Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Unidentified
22 October 1873 • SS Batavia at Queenstown, Ireland
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00977)

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cunard steam ship batavia

At Sea, Oct. 30 ‸22‸.1

Dear Sir:

Thanks for the books & the MS. Shall recreate with them on shipboard. I wish I could tell you about the Modoc man, but I cannot. I don’t know as much about those people as Joaquin Miller.2 All is hurry here.—In great haste,

Ys Truly

Samℓ. L. Clemens.

[letter docketed:] Mark Twain

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 This puzzling correction may have resulted from Clemens’s haste in dispatching the letter at Queenstown, as the Batavia prepared to begin its Atlantic crossing, having left Liverpool the previous day. On 20 October, the night before his departure, Clemens gave a final performance of his Sandwich Islands lecture to an enthusiastic Liverpool audience. The Liverpool Mercury declared that Clemens’s writings “fairly entitled him to rank amongst the keenest and most original of American humorists,” and described his lecture as

racy in its humour, artistic and powerful in its word painting, but somewhat deficient in arrangement. . . . His word-painting of a volcanic eruption was most striking, and at the end of his highly poetical peroration the audience cheered him to the echo, and recalled him to the platform. (“Mark Twain on the Sandwich Island Savages,” 21 Oct 73, clipping in Scrapbook 12:29, 31, CU-MARK)

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2 See 6 July 73 to Fairbanks, n. 13.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

glyph Previous publication: L5, 458.

glyph Provenance:donated to CU-MARK in 1977. See Appert Collection in Description of Provenance.