May 8 Saturday – Sam’s notebook lists an address for Edward “Ned” House in New York City, and a date of “May 8 or 10.” House could no longer walk. Whitelaw Reid described him as “the nearest to a living death of any case I have ever seen, and is most pitiful” [MTNJ 3: 234n26]. The source claims Sam visited House several times when in New York during the spring. In a Feb. 5 1890 letter to Dean Sage outlining House’s misdeeds, Sam gave May 10, 1886 as the date House arrived in New York from Japan.
W.G. Irish wrote to Sam from Bromsgrove, England. Sam wrote on the envelope, “English begging-letter” [MTP].
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Editor Note
Edward “Ned” House was a staff journalist on the New York Tribune when he met SLC in 1867. He accompanied SLC on his visit to Capt. Charles Duncan to inquire about the Quaker City cruise. In 1870 he went to Japan, where he accepted employment as a teacher of English, subsequently founding the Tokyo Times, an English-language newspaper funded by the Japanese government. He returned to the United States in 1880, bringing his Japanese adopted daughter, Koto. Around this time he read and commented on a draft of The Prince and the Pauper. In 1883 he suffered a stroke that confined him to a wheelchair. In 1890 he filed an injunction to prevent performance of a play of The Prince and The Pauper, claiming that in 1886 SLC had given him the dramatic rights; the controversy estranged them permanently. House spent his last years in Tokyo, where he was pensioned by the Japanese government.
https://www.marktwainproject.org/biographies/bio_house_edward.html
https://www.marktwainproject.org/biographies/bio_house_edward.html