14 July 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (Will M. Clemens 1900, 28, UCCL 00637)
Don’t lecture me at Jamestown, N. Y., unless Providence compels you. I suppose all lecturers hate that place.1explanatory note
Shall be in Hartford 3 or 4 weeks hence &Ⓐemendation then I shall run up & bum around with you a day or two if you ain’t busy.2explanatory note
Clemens’s 21 January 1870 lecture in Jamestown had come under attack as part of a debate over which lecturers and lecture topics were appropriate, and how lecturers and lecture committees should be treated in the press (20 Feb 70 to Langdon, n. 2click to open link). Moreover, Clemens was dissatisfied with his performance, which he later characterized as “a poor lecture, & the first delivered poorly delivered; for I was fagged with railway travel” (SLC 1886). Redpath did not schedule a Jamestown lecture for 1871–72.
Clemens spent most of the month of August in Hartford, but evidently did not go to Boston.
References
- Clemens, Will M. “Mark Twain on the Lecture Platform.” Ainslee’s Magazine 6 (August): 25–32. 1900
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- Horner, Charles F. The Life of James Redpath and the Development of the Modern Lyceum. New York: Barse and Hopkins. 1926
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “Unmailed Answer.” MS of four pages. An undated letter to “Many Citizens, an unidentified critic in the Jamestown (N.Y.) Journal of 24 January 1870. The current location of the MS (formerly in the Estelle Doheny Collection at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California) is not known. Published in Lorch 1953, 315, and in facsimile in Morgan, 95–98. 1886
Will M. Clemens 1900, 28.
L4 , 435–436; Horner, 167–68; “Letters to James Redpath,” Mark Twain Quarterly 5 (Winter–Spring 1942): 20.