Starting in his seventies, Mark Twain began the creepy hobby of ‘collecting’ young, innocent girls
He called them his ‘angelfish,’ and started a club for girls between the ages of ten and sixteen
Sixteen-year-old Frances Nunnally met the famous writer Mark Twain in 1907 aboard the SS Minneapolis while traveling to London. Twain was heading there to accept an honorary degree from Oxford University, and Nunnally, an Atlanta native, was traveling with her parents — her father was a successful candy manufacturer. The writer was immediately taken with Nunnally’s “dear sweet grave little body.” On board the ship and throughout their stay in London, the two cavorted and “grew quite confidential,” as Twain would later say in an interview. He called her “Francesca” and kept in touch with her long after the trip, inviting her to visit his home and referring to her as a “faithful correspondent.”
Nunnally was but one of Twain’s “collection” of girls, whom he called his “angelfish.” “I collect pets: young girls,” he wrote in 1908, at the ripe old age of 73. “Girls from ten to sixteen years old, girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent — dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.” He gave them the name because he considered the angelfish “the most beautiful fish that swims,” and even referred to them as the Aquarium Club. Each designee was given a pin confirming her membership. With this group of girls (also referred to as “prizes” in his autobiography), the author exchanged flirtatious letters, sometimes dotted with “blots,” or kisses.
Twain was always taken with youth — his own wife even called him by the nickname Youth — and would defend this habit by arguing that he longed for grandchildren but had none. Because he could collect young girls, he wrote in his autobiography, his heart had become “a treasure-palace of little people whom I worship and whose degraded and willing slave I am.”
With Nunnally, Twain corresponded for a few years, begging her for visits. “Can you come, dear?” he writes in one letter. “And will you? If it isn’t possible to come now, will you name a date & come later? Don’t say no, dear, say yes.” He sent her gifts like a copy of Anne of Green Gables. He even delivered a speech at her graduation from St. Timothy’s School, outside Baltimore. As with the other angelfish, their correspondence died out as Frances grew.
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