See page 520 The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871:
In the spring of 1869, Mark Twain became associated with the Boston Lyceum Bureau, recently established by James Redpath. He promised Redpath ten nights in the state of New York, "provided the towns were close together, but for the most part intended to accept engagements only in the six New England states." In August, after purchasing a partnership in the Buffalo, New York Express, he attempted to cancel all engagements. Redpath refused. Finally, the tour "ranged up and down the coast from Maine to Washington D.C. and throughout New York State and eastern Pennsylvania. And since Redpath had managed to book many of the lectures with Boston as a hub, Mark Twain was able to maintain his room at Young's Hotel and return there almost nightly to be with friends and spend pleasant hours visiting in Redpath's bureau. What pleased him no less was the fact that the tour included nearly all the large cities in the entire area." (Lorch pp 99, 103, 105).
Fatout (pp 122-4) writes: The contention, advanced by Paine and others, that he traveled the lecture circuit only because he needed the money may be discounted. During his absence from the Express office, he said, the paper would probably lose as much as he made on the tour. Modest returns from the 1868-69 season indicated that lecturing was nnot a bonanza. Spending freely, living well, preferring the best hotels, taking sleepers and chair cars when available, he cut heavily into gross income. Besides, the success of The Innocents Abroad, published in late July and bringing in about $1400 a month, suggested a method of making more money than by lecturing, and making it with less ravishment of body and spirit. One reporter wondered why “any man with such a reputation as he has acquired should barter it away on the platform for, comparatively, a mere pittance.” Mark Twain said in November that he was swamped “with high-priced invitations to write for magazines and papers, and publishers besiege me to write books.” These offers he turned down because he was touring. He talked not for the pittance merely, but chiefly for pleasure, which outweighed all objections.
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With more requests than he could use, Redpath arranged a season of forty-seven performances extending over twelve weeks. The time was shorter than that of the previous tour and the route more compact. Except for a few trips into Pennsylvania, all engagements were in or near New England; most of the stops were in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. This time there was on the schedule a greater proportion of substantial cities, one of them being the nation’s cultural mecca, Boston.
Mark Twain did not complicate this tour by rushing off headlong to Elmira or Cleveland. As an affianced man with a job on the Buffalo Express, he was easier in mind than the unsettled suitor of the year before. No longer, as he said, rent by “the frenzy, the lunacy of love,” he was in better condition to attend to his professional career. His letters to Livy were more relaxed now, more like himself because he was learning, he said, “to contemplate her critically as a human being instead of an angel.” Tender, playful, loving, often warm with exasperation over some annoying experience, they said less now of Bible-reading and church-going. Gone was the unnatural consecration of his courting days. The sterling effort of the lover to assume a saintly character pleasing to his beloved had been touching, yet to a detached observer it also seems acutely disturbing, too unreal for comfort. It is a relief to observe the reappearance of a Mark Twain more credible than the sanctimonious pietist he had tried to be.
November 1 - January 21, 1870 Lecture Tour: At least 49 engagements - "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands" Under the management of James Redpath.