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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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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