12 January 1874 • Liverpool, England (MS: WU, UCCL 01040)
We had full houses here & a jolly good time with them.1explanatory note
I am in the midst of the hurry & bustle of getting ready for an early start in the morning, on board the good ship Parthia for Boston—so I snatch a moment to hurl a parting “God be with you!” to you & yours.
After his final performance of “Roughing It on the Silver Frontier” on 9 January in Liverpool, Clemens finished his English tour there with the Sandwich Islands lecture on 10 January. About “Roughing It,” the Liverpool Morning Post remarked:
Mr. Twain’s humour is to combine with an exaggerated, but in effect pretty truthful account of the place on which he lectures an exuberant leaven of the wild fun which we call American, and it is a curious circumstance that though the best points of his anecdotes are in the region of perpetual romance, every hearer knows by a sort of instinct how much to believe, and goes away as much informed by what is true as he is amused by what is grotesque and fanciful.
As it is altogether impossible to retell Mr. Twain’s stories without spoiling them, we shall make no attempt to indicate the means by which he last night provoked incessant mirth. Suffice it that his sallies were as unexpected, his moralisings as much governed by the rule of contraries, his stories as rich in comic incident, and his serious descriptions as full of poetry and glow, as the corresponding features of his previous lecture. (“Mr. Mark Twain on the Silver Frontier,” 10 Jan 74, 5)
The Sandwich Islands lecture the following evening also elicited praise:
There was a large attendance, and the satisfaction of the audience appeared to be unbounded. Though the public are in a great measure familiar with the lecturer’s peculiar observations respecting the inhabitants of those distant islands, . . . the uniqueness of his perfectly unimpassioned subtle droll manner made the recital of even his best known pleasantries as enjoyable as the personations of the most popular comic actors. (“Mark Twain’s Lecture,” unidentified newspaper clipping in CU-MARK)
Stoddard, in his correspondence for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that Clemens “made his last appearance in England at Liverpool, and was most cordially received. Here also the American jollity and readiness to take a joke and heartiness of approval showed itself, as it has on each of the three evenings in Liverpool” (Charles Warren Stoddard 1874). Clemens’s first Liverpool “evening” was 20 October 1873 ( L5 , 458 n. 1).
References
- Madison Memorial Union Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- 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 6: 1874–1875. Edited by Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2002
- Brownell, George H. “Who Was Frank Finlay.” Twainian 4 (October): 1–6. 1944
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Stoddard, Charles Warren. “An Anglo-American City. Number Fourteen.” Chas. Warren Stoddard’s Notes in Liverpool. . . . San Francisco Chronicle, 8 February, 1. Letter dated 10 January. 1874
- 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, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).
L6 , 19–20; Brownell 1944, 1.
Norman D. Bassett, a Madison alumnus, purchased the MS at a Chicago auction sale in 1936. He donated his Mark Twain collection to WU on 9 July 1955.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.