From pages 79-95 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891:

In May 1873 Samuel L. Clemens made good on his promise to escort Olivia to England. His purpose in returning was threefold: to introduce his wife to the mother country; to research his next travel book, a project that would soon be abandoned; and to secure imperial copyright on The Gilded Age, which had just been published in the United States. Joining the three Clemenses were Livy's Elmira friend Clara Spaulding, daughter Susy's nurse Nellie Bermingham, and Sam's personal secretary Samuel Thompson. On May 15 Sam led the party of six from Elmira to New York City. They were greeted there by Mary Mason Fairbanks, who overnighted with Livy in their cabin aboard ship while Sam slept at the St. Nicholas Hotel. ...

Sam sailed with his family on the Batavia, once again under the command of John Mouland. “Capt. Mouland is just about perfection,” Livy wrote her mother. “He has done every thing that he possibly could to make us comfortable and to make things pleasant for us. ... He grows more & more delightful the better one knows him—We would not come back with anyone else on any account if it is possible to come with him.”

Sam and his entourage landed in Liverpool on May 27. ...

They railed to London the next day—“the ride was the most charming that I ever could imagine,” Livy mused—where they rented rooms at Edwards’s Royal Cambridge Hotel in Hanover Square. She added, “Our appartments [sic] are perfectly delightful, I expected to find them rather barren looking but was very happily disappointed—Our food is excellent, delicious bread and butter and everything palatable, we do feel so cozy and comfortable as we sit down to our meals.”...

... on June 17 Sam railed to Dover and crossed the English Channel to Ostend. The residents of the Belgian town “speak both the ‘French and the Flemish with exceeding fluency, and yet I could not understand them in either tongue,” he joked in his first dispatch. ‘The next day he caught a glimpse of “the King of Kings” and wrote a brief portrait of him: ‘He was a handsome, strong-featured man, with a rather European fairness of complexion; had a mustache, wore spectacles, seemed of a good height and graceful build and carriage, and looked about forty or a shade less.” In the afternoon of June 18 Sam recrossed the Channel with the British flotilla accompanying the shah and devoted most of his second report to the “picturesque naval spectacle,” particularly to the ironclads Audacious, Devastation, and Vanguard, the “enormous five-masted men-of-war, great turret ships, steam packets, pleasure yachts... , All the ships were in motion—gliding hither and thither, in and out, mingling and parting—a bewildering whirl of flash and color.” Sam’s next three columns covered the events honoring the shah in London and Portsmouth, including a reception and military exhibition at Windsor Castle; a ball at Guildhall, even though the esteemed visitor did not dance; an opera at Covent Garden Theatre, where the shah wore “all his jewels” and a “shaving brush in his hat front”; a naval show; another grand ball at the Southsea Assembly Rooms, where Sam and Livy were invited guests; and a concert at Albert Hall.

...

As if their days were not hectic enough, on June 25 the Clemenses moved six blocks from Edwards's Royal Cambridge to the Langham Hotel, where Sam had stayed the year before. The private house, according to Thompson, “was not so convenient for some things; for instance there was no billiard room, and billiards was Clemens’ chief exercise, Or, as Sam put it, “My wife likes Edwards’ Hotel; & so would I if I were dead; I would not desire a more tranquil & satisfactory tomb.” And, more bluntly: “I prefer a little more excitement.’ At the Langham they rented, he wrote Joseph Twichell on June 29, “a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor, our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a noble array of great windows.” Their rooms soon became a kind of salon. Moncure Conway visited Sam and “found the great American humorist comfortably at home in an elegant private parlor, in the center of which a dinner was spread for two. Mark looks pale and careworn. His beautiful, charming wife appeared exquisitely graceful playing with the infant Twain.” Among the writers, artists, and politicians who called on Sam were Robert Browning, Charles Dilke, Lord Houghton, Charles Kingsley, John Millais, David Dunglas Home, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, and the Anglo-Irish journalist and politician Lord Wyndham, Fourth Earl of Dunraven.’ ...

The Clemenses spent the next three days, July 8-10, sightseeing in Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon, the hometown of William Shakespeare, at the invitation of its mayor Charles E. Flower. Moncure Conway acted as their guide. Livy “was an ardent Shakespearian,” Conway remembered in his autobiography, and Sam was determined to give her a surprise. He told her that we were going on a journey to Epworth, and persuaded me to connive with the joke by writing to Charles Flower not to meet us himself but send his carriage. On arrival at the station we directed the driver to take us straight to the church. When we entered and Mrs. Clemens read on Shakespeare's grave “Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,” she started back exclaiming, “Heavens, where am I!” Mark received her reproaches with an affluence of guilt, but never did lady enjoy a visit more. ...

To escape temporarily the “tax” on their time—“six weeks of daily lunches, teas, and dinners away from home’—Sam and Livy left for Scotland with Susy and nurse Nellie in tow on July 19 and paused in York, midway between London and Edinburgh, for a few days to bask in their anonymity and tour St. Mary’s Abbey. They carried no letters of introduction and “for full 24 hours no one has called, no cards have been sent up, no letters received, no engagements made, & none fulfilled,” Sam wrote Livy's mother, adding,

All of which is to say, we have been 24 hours out of London, & they have been 24 hours of rest & quiet. Nobody knows us here—we took good care of that. In Edinburgh we are to be introduced to nobody, & shall stay in a retired, private hotel, & go on resting, For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew no wheeled vehicles.

