From March to October of 1871, the Clemens family stayed at the Langdon home in Elmira. Sam would spend days working on his "Roughing It" manuscript at Quarry farm while Livy and their son Langdon recuperated at home. During this period Sam also traveled quite a bit to New York City, Buffalo and Hartford as well as Washington DC. The family relocated to Hartford in October of 1871.
Harold Bush writes, following his comments on The Innocents Abroad: In his next book, Roughing It (1872), similar attacks are brought to bear on social structures of the Wild West, including churches. A strong case has been made that Roughing It was in large part a critique of more traditional accounts of God, especially in terms of God’s benevolence and omnipotence. In both of these early books, Twain was showing that, as Forrest G. Robinson argues, “Humans are everywhere in thrall to fictions of their own devising”. [Mark Twain in Context]
Leonard writes: Sam and Livy resettled to Hartford, CT, in the affluent Nook Farm neighborhood — where he was, one could say, a Republican among Republicans through his Hartford associations, his affiliations with the Langdon family, and his friendship with William Dean Howells. Their neighbors included Harriet Beecher Stowe, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, Charles Dudley Warner (coeditor of the Hartford Courant), and successful Republican politicians Joseph Hawley (Warner’s coeditor at the Courant) and Francis Gillette. Twain combined with Warner to coauthor The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), whose satire is particularly directed toward political corruption, which Twain tended to blame on the overlapping categories of Democrats, the poor, and immigrants, especially the Irish. [Mark Twain in Context]
Harold Bush writes on Twain's desire to fit in at Elmira and Hartford: Any study of the religious culture that influenced Twain during the most mature and productive years of his life should begin with and focus on the sort of community into which Twain flung himself at this time, before and after his marriage. He was serious about the New England cultural ethos, and he hoped to become a respectable author of books and articles for such premiere publications as The Atlantic or Harper's.
But Susan K. Harris admits that it is imaginable that Clemens was in fact “genuinely struggling to become a Christian ... Clemens’s struggles to achieve faith were perfectly sincere”
During the period from Christmas 1868 to the Epiphany, 6 January 1869, Clemens seems Augustinian in his concentrated and agonized examination of conscience”. Livy represented the ideal of home that is the telos of Augustinian searching. Elmira also boasted a vigorous pastoral presence in Thomas K. Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a manly and humorous Christian exemplar whom Twain liked and respected. For these and other reasons, Elmira became Twain’s summer “home away from home” for many years, where he composed many of his great works.
Regarding Hartford, Twain’s search for a permanent home is also reflected in his winsome remarks about the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, pastored by the Rev. Joseph Twichell: “in every feature of this new church one predominant idea and purpose [is] always discernible — the banding together of the congregation as a family, and the making of the church a home. .. It is the great central ruling idea”.
Twain decided to make the morally progressive Hartford his permanent home, with the Asylum Hill Church and Twichell as central features of his extended family. One biographer writes: “from the outset what had chiefly drawn him to the city [Hartford] was his sense of its upright and elevating character” (Steinbrink 189). In Twain’s imagination, Hartford was one of the strongholds of the New England aristocracy — a growing and monied metropolis featuring the infancy of a major American industry (insurance). It featured the quaint neighborhood known as Nook Farm, one of America’s newest, most pleasant, and intellectually stimulating environments for numerous prominent New Englanders: the Stowes (Harriet Beecher and her husband, Calvin), former state governor Joseph Hawley, John and Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Charles Dudley Warner, among others. Nook Farm was also one of the seedpods of the moral uplift that would become the Social Gospel of American Christianity, being as it was the longtime home of Horace Bushnell, whose mentorship largely sealed the beliefs and ministry style of his many protégés, including Joe Twichell.
It is clear from scrutiny of the surviving correspondence, as well as from the personal papers and journals of Twichell, that these two men carried on a friendship that was shaped significantly by the religious, ethical, and moral character of Twichell, a minister of unusual gifts and of wide ranging intellectual interests who had a powerful personal effect on Mark Twain. [Mark Twain in Context]
Mark Twain's less than successful "Three Speeches Tour" went from October of 1871 through February of 1872.
Scharhorst writes (page 38 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891):
During this final week in February the Clemenses were visited by Joe Goodman and his wife, who were passing through Hartford en route back to the West. Goodman remembered later that Sam’s manners had reverted to normal in the year since they had met in Buffalo. Thomas Wentworth Higginson had dined with the Clemenses at the Hooker home soon after they settled in Hartford and “heard him say grace at table,” which “was like asking a blessing over Ethiopian minstrels. But he had no wine at his table and that seemed to make the grace a genuine thing.” When Goodman saw him in Hartford, however, Sam no longer asked Livy “for permission to smuggle whisky” into the house. Instead,
It stood on the sideboard as boldly as in a bar room. And when we sat down at table and I bowed my head in silence, there was no blessing forthcoming, I sought the first opportunity to inquire of Mark what the omission meant. He said he had tried his best to keep up the practice of saying grace to please his wife, but that it had come to seem too much like mockery to him, and he had asked her to relieve him from playing the part of a hypocrite, and she had agreed it was probably as well that he should, and so they had dropped it.
