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 that he prepared a list of conditions that he expected his manager, James C. Redpath, to meet. These included all travel on main lines with only short hops (but some of his travel was by slow train, and once he went eleven hours without food), the best hotel in town (but some were quite unsatisfactory and occasionally he had to spend the night in a private house); $125 per lecture for all presentations outside New England (but sometimes he made only $100), and no lectures west of St. Louis. In all he gave seventy-six performances in sixteen weeks, from October till February 1872.
During the summer he prepared three presentations, but since he had been away from the lecture platform for twenty months, his first lectures were far from polished. A major difficulty was with his topics. Some of the ones he had prepared were not well received; consequently, he had to prepare new ones while on the road. The title he gave Redpath to announce was “Reminiscences of Some Uncommonplace Characters I Have Chanced to Meet”; apparently he drew extensively from The Innocents Abroad. When this subject failed to please, he devoted a weekend to preparing a lecture on the comic writer and speaker Artemus Ward (whom he had known in Nevada). But again his audiences were dissatisfied, partly because much of what he had to say was already familiar to them. Since he had to read proof on Roughing It while touring, he drew on materials from it and as a result was able to perform much more effectively, though to his disgust on two occasions newspapers published long synopses of his lectures. On the road he was often hounded by local residents who felt that they had a right to talk with the lecturer and sometimes made themselves at home in his hotel room. He was expected to enjoy being shown a town’s sights, often in cold weather. Even though he made over $10,000
