20 January 1873 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: phi, UCCL 00860)
Private.
It will be better for you & better for the Star lecturers when you get entirely disgusted witte withⒶemendation the present stupid system & carry out your design idea which you mentioned to me last year1explanatory note —viz., taking all the stars into your own hands exclusively & running them yourself in every big city, placing tickets at $1, & giving the said stars about one-third of the gross proceeds—& never exhibiting in second-rate cities except to break journeys. You needn’t go 100 miles west of the Atlantic seaboard to make that profitable. There isn’t pluck enough in the whole gang of lecture bureausx to run a one-horse circus. TheyⒶemendation all mean well enough; but that isn’t sufficient. I talk Sandwich Islands once or twice in N. Y. about Feb. 1; Beecher talks once, Gough once.2explanatory note Why such a menagerie as we 3, ought to run ten nights each in N. Y. You could talk 3 such cards there that long & charge a dollar a head & make the very children cry for tickets. Under such circumstances would any of us care what became of the stupid absurdity that at present goes under the name of the lecture “system?” Hardly. We never would talk outside of a big city, because we’d never have any need to. And you bet your life the thing a man would be proudest of & put on the most frills about, would be, that he “belonged to Pugh’s Menagerie.” And the very first time you forgot yourself & tried to ring in an Olive Logan or Lilian Edgarton on the public as being anything else but shameless intruders upon the platform & the exquisitely commonplace at that, all your elephants would hoist their trumpets into the air & vamos the ranche!3explanatory note Just think how you could lay out those seven 50- 30-cent courses in Boston by charging a dollar a head & trotting out your swell literary giraffes & Cardiff Giants one after the other!—4explanatory note No use to make them promise they wouldn’t leave you for other agents—ha, you couldn’t hire them to do it! I’m sound on this question.
Evidently in Baltimore on 23 January 1872 (see p. 31).
Clemens was still negotiating the dates of his appearances for the Mercantile Library, which also sponsored Henry Ward Beecher’s talk on “The Unconscious Influence of Democratic Principles” at Steinway Hall on 20 January, and John B. Gough’s “rewritten lecture called ‘Will It Pay?’” scheduled for 27 January (Gough failed to appear). Gough’s lecture was advertised on 20 January as the “concluding Lecture of the Mercantile Library Course” (“Lectures and Meetings,” New York Tribune, 20 Jan 73, 3, and 27 Jan 73, 8; “Personal,” Hartford Courant, 29 Jan 73, 2).
Olive Logan, an author and former actress, was one of the most popular women lecturers, reputedly earning as much as fifteen thousand dollars a year on the platform. On 18 December 1872 she lectured on “Successful People” at Association Hall in New York. In 1906 Clemens claimed that unlike the “Anna Dickinson kind” of female lecturer, who “had something to say; and could say it well,” Logan represented “a new kind of female lecturer,” who “hadn’t anything to say, and couldn’t have said it if they had had anything to say; women who invaded the platform to show their clothes. They were living fashion-plates” (AD, 11 Apr 1906, CU-MARK). Another of the “new kind” of lecturer was the “glamorous” Lillian S. Edgarton, the “pearl of the platform,” who appeared in the Mercantile Library course at Steinway Hall on 6 January 1873, speaking on “Gossip—Its Causes and Cure” ( L4 , 9 n. 3; NCAB , 6:276; Eubank, 136; “Other Lectures,” New York Tribune, 18 Dec 72, 5; “Amusements,” New York Times, 6 Jan 73, 7; Odell, 9:119, 335; Fatout 1960, 98, 101, 147).
In February 1872 P. T. Barnum announced his ownership of the “only living giraffes on this continent, having just succeeded in landing two of these beautiful creatures in good condition” (“New-York City,” New York Tribune, 2 Feb 72, 8). The Cardiff Giant, a three-thousand-pound human figure carved from gypsum, was secretly buried and then “discovered” in 1869 on a farm near Cardiff, New York, and subsequently exhibited as a “petrified man” until the hoax was discovered ( DAH , 1:313).
MS, Samuel M. Clement, Jr., Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (PHi).
L5 , 275–276.
donated to PHi in 1930 by Mrs. Samuel M. Clement, Jr.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.