MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Mark Twain’s Baltimore letters to Olivia Langdon Clemens expose not only a man dedicated to intimate communication with his wife, but they also uncover an entire behind-the-scenes look into Baltimore’s history as a forgotten home to multimillionaire industrial-age inventors and businessmen. This presentation will focus on three preserved letters—written by Twain to Langdon and mailed from Baltimore-two published and only recently accessible letters written in April 1877 and one unpublished and marginally accessible letter written in November 1884.

By examining Twain’s intimate letters written to Langdon in Baltimore over a century after they were originally composed, readers can still discern an energetic voice that meshes self with Other, past with present, fact with fiction, and public identity with private aims—an impressive amount of information about the city in the nineteenth century, especially considering there are only three pieces of preserved correspondence with a Baltimore postmark from Twain. Twain presents a Baltimore that held new discoveries, observations, and mysteries in its veins in the nineteenth century—whether in the chaotic hoarding of inventions in the Winans family’s eccentric estate, in the onstage and offstage drama of the city’s rehearsing actors, or in the laughter of audiences who wanted an up close and personal view of the man known as “Mark Twain.” Twain’s descriptions of his short time in Baltimore highlight the city’s unique mixture of tradition and invention, public and private enterprises, and social and geographical landscapes. Twain’s quote about Thomas DeKay Winans’s bedroom—“Under Chaos is no name for it! Yet it was orderly to him” (Twain, Mark Twain Project)—mirrors Baltimore’s contradictory history, and Twain’s intimate letters to Langdon capture this discrepancy so that others can continue to accompany Twain on his tour in documenting the map of “chaotic, yet orderly” Baltimore.