The years 1876–80 were typically busy and productive, though sometimes frustrating, for Samuel L. Clemens. In 1876 he saw the publication of the English and American editions of Tom Sawyer (by Chatto and Windus, of London, and the American Publishing Company, of Hartford, respectively), but was irritated by delays in the American version and infuriated when sales were damaged by competition from an unauthorized Canadian edition. In July of that year he began its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and drafted about a third of it by September, when he set it aside. He was soon receiving so many inquiries from readers anxious for this sequel that he resorted to a printed form letterclick to open link of reply, which he began sending out, while the work was on hold, in 1877 (included here at the beginning of that year). In 1876 he also wrote 1601, his bawdy burlesque of the court of Elizabeth I, which he circulated privately among friends. And still in 1876, hoping to repeat the popular and financial success of Colonel Sellers, his dramatization of The Gilded Age, he collaborated on a new comedy with his old San Francisco friend, Bret Harte. The collaboration proved a disaster, artistically and also personally. The play, Ah Sin, debuted in Washington in the spring of 1877, had a short run in New York that summer, and a brief road tour that fall, before Clemens pronounced it a failure and withdrew it from the stage. He blamed Harte for the play’s manifold defects, and his bitterness over that and over Harte’s borrowing of money put an end to their long friendship. His attempt to succeed on his own with yet another play, “Cap’n Simon Wheeler, The Amateur Detective,” which he drafted and revised in about two weeks in June and July 1877, was also doomed to failure when he was unable to interest any New York actor or producer in staging it. Abandoning drama then, he turned to historical fiction. In the fall of 1877 he began writing The Prince and the Pauper, completing about a third of the story before setting it aside in February 1878.

While engaged on these major projects, Clemens found time to monitor sales of “Mark Twain’s Patent Self-Pasting Scrap Book,” which he had invented in 1872, patented in 1873, and evidently began marketing in 1877 through his Quaker City friend Dan Slote’s New York blank-book manufactory, Slote, Woodman and Company. In the spring of 1878 he published Punch, Brothers, Punch! and Other Sketches, a small selection of old work, through Slote’s firm, chiefly as a means of advertising the scrapbook. He wrote regularly for the Atlantic Monthly, articles such as “A Literary Nightmare” (February 1876), “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” (June 1876), and the four-part “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion” (October 1877–January 1878), as well as a few pieces for the anonymous “Contributors’ Club”: “Miss Dickinson’s Failure” (January 1877), “An Overrated Book” (June 1877), and “Unlearnable Things” (June 1880). The “Rambling Notes” series was an account of Clemens’s May 1877 trip to Bermuda “to get the world & the devil out of my head” (23 Apr 77 to Craneclick to open link), in the company of his close friend Joseph H. Twichell, pastor of Hartford’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church. Their happy experience together turned out to be a rehearsal for the lengthier jaunt the two men made together in 1878, part of the Clemens family’s extended tour of Europe that year and the next.

The Clemenses had originally planned a European trip for April 1877, but early in the year Olivia decided to postpone it and in the spring Clemens made his Bermuda trip instead. Clemens’s performance in December 1877 at the Atlantic Monthly birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier may have given him, at least for a short time, a special impetus to revive the plan for a foreign retreat. His humorous speech containing irreverent allusions to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not well received and Clemens was persuaded that he had given offense and had embarrassed his presenter, William Dean Howells, as well as himself:

His 27 December 1877 letter of apologyclick to open link to the three men provides ample testimony of the depth of his remorse. They assured Clemens that they had not taken offense, however, and by 5 February 1878click to open link he had rebounded, writing his Quaker City friend, Mary Mason Fairbanks:

Clemens’s stated rationale for the European hegira was literary and financial. On 17 February 1878click to open link he wrote to his mother:

The complaint about correspondence was a frequent one, and in 1876–77 Clemens employed a secretary, Fanny C. Hesse, in an attempt to relieve the burden. A number of letters included here are in her hand. But, of course, since he had to dictate those and approve them before they were sent, the distraction persisted. On 9 March 1878click to open link he wrote Mrs. Fairbanks that

Clemens hoped to economize on living expenses by shutting down the Hartford house for two or three years and putting on furlough most of the staff that kept it running, leaving only “the coachman & family” to “stand guard at the stable, with the horses, & keep the conservatory blooming & the hanging flower-baskets flourishing in the balconies” (20 Mar 78 to Stoddardclick to open link). And so, on 11 April 1878 the Clemens family, accompanied by Rosina Hay, the children’s German nursemaid, and Clara Spaulding, Olivia’s friend since childhood, sailed for Hamburg aboard the SS Holsatia. They arrived on 25 April to begin a sojourn that lasted until 2 September 1879 and took them not just to Germany but also to Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England.

