24 November 1867 • Washington, D.C. (MS: Craven, UCCL 00158)
‸begin insertion spanP.S.—Mum, my boy, about the contents. My address is 224 F, cor. 14th.
‸end insertion span
Dog-gone it, I wrote you from Naples, four years ago, that I wanted to go free of lecturing this season.—you know that, you old rip.1explanatory note In Ⓐemendationthe spring I mean to talk 3 nights in San Francisco, 1 in Sacramento & maybe 1 in Virginia—there is $2,000 to $3,000 in gold—you are safe—isn’t that enough?
I am not playing my hand thoughtlessly. If I lecture now, I shall have to do it solely on the Quaker City’s fame, & take many, very many chances—chances that might utterly damn me. If I stay here all winter & keep on hanging out my sign in the Tribune & getting well acquainted with great dignitaries to introduce my meⒶemendation, like Gov. Nye,2explanatory note I can lecture next season on my own reputation, to 100 houses, & houses that will be readier to accept me without criticism than they are now.
I have to make a bran new start in the lecturing business, & I don’t mean to do it in Tuttletown, Ark., or Baldwinsville, Michigan, either. I won’t start in the provinces, Gov. I won’t do it. You have been a bully good friend to me, & I don’t intend you shall suffer for it long, but you must suffer for it a while. There is no question about that. I have solemnly yielded up my liberty for a whole session of c Congress. Ⓐemendation—enrolled my name on the regular Tribune staff, made the Tribune bureau here my headquarters, taken correspondences for two other papers & one magazine,3explanatory note & started resolutely in to make a lecturing reputation that shall stand fire & enable me to succeed without the kind assistance of the public schools.4explanatory note
Tell those 18 Societies I am truly & sincerely obliged for the compliment they have paid me, but I am already clerk of a Senate Committee & proxy for a Ch Ⓐemendationmember of it & must stand my ground & vote on acceptance or rejection of reports.5explanatory note I don’t have a devilish thing to do, & six dollars a day for that in the hand is better than eighteen hundred in “the bush.”
It would take a month to do 18 lectures—board and traveling expenses $400.—$400 Ⓐemendationfor you—total $800—profit $1,000—next six months, nothing to do.6explanatory note Here, in the next six months I will make twice that, & a reputation that will not be as precarious a capital as it is now. See it? Write me, and forgive me, & be not hard upon me, but good & charitable.Ⓐemendation
The two “correspondences” were for the San Francisco Alta California and the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Clemens wrote his first Enterprise letter on 4 December (SLC 1867). His first Alta letter was dated 10 December and published on 15 January (SLC 1868), a week after the Alta editors printed the following premature announcement:
We publish to-day the first of a series of letters to be written to the Alta by “Mark Twain,” from the other side of the continent. Our readers will be glad to know that Mark’s inimitable letters from the Holy Land are not yet exhausted, but a number are on the way, and will be published hereafter, from time to time, without any reference to the new series of letters, with which they have no necessary connection. “Mark Twain’s” Letters from “The Holy Land” have attracted great attention throughout the country, and their termination will be regarded with real regret by many thousand readers. (“Editorial Notes,” 8 Jan 68, 2)
In addition to these correspondences, Clemens is known to have sent a letter to the Washington Evening Star dated 14 December, and one to the New York Citizen dated 15 December (SLC 1867, SLC 1867). The “one magazine” commitment was to the Galaxy, which published “General Washington’s Negro Body-Servant: A Biographical Sketch” in its February 1868 issue, and therefore must have received Clemens’s manuscript in December (SLC 1868). All of this work was in addition to at least three “occasional” contributions to the Tribune (SLC 1867, SLC 1868, SLC 1868).
See p. 42.
No record has been found of Clemens’s having officially clerked for a Senate committee. Senator Stewart served on four committees at this time—Judiciary, Public Lands, Pacific Railroad, and Mines and Mining—and the possibility remains that Clemens served as a clerk for one of these without creating an official record of his service (Senate 1868, 2–3).
The eighteen “Societies” from which Fuller had evidently forwarded a lecture-tour offer were presumably members of the Associated Western Literary Societies (the earlier offers from Edwin Lee Brown were for a three-month tour, roughly fifty lectures: see 8 June 67 to McCombclick to open link and 7 Aug 67 to Fullerclick to open link). The association, founded in 1864 as an alliance of more than one hundred lyceums in towns ranging from western Pennsylvania to Iowa, furnished its member societies, for annual dues of twenty dollars, the names of available speakers with their topics and fees (Eubank, 76–81; Hoeltje, 125–31). It was probably Fuller who passed on the news of this lecture offer to the New York Evening Telegram, which noted on 29 November, “‘Mark Twain’ has already received and declined, since his return from abroad, eighteen offers to lecture for the round sum of eighteen hundred dollars. He prefers the quiet life of private secretary to an United States Senator” (”Personalities,” 2).
MS, collection of Mrs. Robin Craven.
L2 , 111–113; AAA/Anderson Galleries 1934, lot 121, excerpt; Davis 1954, excerpt.
Mrs. Craven provided CU-MARK with a photocopy of the MS on 21 April 1969. An Ayer transcription of this letter is at WU; see Brownell Collection, pp. 509–11.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.