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 of the state of the author’s mind and art at this time as one could possibly wish. Mamie is an eager, devoted Sunday school student, just nine years old, deeply read in pious tracts. In her earnest attempts to save the souls of those who call at her uncle’s house on business, she manages to stop his newspaper subscription, antagonize the tax collector, and prevent the return of one thousand dollars desperately needed to prevent foreclosure on the mortgage. But she is content. “I have saved a paper carrier, a census bureau, a creditor & a debtor, & they will bless me forever. I have done a noble work to-day. I may yet see my poor little name in a beautiful Sunday School book.” Mark Twain’s skepticism found do-goodism the target most ready at hand for his satire. The burlesque of moral tracts is truly devastating. In speaking to the census-taker, his Mamie shows a remarkable grasp of “the dreadful game of poker:”
Take these tracts. This one, entitled, “The Doomed Drunkard, or the Wages of Sin,” teaches how the insidious monster that lurks in the wine-cup, drags souls to perdition. This one, entitled, “Deuces and, or the Gamester’s Last Throw,” tells how the almost ruined gambler, playing at the dreadful game of poker, made a ten strike & a spare, & thus encouraged, drew two cards & pocketed the deep red; urged on by the demon of destruction, he ordered it up & went alone on a double run of eight, with two for his heels, & then, just as fortune seemed at last to have turned in his favor, his opponent coppered the ace & won. The fated gamester blew his brains out & perished. Ah, poker is a dreadful, dreadful game. You will see in this book how well our theological students are qualified to teach understandingly all classes that come within their reach. Gamblers’ souls are worthy to be saved, & so the holy students even acquaint themselves with the science & technicalities of their horrid games in order to be able to talk to them for the saving of their souls in language which they are accustomed to.
The census-taker has had enough and makes a quick departure.24 But Mark Twain, who saw his own future in the East, already sensed such brazen irreverence was not likely to advance his career: “Mamie Grant” was not offered for publication.
Arriving in New York on July 29, Clemens once again benefited from Anson Burlingame’s assistance, and with much help from him and his staff a piece appeared on the front page of the New York Tribune of August 4, “The Treaty with China.” More significantly, when he visited Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York, that summer, he promptly fell in love. Very likely Burlingame had something to do with his interest in the Langdons, for it was Burlingame who had told him, “Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character: always climb.” If it is not clear that the Langdons were superior in intellect and character, they were certainly superior socially. Clemens extended his visit and was a house guest from August 21 to September 8, during which time he proposed marriage but met discouragement. Olivia’s father, Jervis Langdon, had become wealthy chiefly from the coal business. His business, J. Langdon and Company, included as a partner both his son, Charles Langdon, and his son-in-law, Theodore W. Crane, who had married Jervis’s adopted daughter, Susan. In antebellum days the Langdons had been dedicated abolitionists and had assisted escaping slaves by means of the “Underground Railroad.” Among others, they had assisted Frederick Douglass while he was a fugitive.
