5 July 1868 • San Francisco, Calif. (MS facsimile: Daley, UCCL 02739)
I waited over, one steamer, in order to lecture & so rob persecute the public for their lasting benefit & my profit1explanatory note—but I shall surely sail to-morrow, & shall hope to arrive in New York per steamer “Henry Chauncey” about July 28.2explanatory note
N. Y. address, Westminster Hotel.
letter docketed: ✓ and Samuel J Clements | July 5/68
Clemens made this change in his travel plans probably no sooner than the evening of 28 June. His advertisement in the 29 June Alta California (page 2) announced a single lecture on the evening of 2 July, a “farewell benefit of the future widows and orphans of Mark Twain,” which was entitled “The Oldest of the Republics, VENICE, Past and Present.” Clemens also wrote and published an elaborate handbill, dated 30 June, in the form of a burlesque “call,” ostensibly signed by prominent San Francisco institutions and individuals who, having learned “with the deepest concern that you propose to read a chapter or two of that book in public before you go,” expressed their “cordial desire that you will not.” Clemens’s ostensible reply was:
No, gentlemen, ask of me anything else and I will do it cheerfully; but do not ask me not to afflict the people. I wish to tell them all I know about Venice.... I wish to furnish a deal of pleasant information, somewhat highly spiced, but still palatable, digestible, and eminently fitted for the intellectual stomach. My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. (SLC 1868 [MT00744])
The lecture must, in fact, have been taken more or less wholesale from the manuscript that later became chapters 22 and 23 of The Innocents Abroad, if only because Clemens had no time to prepare anything else.
Clemens sailed on the Montana on 6 July, boarded the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall (Panama) on 20 July, and arrived in New York on Wednesday, 29 July (“Mark Twain,” San Francisco Alta California, 6 July 68, 1; “Passengers Arrived” and “Arrived,” New York Times, 30 July 68, 8). He described both legs of this journey in a dispatch to the Alta dated “August, Recently, 1868” (SLC 1868 [MT00748]).
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the collection of Robert Daley.
L2 , 233.
Robert Daley acquired the letter in 1974 along with eighteen other letters to Elisha Bliss, Jr. He provided CU-MARK with a photocopy of the MS in April 1974. An Ayer transcription of this letter is at WU; see Brownell Collection, pp. 509–11.