To Thomas W. Knox
10 September 1873 • London, England
(MS: IGK, UCCL 04137)

The Langham Hotel
London, Sept. 10.

Dear Knox:1

God bless your heart, I have a wife with me; & a baby; & a nurse; I have been here 4 months; I have already spent [ten ]thousand dollars—& the end is not yet! Is it to such a man that you blandly recommend Vienna?2 Shall I spend my remaining two months over there in that expensive Empire & return to my home an imposing pecuniary [ruin? ]But I know you will excuse me. No, Knox, I shall stay right here in this hostelry till Oct 24.

Oh, no, my hands are full. We are building a house in America, & London is a good enough place to buy little odds & ends in for it, & so I have sent for more money & am going to [continue ]to collect the odds & ends calmly & with courage.

Many thanks for the speech.3 It is a mighty good one. The [ unl underlined ]remarks were some which I was about to make, once, but was interrupted.

I would like to write something for that Lotos book, but I can’t do it, because I am just as busy as I can be, on work that must be done & cannot be avoided by any subterfuge. Therefore she must go to press without me.4

Come, now, when shall we see you here?

Truly Yrs

Samℓ. L. Clemens

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 Thomas W. Knox (1835–96)—a traveler, journalist, and author—was born in New Hampshire. He first worked as a teacher, but in 1860, after gold was discovered in Colorado, he went to Denver, where he worked on the News. He served as a volunteer aide during the Civil War, and also corresponded for the New York Herald. In 1866 he traveled five thousand miles by sledge and wagon across Siberia, in the employ of the Herald, with an American company that was establishing a telegraph line on behalf of the Russian government. His Herald letters formed the basis of his book Overland through Asia (1870), published by the American Publishing Company. In later years he produced nearly forty travel books for boys, as well as several biographies.

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2 Knox’s letter is not known to survive.

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3 Unidentified.

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4 Knox, a director of the Lotos Club had evidently asked Clemens to write something for an anthology entitled Lotos Leaves, currently being prepared by club members John Brougham and John Elderkin. In spite of Clemens’s refusal here, he ultimately contributed “An Encounter with an Interviewer” to the volume, which issued in November 1874 and included articles by Knox and Andrews as well (see the previous letter; Elderkin, 23; Brougham and Elderkin, 27–32, 103–9, 263–75).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Special Collections and Archives, Knox College Library, Galesburg, Illinois (IGK).

Previous publication: L5, 435–436.

Provenance:The MS was owned by George Steele Seymour (1878–1945), whose papers were donated to IGK in 1952 by the Bookfellow Foundation.

Emendations and textual notes:

ten • ten ten [corrected miswriting]

ruin? • ruin? ruin? [corrected miswriting]

continue • [‘nu’ conflated]

unl underlined • unlderlined