22 October 1873 • SS Batavia at Queenstown, Ireland (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00977)
Thanks for the books & the MS. Shall recreate with them on shipboard. I wish I could tell you about the Modoc man, but I cannot. I don’t know as much about those people as Joaquin Miller.2explanatory note All is hurry here.—In great haste,
letter docketed: Mark Twain
This puzzling correction may have resulted from Clemens’s haste in dispatching the letter at Queenstown, as the Batavia prepared to begin its Atlantic crossing, having left Liverpool the previous day. On 20 October, the night before his departure, Clemens gave a final performance of his Sandwich Islands lecture to an enthusiastic Liverpool audience. The Liverpool Mercury declared that Clemens’s writings “fairly entitled him to rank amongst the keenest and most original of American humorists,” and described his lecture as
racy in its humour, artistic and powerful in its word painting, but somewhat deficient in arrangement. . . . His word-painting of a volcanic eruption was most striking, and at the end of his highly poetical peroration the audience cheered him to the echo, and recalled him to the platform. (“Mark Twain on the Sandwich Island Savages,” 21 Oct 73, clipping in Scrapbook 12:29, 31, CU-MARK)
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L5 , 458.
donated to CU-MARK in 1977. See Appert Collection in Description of Provenance.