May 16 Tuesday – Sam sent a postcard from Hartford to Elisha Bliss, asking if the pictures were ready to ship and giving Moncure Conway’s London address. Sam received a postal card reply, sometime shortly thereafter as mentioned in his next letter to Conway [MTLE 1: 61-62].
The front page of the New York Evening Post of May 16, 1876:
The Atlantic Monthly.
Under the title “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” Mark Twain tells, in the first article in the Atlantic Monthly for June, of a personal interview he had not long ago with his conscience. The article is notable chiefly because it shows a decided advance upon Mr. Clemens’s part as a literary artist. Mark Twain has never been a mere fun maker. In the midst of his most exaggeratedly humorous outbursts he has often grown serious for a moment, with a seriousness which indicated deep earnestness as well as profound convictions; and even when he has “stuck to his text” and continued a consistent humorist to the end, his humor has always carried with it at least a suggestion of a deeper purpose than its apparent one. Occasionally, too, Mr. Clemens has written with scarcely any thought of making his readers smile, and with a distinct purpose to do a bit of genuine literary art work, as he did, for example, in the sketch of a negro woman’s life story which he printed about a year ago. In the present paper the purpose is both more manifest and more fully attained, and if readers will forget that its author has been in the habit of saying and writing amusing things, they cannot well help discovering here an unexpected power upon his part to write something better worth remembering than any of his amusingly extravagant stories ever were. The task he has set himself is not an easy one by any means. His conscience, dwarfed and deformed by his indulgence in what he once regarded as sins, appears in bodily shape, and in the conversation which follows it was by no means easy to preserve the verisimilitude, while regarding the conscience as a distinct, personal existence, independent in every thing of its possessor. It is greatly to Mr. Clemens’s credit as a literary artist that he has in the main succeeded in this singularly difficult task, and if we might have been spared the outbreak of the old demon of wild exaggeration which marks and mars the end of the article, his triumph would have been complete. As it is, we have a new Mark Twain who promises to be even better than the old one.
Phineas T. Barnum wrote to advise he’d sent Sam admission to his show last year which Sam could not use, so enclosed more tickets. Barnum & wife would be in Hartford until Thursday night at their friends, the David Clarke family. “If you come to the show Wednesday P.M. we shall see you” [MTP]. Note: Barnum tried repeatedly to visit or to get Clemens to visit him; engagements of either usually precluded meeting.