Ok… this post is rather long, and may be something of a departure from other things you’ve seen here, but I think it’s a fascinating story.  It involves a short visit by Mark Twain to my  hometown of Mexico, Missouri in 1902 …. and some information about the REAL “Becky Thatcher”.

First, some background. When I was a little boy, my dad read me a dog-eared copy of “The Adventures of  Tom Sawyer”. It had been his book when HE was a boy, and his dad had read it to him.   It was the 1920 edition with the famous illustrations by James Ellsworth “Worth” Brehm.   With my dad having been born in 1918, it’s easy  to imagine my grandfather, a widower, spotting the (then newly published) book in a shop and purchasing a copy to read to a young son.  There is an image of the book’s cover here,  you may recognize it.   That copy that dad read to me (and to my siblings before me) is now in the possession of my sister, but it has fallen apart from lack of care through the years.   But my darling daughter, knowing its sentimental value to me, bought me a nearly pristine copy of that very 1920 edition for Christmas last year.

Needless to say, partly because of those memories of sitting on dad’s lap as he read to me, Tom Sawyer is one of my favorite books ever. As a child, I visited “Tom’s”  boyhood home in Hannibal many times.  Hannibal Missouri is just a short drive from Mexico.  And Mark Twain’s birthplace in Florida, Missouri was a site of many family picnics and many a Boy Scout camp-out when I was growing up.  So there was a natural connection that I felt with Mark Twain and perhaps even more powerfully, with Tom Sawyer himself.   For what it’s worth, I think much of the way I tend to think about what it means to be a kid growing up in a small town, having adventures, finding your first sweetheart, getting into more trouble than you ought, and not really letting on to the grown-ups about all the “stuff” in your day….. well, a lot of it comes back to Tom, Huck, and Becky.

While researching something entirely different, I ran across the newspaper story below about Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) at age 67 making a quick stop in Mexico, MO while on the way to Columbia, Missouri and the University after his first return visit in many, many years to Hannibal.  By this time he was living in Hartford Connecticut.  On this particular trip, he spent some time in Hannibal looking up his old friends, haunts, etc….. and the newspaper story clipped below ALSO talks about “Becky Thatcher”. Below that is a story clipped from Harper’s Weekly in December 1899, as the 25th anniversary of the first publication of Tom Sawyer was approaching. The author of the Harper’s story traveled to Hannibal (and elsewhere) to track down some of the real people behind the characters … including the former Laura Hawkins, who had been Sam Clemens pretty little neighbor, his “first love”, and who had presumably provided his model for Becky Thatcher.  I say “presumably”, because Twain himself insisted that the characters in “Tom Sawyer” were fiction, and drawn as “composites” of people he had known as a boy in Hannibal. (Though he did write about Laura in later years using her real name in “The Gilded Age”). As Sam’s boyhood friends read “Tom Sawyer”, they *may* have seen themselves in some of the characters, but it’s reported that nearly ALL of them apparently saw Laura in “Becky”.

What IS known for certain though, is that on the eve of his wedding in 1868 to Olivia Langdon, Samuel Langhorne Clemens penned a note on a personal card, sealed it, and sent it to Hannibal, to the brother of Laura Hawkins to be delivered to her. What was in that note, no one, save for the two of them knows for sure. I’d like to think it was as much from Tom to Becky as it was from Sam to Laura. It’s intriguing, isn’t it? I hope it contained something to make her smile and even laugh, something to make her look back and remember fondly the gregarious boy who lived across the street and thought she was mighty darn special. The boy who looked at her like none other.

And then, 34 years after he penned that note …. on Memorial Day 1902, on his visit to Hannibal, “Sam” met and had dinner with Laura, their first meeting in almost 50 years. It was reported in the St. Paul Globe as follows:

“Mark Twain dined with his first sweetheart on Memorial Day just passed, in the town of Hannibal, Mo., where he spent the boyhood days that he immortalized in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”

He had seen her but once before in nearly half a century. While he had traveled the world over and had become one of its best known men, the woman whom he had loved as a little girl remained in the river town.   After sixty years the friendship they bore each other still endured. Time has robbed neither of them of its gentleness, its beauty and its sweetness.”

 To him she was still Laura Hawkins; to her he was still “Sam” Clemens.    “Time has robbed neither of them…”     Wow.

A few days later, the article below about his brief stop in Mexico appeared in the Mexico Missouri Message.

Hope you enjoy this half as much as I did ….

John

MARK TWAIN.
– Visited Boyhood Scenes –
His First Love.

Mark Twain visited his old home, the scenes of his boyhood, the graves of his parents, mingled with old friends, associates and subjects of his writings, in Hannibal several days last week. He was also up at Columbia where the University conferred upon him the LL.D. degree. On his return from Columbia he stopped at Union Station in Mexico a few minutes, when he was met by a few admirers.

 Mr. Clemens is now 67 years old, and this was his first visit to Hannibal for 40 years and he thinks it will be his last, for the life of the great humorist is drawing to a close. His birthplace is in Florida (Missouri), Monroe County, but the house has been carried away, and sold, for souvenirs. It is said that the owner made considerable money selling souvenirs and when he used up the old house he went to the nearby woods to get material with which to make “Mark Twain” canes, and shipped them East.

 TWAIN’S FIRST LOVE

 The following interesting story is told by the Philadelphia Times: Mark Twain might be suspected of having been up to his old tricks in causing the newspaper men to send out over the country that story of his having met again, after many years, his first sweetheart at the home of his boyhood in Missouri, were it not that there is intrinsic probability in it. “Why, oh why,” asks the feminine enthusiast, “didn’t he seek her out years ago, after he had become famous, and marry her? It would have been so grand, so noble, so like what I have thought him to be!” Ah! Dear young lady, that merely suggests anew the fatal difference between the real and the ideal. Personalities that we do not know by actual face-to-face intercourse are seldom what we dream them to be, and none of the episodes or the episodes of life exactly correspond to our preconceptions of it.

