When in November 1870 Samuel and Olivia Clemens celebrated the birth of their first child, born prematurely, he was given Olivia’s family name, Langdon. The new father took the opportunity to write to Olivia’s grandmother in the baby’s voice:

I tell you, I am tired being bundled up head & ears nine-tenths of my time. And I don’t like this thing of being stripped naked & washed. I like to be stripped & warmed at the stove—that is real bully—but I do despise this washing business. I believe it to be a gratuitous & unnecessary piece of meanness. I never see them wash the cat.

Olivia had a long convalescence, with many worries about the baby’s health, and then a new pregnancy. During Langdon’s eighteen months of life the family moved from Buffalo, New York, to Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1871 traveled to Olivia’s sister Susan Crane’s farm in Elmira. There Susy Clemens was born in March, and after her baptism in late May the family returned to Hartford. By now the heavy cough that Langdon was suffering from started to alarm the family. On June 2 Langdon succumbed to diphtheria, as noted in the city’s vital records: “NAME: Clemens, Langdon. PLACE OF DEATH: Forest Street. TIME OF DEATH: June 2. AGE: one year, six months.” The attending physician was Cincinnatus Taft, a family friend.

In an autobiographical dictation to a secretary in 1906, Samuel Clemens burst out with the statement “I was the cause of the child’s illness.” He had taken Langdon out for a carriage drive on a cold morning in Elmira, and, lost in thought, let the furs fall from the baby’s legs. But in 1911 Susan Crane corrected the record in a letter to Clemens’s biographer: “Yes, the drive was in Elmira, but we never thought of attributing Langdon’s death to that drive, as I remember. It is true he took cold, but was so much better that the physician said he was perfectly able to take that journey. After he arrived in Hartford diphtheria developed—Mr. Clemens was often inclined to blame himself unjustly.”