17 January 1872 • Lock Haven or Milton, Pa. (MS: IaU, UCCL 00719)
No, I can’t lecture anywhere outside of New England in Feb., except it be in Troy, on the 1st. Wouldn’t talk in Utica or Newburgh either, for twice the money.2explanatory note
Was glad Bellefonte backed—wish some more would.3explanatory note The fewer engagements I have from this time forth, the better I shall be pleased.
letter docketed: Clemens Saml L. | Jan. 17 / 72
Clemens was probably writing from Milton, where he lectured on 17 January, but it is possible that he was still in Lock Haven, which was only about fifty miles by rail northwest of Milton (Redpath and Fall, 11; Appletons’ Hand-Book , 162).
Clemens wished to stay close to home as Olivia neared the end of her pregnancy. No lecture was scheduled in Newburgh, New York. A note in Clemens’s appointment book indicates that a tentative lecture engagement in Utica, New York, for 2 February, was canceled (Redpath and Fall, 15).
Clemens had been scheduled to lecture in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, on Monday, 15 January. When the committee “backed,” he remained in Pittsburgh for a long weekend instead (Redpath and Fall, 11).
MS, University of Iowa, Iowa City (IaU).
L5 , 28; Will M. Clemens, 29; Horner, 171; Cyril Clemens 1942, 21.
The MS may have been owned (or merely borrowed) by Will Clemens before he published it in 1900. Sometime before 1922, “Dr. Frank Wakeley Gunsaulus found this letter while on a lecture tour in the East and presented it to Harry P. Harrison, general manager of the Redpath Bureau, Chicago” (notation accompanying MS at IaU). The MS was donated to IaU in 1973 by Carl Backman, then manager of the Chicago bureau.