20 May 1867 • New York, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00131)
I am one magazine article & eighteen letters behindhand (18 days to do them in, before sailing,) & so I am obliged to give up the idea of lecturing any more. Confound me if I won’t have a hard time catching up anyhow. I shall stick in the house day & night for 2 weeks & try, though, anyhow.1explanatory note
I got Mallison’s note, & went over the river s Sunday, backwards & forwards 6 times, & then visited the closed Eagle & stood around till a quarter past 11 A.M, but found nobody; & returned to New York.2explanatory note
I wanted to tell you I had Ⓐemendationgiven up my Brooklyn lecture, but it will do just as well now, perhaps.
I am glad to hear your tickets are going off so fast, & hope you will sell a thousand more than the house will hold.3explanatory note
Remember me to Mallison & the boys, & say I will be over as soon as I have got half of my letters written.
And so, with a thousand thanks for the valuable favor you were so willing to do me,4explanatory note
All but two of Mark Twain’s seven contributions to the New York Sunday Mercury had been published by this time: the exceptions were “A Reminiscence of Artemus Ward”and “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats,”which appeared on 7 and 14 July, and are probably the “magazine”articles referred to here and in the next letter (SLC 1867, SLC 1867). Clemens seems to have exaggerated the number of dispatches to the Alta which he had yet to write before departure on 8 June. Prior to the Quaker City trip, he was supposed to write “weekly.”By the end of April, twenty weeks into his commission, he had completed sixteen dispatches. In early May he fell somewhat further behind, probably because of his lectures, but was at most seven behind at the time of this letter. On 17 May he began catching up, writing one a day for the next four days. By 6 June he had written a total of twenty-six dispatches in as many weeks.
The subject of the note from Francis Avery Mallison (1828?–77), a colleague of Stanton’s on the Brooklyn Eagle, remains unknown. Mallison had begun his career on the Rome (N.Y.) Sentinel, joined the staff of the Brooklyn City News in 1859, and soon thereafter moved to the Eagle, where he served for many years as city editor. In 1864, he and Joseph Howard, Jr., then also on the Eagle, devised a hoax document “purportedly from Lincoln,”which announced that “Grant’s Va. campaign had come to an unsuccessful end, set aside ‘a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer,’ and called for a draft of 400,000 men.”He and Howard were “confined in Fort Lafayette six months for participation in the forgery.”Later in 1867 he was elected to the New York Assembly but continued to serve as the Eagle’s Albany reporter during and after his term of office (Boatner, 412–13; “Death of F.A. Mallison,”New York Times, 23 June 77, 2).
Stanton delivered his own first lecture—“Who Killed Cock Robin?”—at the Brooklyn Institute on 27 May. His newspaper described his performance as “a humoristic success, displaying that pungent, epigrammatic wit in which the lec1turer is so conspicuous.... Meantime the community are just as wise as to ‘Who Killed Cock Robin’ as they were before the lecture.”A writer for the Brooklyn Programme, however, later termed the lecture a “failure”: it was “bewilderingly various, and the house was crowded, but Corry O’Lanus has not a voice to deliver it effectively. Hundreds went away disappointed at not being able to hear the man whose writings have made him so familiar to them”(“‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’—Solution by Corry O’Lanus—A Fine Audience,”Brooklyn Eagle, 28 May 67, 2; “Brooklyn Newspaper People,”Brooklyn Eagle, 11 July 67, 2, reprinting the Brooklyn Programme).
See the previous letter.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L2 , 45–47.
see Stanton Collection, p. 517.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.