"English Notes": A Book Mark Twain Abandoned

Early in 1874 the American News Company published a slim, twenty-five-cent pamphlet: it was a collection of thirteen sketches by Mark Twain. Some were familiar—"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," easily the most familiar, had already appeared in print at least five times. Some, like "Concerning Chambermaids," though previously published, were obscure—deservedly obscure. Only three of the thirteen were new: "A Memorable Midnight Experience" was accorded first-place in the pamphlet, possibly because it was both new and longer than any of the other twelve sketches; in third place, just after the "Jumping Frog," came "Rogers"; and in tenth position stood "Property in Opulent London." Above the title of each of these previously unpublished pieces appeared the bracketed legend: "From the Author’s Unpublished English Notes." The title page and the ornately decorated paper cover of the pamphlet announced it as "Number One."¹ No "Number Two" ever appeared.

Almost two years later, on 18 January 1876, the first issue of a "newspaper" calling itself The Bazaar Record appeared in Cleveland. The paper was produced to publicize a charity bazaar; its editor was Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks—"Mother" Fairbanks to Samuel Clemens—the friendly critic and censor of Mark Twain since 1867, when they had been fellow-passengers aboard the Quaker City on its voyage to Europe and the Holy Land. The first issue of The Bazaar Record featured a sketch by Mark Twain, "Some Recollections of a Storm at Sea." Beneath the title, in brackets, appeared the words "Being an Extract from Chapter III, of a Book Begun Three Years Ago, But Afterwards Abandoned."

"A Memorable Midnight Experience," "Rogers," "Property in Opulent London" and ‘‘Some Recollections of a Storm at Sea’’ are hardly familiar titles. The pamphlet which contained the first three seems to have been sold mostly, perhaps exclusively, in railroad cars—about as ephemeral a mode of distribution as can be imagined; but even more ephemeral was The Bazaar Record, which folded on schedule, along with the bazaar it publicized, after it had run for four issues—folded and was forgotten. Only one of these excerpts from Mark Twain’s "English Notes," the book he had "begun" but "afterwards abandoned," was to appear again in the author’s

lifetime, and that one, "Rogers," was to make its unique reappearance in the inconspicuous little volume Punch, Brothers, Punch!² Mark Twain had dismembered his "English Notes"—dismembered them and abandoned them.

Some parts of the abandoned travel book appear to be irrecoverably lost, but major portions survive in the four published excerpts, in incomplete manuscripts, or in both forms. Recovering and reassembling the book, insofar as that is possible, will not reveal a lost masterpiece: there is no masterpiece here. Yet there is reason enough for making the effort to find the fragments and to put them together again. For just as the recovery and restoration of the preliminary sketches some Old Master made for a major work he never achieved shed light on the Master and his art (I’m not at all sure Mark Twain would have savored this simile, but I’ll charge ahead with it.), so the reassembling of the dismembered "English Notes" will illuminate a stage of Mark Twain’s career, with its unfulfilled possibilities and its misdirected energies. And, more specifically, examining the reasons that "English Notes" remained an unachieved work may clarify for us the nature of Mark Twain’s achievement in the European travel books he wrote before and after "English Notes," The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad.³

II

In the summer of 1872 Mark Twain might have answered a query about his occupation with "humorist." Certainly that is what most of his growing public would have called him. But an equally good case—probably a better one—could have been made for "commercial-traveler." "All the journeyings I had ever done," he would write in 1878, "had been purely in the way of business.⁴ And most of the "business" he had transacted, he might have added, had involved "journeyings." The first book-length work he had tried to publish had been made up of his newspaper travel-letters from the Sandwich Islands. The first book-length work he had succeeded in publishing was again based on travel-letters, and that book, The Innocents Abroad, had scored an immediate and splendidly remunerative success. Roughing It, which had appeared in February of 1872, is through most of its length more a work of personal narrative than a travel book, but those Sandwich Island Letters Mark Twain had found nobody ready to publish in 1867 fill out—more properly, they pad out—the book’s final third. And the lectures which were putting money in Clemens’ pocket and solidifying his hold on his audience were also based on his travels, "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands" being the one he delivered most

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often. Little wonder then that with Roughing It behind him and its sales disappointing, he thought of going traveling again.

On 21 July 1872 Clemens directed a letter to Joseph L. Blamire, New York agent for the London publishers George Routledge & Sons, with whom he intended to negotiate an agreement for the publication of his books in Britain: "I have declined a proposition to lecture for a month for $10,000, & shall spend my winter either in the rural part of England or in Cuba and Florida—the latter most likely."⁵ But it wasn’t to be Cuba and Florida: on 21 August he sailed aboard the Scotia for England.

