July 31 Friday – The Clemens family arrived in Southampton. Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers what may have been meant as a PS to his July 22 letter:

We are just arrived, 16 days out from the Cape, and now I will telegraph London to send down the letters. Love to you all. / SLC [MTHHR 228].

Sam then telegraphed Chatto & Windus to forward his mail to his hotel in Southampton. The Clemenses took rooms at the South Western Hotel in Southampton [Aug. 5 to Harper].

Note: Rodney estimates that half of Sam’s Webster & Co. debt was paid after the world tour [196]. Powers gives Sam’s lecture receipts for the tour at between $20,000 and $25,000, “well short of his $100,000 goal” [MT A Life 576]. Both biographers give Sam’s hope in the travel book (FE) to pay the balance. Pond writes that “with his voice and pen enough to pay all his creditors …in full, with interest, and this he did almost a year sooner than he had originally calculated” [Eccentricities of Genius, 199]. This would have included royalties from FE, however. Lorch writes: “Mark Twain’s debts from the Webster failure [not counting the $70,000 claim by Livy] amounted to approximately $80,000. Thus it is clear that the income from lecturing alone contributed between a third and a half to the final retirement of that burdensome debt” [255]. Further, MTLTP p.365-6 gives the total of $79,704.80 owed to 101 creditors, not counting Livy, and by 1898 “all creditors apparently satisfied.”