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

To Olivia L. Clemens
22 September 1872 • London, England
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00810)

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London, Sept. 22.

Livy darling, I am making tolerably fair progress, & am at last getting my [sight-seeing] systematized. I am running the legs off myself, but tomorrow & next day I am going to devote to my diary. It will bring me up a good long way.

I have been carrying English paper money loosely in my pocket, just as I always did with greenbacks, & I have come to grief. I find I have lost it all out, some time or other, don’t know when—only noticed it to-day. Lost anywhere from £30 to £40.1 Stupid business.

Published that blast at Hotten yesterday. I met Mrs. George Turner & Nellie on the stairs yesterday—wasn’t expecting to see them here.2

This is no worn-out field. I can write up some of these things in a more different way than they have been written before.

Made a speech at the Savage Club last night. Had a very good time there.3

Welly-well-well, I v wish you were here instead of half a world away, [sweetheart.] Tell me how you are. I love you Livy darling, I do [assure] you, with all my heart.

Samℓ

[in ink:] Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor Forest & Hawthorne | Hartford | Conn. [in upper left corner:] U.S. of America. | [flourish] [on flap:] slc [postmarked:] [london • w 6] sp23 72 [and] [ new york oct 5 paid] all

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 About one hundred fifty to two hundred dollars. Clemens recalled this incident in 1907, mistakenly placing the dinner within a day or two of his arrival in England:

We broke up at two in the morning; then I missed my money—five 5-pound notes, new and white and crisp, after the cleanly fashion that prevails there. Everybody hunted for the money but failed to find it. How it could have gotten out of my trousers-pocket was a mystery. . . . After I had gone to bed in the Langham hotel I found that a single pair of candles did not furnish enough light to read by with comfort, and so I rang, in order that I might order thirty-five more, for I was in a prodigal frame of mind on account of the evening’s felicities. The servant filled my order, then he proposed to carry away my clothes and polish them with his brush. He emptied all the pockets, and among other things he fetched out those five 5-pound notes. Here was another mystery! . . . He said it was very simple; he got them out of the tail-coat pocket of my dress suit! I must have put them there myself and forgotten it. Yet I do not see how that could be, for as far as I could remember we had had nothing wet at the Savage Club but water. As far as I could remember. (SLC 1907, 4–5)

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2 Judge George Turner (1829–85), whom Clemens had known in Nevada in 1861 and 1862 when Turner was chief justice of the territory, was visiting London with his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Nellie. Since the mid-1860s he had been practicing law in San Francisco (L1, 128–29 n. 2; “Suicide of George Turner,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 13 Aug 85, 1). Clemens noted in his English journal that “Judge Turner & family . . . hailed me from a box in the Lyceum theatre” (see Mark Twain’s 1872 English Journals). And in mid-October he called on the Turners, where he met his old friend and fellow writer J. Ross Browne. Browne wrote to his wife on 16 October, “I met Mark Twain a day or two ago at Judge Turner’s. He is just the same dry, quaint old Twain we knew in Washington. I believe he is writing a book over here. He made plenty of money on his other books—some of it on mine” (Browne, 399; L2, 230–31 n. 7). Browne evidently believed that The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It had been modeled on his own travel writings, such as Yusef (1853) and Adventures in Apache Country (1869), which had many of the same “tricks of humor” and “journalistic appeals” as Clemens’s works, but had received far less recognition (Blair, 158). Joaquin Miller, for example, believed that Browne had been a strong influence on Clemens, asserting that “it is clear to the most casual reader that if there had been no Yusef there would have been no Innocents Abroad” (quoted in Browne, xix).

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3 See the next two letters. The Savage Club was founded in 1857 as a private but informal “place of reunion” for a “little band of authors, journalists, and artists” (Watson, 17). Moncure Conway, in a letter to the Cincinnati Commercial, explained that

no man can belong to it who has not produced some successful work in art or literature, or gained some success on the stage, and the number of these is limited to a hundred. Membership of the Savage Club has been vainly sought by Lords who had done nothing. The members dine together every Saturday at a table d’hôte, the hour being fixed at five, so that the actors and others may repair to the theaters. (Conway 1872)

Some believed that the club took its name from poet and playwright Richard Savage (d. 1743), whose claim of illegitimate birth, maternal ill-treatment, and subsequent poverty (made famous in an account by Samuel Johnson) are now considered apocryphal. Journalist and novelist George Augustus Sala, on the other hand, asserted that “we dubbed ourselves Savages for mere fun” and “practised a shrill shriek or war-whoop, which was given in unison at stated intervals” (Watson, 21).

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, 169–170; LLMT, 178.

glyph Provenance:see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

sight-seeing • sight-|seeing

sweetheart • sweet-|heart

assure • assure assure

london w 6 • [ white diamond ] ondon w [6] [badly inked]

new york oct 5 paid • [ white diamond ] ew [y]ork [] t 5 [] aid [badly inked]