HARTFORD’S MARK TWAIN

Sam Clemens was a proud product of the Missouri frontier: the world identified him with the Hannibal of his boyhood and the mighty river that flowed past it; friends and neighbors from his early life peopled much of his fiction; Missouri haunted his speech, favored his storytelling, dictated his drawing-room manners – or lack of them. But when, after eighteen years of ceaseless wandering, it came time for Mark Twain to finally establish a home of his own, it was to Hartford, Connecticut that he and his young wife moved in 1871. Hartford was everything Hannibal had never been – prosperous, cosmopolitan, genteel—yet it became as much a home to him as Hannibal had ever been. And it was in Hartford that he forged the closest friendship of his adult life with the Rev. Joseph Twichell, who seemed his mirror opposite in nearly every way.

Sam Clemens first visited HD in January 1868, just weeks after hi thirty-second birthday. By then the pattern of his solitary life had already been defined by his rootlessness and world travel. Even during his childhood in Hannibal, Clemens had moved from house to house. By the age of seventeen he already lived on his own and worked in St. Louis and Philadelphia. Before he ever entered his formative profession as a steamboat pilot, his wondering and work had taken him to Washington, D.C., New York City, and Cincinnati. And in the years immediately after is time on the Mississippi he would come to know the Nevada Territory, California, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), Nicaragua, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Russia, Turkey Egypt and the Holy Land.

Despite having seen much of the world and many of its greatest cities, Twain’s first look at Connecticut’s capital deeply impressed him. In an article for the September 6, 1868 issue of “Alta California” Twain wrote:

“Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this I the chief. It is a city of 40,000 inhabitants, and seems to be comprised almost entirely of dwelling houses – not single-shaped affairs, stood on end and packed together like a “deck of cards”, nut massive private hotels, scattered along the broad, straight streets from fifty all the way up to two hundred yards apart. Each house sits in the midst of about an acre of green grass, or flower beds, or ornamental shrubbery, guarded on all sides by the trimmed hedges of arbor-vitae, and by files of huge forest trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud. Some of these stately dwellings are almost buried from sight in parks and forests of these noble trees. Everywhere the eye turns it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green. You do not know what a beauty that is if you have not been here.”

   © 2001 by John Boyer, used by permission.

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