When we had to make a trip to Hartford, CT, my wife asked if we wanted to go to the Mark Twain House. I did not know there was a Twain house in Hartford, so naturally, I said yes.
From the website: “In 1873, Sam and Olivia Clemens engaged New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design their Hartford Home… Their home measures 11,500 square feet and has 25 rooms distributed across three floors. It displayed the latest in modern innovations when it was built in 1874. The couple spent $40‚000 to $45‚000 building their new home‚ so once they moved in, they kept the interior simple. Mark Twain and his family enjoyed what the author would later call the happiest and most productive years of his life.”
Productive indeed, as this placard indicates, but also ultimately sad. I have to admit I haven’t read any of the major works written there, either Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. I did see the 1949 movie adaptation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court years ago.
Coincidentally, though, a couple of weeks earlier, I saw Marcus Kwame Anderson do an illustrator talk at a Friends of the Albany Public Library, discussing his latest graphic novel, the Eisner-nominated Big Jim and the White Boy, scripted by David F. Walker. Marcus made the case for a class featuring Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James by Percival Everett (2024), and the Walker/Anderson work. My wife has read James, and I purchased Big Jim.
I am a Twain fan. Particularly, I was taken by him taking on the imperialist tendencies of Teddy Roosevelt. I wrote about The War Prayer about a decade ago, and I sweear I bought a Twain collection at the time, but I cannot locate it currently.
The tour
There were a couple different tours of the house. The one we went on was the Living History Tour, led by a costumed actor who played one of the actual maids, played by a wonderful young woman named Lauryn.
The construct was that she only “knew” what had taken place in 1882 or earlier. So when she was asked about his international travel, she noted that he would “like” to go abroad in the future.
The one challenge was that there were about 40 steps up, and another 40 down. They weren’t too bad except the spiral steps heading down near the end of the tour.
The museum
There were lots of quotes built into the building. The one I remember most is, “”Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” My wife used this in her high school yearbook, to the dismay of one of her teachers.
Other creatives, notably Lee Krassner, were also represented. Most of the rooms were named for corporate sponsors. But one was named after actor Hal Holbrook, who portrayed Mark Twain for longer than Samuel Clemens did, who I had watched embody Twain on TV.
At the end, we watched a 23-minute about Twain, a summary of the four-hour PBS piece by Ken Burns from 2001.
Recommended.
