stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are ‘no account,’ go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not.” This notion of hard work rather than relocation as a formula for success may have been eagerly embraced as what Clemens feared he had now committed himself to.
When Clemens had first visited Hartford, he was a house guest at the home of John and Isabella Beecher Hooker, the latter a sister of several noted clergymen, including Henry Ward Beecher and Thomas K. Beecher, the Elmira minister who had married the Clemenses. Afterwards he had visited Hartford often to see his publisher. Although it has often been supposed that the Clemenses’ move to Hartford was made solely for Clemens’s convenience, other factors were important. Olivia enjoyed visiting with the Hookers’ daughter Alice. Indeed, Olivia was with Alice when Clemens first met her. Even before the Clemenses were married, Sam and “Livy” had hoped they could live in Hartford.60
Thus when, in October 1871 after their summer at Quarry Farm, the Clemenses took up residence in the Hooker house, which they rented, they were moving into a house familiar to both of them. (It still stands today, though much modified.) The Hooker house was part of Nook Farm, a community developed on a tract of a hundred acres to the west of the city. The Clemenses were to become very much a part of it. Among the residents of Nook Farm were Susan and Charles Dudley Warner (the latter would soon become Mark Twain’s coauthor), Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the afore-mentioned Hookers, George and Lilly Warner, General Joseph Hawley (owner of the Hartford Courant, governor of Connecticut, U.S. senator), and the Rev. Nathaniel Burton. Harmony and Joseph Twichell lived not far away. William Dean Howells wrote of the enclave, “It seems to me quite an ideal life. They live very near each other, in a sort of suburban grove, and their neighbors … go in and out of each other’s houses without ringing.”61 The Hartford years were happy ones for the Clemenses, although Mark Twain seldom managed to write very much at his Hartford residence.
Just two weeks after moving to Hartford, he began an unusually extended lecture tour, nearly eighty appearances in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New England, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, West Virginia, and Maryland. His experiences were interesting enough, he wrote Olivia in January, to be the subject of a book. As his tour ended, his Western book was published in February 1872. Though not so successful as The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It sold very well: over 72,000 copies in the first two years. Reviews were favorable, too. One found his genius “characterized by the breadth, and ruggedness, and audacity of the West.”62 In an anonymous review, Howells called it “singularly entertaining,” but admitted that the writing was not always marked by “all the literary virtues.”63 Clemens’s future neighbor and collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, opined in the Hartford Courant, “It is not mere accident that everybody likes to read this author’s stories and sketches; it is not mere accident that they are interesting reading. His style is singularly lucid, unambiguous and strong.” A review in the Boston Evening Transcript identified as high points of the book Dick Baker’s story of his cat, Jim Blaine’s account of his grandfather’s ram, and Scotty Briggs’s conversation with the minister. In England, Routledge published a “Copyright Edition” in 1872; it was entitled The Innocents at Home. It was reviewed in the Manchester Guardian, which objected to the use of slang and the author’s being contented “with dwelling on the outside of things and simply describing manners and customs.” The reviewer for the London Examiner focused on the author’s use of humor.64 A third publication of the book was that by Tauchnitz of Leipzig, Germany. In an autobiographical sketch, the author wrote with some pleasure, “Baron Tauchnitz proposes to issue my books complete, on the Continent in English.”65
The American Publishing Company sold 62,000 copies of Roughing It during the first four months of publication, more than the author had expected (though soon he learned that it was less successful than The Innocents Abroad). Moreover, the English sales of Roughing It were also profitable to the author, whereas the pirated publication of The Innocents Abroad had not been. With a second success on the heels of the first, Mark Twain was firmly positioned as a solidly productive writer who knew his craft and had found his market.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fumbling, Success, Uncertainty
Repeatedly throughout his career, Mark Twain tried to take advantage of an earlier success by producing a sequel. Sometimes he returned to ideas that had proved unsuccessful. Now, even before he had finished Roughing It, he was making plans for another book, based on much the same scheme as the one that had failed to work earlier in the preparation of the “Around the World” letters for the Buffalo Express. The results this time would be even more disastrous. On December 2,1870, he wrote to John Henry Riley to propose what he described as “the pet scheme of my life.” Just a little earlier he had drawn up an admiring sketch of this same man, “Riley—Newspaper Correspondent,” published in the November Galaxy, where he explained that Riley wrote on assignment in Washington, D.C., for the San Francisco Alta. Now he proposed to send this experienced reporter, a friend of his from his days as a Washington newspaperman, to South Africa, there “to skirmish, prospect, work, travel, & take pretty minute notes, with hand & brain, for 3 months, I paying you a hundred dollars a month for you to live on. (Not more, because sometimes I want you to have to shin like everything for a square meal—for experiences are the kind of book-material I want.)” Riley would then write up his adventures, which might, Clemens thought, include getting rich from diamonds, and Clemens would then edit his report, adding parenthetical remarks as well.
On December 4, the compliant Riley replied by wire: “Long letter rec’d. Plan approved. Will get ready to go,” and on December 6, Riley wrote a letter confirming his acceptance and making further arrangements with Clemens. On that same day, Clemens signed a contract with Elisha Bliss to prepare a book on the subject of “the Diamond Fields of Africa,” based on “notes of adventures &c” prepared by “a proper party,” with the manuscript to contain “matter enough to fill at least 600 printed octavo pages.” The work was to be delivered by March 1, 1872. A fallback clause permitted substitution of another subject by mutual agreement. The trip was financed to the extent of $2,550 by the American Publishing Company.1 Clemens had told Bliss in November that the book “will have a perfectly beautiful sale” and is “brim-full of fame & fortune for both author [&] publisher.”
To meet their agreement, Riley started promptly, and on March 3,1871, Clemens wrote to him, appreciatively, “Your letters have been just as satisfactory as letters could be, from the day you reached England till you left it.” By October 1871, Riley had completed what turned out to be a truly hazardous journey to South Africa and was back in the United States. But Clemens was unable to see him, he declared in a letter, because of illness in the family and lecture-tour obligations. On January 4, Clemens wrote again, naming early March as the time when they would meet. “I shall be ready for you. I shall employ a good, appreciative, genial phonographic reporter who can listen first rate, & enjoy, & even throw in a word, now & then. Then we’ll light our cigars every morning, & with your notes before you, we’ll talk & yarn & laugh & weep over your adventures, & said reporter shall take it all down.” Clemens wrote again, on March 27, to describe the qualities needed by the stenographer and to report that he anticipated some thirty thousand words of material from Riley’s notes. But the scene so vividly predicted was never to take place. Riley had become ill and could not visit Hartford; he proposed that Clemens visit him in Philadelphia. But they never got together, and in September 1872 Riley died from cancer, reportedly originating from a wound in his mouth caused by a fork while he was eating. Thus ended this unlikely scheme, which had been intended to produce a sequel to Roughing It. Mark Twain’s next effort at a travel book would be only a little more successful. But the author still pursued a second career, that of lecturer. His manager found that he was in great demand and was eager to start Mark Twain on the road again.
When he agreed to go on the lecture circuit in 1871, Mark Twain was sufficiently experienced