December 27 Friday – Sam accepted an invitation from the Langdons for dinner at the St. Nicholas Hotel. There he met Olivia Louise Langdon, his wife to be [MTL 2: 145n3]. (See Dec. 31 entry)

Paine’s biography does not give an exact date of the first meeting, but names “two days before Christmas” as the date of the invitation to Sam [MTB 352]. In his Autobiography, however, Sam writes:

“That first meeting was on the 27th of December, 1867, and the next one was at the house of Mrs. Berry, five days later Miss Langdon had gone there to help Mrs. Berry receive New Year guests” [MTA 2: 103].

Still, others speculate further: Sanborn claims their first meeting was on New Year’s Day, and the second was at the St. Nicholas Hotel, on either Jan. 2 or 3, and that they went to a Dickens reading, but Sam recalled Dickens reading David Copperfield [380]. The only evening Dickens read that work was Dec. 31 [MTL 2: 146 n3]. Skandera-Trombley admits to the controversy involving the exact date, and votes for Dec. 31 as their day of meeting [p. xx]. Lauber claims Sam “never forgot that during the reading he had held hands with Olivia” [220]. This astonishing idea was lately copied by Donald Tiffany Bliss [87] citing Lauber, who gives no source. That a proper and young Victorian woman would hold the hand of a man she’d just met in the presence of her family is simply absurd. But, this is the way myths get repeated and taken as fact.

Sam’s article “Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation” first ran in the New York Tribune [Camfield, bibliog.].