Everett House,1
N. Y. Dec. 10.
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Dear Folks—
I didn’t move to the Metropolitan—shall when next I come to town. I ought to write you fully, now, but can’t—am just ready to leave the city for Norwich, N. Y., Fort Plain, N. Y. & Scranton, Pa—all these are before 20th Dec. Then I begin at Detroit, Mich, Dec. 22 & talk nearly every night for some time, through the West. Shan’t get a chance to go to St Louis—lecture engagements interfere.
I could not write you last night—was tired out. Had not slept for 36 hours. Went over in the evening & lectured in Newark (most superb success I ever achieved)—then returned here at midnight & had to stand around the ferry house twenty minutes before I could get a carriage, & so got chilled through. Couldn’t write—can’t now. Good-bye. Love to all. When you write, address letter simply to “Mark Twain, Care Lecture Committee”—no use for both names—my own is little known. I could have cleared ten thousand dollars this lecture season if I had entered the field before the various lecture courses were filled. As it is, I shall not clear more than $2,000, if so much.2
Always Yrs
Sam.
The little town is Stamford—2 hours from New York. I will think of the Western New York towns.3
Explanatory Notes
Front of the advertising folder on whose three blank sides Clemens wrote his letter of 10 December 1868 to his
family. Courtesy Vassar College Library (NPV).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 1
This letter was written on the three blank sides of a folder announcing a bankruptcy sale at John A. Reed’s
“Diamond Parlor,” a jewelry store at 791 Broadway, six blocks south of the Everett House. The sale
began on 7 December and continued for several days (Wilson, 1867,
849; “A Large Sale of Diamonds and Other Gems,” New York Evening Post, 11 Dec
68, 2).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
Clemens would have had to lecture well over a hundred times during the four-month lecture season, at $100 per
lecture, in order to “clear” $10,000. He actually made about forty appearances between
November and March. In June 1869 he claimed to have made $8,000 or $9,000 from lecturing during the
previous fourteen months, of which only $3,600 was still in the bank, because his “expenses were
something frightful during the winter” (SLC to JLC and family, 4 June 69, NPV, MTL, 1:158).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 3
Clemens’s mother and sister had expressed an interest in moving from St. Louis to some smaller, eastern town.
Clemens had evidently praised (but not identified) Stamford, Connecticut, through which he had passed several times on the
train between New York and Hartford. In April 1870 the Moffett household (including Clemens’s mother) moved to
Fredonia, New York, a small town near Lake Erie, chosen because “Uncle Sam lectured there [in January
1870] and was struck by the intelligence of the audience” (SLC to OC, 21 Apr 70, CU-MARK; MTBus, 103; “From Dunkirk,” Buffalo Express, 24 Jan 70, 4).
Source text(s):MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV). This letter is written on the three blank sides of the advertising folder shown in the illustration below.
Previous publication:
L2, 324–325; MTBus, 102–3, with omissions.
Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 512–14.
