The 2024 Park Church Lectures Begin With A Talk Focusing on Mark Twain’s Son

Posted on by Center for Mark Twain Studies

The 2024 Park Church Summer Lecture Series, organized by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS), continues at 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, July 10 at The Park Church and will continue each Wednesday through July. The lectures are free and open to the public and recordings of the lectures will be posted to the CMTS website.

Charline Jao, PhD Candidate at Cornell University, will present “Langdon’s Pencil: The Infant Voice in Mark Twain’s Letters.”

Portrait of Langdon Clemens.  Photo taken in Elmira, New York, 1871. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Archives, Elmira College.

Between November 7, 1870 and June 2, 1872, Samuel and Olivia Clemens’s letters became absorbed with reports on the condition of their firstborn son Langdon, whose premature birth and constant sickness filled both parents with constant anxiety. The couple’s worry would eventually prove true, as Langdon died of diathermia at nineteen-months old – a death made even more tragic for the Clemens’s inability to travel to Elmira for Langdon’s burial. Following Barbara E. Snedecor’s work on this period, Joseph Csicsila points out that Langdon has often been a “curious gap” in Twain scholarship, especially when the deaths of Clemens’s brother Henry, his daughters, and his wife have been given a comparatively large amount of critical attention. Clemens’s struggle with Langdon’s uncertain health over this two-year period oscillates between hope, happiness, and anxiety. These feelings are especially prominent in the handful of letters where, curiously, Clemens ventriloquizes his son in written correspondences to friends and family. These invented scenes of infant writing and speech comically undermine the etymology of infant – the enfans which literally means “without speech.” The tone of these messages ranges from informative (“At birth I only weighed 4 ½ pounds with my clothes on—&; the clothes were the chief feature of the weight, too, I am obliged to confess”), silly (“I am as red as a lobster”), and defiant (“I do not wish to have any words with you, old man, father”). Narrative and the imitation of infant “language” function as literary and social experiments in these letters. Thus, Clemens’s first experience with parenthood provide a less-explored archive and insights into studies of Twain and childhood.

Charline Jao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her dissertation “Early Lost” examines scenes of child death and separation in nineteenth-century American women’s writing. She is the creator of two digital humanities projects: Periodical Poets, which examines poetry in nineteenth-century Black-edited periodicals, and No Stain of Tears and Blood, which compiles material from the free produce movement. She was previously a Brown Family Collection Short Term Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a Trouble Begins lecturer at Quarry Farm. Her work has been published in American Periodicals and the Cornell Rural Humanities Pamphlet Collection.

Charline Jao is also the 2024 Michael Kiskis Quarry Farm Fellow recipient.

The Trouble Begins Lectures are open to the public and begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Barn at Quarry Farm. The Series will continue on Wednesdays throughout May with recordings of each posted to the CMTS website.

See Additional 2024 Park Church Summer Lectures:

  • Wednesday, July 17 – Mary Lemak, “‘Making of a Woman Minister’: Rev. Annis Ford Eastman and Elmira, New York”
  • Wednesday, July 24 – Edward Guimont, “The Cosmic Mark Twain”
  • Wednesday, July 31 – Barbara Snedecor, “‘the dearest little woman in the world’: Letters of Olivia Clemens to her Sister, Susan Crane”

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series

In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.

In 2016, CMTS expanded the series and in partnership with the Park Church, created the Park Church Summer Lectures Series.  Founded in 1846 by a group of abolitionists, The Park Church has been a strong presence in Elmira’s history and some of its congregation were close friends and family members to Mark Twain. Known for its striking architectural features, The Park Church contained Elmira’s first public library and has a long history of charitable service to the Elmira community.