Dictated after an interval of sixⒶtextual note weeks—The journey to England on the Minneapolis Ⓐtextual note; events that transpired on board, and the English welcome by the stevedores.
There has been an interval of six weeks. Originally I had intended to stay in England only ten or twelve days, but circumstances compelled me to add a fortnight to that. I sailed for London in the Minneapolis Ⓐtextual note on the 8th of June, and took with me as temporary [begin page 72] secretary and professional nurse Mr. AshcroftⒺexplanatory note—Ashcroft the IndelibleⒶtextual note. That name has grown out of an accident of speech. Ashcroft is a young business man and knows how to do everything that I am incapable of doing, and whatever he undertakes to do he does promptly and in the best and most effective way; hence he never fails, and cannot fail. I have long thought of him privately in my mind as Ashcroft the InfallibleⒶtextual note, but the first time that I tried to utter that phrase I made a mistake in the word and told Miss Lyon to call up Ashcroft the IndelibleⒶtextual note. That is, call him up on the telephone and place the pending impossibility in his hands and leave the result to him.Ⓐtextual note Ashcroft has remained Ashcroft the IndelibleⒶtextual note ever since.
We had a lazy, comfortable, homelike, nine-day passage, over smooth seas, with not enough motion in a thousand miles to make a baby sick. The ships of that line are very large and very steady, and most satisfactorily slow and deliberate. They have spacious decks, and every passenger has a deal more room than he needs; they are freight ships, and have accommodation for only a handful of passengers. This one was full, with only a hundred and fifty-four. Fifty-one of them were college girls, withⒶtextual note their protectors,Ⓐtextual note going out on vacation to study Europe. This was pleasant to me, who am rather abnormally partial to young girls. I took care of the most of these, and did it very well, as everybody conceded. The pick of the flock was a very pretty and very sweet child of seventeen who looked only fourteen, and who seemed only fourteen, and remained only fourteen to me to the end of the voyage. I selected her before we were out of sight of land, and borrowed her from her three elderly aunts and placed her at my side at the captain’s table, and from that time until the end of the voyage she had no occasion to miss her mother—if I do say it myself that shouldn’t. Her name was CarlottaⒺexplanatory note, but I changed it to Charley, which seemed to me to improve it. She was a gifted and cultivated little creature. On the last night out there was the usual concert in the dining roomⒶtextual note, for the benefit of the Seamen’s Hospital. Charley played a violin solo to admiration, and astonished everybody. She wasn’t much bigger than her fiddle, but she made it talk a moving and majestic language. I made a speech; other excellent people sang songs, and punished the piano. Rev. Dr. Patton, that verbal and intellectual wonder, twenty-five years President of Princeton University, conducted the concert, thenⒶtextual note finished his services with a brilliant exhibition of what a university president can do when he turns himself into an auctioneer. There was a jack-legged draughtsmanⒶtextual note on board who made some unimaginably poor caricatures of me on six post-cardsⒶtextual note; I autographed them, and Rev. Dr. Patton set himself the task of auctioneering off the six for eighty dollars. It furnished him a stubbornⒶtextual note job, but he is not of the easily discouraged kind and he stayed faithfully by his enterprise until he accomplished it. In my talk I departed from the humorousⒺexplanatory note for a while, and was greatly gratified with the result. I was expecting those people to cry, and they did. Afterward a deputation of ladies visited me on deck, and the spokeswoman said—
“We admired you before, but we love you now.”
I did not suspect that a note was struck then whose gracious music was to continue to fall upon my grateful ears day and night, unceasingly, through all my stay in England. It [begin page 73] made that journey of mine rich beyond expression in words. I am old, but I would repeat theⒶtextual note journey not merely once, but ten times, for the like compensation.
At the end of nine days we reached the dock at TilburyⒺexplanatory note, and the hearty and happy and memorable English welcome began. Who began it? The very people of all people in the world whom I would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class—grimy sons of labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the stevedores! They stood in a body on the dock and charged their masculine lungs, and gave me a welcome which went to the marrow of me.
Mr. Ashcroft] For Ralph W. Ashcroft, see “The Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” especially the editorial preface and the note at 331.40. Clemens, who had met Ashcroft through his investment in the Plasmon Company of America, asked him to be his traveling secretary on a trip to Egypt in October 1906. That trip was canceled; but Ashcroft, as an Englishman, was a natural choice to serve as secretary on the trip to England which followed in June–July 1907. In October, Clemens invited Ashcroft to come stay with him at Tuxedo Park, and he began to establish himself as part of the household (Lystra 2004, 117–19).
very sweet child of seventeen . . . Her name was Carlotta] Carlotta Welles (1889–1979), the daughter of Americans resident in Europe, was eighteen years old when Clemens met her aboard the SS Minneapolis. She was traveling, chaperoned by three teachers from her boarding school in Pennsylvania, to her parents’ house in France. Writing to Dixon Wecter in 1947, she recalled that, after Clemens invited her to sit with him at dinner, she “was forthwith installed with him and really spent every waking moment with him,” although Clemens’s attentions were not always welcome: “I used to get restless and chafed at times at being expected to sit quietly with him when my inclination was to race around.” She added:
I felt, in Mr. Clemens’ attitude toward me, something tender and very sad. He talked quite a bit about “Susy.” . . . There was a heart-broken quality about him but, as you know well, there were also effervescent spirits and at any moment, his eyes were ready to twinkle with mischief and out would come the most unexpected & picturesque remarks! (Carlotta Welles Briggs to Wecter, 4 Nov 1947, CU-MARK)
After Clemens’s return to America, a few letters passed between him and Carlotta, but they did not meet again in person (Schmidt 2009).
On the last night out there was the usual concert . . . In my talk I departed from the humorous] This concert, featuring music and recitations by passengers, was given in the saloon of the Minneapolis on the evening of 15 June 1907. Clemens’s talk for this concert was entitled in the concert program “A Page from My Autobiography”; Carlotta Welles recalled that “the night of the concert, his talk was based on pages from Susy’s diary, and he almost broke down” (Carlotta Welles Briggs to Wecter, 4 Nov 1947, CU-MARK). Proceeds from the auction of “unimaginably poor caricatures” benefited the Liverpool Seamen’s Orphanage, founded in 1868 to care for the children of sailors lost at sea. The master of ceremonies and auctioneer was the theologian Francis L. Patton (1843–1932), from 1888 to 1902 president of the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton University in 1896 (Leitch 1978, 354–57).
At the end of nine days we reached the dock at Tilbury] The Minneapolis reached Tilbury Docks, the principal port of London, at about 4 a.m. on 18 June. A special train took Clemens and Ashcroft to St. Pancras rail station in London, where Clemens spoke to journalists; he was then escorted to Brown’s Hotel by his friend of many years, the British librarian J. Y. W. MacAlister. Newspaper articles reporting Clemens’s arrival are reprinted in Mark Twain’s Four Weeks in England, 1907 by the late Edward Connery Lathem, to which these notes are greatly indebted (Lathem 2006, 15–22).
Source document.
TS1 Typescript, leaves numbered 2064–68, made from Hobby’s notes and revised.TS1, as revised by Clemens, is the only authoritative source for this dictation. Paine marked the text in pencil, abridging and revising it as if he were considering it for publication in MTA —suppressing Ashcroft’s name, for example—but it was not published.