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

To William A. Seaver
6 March 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: WU, UCCL 01204)

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slc farmington avenue, hartford.

March 6.

My Dear Seaver:

We did the lecture last night, & snugly filled every seat in parquette, balcony & family circle, ‸& had some “standees,”‸ but we didn’t succeed in persuading twenty people to pay a dollar for a high-backed pine bench away up in the sky [gallery. ] ‸—& we had no cheaper tickets.‸ However, we had the biggest audience Hartford has seen this year. Mr. Rathbun (who was “business” man) told me last night as I left the Opera house that the clear gains seemed to be $1,233. ‸Several of us paid all the expenses out of ‸our‸ private pockets.‸ I guess that is a pretty good ‸result‸ for these stagnant times—especially as it was all the people that could get into the house ‸(sky-parlor excepted)‸. We opened the box office last Tuesday morning, & I told my coachman to go down town & buy three seats for me. He was there at ten, & they showed him that the rush had come & gone ‸ & so ‸ & there wasn’t a ‸good‸ seat left. that was worth having. So we had to take a private box.1

Thus gratifyingly endeth the [earth‸ly‸ y ] lecturing career of yours truly.2

With deep & abiding affection.
Yours, old hoss,

Mark.

Is John Hay living? Love to him.3

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The Hartford Courant reported that Clemens’s “Roughing It” lecture on 5 March was attended by “one of the largest and finest audiences of the season.” The newspaper noted that the lecture, “rewritten for this occasion,” had been “delivered night after night, and week after week, in London, to immense audiences composed of the best people in the kingdom”:

The lecturer began by a description of the overland trip to Nevada, in a stage coach, then dwelt at length upon the characteristics of the mountainous region and the plains, narrating some personal experiences at Virginia City, including a duel, and giving a graphic picture of the lawless state of society there eleven or twelve years ago. He concluded with some facts about the famous bonanza of the Comstock lode, and an irresistibly funny story of his experiences with a Mexican “plug.” The lecture abounded in graphic description and amusing anecdote, and was delivered in the remarkably comical manner which is peculiar to Mark Twain. No lecture that we have ever heard has been more provocative of mirth. The audience were kept the whole evening in one perpetual burst of laughter. No newspaper report could begin to reproduce its genuine and wholesome humor, or indicate how extraordinarily funny were some of its incidents. The lecture is without doubt the best Mr. Clemens has yet delivered in this city. The audience testified their approbation by frequent and hearty applause. . . . The people of Hartford owe Mr. Clemens the heartiest thanks for his generosity in thus contributing to the relief of the city’s poor. Colt’s band are also entitled to thanks for volunteering their services, as also Mr. Rathbun for his excellent management of the affair. The receipts were over $1200, all of which will be placed in Father Hawley’s hands for the benefit of his “clients” as Mr. Clemens calls them. (Hartford Courant: “Mark Twain To-Night,” 5 Mar 75, 2; “Mark Twain’s Lecture,” 6 Mar 75, 1)

Twichell, who attended with his wife, Harmony, was more discriminating in his praise, remarking in his journal: “M. T. lectured in the Opera House for the city poor. $1200.— H and I sat in the box with Livy. The subject was ‘Nevada’—a pretty fair performance for a lecture, but not at all equal to what he commonly does in private talk” (Twichell, 1:63). Julius G. Rathbun was a partner, with Julius A. Case, in Case and Rathbun, Hartford shirt manufacturers (Geer 1874, 45, 120). Seaver printed a report of the lecture in his “Personal” column in Harper’s Bazar for 3 April (Seaver 1875; see William Seaver’s Squibs about Clemens).

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2 Just over a month later Clemens gave another benefit performance. On 7 April, accompanied by Twichell, he visited the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane, on Washington Street in Hartford. There, Twichell noted in his journal, he “delivered to a hall full of patients and visitors his ‘Nevada’ Lecture—with great success.” Twichell pasted in the journal the prompt notes that Clemens titled “Notes of a Lecture on ‘Pioneer Times on the Silver Frontier.’ By Mark Twain.” (Twichell, 1:80–81; Geer 1874, 293). They are reproduced on p. 405. No newspaper account of the lecture has been found, but the icons can be identified with passages in Roughing It or glossed by newspaper notices of previous performances (citations to RI 1993 are provided here only for icons not already identified in Clemens’s letter of 9 January 1874 to Stoddard). Reading from top to bottom in the left-hand column: Mono Lake and its belt of flies, evidently canceled; the duel between rival newspaper editors; alkali dust; sagebrush; the exorbitant cost of hay; the “always level full” Nevada “sink,” with its feeder river; the Washoe Zephyr, here with two hats blowing sideways in it. And from top to bottom in the right-hand column: the “jackass rabbit”; Indians; the lack of lightning and dew; a tombstone representing the “first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery,” or the private graveyards said to be kept by Nevada desperadoes (318, 322); the “Map of Toll-Roads” (173); and the Mexican plug.

Notes for Clemens’s lecture of 7 April 1875. See 6 Mar 75 to Seaver, n. 2. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (CtY-BR).

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3 Hay had not answered a letter from Clemens, probably written around 12, but no later than 20, February, inviting him along on the since abandoned Mississippi River trip. He finally responded (CU-MARK):

UCLC32121

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Clemens noted on the envelope, “‸Col.‸ John Hay’s first baby.” This was Helen Hay (d. 1944) (Gale, 22).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).

glyph Previous publication: L6, 402–5.

glyph Provenance:Norman D. Bassett, a Madison alumnus, owned the MS by October 1942. He donated his Mark Twain collection to WU on 9 July 1955.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

gallery. • [deletion implied]

earth‸ly‸ y • [‘ly’ written over conflated ‘hy’]