14 July 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (Will M. Clemens 1900, 28, UCCL 00637)
Don’t lecture me at Jamestown, N. Y., unless Providence compels you. I suppose all lecturers hate that place.1explanatory note
Shall be in Hartford 3 or 4 weeks hence &Ⓐemendation then I shall run up & bum around with you a day or two if you ain’t busy.2explanatory note
Clemens’s 21 January 1870 lecture in Jamestown had come under attack as part of a debate over which lecturers and lecture topics were appropriate, and how lecturers and lecture committees should be treated in the press (20 Feb 70 to Langdon, n. 2click to open link). Moreover, Clemens was dissatisfied with his performance, which he later characterized as “a poor lecture, & the first delivered poorly delivered; for I was fagged with railway travel” (SLC 1886). Redpath did not schedule a Jamestown lecture for 1871–72.
Clemens spent most of the month of August in Hartford, but evidently did not go to Boston.
Will M. Clemens 1900, 28.
L4 , 435–436; Horner, 167–68; “Letters to James Redpath,” Mark Twain Quarterly 5 (Winter–Spring 1942): 20.