ABOUT THE TEXTS

The following notes describe the manuscripts on which these texts are based. They also briefly identify places and events mentioned in the texts. Names printed in SMALL CAPITALS direct the reader to an entry in the Biographical Directory.

Differing approaches have been taken in transcribing the works by Mark Twain, on the one hand, and those by Livy and Susy, on the other. Livy’s and Susy’s texts are allowed to retain more of the graphical conventions of manuscript—superscript characters, for example, which are lowered in Mark Twain’s texts, as he would have expected. Mark Twain’s double- and triple-underscoring have been rendered as small capitals and full capitals, respectively, as a contemporary printer would have done; in Susy’s biography, we assume she was unaware of these printing-house conventions, and we render her double-scorings as such. In all these texts, editorial corrections are few: in Mark Twain’s, because few are needed, and in Livy’s and Susy’s, because their errors are part of the texture of their distinctively nonprofessional writings. Text printed on a shaded background represents a newspaper or magazine clipping. Full-size [brackets] are the writer’s own; subscript [brackets] enclose words or characters supplied by the editor. Footnotes in this book are “signed,” in order to distinguish those by Mark Twain or Susy Clemens from those by the editor (“BG”). The footnotes giving translations have been supplied by the editor.

The original manuscripts published here are owned by the following:

• Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: “A Family Sketch,” “At the Farm,” and “Quarry Farm Diary.”

• Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville: “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” “A Record of the Small Foolishnesses of Susie and ‘Bay’ Clemens (Infants),” and “Mark Twain by Susy Clemens.”

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A Family Sketch
by Mark Twain
written 1896–97, 1901–2; revised 1906

Mark Twain began to write a memoir of Susy just after she died in August 1896. His project of commemorating his daughter eventually produced this sketch of the household at large, as described in the Introduction. The transcription renders the text as finally revised—with one exception. Probably well after the initial composition, Clemens made several substantial deletions, striking out whole paragraphs and pages while leaving them entirely legible. Because these deletions have an appearance of being “conditional,” perhaps conditional upon the desire to shorten the text or to suppress personal information, these passages are included in our text.

Mark Twain mentions: “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” for which see the Biographical Directory under James G. BLAINE; “the Century building,” the editorial offices of the Century Company in Union Square, New York; “St. Nicholas,” one of the magazines published by that company; see the Biographical Directory entry for Mary Mapes DODGE.

A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It
by Mark Twain
written 1874

The text published here has been prepared by comparing the manuscript with the first printing in the Atlantic Monthly (SLC 1874), and adopting only those Atlantic changes that are clearly necessary or that are likely to have been made by Mark Twain in the (lost) proofs. In dialect speech, the Atlantic used the apostrophe to signal every elided sound, or letter; the manuscript is far less fussy, reading, for example, might a (not the magazine’s might ’a’ ), mongst (not ’mongst), and arnest (not ’arnest). Believing, after analyzing the evidence, that Mark Twain is responsible for few of the revisions evident in the Atlantic, we follow the manuscript’s dialect closely. Little is gained by rendering it either “logical” or self-consistent; as Clemens wrote to Atlantic editor William Dean HOWELLS on 20 September 1874: “I amend dialect stuff by talking & talking & talking it till it sounds right—& I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro sometimes (rarely) says ‘goin’ ’ & sometimes ‘gwyne,’ & they make just such discrepancies in other words—& when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer’s carelessness” (L6, 233). The Atlantic expanded ‘&’ to ‘an’ ’ (instead of ‘and’) when it is Aunt Rachel who is speaking, and we have followed that practice. The first book printing (in SLC 1875) has been examined; it seems not to have received any further authorial revision.

The first page of the manuscript of “A Family Sketch.”

A Record of the Small Foolishnesses of Susie and “Bay” Clemens (Infants)
by Mark Twain
written 1876–85

This record of the children’s sayings was written in a bound composition book with ruled pages. This record was kept by Mark Twain (and, in three entries, by Livy) starting in August 1876; the latest entry is dated June 1885. Some entries, written on versos, are clearly additions made out of sequence; if reproduced exactly where they stand, they would be chronologically out of place. They have been silently moved to their temporally correct locations. The text has been ordered according to Mark Twain’s directions in the manuscript, and the directions themselves are not printed—e.g. “Skip the next 2 or 3 pages, for I wish to say a further biographical word or two about these children.” This edition does not reproduce the author’s memory-jogging notations of subjects he means to record; most were expanded in due course into full entries. The newspaper article “An Actor’s Fatal Shot” is from the Hartford Courant of 1 December 1882; the obituary of Jacob H. Burrough is from the St. Louis, Missouri Republican, on or around 3 December 1883.

The ornaments separating the entries have been editorially supplied.

The epigraph—“And Mary treasured these sayings in her heart”—is an adaptation or recollection of Luke 2:19: “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” The “Modoc war” was fought in 1872–73 between United States troops and members of the Modoc tribe of Oregon and California. For Mark Twain’s explanation of “the ombra,” see page 33. “Vöglein” is German for “little bird.”

