No letters written between 23 June and 9 July 1872 have been found. Clemens had expressed his intention of being in New York City on 26 June, perhaps staying with Dan Slote (21 June 72 to Blamireclick to open link), but no mention of his presence in the city has been found until 1 July, when the New York Tribune listed him among the previous day’s arrivals at the St. Nicholas Hotel. About this time, Clemens may also have made his long-planned junket to the Boston World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival (20 Apr 72 to Redpathclick to open link), although he is not mentioned in accounts of the festival. (He did, however, purchase monogrammed stationery from a Boston stationer sometime during this period: see 25–27? July 72 to MEC, n. 1click to open link.) The festival ran from 17 June to 4 July, attracting up to one hundred thousand visitors a day. A vast temporary coliseum was built for concerts of soloists and bands from all over the world, and a chorus of twenty thousand voices was featured. James R. Osgood and Company were among the principal underwriters of the event, and Osgood himself presided over the Press Reception Committee. Clemens referred to the Jubilee in one of his June 1873 New York Herald letters, but his ambiguous remark does not confirm his own attendance: having failed to secure a seat for a concert at the Albert Hall in London, he noted that it was supposed “to seat 13,000 people, and surely that is a thing worth seeing—at least to a man who was not at the Boston Jubilee” (SLC 1873; “Prominent Arrivals,” New York Tribune, 1 July 72, 8; Boston Advertiser: “Amusements,” 17 June 72, 1; “The World’s Jubilee and International Musical Festival,” 17 June 72, Supplement, 1; “The Last Days,” 6 July 72, 1).
Clemens was certainly home by 5 July, when the family packed up precipitately to flee the summer heat. The next day, with Orion and Mollie once again in charge of the Hartford house, Clemens, Olivia, infant Susy, and the nursemaid Nellie removed to the waterside resort of Fenwick Hall at Saybrook Point, just north of New Saybrook (now Saybrook), Connecticut, two hours by rail from Hartford (11 Aug 72 to Fairbanksclick to open link; OLC to MEC, 12 July 72, CU-MARK; Holman, 3, 46). Completed in 1871, Fenwick Hall was in its second season. The “splendid” hotel
was built at Saybrook Point at the mouth of the Connecticut. A company had been formed ... and $100,000 of stock taken principally by Hartford men, to improve the fine location afforded at that point for building up a favorable watering place. The land was divided into villa lots, and parcelled out among the stockholders. ... The building ... is an elegant and spacious frame edifice furnished with all modern improvements. ... Saybrook Point is essentially a Hartford enterprise and Hartford people take pride in its success. (“Connecticut,” Boston Globe, 19 June 72, 2)
Many Hartford residents stayed for the entire summer, while others went for weekends or to attend the Saturday evening “hops.” Swimming, boating, and picnicking, as well as billiards and bowling, were available (“Opening of Fenwick Hall,” Hartford Courant, 26 June 72, 2). Olivia wrote to Mollie Clemens on 7 July:
We are very comfortably fixed here, much more so than I thought we should be from Mr Clemens discription—The air is delightful, the coolness is a pleasant coolness not chilliness. The only disagreableness is that there are so many Hartford people here, but then I stay closely in the room— (CU-MARK)
Unlike Olivia, Clemens was a very visible participant in the daily activities, as revealed in an account that appeared in the Hartford Courant later in July:
There is no more pleasant way of spending a morning than sitting on the cool and spacious verandah of the Fenwick and watching the myriads of sail moving slowly over the broad expanse of water before you. For a lazy man it is delicious. Mark Twain does it every day when he is not playing billiards or setting up ten-pins. By the by, the genial humorist is a great favorite with the ladies, and really the lion of the house. The other day, while scoring at the bowling alley and becoming dreadfully mixed, he exclaimed to a party of ladies around him, in his well-known, drawling tone, “Ladies, I be-lie-ve I do-on’t kno-ow any more about this ga-ame than you do.” Another story is told at his expense. A charming young lady from the west, to whom Mr. Clemens was introduced, said, “I met you in Buffalo a few years ago, Mr. Clemens. Don’t you remember me?” “Yes-s-s, perfectly,” said Mark. “You were sitting on the curbstone, with a pa-a-ir of ear-rings on.” “Sir!” said she, and moved off with the air of an offended duchess. (“Fenwick Hall,” 29 July 72, 2)
Clemens also took part in the tableaux vivants staged in the hotel’s parlor, entertaining the guests on the evening of 29 July with “an inimitable personation of Mrs. Jarley,” the wax-works exhibitor in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop (“Brief Mention,” Hartford Courant, 31 July 72, 2). Three leaves of his script for that entertainment survive in the Mark Twain Papers. Clemens, as Mrs. Jarley, seems to have provided a running narration for the tableaux, interspersing personal remarks, such as the following:
Then I married a scrub by the name of Mark Twain—one of these ritin mejums. Mark T warn’t his real name—but if all I’ve heard is true, he had good reasons for not trottin out his other one. He wouldn[’]t steal—Oh, no—a man with a mug like that wouldn’t steal—but people noticed that when he came around it was pooty difficult to make their things stay wher they put ’em. And I always noticed myself that his clothes warn’t any particular size, & they had more different marks in ’em than was necessary. (SLC 1872, 7–8)
Clemens’s literary activity during his Saybrook stay may have produced more than the Jarley script. Isabel V. Lyon, his secretary from 1902 to 1909, later recalled his response to an inquiry about “when & where” he began to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:
he spoke with tenderness of the boy and the playmates and the pranks which inspired Tom Sawyer. ... He said that during all the years between boyhood and a summer spent in Saybrook, Connecticut—“about 1872”—when he definitely began to write a book about those boys, he had “never lost sight of the magic and freedom and careless young life on the river.” (Isabel V. Lyon to W. T. H. Howe, 28 Nov 1934, NN-B)