A Pilgrim’s Digression

Our days begin like this: we get up, get ready to leave, and only then really decide where we will end up at the end of the day. After some consultation of a map, and some debate amongst ourselves, we decided that today we would only go as far as Hartford, Connecticut.

One of the places I wanted to see on this trip is the Mark Twain house. It turned out that Harriet Beacher Stowe also had a home right next door to Twain, but unfortunately, it was closed when we visited or we would have went there, as well.

But anyway, what we discovered is that although we feared we would not have enough time to travel on to Massachussetts in one day, we probably could have done it easily. We arrived in Hartford relatively early in the afternoon, checked in at our hotel, and then went out exploring.

The Twain house is really pretty stunning, outside and inside. My own pictures really don’t do it justice, and we were not allowed to take pictures inside. But here is one picture I took; Lynn’s mother is in the foreground, walking toward the camera.

Twain spent the happiest twenty or so years of his life in Hartford, only to lose the house after a failed investment in a typeset machine. He did return to the home once, late in life, but it held too many memories for him to ever set up residence there again. In the meantime, two of his daughters had died, his wife had died, and he was living from hotel room to hotel room, travelling across Europe and the U.S. making a living as a lecturer.

His home, however, remains as much a monument to him as his books. His mark is everywhere upon it, from the hand-painted bricks in the outside walls, to the decorations inside the home–many of them souvenirs from his world travels.

For me, the highlight of the tour is Twain’s study on the top floor. He set up his writing desk in the billiard room where, when he was not entertaining his friends, he wrote his classic books such as “Huck Finn.” In the process, he would smoke as many as 20 cigars a day, probably making the room pretty much impenetrable to non-smokers.

Although I enjoy these tours immensely, there is also something a bit depressing about walking through someone’s home after they have been long dead. And then, one starts asking questions of the guide: “Were these actually Twain’s books?” (I asked while in the library).

“No, those are all first editions from that time period, but Twain’s books were donated to the Hartford public library.”

“How much of the furniture was Twain’s?”

“Well, the master bed was Twain’s and his wife’s, but a lot of the furniture are period antiques not specifically traceable to Twain.”

So, the experience is somewhat lessened, the few actual Twain relics becoming the only links to the past. As Lynn’s mother remarked, if one could only look into the mirror that hangs in the dining room (a true Twain piece) and glimpse a little of what that mirror has seen, think of the history one would witness.

After walking through the museum on the grounds of the house, which ironically houses the only existing version of the typeset machine that ruined Twain, we decided to drive through some of the towns surrounding Hartford. Specifically, there was a small village nearby which supposedly had recpatured its colonial past in much the same way as Williamsburg, Virginia. Unfortunately, it was a pale imitation of Williamsburg, and we just drove through and headed back to the hotel.

Tomorrow, we are going to drive on to Warwick, Rhode Island, of which I will have more to say at that time.