23 September 1872 • London, England (MS: PHi, UCCL 00812)
I snatch a moment, in a desperate hurry, to say that it won’t be possible for me to talk in the Star course.1explanatory note 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
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).
References
- Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
- 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 5: 1872–1873. Edited by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1997
- Dreer, Ferdinand Julius. A Catalogue of the Collection of Autographs Formed by Ferdinand Julius Dreer. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Privately printed. 1890
- Pond, James B. Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage. New York: G. W. Dillingham Company. 1900
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 3: 1869. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Dahlia Armon. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1992
- 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
MS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (PHi).
L5 , 178.
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).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.