When Did Mark Twain Get Married

The wife and daughters of Mark Twain — The wife and daughters of Marker Twain Albert Bigelow Paine

The yr 2018 marks the 150th anniversary of i of the great courtships in American history, the wooing of an unenthusiastic 22-year-sometime Olivia Langdon by a completely smitten 32-year-old Samuel Langhorne Clemens, ameliorate known every bit Mark Twain.

As I offset learned while visiting Twain'south hometown of Hannibal, Missouri in training for teaching "Adventures of Blueberry Finn," the contrasts between the two were indeed stark, and the prospects for their eventual spousal relationship exceedingly poor. Olivia Langdon, known as Livy, was a thoroughly proper easterner, while Sam was a rugged man of the West. Livy came from a family unit that was rich and well-educated, while Sam had grown up poor and left school at age 12. She was thoroughly pious, while he was a man who knew how to fume, drink and swear.

On Valentine's Mean solar day, their story is a reminder of the true pregnant of honey. Despite many challenges, once united, they never gave up on each other and enjoyed a fulfilling 34 years of marriage.

The immature Olivia

Olivia Langdon was born in 1845 in Elmira, New York to a wealthy coal merchant. Her father, Jervis Langdon, was deeply religious merely also highly progressive: He supported Elmira College, which had been founded in 1855 as one of the first in the U.Southward. to grant bachelor's degrees to women. He was also an ardent abolitionist who served every bit a conductor on the Underground Railroad, which offered shelter and assistance to escaped slaves from the South. He even offered sanctuary to a fugitive Frederick Douglass, one of America'southward greatest abolitionists, who became a lifelong friend.

Her mother, also Olivia, was active in many civic organizations and served as a strong advocate for her children's teaching. The younger Olivia suffered from a delicate constitution her whole life. As a teenager she was crippled for two years afterward a autumn on the water ice.

Mark Twain and love at first sight

Born in 1835 and raised on the Mississippi River in Hannibal, the immature Samuel Clemens worked as a typesetter, a riverboat pilot, a miner and a author. His beginning national literary success came in 1865 with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," a story most a frog and a homo who would bet on anything.

He shortly moved into travel writing, filing dispatches from Hawaii (then the Sandwich Islands) before embarking in 1867 for Europe and the Middle E aboard the steamship Quaker City. Clemens would later cobble together his dispatches from the voyage into a book that became a 19th-century bestseller, "The Innocents Away."

Information technology was aboard the Quaker City that Clemens first laid optics on a photograph of Livy. Her younger brother, Charles, who would later add to his male parent's coal fortune, befriended Clemens on the voyage and showed him a picture of his sister. Clemens afterwards claimed that information technology was love at commencement sight.

Wooing the 'dearest girl in the world'

Back in the U.Due south., Clemens accepted an invitation from Charles to visit his family in Elmira. Inside days of meeting Livy in 1868, he proposed matrimony. She rebuffed him. Clemens later wrote,

"She said she never could or would love me – just she prepare herself the task of making a Christian of me. I said she would succeed, only that in the concurrently, she would unwittingly dig a betrothed pit and finish by tumbling into it."

Although Livy refused Sam's proposal, she did offer to enter into a correspondence with him equally "brother and sister." He wrote to her the very next day and kept on writing for 17 months, a total of over 180 letters. 1 of them reads as follows:

"Livy beloved, I have already mailed today'due south letter, but I am so proud of my privilege of writing the dearest girl in the globe whenever I please, that I must add a few lines if but to say I love y'all, Livy. For I do beloved you … , as the dew loves the flowers; the birds honey the sunshine; equally mothers love their first-built-in… .

P.S. – I accept read this letter over and it is flippant and foolish and puppyish. I wish I had gone to bed when I got back, without writing. You said I must never tear upwards a alphabetic character later on writing information technology to y'all so I ship it. Burn it, Livy, I did not recollect I was writing and so clownishly and shabbily. I was in much too good a humor for sensible letter writing."

