No letters are known to survive for the next ten days. Four letters that Clemens sent to Olivia before 21 March (docket numbers 57–60) are among the missing documents. Even without the details they would provide, however, the general outline of his activities during most of the period can be established. Following his 14–15 March visit to Boston with Petroleum V. Nasby, at which time he met Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clemens went to New York City on the night of 15 March. The next day, before lecturing in Newtown, on Long Island, he probably stopped in at the offices of the New York Tribune to confer with John Russell Young, to whom he had recently offered “The White House Funeral,” about further contributions to the paper. On 17 March Young sent him an “extract” from a San Francisco Evening Bulletin article on the importation and sale of Chinese women as prostitutes, inviting him to write something about that “singular social question.” Clemens’s response has not been found, but he presumably declined within a day or two, for on 20 March Young instead addressed the issue by reprinting part of the Bulletin article and accompanying it with a Tribune editorial (Young to SLC, 17 Mar 69, DLC; “The Importation of Chinese Women,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 25 Feb 69, 3; “The Traffic in Chinese Women,” “Loveliness by the Cargo,” New York Tribune, 20 Mar 69, 4, 6). Meanwhile, Clemens left New York for Elmira, arriving in the evening on 17 March. Although the next batch of proofs of his book, consisting of chapters 10–14 (pages 90–138), must have been awaiting him, other commitments surely forestalled any sustained proofreading for four or five days. On 18 March, for example, Clemens helped the Langdons entertain a prominent guest: Wendell Phillips (1811–84), the social reformer and former abolitionist, spent the day at their home receiving callers, including the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher. Later, in the margin of the copy of Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table that he was marking for Olivia, Clemens apologized for embarrassing her on that occasion: “I ought not to have said what I did in Wendell Phillips’ presence 3 days ago, & which produced a blush which touches me yet with its distress—& will, for many days to come” (PH in CU-MARK, in Booth, 460). Despite this incident, it is likely that on the evening of 18 March Clemens and Olivia, along with her parents, attended Phillips’s lecture on Daniel O’Connell, the Irish political leader, in the Elmira Opera House (Thomas K. Beecher to Ella L. Wolcott, 18 Mar 69, CtHSD; “City and Neighborhood,” “Opera House. Lecture of Wendell Phillips,” Elmira Advertiser, 19 Mar 69, 4). Either on 19 March or the day after, Clemens traveled to Sharon, Pennsylvania, where he concluded his lecture season with a “grand success” on 20 March. By that date he had decided on a new title for his book, for the Sharon reviewer reported: “He is about to issue a work of some six hundred pages, ‘The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress’” (“Mark Twain,” Sharon Times, 24 Mar 69, or Sharon Herald, 27 Mar 69, reprinted in Advertising Circular for The Innocents Abroad (see Advertising Circularsclick to open link). And in his Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Clemens affirmed the decision: “‘The Innocents Abroad—Or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress.’ {Sharon, Mch 21.” (PH in CU-MARK, in Booth, 459, with the date mistranscribed “Mch 31.”). Probably on 21 March he returned to Elmira, where he resumed proofreading and wrote the next sequence of letters.
Editorial narrative following 13 March 1869 to Olivia L. Langdon