Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK):

Conway’s enclosure was from an unidentified Chatto and Windus staff member (CU-MARK):

Ellen Conway had approached Chatto and Windus after receiving the following letter from her husband, written while he was visiting the Clemenses (MoFlM):

In his letters Conway alluded to the “Centennial Continental Costume Party” held at Pike’s Opera House in Cincinnati on Washington’s birthday, 22 February, as a benefit for the Mount Vernon Association. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the pageant and dance, at which the participants wore historical ball costumes and military uniforms, was “the most notable society event in Cincinnati’s history, and before its splendor the ball to the Prince of Wales pales in splendor.” Conway also mentioned his father, Walker Peyton Conway (1804–84), a Virginia landowner, legislator, and judge; Horace Cornwall (1818–1904), former Connecticut state’s attorney and United States district attorney, and an officer of the Unitarian Society, sponsor of Conway’s Hartford lectures; his wife, Lucy Deming Cornwall (d. 1883); Andrew Chatto (1840–1913), who had joined the publishing firm of Clemens’s old enemy, John Camden Hotten, at the age of fifteen, then had purchased the firm in 1873 and taken poet W. E. Windus as his partner; George Routledge and Sons, publishers of the authorized English editions of The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Gilded Age, and three volumes of Mark Twain’s sketches; and, evidently, the American Literary Bureau, a New York lecture agency (Cincinnati Enquirer: “Amusements,” 22 Feb 76, 5; “Our Meschienza,” 23 Feb 76, 8; Southern Plantation Records 2006; Hartford Courant: “Marriages,” 4 Jan 47, 2; “The Unitarian Society,” 17 May 75, 2; “Deaths,” 14 July 83, 2; “Obituary. Horace Cornwall,” 18 Nov 1904, 6; Osborne and Gerencser 2003; Trumbull 1886, 1:117–18; Weedon 2004; Schneller 1991, 111; L5 , 163–68, 321; SLC 1872).

Conway’s letters dealt only with Tom Sawyer , but Chatto and Windus had already published one piece of “anthological literature.” In 1874 they had issued The Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain, which Clemens revised from Hotten’s unauthorized 1873 edition (see ET&S1 , 602–7; SLC 1873, SLC 1874).

The three lectures Conway had delivered in Hartford in January (see 5 Jan 1876 to Conwayclick to open link, n. 2). Isabella Beecher Hooker, the prominent Hartford spiritualist and feminist, and her husband, John, a lawyer, were close friends and neighbors of the Clemenses’. Conway was scheduled to return to Hartford for lectures on 8 and 9 March on “Impressions of London” and “Heroes and Dragons,” respectively. He spent the first night there with the Cornwalls before going on to the Clemenses’ home (Hartford Courant: “Mr. Conway’s Lectures,” 6 Mar 76, 2; “Impressions of London,” 9 Mar 76, 2; “Heroes and Dragons,” 10 Mar 76, 2).

Evidently a billiards metaphor. Clemens and Conway played when Conway visited Hartford (see 9 Apr 76 to Conwayclick to open link, n. 1, and L6 , 600 n. 2).

Here Clemens replied to the following letter (CU-MARK):

In his opening sentence Conway alluded playfully to Clemens’s “A Literary Nightmare.” Clemens is not known to have planned a spring 1876 lecture engagement in London. Conway had delivered his lecture on “Oriental Religions; Their Origin and Progress,” to a sparse audience, in the Young Men’s Christian Association course in Elmira on 20 December 1875. No communications between Clemens, Theodore Crane, and the Elmira Y.M.C.A. regarding the association’s “pleading the Baby Act” (that is, acting childishly) about Conway’s fee are known to survive. John F. Effinger, (1835–1902), a Unitarian, was minister of St. Paul’s Unity Church. The Reverend Robert Collyer (1823–1912) was a well-known Chicago Unitarian clergyman (not to be confused with Robert Laird Collier [1837–90], another Unitarian clergyman who served in Chicago). (Elmira Advertiser: “City and Neighborhood,” 13 Dec 75, 4; “Moncure D. Conway,” 21 Dec 74, 5; L6 , 600 n. 1; Mathews 1951, 1:55; L5 , 82 n. 4).