Today it is farewell to Boston and the old police station that we have called home for the last few days and onto Hartford. We had decided to take a taxi to the car hire which as it turned out was a good thing as our other option would have been to drive back to the hotel with the car and collect the luggage once we had checked out, something that would have probably had a very big impact on our day as the process of collecting the car was single and actually quite quick, however, the same cannot be said for leaving Boston. Safe to say an hour after we had collected the car we were still trying to find our way around the various tunnels and onto an interstate going in the right direction, this added to the fact that a lot of Boston is being rebuilt meant that having picked the car up at 9.00 we probably didn’t reach the interstate heading out of town until about 10.30. Once we managed to find the right road the journey wasn’t too bad and we arrived in old Stourbridge around lunch time with the plan of going round the old village and having a bite of lunch before heading off to the hotel. Unfortunately for some reason the village is closed on Monday and Tuesday so we will have to re plan so we can visit on Wednesday. In place of the village we decided to head off to Mark Twain’s house which is just on the outskirts of Hartford. This is the home he had built and lived in for 17 years and where he wrote most of his famous books. The only way round the house is on a guided tour so we joined the next available one and set off round the house which is really nice but very dark. This was very much a home to show off the new wealth and everything was either very grand or exotic. We did learn a fair amount about Mark Twain or Sam Clemens as he was actually known. He left school at 12 and worked the ferry boats in the south, but his job was interrupted by the civil war and he headed north. He married money although it took 3 proposals before she said yes, and he had to woo his rich in-laws to allow him to marry their daughter. I hadn’t realised how well travelled he was, he wrote ‘The innocents abroad’ while travelling Europe with a group of wealthy ‘young men’ doing the ‘European Tour’ he also traveled a lot with his wife and family, he had 3 daughters, and ended up having to supplement his income by doing a speaking tour of Europe as he had invested badly and needed the money. The house was very ‘modern’ having hot and cold running water as well as a system of pipes that connected to the kitchen and the stables where you could whistle then talk to either the groom to tell him to bring the carriage round or the kitchen asking for food or possibly more hot water. After this tour we went to Harriet Beecher Stowe who literally lived next door, she was the author of Uncle Tom’s cabin. Only Chris and I were on this tour which was really interesting, it is very interactive and you are asked what you think and believe a lot. Unfortunately it is probably 40 years since I read Uncle Tom’s cabin and what I thought was a book that really highlighted the plight of the slaves in America and helped to bring about the end of slavery is actually not read in America and the ultimate insult to a ‘person of colour’ is to actually call them Uncle Tom. Our guide was actually a black American and she shared a lot of information that was quite surprising. Apparently the black community don’t understand or agree with the fact that a book written by a white female should represent what was happening at the time, and although I agree in an ideal world the story would have been written by someone that lived it we discussed the fact that it wouldn’t have been accepted by the white audience it was targeting. Interestingly Harriet actually sold the story to a paper and it was serialised much like many of the Dickens stories were and although she was originally only commissioned to write 12 episodes she actually wrote 42 for publication in the paper and the 43rd chapter was only available if you brought the book, this was the one that told the fate of Uncle Tom. It was also notable that she sold 10,000 copies in the Northern states of America but almost 1,000,000 copies in England. The area was actually preserved by Katharine Seymour Day who in 1941 founded the centre and worked to purchase both the house and furniture associated with the period for prosperity. I think we probably took longer than was expected for the tour as it was 4.30 by the time we left but it was a great afternoon. From here we went in search of a supermarket to get provisions then round to the hotel which actually provides free drinks until 7pm so we made sure we had a couple of those then off in search of something to eat and prepare for tomorrow.
