July 15, 1895 to July 15, 1896 – World Speaking Tour – Sam’s tour consisted of the northern United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ceylon, Mauritius, and South Africa: about 140 engagements [Fatout, MT Speaking 662]. See Railton’s website at the University of Virginia for more details on the North American portion of the tour including map, letters, and reviews, many of which are quoted here. The North America portion of the world tour was under the management of James B. Pond, who, along with his wife, Martha G. Pond, accompanied the Clemens party as far as the Pacific Coast. The manager for the down-under portion was Robert Sparrow Smythe (usually seen as R.S. Smythe) and his son, Carlyle G. Smythe.

The starting point of this lecturing-trip around the world was Paris, where we had been living a year or two.

We sailed for America, and there made certain preparations. This took but little time. Two members of my family elected to go with me. Also a carbuncle. The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a dictionary [FE 25].

July 15 Monday – The Clemens party arrived in Cleveland, Ohio sometime during the morning and checked into the Stillman House. Pond had collected $300 in advance for the Cleveland appearance and gave Sam $200, for which he receipted Pond on the train; Sam didn’t want Livy to deal directly with the money [July 16 to Rogers]. The World Tour began at the Music Hall on this evening and the next. Sam felt the first night was “another Randall’s Island defeat,” though Fatout writes the Cleveland papers were complimentary [Lecture Circuit 244]. From this same letter, Sam described the chaotic affair of his first night on the tour:

There were a couple of hundred little boys behind me on the stage, on a lofty tier of benches which made them the most conspicuous object in the house. And there was nobody to watch them or keep them quiet. Why, with their scufflings and horse-play and noise, it was just a menagerie. Besides, a concert of amateurs had been smuggled into the program (to precede me,) and their families and friends (say ten per cent of the audience) kept encoring them and they always responded. So it was 20 minutes to 9 before I got on the platform in front of those 2,600 people who had paid a dollar apiece for a chance to go to hell in this fashion.

I got started magnificently, but inside of half an hour the scuffling boys had the audience’s maddened attention & I saw it was a gone case; so I skipped a third of my program and quit. The newspapers are kind, but between you & me it was a defeat. There ain’t going to be any more concerts at my lectures. I care nothing for this defeat, because it was not my fault. My first half hour showed that I had the house, and I could have kept it if I hadn’t been so handicapped.

P.S. I find that there were five hundred boys behind me, two-thirds as many as Randall’s Island, and that they flowed past my back in clattering shoals, some leaving the house, others returning for more skylarking! [July 16 to Rogers].

Note: Fatout mistakenly reports this as July 13 in MT Speaking, but correctly as July 14 in the earlier On the Lecture Circuit. In the latter he describes Sam’s presentation and quotes from the July 23 N.Y Times, p.3, “MARK TWAIN BEGINS HIS TOUR”:

“In the Music Hall a tremendous audience of 2600, cheerfully sweltering in ninety-degree heat, made the evening look like a triumph. He started with a preface about morals. Since the Australians wanted lectures on ‘any kind of morals,’ he said he intended ‘to teach morals to those people. I do not like to have them taught to me, and I do not know of any duller entertainment than that, but I know I can produce…goods that will satisfy those people.’ Stating the principle that, to achieve moral superiority, one should commit all the 462 possible crimes, he remarked:

When you have committed your 462 you are released of every other possibility and have ascended the staircase of faultless creation, and you finally stand with your 462 complete with absolute moral perfection, and I am more than two-thirds up there.

“Proceeding from principle to illustration, he launched into the watermelon story. Another theory, ‘that when you do a thing do it with all your might,’ introduced Baker and the blue jays”:

You never saw a bluejay get stuck for a word. He is a vocabularized geyser….A bluejay hasn’t any more principle than an ex-Congressman….A bluejay is human….He likes especially scandal; he knows when he is an ass as well as you do.

Major James B. Pond’s diary for this date cites a larger crowd and payment made at the hotel:

At the Stillman with “Mark Twain,” his wife, and their daughter Clara. “Mark” looks badly fatigued.

We have very comfortable quarters here. “Mark” went immediately to bed on our arrival. He is nervous and weak.

Reporters from all the morning and evening papers called and interviewed him. It seemed like old times again, and “Mark” enjoyed it.

The young men called at 3 p.m.. and paid me the fee for the lecture, which took place in Music Hall. There were 4,200 people present, at prices ranging from 25 cents to $1. It was nine o’clock before the crowd could get in and “Mark” begin. As he hobbled upon the stage, there was a grand ovation of cheers and applause, which continued for some time. Then he began to speak, and before he could finish a sentence the applause broke out again. So it went on for over an hour on a mid-July night, with the mercury trying to climb out of the top of the thermometer. “Mark Twain” kept that vast throng in convulsions [Eccentricities of Genius 200-1].

H.H. Rogers telegrammed Livy and quoted it in his July 16 to Sam:

I shall do everything to carry out your wishes even though it conflicts with my judgment. In order to make progress, I have talked with your brother [Charles J. Langdon] on the telephone to-day and he is coming here on Wednesday to help us in the matter. Everybody is friendly. I will send newspaper clippings with letter to Sault Ste. Marie. Kindest wishes all around [MTHHR 168]. Note: the meeting had to do with resolution of the Thomas Russell matter.