December, end – Sam remained in Hartford with his family during this period and no letters from Dec. 22 to Jan. 3 have been found. Clemens may have gone to Elmira, where George MacDonald was visiting Livy’s mother [Lindskoog 26]. After returning from England, Sam was drafting an English book, so it’s probable he worked on it over the holidays. Sam got the book about a third completed and stopped. Some of the material found its way into Mark Twain’s sketches. Number One (1874). By year’s end, Sam was interested in collaborating with his neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, in a satire about American politics. This work became The Gilded Age and was published at the end of 1873. Paine [MTB 476] describes a dinner with the Warners where the idea was a spur-of-the-moment agreement to do a novel together. Neither man had written a novel [Emerson 83]. Sam had wanted to use his mother’s cousin, the wealthy James A.H. Lampton, as a character in some work. Also, Sam’s Washington experiences had furnished him with many character sketch ideas [MTL 5: 258-63].
With Sam doing more work on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in Jan. 1873, as well as continued work on the English book and the collaboration with Warner, this period marked the beginning of the technique or approach of having several major manuscripts going at once—one Sam engaged in for the rest of his literary days. Interrupting work on one book allowed him to put steam into another. Some fell by the wayside, but the best were eventually completed. It took nine years, mostly shelf-time, to finish Huckleberry Finn, his masterpiece.
William Dean Howells, in a Jan. 3, 1873 letter from Boston to Charles W. Stoddard: “I lunched the other night with Mark Twain, and we had some ‘very pretty conversation,’ as Pepys says. Yourself was among the topics” [MTHL 1: 12]. The reference to “the other night” would most likely place this in late December.