12 December 1873 • London, England (MS: ViU, UCCL 1002)
The fog got so thick, & so depleted my audiences, that I got desperate. I Ⓐemendation can’t talk to thin houses; I would so cheerfully have paid half a crown to every man who would come—but I couldn’t say that, & so I had to talk, & go on suffering.
Then I thought maybe I was not advertised enough. So I wrote the accompanying squib—the one which is not in my handwriting—& sent it to all the morning dailies, hoping that maybe one out of the lot would print it. But Ⓐemendationno—the first line was too plainly & sadly an advertisement, & then the gentle satirical vein—touching both the Prince & the people—was a thing they were a bit afraid of, I fancy.
It is no longer an advertisement, because my lecturing will be at an end a week & a day from now—& I have just written 10 pages of remarks purposely to get in, very quietly & unobtrusively, the fact that I mean no disrespect Ⓐemendationto the Prince, & that I believe he would appreciate & smile at the joke as soon as anybody.
Still, you may not be favorably impressed, & if not, will you send it back to me? There is nothing but good-nature in it—so I could send it to America, & it would run there very well.1explanatory note
Clemens evidently enclosed two brief manuscripts with his letter—neither of which survives. It is possible, however, that the one “not in my handwriting” was a copy, made by Stoddard, of his 10 December letter to the Morning Post (published on 11 December), which Clemens may not yet have seen in print. The other, comprising “10 pages of remarks,” has not been identified. Brooks did not print it (or anything else by Clemens) in Punch, nor has a likely article been found in any American newspaper. For Brooks’s response, see the enclosure with 13 and 15 Dec 73 to OLCclick to open link.
References
- University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
- 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
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L5 , 510–511.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.