At the Farm
by Mark Twain
written 1884

This supplement to “Small Foolishnesses” is transcribed from an almost-complete manuscript in Mark Twain’s hand. Written between 1 June and 7 July 1884 at Quarry Farm, the manuscript consisted originally of eleven leaves; leaf 10 is missing. Leaf 11 became separated from the rest of the manuscript and has only recently been reunited with it. Despite the missing leaf, the text has no appearance of discontinuity, thanks to an added passage, written in shorthand by Mark Twain’s stenographer Josephine S. Hobby, “completing” leaf 9, where his longhand text breaks off. The shorthand passage, rendered in natural language, concludes the anecdote in words that are clearly Mark Twain’s; these words also appear in his Autobiography, where this text was partly quoted (AutoMT2, 223). The added passage was inscribed in 1906 when this manuscript was revised by Mark Twain. Two further authorial revisions in the manuscript, dating from that time, are not followed in the present text because they were made specifically as adaptations for the Autobiography.

Quarry Farm Diary
by Livy Clemens
written 1885

Livy’s manuscript diary is written in a blank book with ruled pages. She made entries fairly frequently in the summer of 1885, and very intermittently thereafter, with the latest being written in June 1902. The text printed here consists of selections from the diary’s 1885 entries; omitted text is signaled by bracketed ellipses. The title is editorially supplied.

Livy mentions: Cadichon, the donkey, named after the donkey in Les Mémoires d’un âne (1860) by Sophie, comtesse de Ségur; Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy about Joan of Arc; Arabella B. Buckley’s Life and Her Children (1880), a popular biology text; The Betrothed (1825), novel by Sir Walter Scott; Thomas à Kempis, fifteenth-century German mystic, author of The Imitation of Christ.

Mark Twain by Susy Clemens
written 1885–86

Susy’s biography of her father was written between March 1885 and July 1886, in a ruled composition-book. Mark Twain quoted and commented on substantial extracts from Susy’s text in his Autobiography, parts of which saw publication in the North American Review in 1906–7 and in later editions. A transcription of the entire biography was published on the 100-year anniversary of Susy’s beginning to write it (Neider 1985). All these versions printed Susy’s text interspersed with the added comments and digressions of Mark Twain; the present edition is the first to publish Susy’s work without the mediation of her father. The title is editorially supplied.

Transcribing Susy’s juvenile writing presents an editor with some challenges. Transcription is done with reference to the writer’s norm, and Susy’s norm is elusive. There are many places where it is uncertain what character is intended, and whether it is intended as upper- or lower-case. Susy, her mind racing ahead of her hand, sometimes omits whole words, which we supply in [subscript brackets]. The word missed is usually obvious; if it is not, we offer the reader our best guess. Sometimes we avail ourselves of Mark Twain’s own guesses, written into the manuscript years afterward. Outright corrections of the manuscript text have been kept to a bare minimum, but they do occur—on page 131, for example, where Susy distractedly wrote “flowers” instead of “flies.”

Susy mentions (or the various texts she incorporates in her work mention): “mugwump,” slang term for a Republican voter who withheld his vote for the party’s 1884 presidential candidate James G. BLAINE; “the F.F.V’s,” or First Families of Virginia; “Gen. How,” a mistake for “Gen. Hood” (Confederate general John Bell Hood, 1831–79); Morte Darthur, romance by Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471); Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), and his Arthurian poem cycle Idylls of the King; two public readings by Mark Twain: “A Trying Situation,” adapted from chapter 25 of A Tramp Abroad (SLC 1880), and the folk-tale “The Golden Arm,” eventually collected in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (SLC 1897); Ananias and Sapphira, proverbial liars (Acts 5:1–11); The Mikado, operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, which in April 1886 was about to close its successful first American run in a production by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), novel by William Dean HOWELLS. The German phrase on page 117 may be translated “Loving gift to Mamma”; that on 141, “I kiss you my darling.” On page 124, “T. S.” is Susy’s abbreviation for “tortoise-shell.” The word “anc-anifertent” (page 157) has not been satisfactorily explained.

Page 87 from the manuscript of “Mark Twain by Susy Clemens.”

In Andrew LANG’S birthday tribute to Mark Twain (pages 160–61), “the Ettrick Shepherd” refers to James Hogg, the Scottish poet and novelist; “the Laureates Markes” alludes to a line in “The Last Tournament” by British poet laureate Alfred Tennyson: “‘Mark’s way,’ said Mark, and clove him thro’ the brain.” Lang’s “like Gargery Wot larx!”—not obvious in Susy’s transcription!—alludes to Joe Gargery in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and to this character’s repeated phrase “What larks!”

Detailed annotation to much of Susy’s text—all of it that was quoted by Mark Twain in his own autobiography, which is most of it—may be found in the first two volumes of the Mark Twain Project edition (AutoMT1; AutoMT2).