 Noble – grand! No, the characteristic adjectives shall not be attacked; only it should be mildly remarked that Mark Twain, aside from his qualities as a humorist, it pretty fully endowed with the common traits of humanity, and that there is every reason to suppose that he has lasted of its common experience. So, the story being so plausible, the language of the rural judge as to the very crestfallen prisoner before him is appropriate in this ease: “If he ain’t guilty he orter (sic) be.”

It would be interesting if someone could calculate the percentage of first courtships that culminate in weddings and in “living happily ever afterward.” The figures, however, could only be obtained through the census taker, and it is to be feared that the effort would lead merely to the embalming in the government’s records of more lies than have ever yet appeared there. The first sweetheart is such a a choice theme for embellishment, on the lips of either man or woman! And it is usually has as much pathos as tenderness; for who is going to admit that anything but dramatic or tragic or emotional causes ruptured and dissipated the dream? It is true that Mark Twain is said to have immortalized Mrs. Frasier of Hannibal, Mo in Becky Thatcher, of the Tom Sawyer story, written at the zenith of his powers; but he is now at the threshold of the garrulous stage of life’s journey, and may we not hope that he will yet, tell in romantic earnest just why, as a boy, he loved and rode away, and never went back any more until it was too late, and he had reaped and exhausted all that there can be in fame? That should be worth reading and perhaps it would appease the feminine admirer.

(Above was taken from the Mexico Missouri Message for Thursday, June 12, 1902.)

Now, in regard to the REAL life relationship between “Tom and Becky”, or Sam and Laura… I found the following, which is excerpted from an article in Harper’s Weekly Magazine, 16 December 1899, by Elizebeth Davis Fielder entitled “The Familiar Haunts of Mark Twain”.

…. By all odds the most interesting character connected with the history of those years is Mrs. A. L. Frazer, formerly Miss Laura Hawkins, presumably the Becky Thatcher of Tom Sawyer, and the Laura Hawkins of The Gilded Age. A very gentle and winsome lady she is, with wavy gray locks about her face, eyes as sparkling as any girl’s, and a charm of manner which marks the genuine woman, no matter what station in life may claim her.

Mrs. Frazer enjoys talking about her old play-mate, not because he has grown great and famous, but because he was her old play-mate. Her heart warms to the memory of those halcyon days, and in her regard there mingles no questioning of the world’s opinions, no weighing of possible honors. It is one of those tender and unselfish friendships which some very lovable women are capable of inspiring and cherishing through a long lifetime.

“I remember very well when we moved into the house opposite where Mr. John M. Clemens lived,” she said. “I remember also the first time I ever saw Mark Twain. He was then a barefooted boy, and he came out in the street before our house and turned hand-springs, and stood on his head, and cut just such capers as he describes in Tom’s ‘showing off’ before Becky. We were good friends from the first. One of our favorite play-places was in the Clemens yard, where we built houses out of a heap of bricks. On one occasion he accidentally tumbled our house down on my hand and made blood blisters on every finger.

“On another occasion a crowd of boys and girls went out on the hills of what is now Palmyra Avenue, to spend a Saturday afternoon. The hill-sides were covered with trees and brush, and a favorite sport was to bend down slender saplings and ride, the smaller girls being taken on behind the larger ones. I was having a fine ride behind one of the big girls when she suddenly sprang off, and I was thrown to the ground, striking my head against a stone. I was taken home unconscious, and was very ill for some time, and I remember hearing the children talk about how scared and anxious ‘Sam’ was.”

We can but wonder if it was this illness which so wrought on Tom’s health and spirits, and if it was his own condition which he so feelingly describes as he tells of the boy hanging around the gate of the school-yard anxiously watching for the coming of Becky: “Presently Jeff Thatcher hove in sight, and Tom’s face lighted; but he gazed a moment, then turned sorrowfully away. When Jeff arrived, Tom accosted him and ‘led up’ warily to opportunities for remark about Becky, but the giddy lad never could see the bait. Tom watched and watched, hoping whenever a whisking frock came in sight, and hating the owner of it whenever he saw she was not the right one. At last frocks ceased to appear, and he dropped down into the dumps; he entered the empty school-house and sat down to suffer. Then one more frock passed in at the gate, and Tom’s heart gave a great bound. The next instant he was out and ‘going on’ like an Indian, yelling, laughing, chasing boys, jumping over fences at the risk of life and limb, throwing hand-springs, standing on his head, doing all the heroic things he could conceive of, and keeping a furtive eye out all the while to see if Becky Thatcher was noticing.”

If others in the town were unable to see Huck Finn with Mark Twain’s eyes, the same difficulty did not obtain in this case, for his little sweetheart seems to have been a universal favorite. One of the old “boys” tells the story of how on one occasion three of the “gang” started out into the great world to seek their fortune, with the understanding that on their return one of the number should marry Laura Hawkins. How the lucky one was to be chosen he fails to relate, but it is safe to say that if the matter had come to settlement after the manner in which boys usually adjust difficulties, Mark Twain would have had at least “a fighting chance.” But alas for the brave knights! When they returned the princess was gone! She might have been carried off in their absence by a dreadful ogre, or a rival prince might have spirited her away to his castle. But the unpoetical (sic) fact was that her father had moved away, and that was the end of this little romance.