25? September 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (Boston Globe, 29 Sept 74, UCCL 01135)
Your offer of $30,000 to lecture fifty nights does not tempt me. I have run about the world long enough. I mean to live & Ⓐemendation die at home, now, if I starve at it. I love you, but I cannot lecture any more.1explanatory note
See 23 Feb 74 to Redpath (2nd), n. 1click to open link. The earliest identified printing of this letter was in the Boston Globe on 29 September. The paper noted, “Mark Twain thus crusheth the hopes of lecture managers in a letter to Mr. Redpath” (“Notes and Extracts,” 4). Redpath’s offer may have been part of the “accumulated correspondence of 3 weeks” that Clemens reported in his 25 September letter to Seaver. If he wrote this refusal around that date it would have reached Redpath in time for publication in the Globe. Clemens had cards printed to use in declining lecture invitations for the 1874–75 season. None has been recovered, but the text survives on the back of an unrelated letter: see 19 or 20 Nov 74 to Parishclick to open link.
“Notes and Extracts,” Boston Globe, 29 Sept 74, 4. Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Fogler Library, University of Maine, Orono (MeU).
L6 , 246–247; “Lyceum Notes,” Boston Advertiser, 30 Sept 74, 1; “Personal Gossip,” Hartford Courant, 1 Oct 74, 1; “Personal,” New York Evening Post, 2 Oct 74, 2; “Minor Items,” Hartford Times, 8 Oct 74, 2; “Personal,” Harper’s Weekly 18 (24 Oct 74): 875.