slc
Langham Hotel,
London,
Dec. 30.
My Dear Mr. Fitz Gibbon:
After all, I find I am not going into the provinces—(I got the paragraph—many thanks.)1 Every hall & theatre is full of holiday shows. We can’t even get a church to talk in till near the end of January, & I can’t wait that long. My chief business here is already accomplished (Eng (getting English copyright on my novel), so there is nothing to keep me from sailing at once, if I chose.2 I lecture only 3 more times on British soil, & 3 nights in New York, & then I retire from the platform permanently.3 I [think ]I will try to eke out a meagre subsistence upon my permanent annual income of £8,000, & try to sit at home & in peace & do nothing. (Don’t tell anybody that.) But if there is a fool in the world, I think I am that person. A sensible man lectures only when butter & bread are scarce.
I am to appear on the scaffold 3 more times in England, as I remarked a moment ago—on the 8th of January at Leicester, & on the 9th & 10th at Liverpool—& then sail for home on the 13th in the Parthia.4 If you’ll only run over there, the first time you get a chance, I’ll treat you the best I know how, & give you the best bed in the house as long as you stay.
I was in Ventnor, Sunday, & hunted up Miss Florence.5 She is a most attractive & very natural & girlish sort of girl. (I hate artificial girls.) I saw all the family—exceedingly pleasant people they are, too.
Remember me kindly to Mrs. Fitz Gibbon & the family, & believe me—
Ys faithfully
Samℓ. L. Clemens.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Some day, but not just at present, I hope to write a
book about England, but it will hardly bear so broad a title as the
one suggested above. In such a book as that, I could not leave out
the manners & customs which obtain in an English
gentleman’s household without leaving out the most
interesting feature of the subject.
; They are
the next thing to perfection;
‸admirable;‸ yet I would shrink from
‸deliberately‸ describing them in a book, for I
w fear that such a course would be, after all, a
violation of the liberal
‸courteous‸ hospitality which furnished me the means of
doing it. There may be no serious indelicacy about eating a
gentleman’s bread & then printing an
appreciative & complimentary account of the ways of his
family, but still it is a thing which one naturally dislikes to do.
(Daley) In addition to the two pieces Clemens had probably
written in the winter of 1872–73 (see pp. 258–59),
he produced several manuscripts that originally could have been intended
for the book. Two of these, “Rogers” and
“Property in Opulent London,” were included in Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One,
where they were explicitly identified as “From the
Author’s Unpublished English Notes” (no such notes
appear in the surviving English journals) (SLC 1874, 13–16, 28–29;
Mark
Twain’s 1872 English Journals). Two others, “The ‘Blind
Letter’ Department, London P. O.” and
“‘Party Cries’ in Ireland,”
survive in manuscript (the first at CtY-BR and the second at ViU) and were published in Mark
Twain’s Sketches, New and Old (SLC 1875, 262–63, 279–82).
Clemens probably wrote the first of these shortly after visiting the
post office, either in the company of Edmund Yates or through an
introduction from him, since Yates had been head of the missing-letter
department for a decade before his resignation in 1872. This visit may
have taken place during the second half of June 1873, when Yates was in
or near London reporting on the shah (17 or 18 June 73 to
Young, n. 1). Clemens almost certainly wrote the second piece
in Belfast, between 28 August and 1 September 1873. One last manuscript,
“One Method of Teaching in England,” remained
unpublished: it was based on a visit Clemens made to an English school,
apparently with Stoddard, sometime between late November 1873 and
mid-January 1874. It includes a four-page introduction in
Clemens’s hand, together with thirteen pages of sample
student essays copied by Stoddard. Clemens included this piece in the
table of contents he drafted in February 1875 for Sketches, New and Old, but he later changed his mind and
deleted it (ET&S1, 623, 626; SLC 1873).
I regret having to inform you that the people of
the North of England and Scotland are doomed not to make the
personal acquaintance of “Mark
Twain’s” richly original humour. His agents
have been prowling about the country endeavouring to get a place
wherein he might lecture, and they report that every hall and
theatre in the country has been pre-engaged for holiday shows till
the end of January. “Mark Twain’s”
American engagements prevent him remaining so long in England. His
chief business in England was to get copyright for his novel. That
has been accomplished. As he cannot get any place in your
neighbourhood or in Scotland to lecture, all that remains for him is
to fulfil his remaining engagements. He sails for America in the Parthia on the 13th, and after lecturing
three times in New York, he retires to private life. He has made up
his mind, notwithstanding his splendid success, to never more appear
on what he calls the public scaffold. So well he may, being in the
enjoyment of a private annual income of 8,000l. The great surprise is that he ever bothered himself with
lecturing. (Fitzgibbon 1874)
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L5, 539–541; AAA/Anderson 1934, lot 130, excerpts; AAA/Anderson 1936, lot 127, excerpts.
Provenance:The MS was offered for sale in 1936 as part of the collection of Abel Cary
Thomas. By 1939 it was owned by businessman William T. H. Howe
(1874–1939); in 1940 Dr. A. A. Berg bought and donated the Howe
Collection to NN.
Emendations and textual notes:
think • thintk
