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

To T. B. Pugh
23 September 1872 • London, England
(MS: PHi, UCCL 00812)

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London, Sept. 23.

My Dear Pugh:

I snatch a moment, in a desperate hurry, to say that it won’t be possible for me to talk in the Star course.1 I have not even the vaguest notion of lecturing next winter—otherwise I would accept your proposition at once. Wishing you g every good fortune, I am

Ys Sincerely

Samℓ L. Clemens

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 Thomas B. Pugh’s “Star Course of Lectures and Concerts,” now beginning its fourth season, featured the most famous performers of the day, and was so popular that “every seat in the great Academy of Music” was filled “as soon as the tickets could possibly be passed out to the waiting crowd” (Pond, 543). Pugh arranged Clemens’s appearance in Philadelphia in December 1869, and again in November 1871. In January 1872 he had tried unsuccessfully to engage Clemens for yet another lecture there (L3, 415–16; L4, 239–40 n. 1, 399, 401 n. 4; see p. 31).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (PHi).

glyph Previous publication: L5, 178.

glyph Provenance:The MS is in the section of American Prose Writers in the wide-ranging Dreer Collection, donated to PHi by collector Ferdinand Julius Dreer (1812–1902). Dreer acquired the MS sometime before 1890 (Dreer, 1:123).