Wed, 02/21/1872 - Wed, 08/21/1872:
“Tuesday’s child is full of grace,” goes the old verse, and on this Tuesday the most graceful of Sam’s children was born at Quarry Farm. Olivia Susan Clemens, known as “Susy,” was named for her grandmother, Olivia Lewis Langdon, and her aunt, Susan Langdon Crane. The baby girl appeared healthy and hearty, unlike Langdon, but was probably also somewhat premature at a tiny five pounds [Powers, MT A Life 318].
Sam was in Elmira March 18, 1872 as per telegram to WD Howells: Mark Twain-Howells Letters pg 9 but in Hartford on June 15th (pg 10 & 11)
September - November 1872: Twain's plan ..."was to travel through various parts of the British Isles to collect material for a book that would do for that country what Innocents Abroad had done for Europe and the Holy Land. A second objective was to secure a British copyright for Roughing It."
"He arrived in England in early September, and from that time until November 12, when he returned home, he was so frequently entertained by the literary and civic leaders of London that he scarcely had time for anything else."
From CHRONOLOGY OF KNOWN MARK TWAIN SPEECHES, PUBLIC READINGS, AND LECTURES
September 6 - Whitefriars Club, London, England - Dinner Speech.
Published in Mark Twain Speaking, pp. 72-73.
September 21 - Savage Club, London, England - Dinner Speech
Published in Mark Twain Speaking, pp. 69-71.
September 28 Sheriffs Dinner, Guildhall, London - Response to a toast "Success to Literature" - text not available
The dinner was given by the new sheriffs of London to the city guilds and liverymen. When one of the sheriffs proposed the health of Mark Twain, he was applauded, then responded to the toast. The London Times, September 30, 1872, called it "an amusing speech." See Love Letters of Mark Twain, edited by Dixon Wecter (Harper & Bros., 1949), pp.178-79.
Back in Hartford:
From CHRONOLOGY OF KNOWN MARK TWAIN SPEECHES, PUBLIC READINGS, AND LECTURES
January 31 - Benefit for Father Hawley, Allyn Hall, Hartford, Connecticut - "Sandwich Islands"
In a letter to the Hartford Courant, January 29, 1873, Mark Twain said that charity is "a dignified and respectworthy thing, and there is small merit about it and less grace when it don't cost anything. We would like to have a thousand dollars in the house; we point to the snow and the thermometer; we call Hartford by name, and we are not much afraid but that she will step to the front and answer for herself.... I am thoroughly and cheerfully willing to lecture here for such an object, though I would have serious objections to talking in my own town for the benefit of my own pocket--we freebooters of the platform consider it more graceful to fly the black flag in strange waters and prey upon remote and friendless communities." All services having been donated, the benefit netted $1,500 for Father Hawley.
One version of this speech is published in Mark Twain Speaking, pp. 4-15.
February 1 - Lotos Club, New York City - Speech
Remarks summarized in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 5, p. 292 which references text from John Elderkin, A Brief History of the Lotos Club (New York: Club House, 1895), pp. 15-16 for a page summary.
February 5 - Steinway Hall, New York City - "Sandwich Islands"
One version of this speech is published in Mark Twain Speaking, pp. 4-15.
Review in The New York Times.
February 7 - Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York - "Sandwich Islands"
One version of this speech is published in Mark Twain Speaking, pp. 4-15.
February 10 - Steinway Hall, New York City - "Sandwich Islands"
One version of this speech is published in Mark Twain Speaking, pp. 4-15.
February 13 - Jersey City, New Jersey - "Sandwich Islands"
One version of this speech is published in Mark Twain Speaking, pp. 4-15.
Mentioned in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 5, p. 295.
March 31 - Monday Evening Club, Hartford, Connecticut - "License of the Press"
Published in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, edited by Louis J. Budd, (Library of America: 1992), pp. 551-555.
Leonard writes of this speech: "He told his audience, “the trouble is that the stupid people — who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations — do believe and are molded and convinced by what they get out of newspapers, and there is where the harm lies”. The newspapers, whose power Twain considered more a matter of transgressive license than responsible use of freedom, were in his view a means for rousing the rabble and thus blocking the right reforms that the Republican Party would otherwise bring to bear — to the benefit of all, though much of the electorate was too ignorant and/or simply stupid to understand it. According to Twain, “That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse” [Mark Twain in Context]
June - October 1873: "By early June the Clemenses were in London, comfortably housed in the Langham Hotel, Portland Place and Regent Street, where their apartment soon became a gathering place for London's literary notables, During July and August they toured Scotland and Ireland. Then, in September, after two weeks of busy sightseeing and shopping in Paris, they returned again to their rooms at the Langham." (Lorch pg 137)
October, 1873 - January 1874: "After only six days in the United States Mark Twain returned alone to London, arriving there about November 20, and again took up residence at the Langham." (Lorch pg 143).
He returned to Boston January 26th and Hartford the next day.