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).
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).