From pages 95-107 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891:
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.” ...
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.
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“It was a dangerous experiment to think of renewing the season after the interval of a month,” Stoddard reported in his London correspondence with the San Francisco Chronicle, but Sam “opened his new season to good business” on December 1. Dolby certainly had a hand in his success. He reproduced Sam’s photo on posters plastered all over the city. His picture was so ubiquitous, Sam wrote, that “it seems as if 3 people out of every 5 I meet on the street recognize me.” Though his schedule initially required no travel, the pace of his appearances was arduous, As Fred Lorch re-creates the calendar of speaking dates, Sam lectured each evening through December 5 and at two afternoon matinees, resumed his appearances on December 8, and performed every night through December 20, as well as at four matinees, for a total of twenty-four lectures in twenty days.
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In a column dated December 15 the London correspondent of the New York Herald asserted that Sam “made a great hit at first, but I am afraid has rather overdone it by lecturing every night,” and the Bradford Observer remarked that his lectures had “met with indifferent success.” Above all, there is the reason Sam suspended his platform appearances on December 6 and 7. During the hiatus, Sam revised his old “Roughing It” lecture apparently because the Sandwich Islands talk had exhausted its appeal. George Grossmith, most famous today for his performances in the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, soon began to impersonate Sam onstage —the sincerest form of flattery—delivering this lecture.”
“Roughing It on the Silver Frontier” revived interest in hearing the original Clemens. The papers puffed the lecture in a new round of reviews. Sam bragged to Livy the first evening he delivered it that he had “never enjoyed delivering a lecture, in all my life, more than I did tonight. It was so perfectly jolly.”
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Sam and Stoddard left London on December 24 and railed to Salisbury for Christmas. ... Sam and Stoddard registered at the historic White Hart Hotel, a short walk from the cathedral, where they “attended the grand Christmas” service the next morning, In the afternoon they drove eight miles out of town to Stonehenge, “one of the most mysterious & satisfactory ruins I have ever seen,” as Sam put it. On December 26 they rode to Old Sarum, “where the Saxons used to meet.” Sam was “feeling rather ill after all this dining,” according to Stoddard, so they left Salisbury for Ventnor, on the southern tip of the Isle of Wight, to recuperate from their holiday before heading back to London on Decermber 29.”
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According to Stoddard, on January 12, the night before his departure, Sam “sank into a sea of forebodings. His voice was keyed in a melancholy minor.... his last words were, that if ever he got down in the world—which Heaven forbid—he would probably have to teach elocution; but this was at five o'clock in the morning.”
Sam boarded the Cunard steamer Parthia the next day and arrived in Boston on January 26, He was back in the bosom of his family in Hartford and no doubt sipping whiskey cocktails the next day.