Olivia Langdon was born in 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 as one of the first in the U.
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. 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. Born in and raised on the Mississippi River in Hannibal, the young Samuel Clemens worked as a typesetter, a riverboat pilot, a miner and a writer. He soon moved into travel writing, filing dispatches from Hawaii then the Sandwich Islands before embarking in for Europe and the Middle East aboard the steamship Quaker City.
It was aboard the Quaker City that Clemens first laid eyes on a photograph of Livy. Clemens later claimed that it was love at first sight.
Back in the U. Within days of meeting Livy in , he proposed marriage. She rebuffed him. She was an active supporter of abolition and temperance. According to legend, Charles showed Clemens a miniature painting of his older sister on ivory, and Clemens fell in love with her on the spot.
Little is known of that first meeting. Rather than stay the socially acceptable 15 minutes, he stayed for 12 hours. Their courtship, marriage and love for one another are much documented in the correspondence they exchanged throughout their marriage. He left pages of manuscript by her bedside for her to read and review. And he forecast their future and old age:. So much for past and future. The Samuel Clemens of the present that he presented to the Langdon parents was a man diligently working to become a Christian, to abstain from both tobacco and liquor, and to secure a source of steady income.
And so the wedding was a happy affair. Its immediate aftermath was even happier. Several months before the wedding, Sam had ended his search for steady employment by buying into the Buffalo Express in part with a loan from Jervis Scharnhorst, The purchase gave him an editorial position on the newspaper, a job that would, presumably, keep him in Buffalo for the foreseeable future, and so the young couple decided to make Buffalo their home.
Mindful of his limited salary, Sam planned to take his new bride to a respectable Buffalo boarding house, where they would live while searching for suitable housing. He had engaged a friend to find an appropriate lodging, and it was there that he assumed they were heading when he and Livy left the rest of the wedding party at the Buffalo train station and took a cab to their quarters.
Livy, who was in on the joke, had to convince Sam that he was not dreaming. If Jervis and Olivia Lewis Langdon had not proven that they fully accepted their new son-in-law before, they certainly did so with this gift.
Sam soon backslid on his vows, smoking, drinking, and cursing his way through life and, if never disavowing Christianity outright, asking very hard questions about its premises. Livy adjusted to the smoking and learned to drink a little bit herself, and though she remained a steadfast Christian, she never showed the same religious fervor she had felt before her marriage. But though they learned that the person they had married was not quite the ideal they had envisioned, both parties to this union valued their partnership.
If they never achieved the serenity that Clemens had predicted in his courtship letters, they did learn how to live, work, plan, and overcome sorrow and adversity together. The wedding that took place on February 2, heralded an enduring relationship, a testimony to strength, patience, mutual respect, and love.
Berkeley: University of California Press, , Unfortunately, difficult times soon befell the couple. Samuel went back on his vows and began cursing, smoking, and drinking. Olivia fortunately learned to deal with these bad habits and although she remained a Christian, the fervor she had once embraced for God was never the same.
Fortunately, not everything was going badly. Around the same time, the Clemens purchased a plot of land and began building a house in Hartford.
Legend has it that it was designed to look like a riverboat. Located at number Farmington Avenue, the house was later described by Justin Kaplan, a biographer of Samuel:. Its dark brick walls were trimmed with brownstone and decorated with inlaid designs in scarlet-painted brick and black; the roof was patterned in colored tile.
The house was permanent polychrome and gingerbread Gothic; it was part steamboat, part medieval stronghold, and part cuckoo clock. Hartford house of Samuel and Olivia Langdon Clemens. For instance, the Los Angeles Evening Express provided the following comments on the structure shortly after it was built:.
The whole structure brick and wood, is painted the darkest Indian red, and has a sort of drawbridge in the rear … and a moat for the children to be occasionally rescued from. The Clemens family moved into their new place in and that same year Oliva Langdon Clemens gave birth to another daughter named Clara. Her birth was followed six years later by the arrival of their third daughter, Jane, whom they called Jean.
Nonetheless, Olivia Langdon Clemens proved to be more than just a good mother to her children or a faithful wife to Samuel. This was noted by him when he wrote the following of her:. She also edited them.
She was my faithful, judicious, and painstaking editor from that day forth until within three or four months of her death — a stretch of more than a third of a century. What the Langdons valued was the education of women and the rights of women. Further, he was accompanied by his wife and their daughter Clara.
While traipsing around the world, the Clemens received word that their daughter Suzy had suddenly became ill. Unbeknownst to her she was suffering from spinal meningitis. Susy initially refused to see a doctor. He provided details and noted that her condition had worsened.
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