They sailed in April, 1873, and spent a good portion of the year in England and Scotland.They returned to America in November, and Clemens hurried back to London alone to deliver a notable series of lectures under the management of George Dolby, formerly managing agent for Charles Dickens.For two months Mark Twain lectured steadily to London audiences--the big Hanover Square rooms always filled.He returned to his family in January, 1874.
Meantime, a home was being built for them in Hartford, and in the autumn of 1874 they took up residence in ita happy residence, continued through seventeen years--well-nigh perfect years.Their summers they spent in Elmira, on Quarry Farm--a beautiful hilltop, the home of Mrs.Clemens's sister.It was in Elmira that much of Mark Twain's literary work was done.He had a special study there, some distance from the house, where he loved to work out his fancies and put them into visible form.
It was not so easy to work at Hartford; there was too much going on.
The Clemens home was a sort of general headquarters for literary folk, near and far, and for distinguished foreign visitors of every sort.
Howells and Aldrich used it as their half-way station between Boston and New York, and every foreign notable who visited America made a pilgrimage to Hartford to see Mark Twain.Some even went as far as Elmira, among them Rudyard Kipling, who recorded his visit in a chapter of his American Notes.Kipling declared he had come all the way from India to see Mark Twain.
Hartford had its own literary group.Mrs.Harriet Beecher Stowe lived near the Clemens home; also Charles Dudley Warner.The Clemens and Warner families were constantly associated, and The Gilded Age, published in 1873, resulted from the friendship of Warner and Mark Twain.The character of Colonel Sellers in that book has become immortal, and it is a character that only Mark Twain could create, for, though drawn from his mother's cousin, James Lampton, it embodies--and in no very exaggerated degree--characteristics that were his own.The tendency to make millions was always imminent; temptation was always hard to resist.Money-making schemes are continually being placed before men of means and prominence, and Mark Twain, to the day of his death, found such schemes fatally attractive.
It was because of the Sellers characteristics in him that he invested in a typesetting-machine which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars and helped to wreck his fortunes by and by.It was because of this characteristic that he invested in numberless schemes of lesser importance, but no less disastrous in the end.His one successful commercial venture was his association with Charles L.Webster in the publication of the Grant Memoirs, of which enough copies were sold to pay a royalty of more than four hundred thousand dollars to Grant's widow--the largest royalty ever paid from any single publication.It saved the Grant family from poverty.Yet even this triumph was a misfortune to Mark Twain, for it led to scores of less profitable book ventures and eventual disaster.
Meanwhile he had written and published a number of books.Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court were among the volumes that had entertained the world and inspired it with admiration and love for their author.In 1878-79 he had taken his family to Europe, where they spent their time in traveling over the Continent.It was during this period that he was joined by his intimate friend, the Rev.Joseph H.
Twichell, of Hartford, and the two made a journey, the story of which is told in A Tramp Abroad.
In 1891 the Hartford house was again closed, this time indefinitely, and the family, now five in number, took up residence in Berlin.The typesetting-machine and the unfortunate publishing venture were drawing heavily on the family finances at this period, and the cost of the Hartford establishment was too great to be maintained.During the next three years he was distracted by the financial struggle which ended in April, 1894, with the failure of Charles L.Webster & Co.Mark Twain now found himself bankrupt, and nearly one hundred thousand dollars in debt.
It had been a losing fight, with this bitter ending always in view;yet during this period of hard, hopeless effort he had written a large portion of the book which of all his works will perhaps survive the longest--his tender and beautiful story of Joan of Arc.All his life Joan had been his favorite character in the world's history, and during those trying months and years of the early nineties--in Berlin, in Florence, in Paris--he was conceiving and putting his picture of that gentle girl-warrior into perfect literary form.It was published in Harper's Magazine--anonymously, because, as he said, it would not have been received seriously had it appeared over his own name.The authorship was presently recognized.Exquisitely, reverently, as the story was told, it had in it the, touch of quaint and gentle humor which could only have been given to it by Mark Twain.
It was only now and then that Mark Twain lectured during these years.
He had made a reading tour with George W.Cable during the winter of 1884-85, but he abominated the platform, and often vowed he would never appear before an audience again.Yet, in 1895, when he was sixty years old, he decided to rebuild his fortunes by making a reading tour around the world.It was not required of him to pay his debts in full.The creditors were willing to accept fifty per cent.of the liabilities, and had agreed to a settlement on that basis.But this did not satisfy Mrs.
