February 2 Sunday – Sam and Livy’s 20th Anniversary, which they both seemed to have overlooked — from a letter to her mother, Livy wrote:

Until I wrote the date… I had not remembered that this is my wedding day. Mr. Clemens is in New York for the day, he went yesterday and will I think return tomorrow…. Susy has gone to church Clara is in New York with Miss Foote attending to her teeth, Jean is upstairs reading. / It is a grey Sunday and looks like snow [Salsbury 273].

In New York at the Murray Hill Hotel, Sam wrote a long letter to Daniel Frohman about his reactions to seeing P&P on stage on opening night, Jan. 20.

Do not make any foreign contracts. I cannot consent to have this amazing burlesque played in England. The very cattle would laugh at it. When I sat in the theatre that first night, I was bewitched by Elsie’s acting, & carried out of myself by the pretty stage-pictures & the rich colors of the dresses, & so the infinite repulsivenesses of the piece (as to language,) got no sufficient attentions from me. I really thought I was seeing a dramatization of the book. It was a vast mistake….I should have perceived that Mrs. Richardson’s contract to dramatize the book had not been fulfilled; that she carefully & deliberately got as far away from the book as she could; that she merely transferred names from the book, & often left the characters that belonged to them behind…

      Is the contract fulfilled? Is this mess of idiotic rubbish & vapid twaddle a “dramatization” of the book? It resembles it about as a riot in a sailor boarding-house resembles a Sunday school.

      No, if you had allowed me to see the manuscript in time, this stuff would not have gone on the stage. I could not have endured it [MTP].

Sam inscribed a copy of CY to Elsie Leslie: To Elsie dear from her friend Mark Twain Feb.2/90. He also sent a picture of himself with a note and a poem:

…here is my latest book, Elsie dear, but I fear you won’t understand it — yet later when you grow up. However, you will understand the picture of your devoted friend, who sends it.

I’ll be your friend, your thrall, your knave

I’ll be your elder brother

I’ll be, for love, your very slave

Or anything you’d druther

[MTP].

An excerpt from CY ran with comment in the Nationalist, praising Mark Twain’s emphasis on “loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders,” and his stand for human rights [Tenney 17].

Dean Sage wrote to Sam:

My lord the Bishop has just been in & showed me your letter declining to come here next week & assist Mr Hopkinson Smith in an entertainment for the benefit of the Cathedral.

Now I don’t take any more stock in the Cathedral than you do, nor in the bishop, as an ecclesiastic, but I have for him a great regard as a mighty fine man who continually undergoes persecutions & snubbings at the hands of his theological opponent, but has nevertheless, with wonderful perserverance & modesty, kept on for years & years in an enterprise which everybody predicted would be a disastrous failure, but which will succeed if the bishop lives five years longer.

Sage had read CY and liked it “very much.” He added he was sorry that Sam and Edward House “have had trouble, especially as I know you used to think highly of him — It is simply dreadful to have a friend turn on one as the age we now are, when the circle is continually narrowing…” [MTP].

Bishop William C. Doane wrote from Bishop’s House, Albany to Sam, a short and rather illegible note that mentions seeing Mr. & Mrs. Sage on the train [MTP].