he receives, especially those intended “to conceal the real passion that is consuming the young women who send them.” One such reads in part: “SIR: Our metallic burial cases have taken the premium at six State Fairs in this country, and also at the great Paris Exposition. Parties who have used them have been in each instance charmed with them. Not one has yet entered a complaint.… Families supplied at reduced rates.” Other “Valentines” received on February 14 deal with a “patent Cancer-Eradicator,” a “double-back action, chronometer-balance, incombustible wooden legs,” gravestones, and one “fraught with a world of happiness for me. It—it says: ‘SIR: YOU better pay for your washing. BRIDGET.’”11
Two other pieces from Washington, D.C., are sketches. The earlier, published in the New York Citizen of December 21, 1867, and entitled “The Facts in the Case of the Senate Doorkeeper,” is signed “Mark Twain, Doorkeeper ad interim.” He tells how as doorkeeper he was “snubbed” every time he attempted to speak on the Senate floor. Eventually he was impeached for a variety of causes, among them charging senators fifty cents admission.12 Here the writer posed as what can only be termed an inspired lunatic. In “The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,” published in the New York Tribune of December 27, 1867, he tells how as secretary of the Senate Committee on Conchology he never enjoyed the courtesy due him from other members of the cabinet.13 Again it is the inspired idiot who writes. This persona, in which the writer presented himself as a humorist and nothing more, suggested that “Mark Twain” was at a loss for fresh inspiration.
In late December 1867, Clemens met Olivia Langdon, who was visiting New York with her parents. She was twenty-two, ten years younger than Clemens. Her brother, Charles, had been Clemens’s Quaker City companion; all five attended a reading by Charles Dickens on December 31. In a letter to the Alta California dated January 11, the writer took pleasure in reporting that “there was a beautiful young lady with me—a highly respectable young white woman.” Although Clemens was to see his bride-to-be twice more within a few weeks, he did not begin his formal courtship until August, when he visited the Langdons in Elmira. By then his situation had changed significantly.
Just after Clemens arrived in New York following his trip abroad, a man who was to play a crucial role in his life, Elisha Bliss Jr. of the American Publishing Company of Hartford, wrote to ask Clemens for “a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the East, &c., with such interesting additions as may be proper.”14 Clemens replied on December 2 that he could “make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write.” He believed that he could revise the letters, “weed them of their chief faults of construction & inelegancies of expression,” drop some and write others in their place. He sought more information, especially concerning “what amount of money I might possibly make out of it”; clearly, he was enticed by Bliss’s invitation. Early in January 1868, he wrote to his mother and sister to request that they “cut my letters out of the Alta’s and send them to me in an envelop.”
For a conference with Bliss in late January, Clemens visited Hartford. He stayed with the Hooker family at Nook Farm, where he was later to make his home. (Alice Hooker had been with Olivia Langdon at the Dickens reading.) A few days later, Clemens wrote from New York to accept Bliss’s proposition that he furnish “Manuscript properly prepared & written sufficient to make an Octavo volume of at least 500 pages … the subject of the same to be the trip of the ‘Quaker City’ to the Holy Land.”15 The author would have a great deal of revising to do, but he was encouraged by the fact that he was already expecting the book to be highly remunerative, at a time when he had been looking desperately for some project that would pay him well. As he explained to his family in late January, “I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, & a good deal of it.” (Bliss had offered him a royalty of 5 percent of sales.) Untroubled by a deadline to deliver the manuscript by “the middle of July,” Clemens even continued writing for newspapers.
By January 31, he was writing to Emeline Beach, who had been on the Quaker City, asking for names and other information that he had not remembered. He was also consulting the published letters of three other Quaker City passengers. But shortly after receiving copies of his own Alta letters from his family, he learned that the Alta proprietors intended to publish his letters in book form and that they were not willing to let him use them. About the middle of March, he was therefore obliged to head for San Francisco, a trip he described fancifully in a letter to the Chicago Republican for May 19. He had “chartered one of the superb vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.” Traveling this time by crossing Panama, Clemens successfully arranged in San Francisco with the Alta to publish the Quaker City letters in revised form. Although the reason for the long trip was to obtain rights to his Alta letters, the author had another enterprise in mind, for he needed money. A celebrity in San Francisco, where Mark Twain’s letters to the Alta, the Enterprise, and eastern papers had been reprinted, he soon had newspapers announcing plans for a lecture.16 The Golden Era was among the many publications that publicized his intentions. Mark Twain was “to enter minutely into the scandal of the Quaker City, … and how his innate morality was unsuccessfully assailed during his brief but perilous career.”17 He made his presence felt by attending entertainments sponsored by Presbyterian and Methodist churches. The much-publicized lecture, presented on April 14, earned Mark Twain some sixteen hundred dollars and drew such a large audience that it had to be repeated the next day.18
The lecturer began by promising to make his performance “somewhat didactic. I don’t know what didactic means, but it is a good, high-sounding word, and I wish to use it, meaning no harm whatsoever.”19 After a less-than-triumphant first effort, the Alta reported, he “got the hang of the sermon,” and thereafter he spoke with “that confidential tone that breaks down… barriers between the man on the stage and people occupying the seats.”20 Now he possessed the secret to his continuing success as a speaker. He went on to lecture in Sacramento, Marysville, Nevada City, Grass Valley, and Virginia City, and he reported his experiences to the readers of the Chicago Republican.
By May 5, he had returned to San Francisco, where he completed the transformation of his newspaper letters into a book manuscript, a task he had begun earlier in Washington. There was also to be much new matter. Much of the work consisted simply of pasting newspaper clippings to paper and making revisions in the margins. In his autobiography Mark Twain remembered that he “worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days the average was 3,000 words a day—nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me.”21 Then Bret Harte, who was preparing the first issue of the Overland Monthly, agreed to review the manuscript. In compensation, Mark Twain let Harte publish four excerpts in his journal. In November 1870, in a letter to C. H. Webb, he reported, “Harte read all of the MS of the ‘Innocents’ & told me what passages, paragraphs, & chapters to leave out—& I followed orders strictly. It was a kind thing for Harte to do, & I think I appreciated it.” The cuts were substantial. A surviving manuscript has a few of Harte’s notes; one indicates that a description of seasickness should be deleted because it is a hackneyed subject, treated by Dickens, Thackeray, and Jerrold.22
After giving a final lecture on Venice in San Francisco, Mark Twain left California for the last time on July 6 to return to New York. He found Captain Edgar Wakeman’s ship in the harbor of Panama and was able to record for the Chicagoans a good deal of his colorful talk. This time Wakeman told him a story that he would later develop into one of his very best pieces, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” But he reported to the Republican simply that “the old gentleman told his remarkable dream.”23 He arrived on July 29 in New York, which was now to serve as his headquarters. Then he went to Hartford to deliver his book manuscript.
While returning to the East, he drafted two sketches in his notebook. One concerns an imagined personage, “Mamie Grant, the Child-Missionary.” The complete sketch, preserved in the notebook, is as good an indication