November 29 Thursday – Dora Knowlton “a stranger to you” and an actress, wrote from NYC to ask if he’d allow her to dramatize P&P [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “Can’t / P&P”
November 27 Tuesday – Livy’s 38th birthday.
November 26 Monday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Charles Webster, enclosing information he’d been sent about an investment. If it was “safe” he asked Webster to let him know [MTP].
November 21 Wednesday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Howells.
“Good—& all right. Within an hour I shall be deep in an old piece of work which always interests me, any time of the year that I take it up. So I will go down into that, & not appear at the surface again till the Howellses arrive here the 3d of December” [MTHL 1: 451].
November 20 Tuesday – George W. Cable arrived for a visit. He went with the Clemenses and the Warners to a reception. Cable wrote his wife the next day that he’d “Talked my head off; but don’t worry, there wasn’t anything in it.” At the Clemens home, Cable read for “Mark T., his sweet wife, her mother, & Clara and her sister. They were pleased…” [Turner, MT & GWC 23].
November 19 Monday – Back in Hartford, Sam telegraphed Howells. He and Livy repeated an invitation for the Howellses to visit. Sam had not received a letter from Howells written the same day expressing that he couldn’t return to Hartford for a solid week, but would come “two weeks from to-day” (Dec. 3) [MTHL 1: 449-50].
“I have told thirty lies and am not out of the Woods yet; S L Clemens” [MTP].
November 18 Sunday – Sam was in Boston and accompanied the Howellses in a social call upon the Aldriches Sam returned to Hartford directly from the Aldriches, after the Howellses left. Howells wrote him on Nov. 19 about being “half dead …from eating & laughing yesterday” [MTHL 1: 448, 450n3].
November 17 Saturday – A pink 3×5 receipt to Sam, printed “Stock Account” for a check of $5,000 is in the 1883 MTP financial file.
William Dean Howells wrote: “When I supposed you were coming to us I engaged to take you out to Cambridge this (Saturday) evening to see my play at a friend’s done by children. If you can go, come to 4 Louisburg Square by a quarter to eight, and let me know, anyway”[MTP]. (not in MTHL)
November 16–17 Saturday – Sam, Livy and William Dean Howells went to Boston sometime during this period. Matthew Arnold lectured there on Nov. 17 [MTHL 1: 449n2].
November 15 Thursday – In the afternoon, the Clemenses held a tea for Matthew Arnold in their Hartford home [LeMaster 36]. Arnold gave his “Numbers” lecture after the tea. He also visited the Clemens home in the evening. Sam did not disclose to Howells what the two talked about [Powers, MT A Life 480]. From Twichell’s journal: