No letters have been found for the next two weeks—a period during which Clemens neglected his Alta correspondence and may well have written very few personal letters, while he took the crucial step of lecturing for the first time before a New York audience. His debut at Cooper Institute occurred on 6 May; he repeated the lecture at the Athenaeum, in Brooklyn, the following Friday (10 May). Shortly after the next letter, he repeated it a third time (15 May), at Irving Hall in New York; and he planned (but canceled) a fourth appearance, in Brooklyn, at the Academy of Music.
In 1906 Clemens recalled his fears that the advertising for his lecture—which he had delegated to his manager, Frank Fuller—was not sufficiently vigorous:
He hired Cooper Institute, and he began to advertise this lecture in the usual way—a small paragraph in the advertising columns of the newspapers. When this had continued about three days I had not yet heard anybody or any newspaper say anything about that lecture, and I got nervous. “Oh,” he said, “it’s working around underneath. You don’t see it on the surface.” He said, “Let it alone, now, let it work.”
But Clemens was not entirely reassured: some “three or four days” before his first appearance he told Fuller to “advertise more energetically” (AD, 11 Apr 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:353). Fuller did advertise in (at least) the Times, the Evening Express, the Citizen, the Evening Post, and the Tribune on 4, 5, or 6 May. In each of the last two newspapers (on 4 and 6 May, respectively) he reproduced both Senator Nye’s endorsement and the “call,” with some ninety names signed in support: Senator William M. Stewart, M. G. Upton (chief editor of the Alta, who must have signed before he sailed for France on 16 April), Clement T. Rice, Marcus D. Larrowe, Charles Henry Webb, John J. Murphy, Robert M. Howland, Edward C. Dixon, Frank Fuller, and Thomas Maguire—to mention only the more familiar names (“Amusements,” New York Times, 4 and 6 May 67, 7; “Lectures,” New York Evening Express, 4 May 67, 3; “Cooper Institute,” New York Citizen, 4 May 67, 8; “Lectures and Meetings,” New York Tribune, 4 and 6 May 67, 7; “Amusements,” New York Evening Post, 4 May 67, 4; SLC 1867). Clemens’s lecture also received various brief advance notices from his many newspaper friends. On 3, 4, and 6 May, James and Erastus Brooks’s New York Evening Express devoted several lines to it (“Amusements,” 3 May, 1; “The Drama and Music,” 4 and 6 May, 2). It was probably Charles Halpine who said, anonymously, in the weekly New York Citizen of 4 May:
Mark Twain, the gifted humorist from California, will lecture on Monday evening, at the Cooper Institute. The subject is “Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands,” and a rarer combination of useful information and brilliant wit was never listened to. We certainly hope he will meet with the reception his talents and sterling qualities as a gentleman and a journalist have entitled him to, at the hands of all cultivated and appreciative people. (4 May 67, 5)
Also on 4 May Halpine’s associate on the Citizen, James Copper Bayles, devoted some thirty lines to “the long expected and much hoped for event.” He praised “the great ability of this young man as a humorist” and urged his readers to buy the Jumping Frog book as well as attend the lecture, noting that “his already extensive reputation is prophetic of still greater successes in the future” (Bayles, 8). And Clemens himself preserved (and identified) a clipping from the 4 May issue of Stage, “a theatrical advertising medium, used as a programme,” with a daily circulation of 10,000 (Rowell, 71):
Mark Twain, otherwise known as “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific,” whose funny writings have convulsed half a continent, and whose book—“The Jumping Frog,”—just issued from the press of Webb, is now introducing the accomplished and talented author into new fields, new harvests, and new triumphs, appears before the New York public on Monday evening next, at Cooper Institute, to relate his last year’s “Experiences in the Sandwich Islands.” There could be no doubt of Mark’s ability to be intensely funny, nor of the impossibility of his being anything else, if we were to judge of his quality solely by his humorous publications; but we have the assurance of the San Francisco press that the address contains an immense amount of valuable descriptive matter, not to be found elsewhere, while the quaint similes and expressions are lavished upon the audience in quantity sufficient for an entire course of lectures by any other orator in America. Seth Twain is young, handsome, single and rich, and his future is altogether fair and promising. He sails for the Holy Land with General Sherman’s party, June 8th, and this lecture is delivered now on the invitation of many friends, who have determined to give him a right, royal benefit at parting. Senator Nye, of Nevada, takes much interest in Mr. Twain, and will introduce him to the audience in a speech. The Senator is a good deal of a humorist, and if he “does his level best,” Mark must look to his laurels. (Clipping identified by SLC as “Stage ǀ May 4,” CU-MARK)
A similar notice appeared in the weekly New York Dispatch, and the Times published a much briefer one, both on the day before the lecture (“Mark Twain’s Lecture on ‘Kanakadom,’” New York Dispatch, 5 May 67, 5; “Mark Twain’s Lecture,” New York Times, 5 May 67, 5). Moreover, at least five New York newspapers—the Times, Evening Express, Citizen, Tribune, and Dispatch—favorably noticed the Jumping Frog book before 6 May (“New Publications,” New York Times, 1 May 67, 2; “Literary,” New York Evening Express, 1 May 67, 2; “The Citizen’s Book Table,” New York Citizen, 4 May 67, 4; “New Publications,” New York Tribune, 4 May 67, 6; “New Publications,” New York Dispatch, 5 May 67, 7).
In short, the anxiety Clemens felt about publicity for his lecture was unnecessary. Nevertheless, shortly before his initial performance he instructed Fuller to “paper the house” with “thousands of complimentary tickets.” Fuller agreed, and sent tickets “to every public-school teacher within a radius of thirty miles of New York.” The result, as Clemens later recalled, was that “on the appointed night they all came. There wasn’t room in Cooper Institute for a third of them” (AD, 11 Apr 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:353–54). At least one New York newspaper noted at the time that a “large number of persons were unable to hear this lecture at Cooper Institute last week, and it is repeated by request” (“‘Mark Twain’ will repeat ...,” New York Evening Post, 13 May 67, 3).
The lecture performance was clearly a success, even though Senator Nye inexplicably failed to appear. Newspaper estimates of attendance ranged from two to three thousand (“‘Mark Twain’ delivered ...,” New York Times, 7 May 67, 4; “Mark Twain’s Lectures,” Brooklyn Union, 9 May 67, 4). And those who noticed or reviewed the performance were favorable. The critic for the Times reported that “seldom has so large an audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark Twain’s quaint remarks last evening” (“Mark Twain’s Lecture,” New York Times, 7 May 67, 5). The Herald, which would be the only newspaper to notice all three performances, shared this enthusiasm:
The lecture is descriptive of the life, manners and customs of the natives of the islands of the Pacific, and is embellished with sparkling wit, happy hits and a genial humor wholly peculiar and unexcelled. In its entirety it is unreportable, but the manner of the gentleman and his style of delivery is so pleasing and acceptable that he, in a moment’s acquaintance with his audience, makes them his friends, and with constant laughter and genuine enthusiasm carries them along with him to the end, dismissing them in the happiest possible frame of mind. The mantle of the lamented Artemus Ward seems to have fallen on the shoulders of Mark Twain, and worthily does he wear it. (“Mark Twain at the Cooper Institute,” New York Herald, 7 May 67, 4)
“Ajax,” the New York correspondent of the Sacramento Union, commented on the eastern response to western humor—a matter that had concerned Clemens since January:
“Twain’s” debut took place at Cooper Institute before at least 2,300 people. ... I have seldom seen a more intelligent audience anywhere.... Some of his wit was a little coarser than our lecture-room audiences were accustomed to, and many quiet lovers of a good joke were amazed and confounded at the impudence and freedom of this wild Californian. (Ajax, 1)
Reporting the “first rate notices” of the major New York newspapers, Ajax observed that “the Tribune, through some blunder, failed to get its report in due season and appears without any comments on the lecture.”
Mark says the Tribune sent their highest art critic to review his lecture; that the critic went off to his hotel (the Axminster) to write up his notes, and the “darned pelican of a reporter” sent to get his copy went to the wrong hotel, and so he failed to get a hearing in the Tribune. (Ajax, 1)
The Tribune’s “art critic” was none other than Clemens’s recent acquaintance Edward House, evidently also then living at the Westminster (slightly garbled by the Sacramento typesetter). House’s perceptive review, which obviously benefited from his personal familiarity with Clemens, appeared on 11 May, following the second performance. (Clemens himself identified House as the reviewer: see 28 Nov 68 to OLLclick to open link, and House’s reviewclick to open link, which Clemens enclosed with his letter.
Clemens’s 10 May lecture in Brooklyn was praised by the New York Herald and the Brooklyn Union (“Mark Twain in Brooklyn,” New York Herald, 11 May 67, 4; “Mark Twain at the Athenaeum,” Brooklyn Union, 11 May 67, 4), as well as by the Brooklyn Eagle, whose reviewer wrote:
It would be manifestly unfair to report this most acceptable lecture, and no type could do justice to the cool, self-possession of the lecturer. His style is quaint and taking, and commends itself to an audience before they are aware of it, and is entirely original. To those who may think that the moderate style of manner is put on, it is only necessary to say that Mr Twain in everyday life is as staid and circumspect as he is before the public.... It is a pleasure to know that he will visit Brooklyn again before leaving in June on the grand excursion trip to the Holy Land. (“Mark Twain on the Sandwich Islands,” Brooklyn Eagle, 11 May 67, 3)
Three days after this notice appeared, Clemens wrote the next letter to John Stanton, who may have been the Eagle reviewer.