The unfinished manuscripts that Clemens took with him probably included, in addition to Huckleberry Finn and The Prince and the Pauper, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” which he had worked on intermittently since 1868; a burlesque diary of Methuselah, begun in 1873; a fictionalized biography of his hapless brother, Orion, which he had started and was “charmed” with in March 1877 (23? Mar 77 to Howellsclick to open link) and which Albert Bigelow Paine, his official biographer and literary executor, later entitled “The Autobiography of a Damned Fool”; and a novelization, first worked on in late 1877 and early 1878, of his unsuccessful Simon Wheeler play.

Clemens soon gave up the notion of continuing any of these. He decided instead to write a book along the lines of The Innocents Abroad. But the demands of travel and bouts of rheumatism were to prevent steady and coherent composition. After Twichell joined the family party, at Clemens’s expense, on 1 August 1878, he and Clemens began the five and a half weeks of companionable “tramping” through Germany and Switzerland that produced much of the matter of the book and suggested its title: A Tramp Abroad. Clemens filled his notebooks with observations, hoping to turn them into chapters of the book as they went, but difficulty in composition persisted. On 20 August 1878click to open link, he wrote to Francis E. Bliss, of the American Publishing Company:

In Munich, though, he was stalled by the loss of one of his Swiss notebooks, an occurrence that made him consider abandoning the travel book entirely. By late January 1879 he had recovered it, but the writing continued to come hard and acceptable manuscript did not accumulate rapidly. In the spring of the year he was only half finished and by early July, with much remaining to do, he suspended work on the book pending his return home.

For the family, the travel experience was a mixed blessing. Although there was much to see and much to enjoy, some adjustments were difficult to make. Olivia Clemens found the food unpalatable and the accommodations uncomfortable. She was overwhelmed by the flattering and exhausting attention she and Clemens sometimes received, particularly in Paris, and grew increasingly homesick. In Germany, she studied the language, but with only indifferent success. Clemens also worked at it as time allowed, railing comically at its stubborn intricacy, but finally gave up any serious attempt to master it. Only the children, six-year-old Susy and four-year-old Clara, took to it easily and were soon fluent.

Wherever the Clemenses went, Olivia and Clara Spaulding visited parks and galleries and other tourist sites. Olivia also shopped. While aspiring to frugality and pleading poverty, she relentlessly hunted out furniture, glassware, and decorative items for the Hartford house and gifts for her Elmira family. Clemens joined in the costly process, endorsing Olivia’s purchases and adding some of his own, in particular a custom-made Swiss music box that alone cost $400. In just three months in Paris, he and Olivia spent $4,000. Their acquisitions helped fill “12 trunks, and 22 freight packages” and, when the steamer SS Gallia reached New York on 2 September, cost Clemens “6 hours working them through the Custom-house formalities. . . . I was the last passenger to get away (8 o’clock P.M.,) but it was because one of my trunks didn’t turn up for several hours. But I was lucky to get through at all, because the ship was loaded mainly with my freight” (“Mark Twain Home Again,” New York Times, 3 Sept 79, 8; 4 Sept 79 to Sloteclick to open link). Clearly the trip abroad had proved to be no economy.

In Elmira and Hartford throughout the fall and winter of 1879, Clemens struggled to complete the manuscript of A Tramp Abroad. Finally, on 7 January 1880, he put an end to the “life-&-death battle with this infernal book . . . which required 2600 pages, of MS, & I have written nearer four thousand, first & last” (8 Jan 80 to Howellsclick to open link). He had still to endure the tribulations of the book’s production and the futile attempt to schedule publication of the English edition so as to secure British copyright and forestall an unauthorized Canadian edition. But well before Tramp was published in mid-March 1880, Clemens was deep into work on one of his deferred manuscripts, informing Orion Clemens on 26 Februaryclick to open link: “I am grinding away, now, with all my might, & with an interest which amounts to intemperance, at the ‘Prince & the Pauper.’” Around mid-March he put that manuscript aside and returned to Huckleberry Finn. He worked on Huck until mid-June, bringing it to its halfway point. In July there was a brief and happy distraction: the Clemenses’ third daughter was born on the twenty-sixth of the month. Named Jane Lampton, for Clemens’s mother, but always known as Jean, she weighed in, Clemens wrote William Dean Howells that dayclick to open link, at “about 7 pounds. That is a pretty big one—for us.” On 17 August, in a lightly canceled passage he intended to be read in a letterclick to open link to Howells’s wife, Elinor, Clemens facetiously compared Jean to “an orange that is a little mildewed in spots.” Baby notwithstanding, he finished drafting The Prince and the Pauper on 14 September 1880. By mid-November 1880 he was planning to resume work on Huckleberry Finn, which, he predicted inaccurately, could be finished with only “two or three months’ work” (14? Nov 80 to Moffettclick to open link). In fact, he did not complete that manuscript until 1883.

