It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us-dreamers and indolent.…It is good to begin life poor it is good to begin life rich-these are wholesome but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it. Late in his life, Twain reflected on this promise that became a curse: Still, John Clemens believed the Tennessee land he had purchased in the late 1820s (some 70,000 acres ) might one day make them wealthy, and this prospect cultivated in the children a dreamy hope. John Clemens opened a store and eventually became a justice of the peace, which entitled him to be called “Judge” but not to a great deal more. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles (50 km) east from Florida, Mo., to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, where there were greater opportunities.
No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of business failures. John Clemens, by all reports, was a serious man who seldom demonstrated affection. Insofar as Clemens could be said to have inherited his sense of humour, it would have come from his mother, not his father. “Afraid I wouldn’t live?” “No,” she said, “afraid you would.” When Jane Clemens was in her 80s, Clemens asked her about his poor health in those early years: “I suppose that during that whole time you were uneasy about me?” “Yes, the whole time,” she answered.
Because he was sickly, Clemens was often coddled, particularly by his mother, and he developed early the tendency to test her indulgence through mischief, offering only his good nature as bond for the domestic crimes he was apt to commit. His mother tried various allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and his recollections of those instances (along with other memories of his growing up) would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other writings. Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Moffit Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life.
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