Richard Gunderman - For Mark Twain, It Was Love At First Sight.
The year 2018 marks
the 150th anniversary of one of the great courtships in American history, the
wooing of an unenthusiastic 22-year-old Olivia Langdon by a completely smitten
32-year-old Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
Wherever she was, there was Eden: Mark Twain of his wife, after her death
As I first learned
while visiting Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri in preparation for
teaching “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the contrasts between the
two were indeed stark, and the prospects for their eventual union 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 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 smoke, drink and swear. On Valentine’s Day,
their story is a reminder of the true meaning of love. Despite many challenges,
once united, they never gave up on each other and enjoyed a fulfilling 34 years
of marriage.
The young Olivia: Olivia Langdon was born in 1845 in Elmira, New York to
a wealthy coal merchant. Her father, Jervis Langdon, was deeply religious but
also highly progressive: He supported Elmira College, which had been founded in
1855 as one of the first in the U.S. to grant bachelor’s degrees to
women. He was also an ardent abolitionist who served as a conductor on the
Underground Railroad, which offered shelter and aid to escaped slaves from the
South. He even offered sanctuary to a fugitive Frederick Douglass, one of America’s 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 education. The younger Olivia suffered from a delicate
constitution her whole life. As a teenager she was bedridden for two years
after a fall on the ice.
Mark Twain and love
at first sight: Born
in 1835 and raised on the Mississippi River in Hannibal, the young
Samuel Clemens worked as a typesetter, a riverboat pilot, a miner and a writer.
His first national literary success came in 1865 with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a story
about a frog and a man who would bet on anything.
He soon moved into
travel writing, filing dispatches from Hawaii (then the Sandwich Islands)
before embarking in 1867 for Europe and the Middle East 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 Abroad.” It was aboard the
Quaker City that Clemens first laid eyes on a photograph of Livy. Her younger
brother, Charles, who would later add to his father’s coal fortune, befriended
Clemens on the voyage and showed him a picture of his sister. Clemens later
claimed that it was love at first sight... read more:
