November 1 Tuesday –

Check #  Payee  Amount  [Notes]

3884  John O’Neil  60.00  Gardener

3885  Patrick McAleer  50.20  Coachman

November 1 Tuesday ca. – About the first of the month, the Clemenses invited Charles Culliford Boz Dickens, son of the late great novelist, and family, to visit them in Hartford on Nov. 10. Dickens was in the U.S. with his wife, Bessie, and daughter, Sydney, giving readings from his father’s works [MTNJ 3: 341n125].

Also around the beginning of November, Sam wrote in his notebook, a secret which is the foundation of much of his best writing, having to do with hoaxes, exaggerations, and the like:

For Princeton Review — to be written in April ’88. If you attempt to create & build a wholly imaginary incident, adventure or situation, you will go astray, & the artificiality of the thing will be detectable. But if you found on a fact in your personal experience, it is an acorn, a root, & every created adornment that grows up out of it & spreads its foliage & blossoms to the sun will seem realities, not inventions. You will not be likely to go astray; your compass of fact is there to keep you on the right course. Mention instances where you think the author was imagining. Others where he built upon a solid & actually lived basis of fact [MTNJ 3: 343].

Note: The commitment to write this article slipped Sam’s mind, and he was forced to withdraw after being notified on Apr. 10, 1888 by A.C. Armstrong, publisher of the Review.