Livy'southward parents had good reason to be skeptical about the relatively uneducated and uncivilized Clemens, and they asked for references from his friends out west. As Clemens later reported, his friends did little to ease their mind, reporting that he was wild and godless, an unsettled rover "who got drunk oftener than was necessary." Simply Sam had already told them as much, which seemed to ostend his honesty. Plus, he tried to reform himself, for a time giving upwardly drinking and attending church building regularly.

Matrimony, lavish home and beloved's travails

Despite the Langdons' initial objections, Jervis Langdon took a liking to Sam, who soon won Livy's heart. On the couple's first outing together, they attended a reading past Charles Dickens, and in an effort to elevate her beau'due south grapheme, Livy began sending him copies of the sermons of one of America'due south most famous preachers, Henry Ward Beecher.

They announced their engagement in February of 1869. A year later, they were married.

Mark Twain with his family — Marker Twain with his family Wikimedia Commons

To Clemens's surprise, his father-in-law provided lavishly for the newlyweds, purchasing for them a beautiful domicile in Buffalo, New York, staffed with servants. He also provided Clemens a loan with which to buy an interest in a local newspaper. "The Innocents Away" was shortly published, and Clemens rocketed to fame and fortune.

The Clemens' life was not always happy, nevertheless. Soon afterward their marriage, Jervis Langdon died of stomach cancer, and their first child, a son, was born premature and died of diphtheria at 19 months. Years later, their girl Susy died at age 24 of meningitis, and another daughter, Jean, died of epilepsy at 29. Just one girl, Clara, survived. She married a musician and lived to age 88.

Mark Twain with his wife, Olivia, and daughter, Clara — Mark Twain with his wife, Olivia, and girl, Clara AP photograph

Clemens's brilliance as a writer was nearly matched by his financial ineptitude. His enthusiasm for new technology led to investments in a money-losing typesetting machine. His publishing investments met initial success with the publication of the memoirs of Ulysses Grant, but soon failed. Eventually the family unit had to shutter their house and move to Europe. Finally he turned over control of his financial affairs to a Standard Oil baron who persuaded him to file bankruptcy before ensuring that his creditors were paid off.

A lasting love affair

Sam and Livy's marriage was remarkable for its 24-hour interval, and perhaps whatsoever day. When they later congenital a mansion in Hartford, Connecticut – where they were next-door neighbors to some other of the 19th century's best-selling American novelists, Harriet Beecher Stowe – the deed was in Livy's proper name. Clemens as well transferred the copyrights to some of his works to Livy, to avoid seizure by creditors.

More importantly, she became proofreader and editor of all his manuscripts. Without her, he believed, his most important works, such as "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," would never take been written. Of her role he recalled,

"I never wrote a serious give-and-take until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely responsible – to her should go all the credit – for whatever influence my subsequent piece of work should exert. Later my marriage, she edited everything I wrote."

At domicile their children would listen equally their mother read his stories. When she came to a passage that she thought needed more work, she would turn down the corner of the page. Clemens later claimed that he occasionally inserted passages to which he knew she would object just to savour her reaction.

Mark Twain Cyberspace Archive Book Images

Sam and Livy remained securely devoted to i another throughout their marriage, which concluded only with Livy'south death in Italy in 1904 from middle failure. Clemens himself lived until 1910, devoting his terminal years to his autobiography. When the uncensored version was finally published – at his request, 100 years subsequently his death – information technology sold unexpectedly well, making him the writer of all-time-sellers in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Later on Livy's death, Sam found it difficult to live. One of the chroniclers of their lifelong dear affair finds perhaps his most poignant testimony in 1905'due south "Eve's Diary," in which the grapheme of Adam says at Eve's graveside,

"Wheresoever she was, in that location was Eden."

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Richard Gunderman, Chancellor'due south Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University