To Mary Mason Fairbanks
13 February 1872 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: CSmH, UCCL 00725)

Hartford 13th.

Dear Mother—

At last I am through with the most detestable lecture campai[g]n that ever was—a campaign which was one eternal worry with contriving new lectures & being dissatisfied with them. I think I built & delivered 6 different lectures during the season1—& as I lectured 6 nights in the week & never used notes, you may fancy what a fatiguing, sleepy crusade it was. My last effort suited them in New York, & so I come out satisfactorily at the very fag-end of the course. Pity but it could have happened sooner.

The building of a new lecture robbed me of my visit to you, upon which I had long been calculating. But there was no help for it. I worked all night at Erie, & all next day, & still wrote by candle-light from Erie to Toledo in the cars & got through at midnight—but was so killed up that I had to fall back on my old lecture for a night or two.2 And then after all, the Chicago Tribune printed my new speech in full & I had to sacrifice all my most of my sleeping time for 5 days & nights in the getting up of an entirely new lecture.

So you can see that letter writing has been among the impossibilities with me for the last four months. I have wanted to write you, many a time, but there wasn’t life enough in me for that or anything else. Under the circumstances, my conscience almost held me guiltless. When you get into the lecture field you will appreciate these hardships; but until that time I fear you will only laugh at them.

I lectured eleven or [twelve] thousand dollars’ worth, paid off all my debts, squandered no end of money, & came out of the campaign with less than $1500 to show for all that work & misery.3 I ain’t going to ever lecture any more—unless I get in debt again. Would you?

{I killed a man this morning. He asked me when my book was coming out.}4

Our baby is flourishing wonderfully. He is as white as snow, but [ seel seems] entirely healthy., & is very [fatt ] & chubby, & always cheerful & happy-hearted—can say “Pa” & knows enough to indicate which parent he means by it (which is Margaret the nurse.)5 He can’t walk, though 16 months old; but that is not backwardness of development physically, but precocity of [ del development] intellectually, so to speak, since it is development of inherited indolence, acquired from his father—(indolence is an intellectual faculty I believe?)

Livy is doing finely—getting a little bit stronger all the time. She is taking German lessons from an [Irishwoman] (the party who does our washing)6—& she drives out without counting the miles. So, bodily & mentally she is growing.

We have the Spaulding girls with us from Elmira, & also the Gleasons from the Water Cure.7 I wish we had you & your tribe.

We are to go to Elmira early in March & stay 2 months—& then we not only hope to see you there, but bring you here with us when we return.8 We would go to see you, but our servants will not permit us to be absent more than 2 months. They have so signified.9

Love to the household. Do you forgive

Yr eldest

Samℓ ?

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens actually delivered five “different lectures,” if the three versions of “Roughing It” are counted (see 2 Jan 72 to Redpath, nn. 1, 2). In June 1871, before the season even began, he had written and discarded two additional lectures: “An Appeal in behalf of Extending the Suffrage to Boys” and “D. L. H.” (L4, 398, 402 n. 12, 413, 414).

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2 Clemens had intended to spend Sunday, 10 December, visiting the Fairbankses in Cleveland, on his way between Erie, Pennsylvania, and Toledo, Ohio (L4, 513).

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3 See 2 Jan 72 to Redpath, nn. 3, 4.

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4 Clemens was evidently impatient with the delay between the arrival of the first copies of Roughing It from the bindery, on 30 January, and the start of actual distribution, probably on 19 February, when a copy was deposited with the Library of Congress. Books were certainly available before 23 February, when the earliest known review appeared in the Utica (N. Y.) Morning Herald and Daily Gazette (1) (possibly written by Ezekiel D. Taylor, Jr., city editor of the newspaper and a cousin of Olivia’s [L4, 29 n. 4]). Publication was not officially announced until 29 February. Bliss may have delayed distribution out of a mistaken belief that he needed to wait for the second volume of the English edition to secure British copyright (RI 1993, 876–77).

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5 The nursemaid Margaret had served the Clemenses since 1871 in Buffalo, Elmira, and Hartford (L4, 412 n. 3, 504, 505 nn. 6, 8).

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6 Unidentified.

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7 The guests were Olivia’s girlhood friends Alice and Clara Spaulding, and the proprietors of the Elmira Water Cure, doctors Rachel Brooks Gleason and Silas O. Gleason, who, presumably, were taking an interest in Olivia’s pregnancy. Clara had arrived on 29 December; Clemens’s reference is the first and only indication of Alice’s presence (L3, 182–83 n. 6; L4, 335 n. 2, 523 n. 2).

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8 See 2? Mar 72 to Fairbanks, n. 2, for Fairbanks’s response to this plan.

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9 Besides Margaret, the identifiable servants included coachman Patrick McAleer and (probably) his wife, the former Mary Reagan of Elmira, and Ellen, the cook or housekeeper (15 May 72 to OC and MEC, nn. 4, 7–8; “Coachman Many Years for Mark Twain,” Hartford Courant, 26 Feb 1906, 6).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino (CSmH, call no. HM 14276).

Previous publication: L5, 43–45; MTMF, 158–61.

Provenance:see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

twelve • [‘we’ conflated]

seel seems • seelms

fatt • [‘t’ partly formed]

del development • delvelopment

Irishwoman • Irish- | woman