Even while grinding out literature, Clemens continued to be one of the most visible and talked-about American celebrities. “I cannot abide those newspaper references to me & my matters,” he complained to his brother, Orion, in a letter of 9 February 1879click to open link. “I think that one reason why I have ceased to write to friends & relatives is that I can’t trust them.” He did have grounds for complaint: in January 1878 the New York Sun printed two bogus interviews alleging that he had become editor of the Hartford Courant and that he planned to run for governor of Connecticut (“Mark Twain’s Enterprise,” 7 Jan 78, 2; “Not Quite An Editor,” 26 Jan 78, 2), and in February 1880, it was rumored that he would be a candidate for Congress. But of course he never ceased his correspondence, writing regularly to family members and to fellow writers such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Howells, Moncure Conway, William Wright (Dan De Quille), and Bayard Taylor, and to other prominent figures, such as Boston publisher James R. Osgood, Harper’s Weekly and Monthly editor William A. Seaver, and actor Edwin Booth. He also did not hesitate to put himself directly in the public eye with letters to editors, which included his 22 July 1876click to open link complaint about the postal service to the New York Evening Post; his 14 and 16 Februaryclick to open link and 22 February 1877click to open link letters to the New York World about the malfeasance of New York Shipping Commissioner Charles C. Duncan, an old adversary from the Quaker City excursion; his 19 September 1877click to open link letter to the Hartford Courant in aid of a stranded vessel; his 2 February 1879click to open link letter to the Courant about the threat to public safety posed by tramps; his 22 Novemberclick to open link and 8 December 1879click to open link lettersclick to open link to the same paper with further postal service complaints; and his 30 November 1880click to open link letter to Childhood’s Appeal magazine, agitating for a “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fathers” afflicted with crying babies. Moreover, although he had formally retired as a paid lecturer in 1874 and, as evidenced by two letters included here, was still retired in 1880 (printed card, January 1880click to open link; 20 Apr 80 to the Press Club of Chicagoclick to open link), he did not shrink from the public, but appeared regularly as an after-dinner speaker and for charitable causes. And he was willing to end, or at least interrupt, his self-imposed retirement under the proper circumstances. So, in a letter of 12 November 1877click to open link to noted political cartoonist Thomas Nast, he proposed a joint lecture tour that he confidently predicted would pack houses and gross $100,000 without subjecting him to the “heart-breakingly dreary” grind of solitary travel.

Although the tour with Nast was not arranged, Clemens otherwise stepped forward politically more overtly during this period than ever before. He declared himself for Rutherford B. Hayes in the presidential election of 1876, making a speech on civil service reform at a Hayes rally in Hartford on 30 September 1876, and then, four years later, endorsed James A. Garfield. But he achieved a special prominence in the political sphere in Chicago in the early hours of 14 November 1879. At the thirteenth reunion of the Civil War veterans of the Army of the Tennessee, before a tumultuous crowd, his humorous celebration of Ulysses S. Grant, in response to the toast “The Babies,” brought down the house, Grant himself included. His accounts of the event, in his letters of 14 November 1879 to Olivia Clemensclick to open link and 17 November 1879 to Howellsclick to open link, still convey all the drama and exhilaration of the moment. Clemens himself was quick to realize how that success had enhanced his already larger-than-life image. “I can’t afford to attend any but the very biggest kind of blow-outs,” he wrote his friend Frank Fuller on 18 November 1879click to open link, “neither can I afford to miss the biggest kind of blow-outs.” One such event came on 3 December 1879, when he attended the Atlantic Monthly breakfast in Boston for Oliver Wendell Holmes, making any emends left to make for his 1877 Whittier dinner blunder with a gracious tribute to Holmes in a speech on “Unconscious Plagiarism.” Another occurred on 16 October 1880 when he spoke welcoming Grantto Hartford during the campaign for Garfield.

Through it all, the “infernal” books, the family matters, the travel, the business affairs, the public appearances, and the public attention good and bad, Clemens’s vocation and avocation was his writing. As he told Norwegian novelist Hjalmar H. Boyesen in a letter of 23 April 1880click to open link:

Some of the best of that compelled, and always compelling, writing is preserved in the letters published here.