The Clemens party arrived in the Scottish capital no later than July 25, registered at Veitch’s Hotel on George Street, “and prepared to have a comfortable season all to ourselves,” Sam recalled. But as luck would have it, Livy immediately fell ill and required medical attention. Sam knew the name of only one physician in the city and him only by reputation: John Brown, the author of Rab and His Friends (1859), a heart-warming boy-meets-dog story. Brown was still practicing medicine, Sam learned, so he called at his home on Rutland Street to fetch him to the hotel, Livy soon recovered and, for the next month, Brown and the Clemenses “were together every day, either in his house or in our hotel,” and Sam was unusually grateful. “I am very glad,” he confessed to Brown, “to know that I reached so high a place with you—& all the more so because we hold you in such love & reverence. Livy, my wife, has never conceived so strong & so warm an affection for any one since we were married as she has for you.” According to Sam’s dictation in February 1906, “[Brown’s] was a sweet and winning face—as beautiful a face as I have ever known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant—the face of a saint at peace with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love that filled his heart.” Sam thought Brown was the loveliest creature in the world... We made the round of his professional visits with him in his carriage every day for six weeks. He always brought a basket of grapes and we brought books, The scheme which we began with on the first round of visits was the one which was maintained until the end—and was based upon this remark, which he made when he was disembarking from the carriage at his first stopping place to visit a patient, “Entertain yourselves while I go in here and reduce the population.”

...

Soon enough he had reason to worry. The financial markets in the United States were shaky when Sam sent for more money and they collapsed shortly after the money arrived by wire. Jay Cooke and Company, one of the largest banks in the world, defaulted on its debt on September 13 and the brokers on Wall Street were plunged into panic on Black Thursday, September 18. The New York Stock Exchange locked its doors on September 20 and did not reopen for ten days. Meanwhile, Sam was as unnerved as a New York stockbroker. ...

After resisting for months Dolby’s entreaties to lecture in London, Sam finally consented under financial duress. Before leaving for Paris on September 30 he asked the agent to schedule dates for him to deliver “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” after he returned from the Continent on October 7, The next week in Paris is a literal blank in the record. ...

Back in London, Sam launched a weeklong lecture series—six performances in London at the Queen’s Concert Rooms, aka the Hanover Square Rooms—beginning the evening of October 13. Dolby’s choice of venue was strategic: Charles Dickens, Franz Joseph Haydn, Franz Liszt, and Niccold Paganini had all performed in the hall, which had opened in 1774 with a seating capacity of about nine hundred. Moncure Conway expressed surprise that Dolby had booked Sam to appear in “the most fashionable hall in London’ and “charge high prices for admission” rather than, “like Artemus Ward and other American entertainers, at Egyptian Hall or some popular place,” but it may have been the only venue available on short notice. Or Dolby chose it for its snooty cachet and excellent acoustics, Because he charged high prices, “the hall was crowded with fashionable people in evening dress” every night. Sam adapted the talk to his upscale audience, slightly revising ‘Our Fellow Savages,” for example, by omitting his description of the statue of a skinless man in the introduction, his offer to illustrate cannibalism by devouring a baby, and his comment about a cannibal who wondered “how a white man would go with onions.” Both Sam and Dolby promoted the lectures unstintingly during the week before Sam debuted. In a letter to the editor of the London Standard dated October 7, Sam piqued interest in his appearances by declaring his intention to serve the public: ...

Sam ended his week at the Queen's Concert Rooms with a matinee performance on Saturday, October 18. He had already laid plans with Dolby to resume his London lectures on December 1. First, however, he was obliged to escort Livy, Susy, Clara Spaulding, and Nellie back to Hartford, He closed his afternoon performance by thanking his audience for their kindness: ...

Afterward, the Clemenses railed to Liverpool, where Sam spoke before a packed house at the Liverpool Institute the evening of October 20, According to the New York Graphic, “thousands were unable to obtain admission to the hall.”...

The next day, the Clemenses embarked aboard the Batavia, again captained by John Mouland, for their return to the United States. ...

“The first three days were stormy, and wife, child, maid, and Miss Spaulding were all sea-sick 25 hours out of the 24, and I was sorry I ever started,” Sam wrote John Brown during the voyage. “We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two hundred miles of restless water between us, now, besides the railway stretch.” When they landed in New York the evening of November 2, they were met by Sam's brother Orion, Charley Langdon, who helped them clear customs, registered for the night at the St. Nicholas Hotel. Orion wrote Mollie the next day that Susy “runs about and talks a little, and is exceedingly pretty, having a rather broad face with color in her cheeks.” Their Hartford house, nothing more than a hole in the ground when they left, had been roofed by the time they returned.” ...

Sam and Livy, with Susy and Nellie, returned home on December 4, They were accompanied by Livy’s mother, who remained with her daughter when Sam returned to England. After lingering in Hartford for only three days, he railed to New York on December 7, apparently spent the night at the home of his friend Dan Slote, and embarked on the Inman steamer City of Chester the next morning, He booked the ship for comfort, not company, and assured Livy he was unlikely to suffer from mal de mer during the voyage. Whereas the Batavia was 316 feet long, the City of Chester “is nearly 500° and thus “does not rock & pitch,—so we do not need racks on the table; there are no staterooms anywhere near,—so you eat in peace & hear no nasty sounds of vomiting in your vicinity.” It was ‘a lovely ship,” with a smoking room and speed. The Batavia “left considerably ahead of us, but we overtook her in half an hour & swept by her as if she were standing still, She looks like a yawl beside this vast vessel.” Sam suffered from insomnia during the cruise—‘sleep would only tire me,” he complained to Livy—so for recreation he read Samuel Richardson's monumental Clarissa (1748), originally published in seven volumes and at nearly a million words one of the longest novels in the English language. The ship docked at Queenstown on November 17, at Liverpool the next day, and Sam arrived back at the Langham in London on November 19.