery with your name on it, and they turned the Wonder Hostess Discount Bakery Outlet into a vape shop. That pretty much brings us up to speed.

At the entrance to the Mark Twain Cave Complex, which holds both “America’s oldest and newest show caves,” I spotted our teenage tour guide sitting behind the ticket counter, brushing up on her presentation with a copy of Tom Sawyer that they sold right there in the gift shop. (You won’t be surprised to learn that only the heartland hits have really survived. No copies of The Mysterious Stranger or The Private Life of Adam and Eve are available for purchase. I’m still not sure Hannibal is ready for either of them.) I was tempted to buy a bobblehead barely intimating your likeness. You could sit on the dashboard of my car, passing judgement on all passing things. I settled instead for a souvenir dime my father couldn’t believe cost 50 cents to smash.

My parents have joined Sara and I here at the cave. Due to ongoing circumstances, we had to skip last year’s Christmas and Thanksgiving, which our pre-tour conversation reflects. After a short video introduction, we are ushered into the mouth of the cave. The air in there is cool and surely the same as when you wandered through as a kid, only today it is mixed intermittently with my father’s picnic belches emanating from immediately over my shoulder. I recognize it even through the mask I wear, one of only two seen on the entire tour, the other covering my love’s face. We are clearly the real tourists here. I have to forgive my mother, who says she just forgot her mask in the car.

As you are aware, the cave is unique in its almost complete lack of speleothems, those stalagmites and stalactites that make caves desirable these days. Instead, hundreds of thousands of signatures cover the limestone walls around us, lots written in black paint or candle ash or berry juice, as our tour guide tells us. The signatures all around us confirm that for as long as we’ve been stumbling into caves, we’ve wanted to leave some kind of mark. Someone from St. Louis even drew a caricature of you about a century ago, a white outline cut into a patch of black paint.

Would you believe that they finally found your signature on the bicentennial of the “discovery” of the cave? They had it authenticated and everything, put up a wooden box with a screen on it to protect it from smudges. My father points to it, his indication that I should take a picture. Photographing in the cave is futile, but still I try to capture whatever he points at. I don’t think he’s ever read one of your sentences.

While we follow the path you made Tom and Becky traverse, we learn about the cave’s various lives as a one-time hideout for Jesse James, as a secret storeroom for Confederate weapons, and as a mausoleum for a doctor’s deceased teenage daughter. None of this is particularly surprising: most of what has been “discovered” over the last few centuries here in the river basin are grisly—bones left by things once chased or killed or both. No matter how we’ve tried to dress them up, we still played a role in the burial, if only by coming here now to attend the funeral.

At one point, our tour guide leads us in an exercise in which she turns out the accessory lights and we experience total darkness, something she says with teenage gravity is “really rare.” “So dark that you can’t see the hand in front of your nose,” tempting us to try. The punchline comes when she flips the lights, and we all stand there waving at one another. (Of course, we stop immediately when the lights come back on). The tour continues, more signatures are found, formations pointed out, and a prop treasure chest is revealed at the bottom of a crevice, but I keep thinking about that moment of total darkness.

Not only was there the absence of light, it was finally quiet for a moment, even the kids in the group awed by something outside of the algorithms’ reach. We shared there for a moment the realization of how much of our lives are consumed in light. This shared, quiet darkness felt elemental and deeply human, full of something communal, maybe grief, or fear. It might have been more commonplace in your time, but as our tour guide said, it’s rare these days.

I truly think the price of admission was for that one brief moment of total obscurity. I regret to admit that I really wanted to take that time to add my name to the thousands covering the cave walls. I wish I knew why. Instead, we walked out into August, said our goodbyes and drove back home beneath clouds of black gnats that seemed to follow the highway.

Let’s do it again next summer. I’ll bring a permanent marker. You bring a light.

Avery Gregurich is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River and has never strayed too far from it.

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