6 December 1869 • New York, N.Y. (MS: ViU, UCCL 00383)
Mr. Sam’l L. Clemens,
Dear Sir,
As you will perhaps remember, the lecture committee of the “Plymouth Young People’s Association” desired to secure your services, for a lecture to be delivered, during the present month, in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. Your agent in Boston wrote us some two weeks ago, that you were to lecture in Brooklyn, Dec. 1st and again Dec 6th, and would prefer not to engage yourself for a third time. Seeing your card, however, in the Brooklyn evening papers of Saturday last, we thought you might, perhaps, be induced to change your answer previously given us.
If you can lecture for us any night of this or next week, we would be pleased to have you communicate with either of us, as below.
Yours truly,
Wm. F. West
31 Mercer St, near Grand
Horatio C. King
38 Wall St.
Lorin Palmer
170 Water St.Ⓐemendation
Committee. 1explanatory note
in available space:
I talked with Horatio C. King about this but I didn’t want to lecture in Brooklyn any moreⒶemendation, & so I told him I had no night open.
This is the very society I thought that infernal woman was representing. This is the Society I have long been wanting to talk for & King & I have often tried to fix a date & never could before.2explanatory note
But I’ve got enough. I never will lecture outside of New England again—& I never will lecture in Brooklyn at all. I’m just beat out with that most infernal infernal Mite Society. I published a card in the Brooklyn papers saying I would not be present at the Brooklyn Atheneum to-night.3explanatory note I am to blame from the very start—& nobody else. I have done all this on my own responsibility—I shoulder it all.
Suspend judgment, Redpath, till you see me. We were both mistaken about that Miss Wason’s Mite Society. If she writes complainingly to you, tell her I you are authorized by me to pay the expense she has been at if it is not over fifty dollars—& that is all the reparation you know how to make. {She did no advertising, & that was one thing I was so outrageously mad about. She put in one square (marked eod “>e ie. “every other day”) in the least circulated Brooklyn paper, & not a line in any other—& th she made that ad. read as if I was talking on my own hook & for no society—a public independent mountebank in an unused barn of a theatre up a back street.} Excuse me from talking in any such place.4explanatory note
Snowing & blowing—this is the worst night you ever saw—I am glad I just saved myself.
The lecture invitation, including the signatures, is in a single hand, probably William F. West’s. West and Lorin Palmer, like Horatio C. King, were members of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church—since 1865 and 1859, respectively. The addresses given here were business locations. Palmer was a New York tobacconist, in partnership with Amasa H. Scoville; West was a New York importer, in partnership with William S. Field (Noyes L. Thompson, 246, 250; Wilson 1869, 353, 858, 859, 994, 1167).
One such attempt had come early in 1869 (see 13 Mar 69 to King and Howardclick to open link). A lecture itinerary prepared for Clemens on 25 November 1869 by George L. Fall—“Mark Twain’s Engagements from Dec 1st 1869” (James Redpath Letterpress Book, 481, IaU)—had included a 6 December lecture at Plymouth Church. In requesting to speak for S. E. Wasson on that date (see the preceding letter, n. 3), Clemens had mistakenly assumed that she represented the Plymouth Young People’s Association. Therefore when he received Fall’s 29 November revised itinerary, which replaced the Plymouth Church engagement with the lecture for Wasson, he was unaware that anything was amiss (see 29 Nov 69 to OLLclick to open link).
The only version of Clemens’s “card” that has been recovered is his 3 December letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.
The Brooklyn Atheneum, on the corner of Atlantic and Clinton streets, reportedly was “a literary institution, containing a fine library, reading-room, lecture-room, &c. . . . It is a handsome brick building, with stone facings” (James Miller, 112–13). The offending advertisement of Clemens’s scheduled lecture there has not been identified, but it was not the only notice that S. E. Wasson placed. The Brooklyn Eagle, the borough’s most influential paper, carried at least one advertisement (“Lectures,” 2 Dec 69, 1). And the Brooklyn Union, which also had a large circulation, printed at least one announcement (“Amusements,” 4 Dec 69, 2). Neither paper identified the organization that Wasson represented, however (Rowell, 65).
MS, on a letter from the lecture committee of the Plymouth Young People’s Association of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L3 , 419–421; Anderson Auction Company, lot 181, excerpts.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.