12 October 1873 • London, England (MS: CtHMTH, UCCL 00973)
No indeedy, mother dear, let’s not stop at the St. Nicholas if the new hotel is better—however, it don’t matter—suit yourselves about that.1explanatory note
I am lazying, to-day,Ⓐemendation in order to be rested for my first lecture tomorrowⒶemendation night,2explanatory note so I won’t write any more except to say that we love you & are ever so anxious to see you all.
This fragment was written on one side of a single leaf; the number of pages now missing is unknown. Mrs. Langdon and her son, Charles, were planning to meet the Clemenses in New York upon their arrival, and stay at least one night in the city with them. The “new hotel” was almost certainly the Windsor on Fifth Avenue, completed in early September at a cost of over one million dollars. It occupied the entire block from Forty-sixth to Forty-seventh Street, and was an elegant and dignified hotel “far removed from the bustling business centres” (“A New Hotel,” New York Times, 13 Aug 73, 2; OLC to Olivia Lewis Langdon, 31 Aug and 2 Sept 73, CtHMTH; OC to MEC, 3 Nov 73, CU-MARK). No record of the Langdons or the Clemenses has been found among the New York hotel arrivals for late October through early November.
The date of this letter, written on the back in an unknown hand, is confirmed by Clemens’s reference here to his first lecture, on 13 October. His lecture appearances on 13 through 18 October were very well received by audiences and critics alike. In a letter from London to the San Francisco Chronicle, Charles Warren Stoddard explained that Clemens
had but three days to acquaint the public with the fact that he would lecture, and for one week only. Nobody expected him to draw an audience unless he could be advertised at least three months in advance. He drew. He drew better every night. The week’s business was something astonishing. In this same hall Dickens used to read, and when Mark took it people were turned from the door on the last nights of his first week. (Stoddard 1874)
The London correspondent for the Buffalo Commercial summed up for his readers:
Mark Twain’s success as a lecturer has been distinct and perfect. The general opinion is that he is not so essentially original a humorist as Artemus Ward, but there are compensating qualities in his fun which render him as a whole as successful a “show"—he will pardon the expression—as was the poor fellow who came over here to make us laugh while he was coughing his way to an early grave. (Reprinted in the Elmira Advertiser, 7 Nov 73, 3)
On the morning after Clemens’s first appearance, the London Daily News called his lecture “an odd and amusing mixture of solid fact and humorous extravagance,” and concluded:
Mr. Twain is a comparatively young man, small in form and feature, dark-haired and dark complexioned. He has a good deal of the nasal tone of some portion of the Americans. He possesses all that insouciance and aplomb which is generally ascribed to American lecturers, and apparently came upon the stage assured of the success which he so speedily obtained. (14 Oct 73, 2, clipping in Scrapbook 12:9, CU-MARK)
Clemens’s friend George H. Fitzgibbon, the London correspondent for the Darlington Northern Echo, telegraphed his newspaper:
Anything more thoroughly original and enjoyable than Mark Twain’s lecture on our fellow savages of Sandwich Island has never been presented to the London public. If ever an entertainment had to be personally witnessed, to be fully enjoyed, it is Mark Twain’s lecturing. No amount of verbatim reporting or glowing description could give you a fair idea of the charmingly novel mannerism and marvellously happy story-telling ability of this singularly eccentric American genius. . . . Judging by the attendance, applause, and laughter, the lecture was a great success. (Fitzgibbon 1873)
The London Graphic noted that the
descriptions of the manners and customs of the natives were interspersed with various witticisms, which were heartily appreciated and loudly applauded. Mr. Twain evidently has “the art of putting things.” The lecture, which lasted rather more than an hour, . . . was listened to throughout with great interest. (18 Oct 73, 375)
And the London Examiner reported:
This week we have had in Mark Twain (Mr S. L. Clemens) a genuine specimen of the American humorous lecturer. Although some of the more essentially American allusions were barely appreciated by an English audience, Mark Twain’s dry manner, his admirable self-possession, and perfectly grave countenance formed a background that made the humorous portion of the lecture irresistible. Once or twice in the course of the evening the lecturer, partly on his credit as a man of humour and partly on the expectation that each sentence would prove to contain an artfully-hidden joke, was watched and listened to with almost breathless attention whilst he indulged in some rather bombastic prose-poetry descriptions of life in the islands that formed the subject of his lecture; and it was one of his boldest strokes to conclude, not with a quaint anecdote, but with one of those flowery performances that had been listened to in this way, and to make his exit in the most complete silence. (18 Oct 73, 10)
Favorable reviews also appeared in the London Morning Post, Times, Evening Echo, Standard, and Sportsman, as well as in several weeklies—the Observer, Cosmopolitan, Spectator, and Saturday Review, among others (Scrapbook 12:1, 7, 11, 13, 15, 19, 23, 25, 27, CU-MARK). Although Clemens was extremely gratified by his enthusiastic reception, he was probably not flattered by the remarks of a supercilious writer for the London Daily News, who called him “a leading professor” of “that school of jesting” that included humorists such as Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Josh Billings:
Fresh, original, and amusing this new kind of humor is; at its best, it is irresistible; even at its worst, it is popular. Its success here, as well as across the ocean, is beyond dispute. But we doubt whether it is destined to amuse the world for long; or whether anything more than ashes will be felt when its fire goes out.
This critic considered Bret Harte, however, to be “a true poet, ... the discoverer of a new world for literature,” and was also full of praise for James Russell Lowell, who
belongs decidedly to the brotherhood of the great humourists whose works are among the ornaments of literature and the reforming agencies of society. He is of kin to the genuine poets who were satirists as well; his humour is always refined by high culture, intensified by its tinge of pathos, and strengthened by manly purpose. (17 Oct 73, 5, clipping in Scrapbook 12:3, 5, CU-MARK)
MS, Mark Twain House, Hartford (CtHMTH).
L5 , 452–454.
donated to CtHMTH in 1962 or 1963 by Ida Langdon.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.