In the mid-nineteenth century no steamship line would have thought of advertising that "getting there is half the fun." Yet for the travel writer—for the literary commercial-traveler—an outbound ship was loaded with opportunities. Gathering material from and about fellow passengers was easy, and the enforced leisure of the voyage provided plenty of time for writing. A glance at the first half-dozen chapters of The Innocents Abroad will suffice as a reminder of how much interest Mark Twain could extract from that literary capital. On all of his previous voyages his fellow passengers had been numerous enough and their foibles arresting enough to supply him with abundant anecdotal and dramatic material, but the eastward crossing of the Scotia proved a sad disappointment. "I can’t say that I have been enjoying myself, greatly, lost in a vast ship where our 40 or 50 passengers flit about in the great dim distances like vagrant spirits," he complained in a letter to his wife.⁶ Yet it would appear that he found or invented something to say about those "vagrant spirits," for when the ship touched at Queenstown (now Cobh) on the southwest coast of Ireland, he had the purser mail two envelopes of manuscript to Livy.⁷ And from Liverpool, before he had any opportunity for sightseeing ashore, he wrote her: "I will put in another 20 minutes cutting out my journal to enclose with this. It seems to take a power of time to cut out these flimsy leaves."⁸

Those leaves were the first portion of his "English Notes." The mere fact that the leaves from his notebook were committed to three envelopes gives some idea of their extensiveness. They ran to about 150 words per page and fifteen or twenty pages would have fit easily into a small envelope: the notes on the voyage must have totaled more than 7500 words. None of that portion of the notes has come to light, but the estimate of length can be ventured with confidence because another notebook which meets the same description survives in the Mark Twain Papers.⁹

That little notebook (it measures five-and-a-quarter by eight-and-a-half inches) is a bibliographical oddity. Called "Francis’ Highly Improved Manifold Writer," the book in which Mark Twain recorded his impressions was manufactured by the stationers Francis & Loutrel, 45 Maiden Lane, New York. The well bound and sewn little volume contained originally two hundred ruled, translucent "flimsy leaves." By placing one of the sheets of carbon paper which came with the book—paper carboned on both sides—between two sheets and then writing with a stylus or pencil on a loose sheet of heavier paper placed on top, one could produce two copies (or if a pencil was used rather than a stylus, an original and two copies) simultaneously. The surviving Manifold Writer contains pages numbered 100 through 199, undetached, of the second carbon copy with the imprint on the recto; the pages numbered 175 through 199 are preceded by the first carbon, also undetached, with the imprint on the verso; and pages numbered 120 through 140 of the first carbon, detached, also survive. In addition, two different typescripts of pages 88 through 99 of the preceding Manifold Writer have been preserved in the Mark Twain Papers. When and by whom these typescripts were prepared and what has become of the manuscript from which they were made are unknown. The first page of the second—the surviving—Manifold Writer continues without a paragraph-break the topic which, according to the evidence of the typescripts, the final page of the first had introduced. The last page of the surviving book ends in mid-sentence—in fact in mid-word: "A little actor who called in our box told me how he cured himself of consump-" It is apparent that Mark Twain’s "English Notes" ran on into at least one more notebook, but no additional manuscript has been located.

How shall we classify these "English Notes"? As a notebook? as a journal? as a diary? as a series of personal letters? as a draft of a book? A good case could be made for the answer "None of the above"; but a better one could be made, I think, for "All of the above."

A notebook? Mark Twain informed the readers of Sketches No. 1 that the three new sketches published there were "From the Author’s Unpublished English Notes," yet he himself made a distinction between this work and what he called his "note-book." In a letter of 25 October to Livy—a letter which stresses his difficulties in finding subjects for his travel writing or time to devote to it—he says: "I am using a note-book a little, now, and journalizing when I can," and at the end of the nine-page letter he adds, "Well, I must

get to my journal—so good night. . . ."¹⁰ The "English Notes" would seem to be what Mark Twain was here designating as a journal rather than a notebook. Its entries may even have refined and expanded jottings in a now-lost notebook. The "Manifold Writer" itself is the best argument against calling it—or what Mark Twain wrote in it—a "notebook." It was, first of all, too large to meet one of his requirements: it would not have fitted conveniently in a pocket. Furthermore, its flimsy onion-skin pages and its loose carbon-sheets would have made it altogether too clumsy for a peripatetic note-taker like Mark Twain. It was designed for one purpose: writing multiple copies at a desk.

But this is not to say that what Mark Twain wrote in it was invariably sequential, narrative, or highly developed. It would appear that he often forgot his own distinction between "journalizing" and "using a note-book"; or that, whenever ideas he would normally have consigned to a notebook for later development occurred to him while he was "journalizing," he simply set them down in his "journal," the Manifold Writer. For example, between a one-paragraph observation on the streets of London and nine pages of polished humor on the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall, he jotted down what readers of the volumes thus far published of Mark Twain’s Journals and Notebooks will recognize as a typical notebook entry. Separated from the material above and below it by wavy horizontal lines, it reads: "J. R. Toole & the old clo’ man of Dublin." (I shall return to Toole and his "old clo’ man" later.) Although short items of this kind are uncommon in the surviving manuscript of "London Notes"—so uncommon as to assure us that Mark Twain must have been keeping another notebook of his customary kind at the same time—there are enough of them to suggest that the distinction between notebook and journal was not absolute even in the mind of the note-taker and journalizer.

A term that has more interesting applications to "London Notes"—a term etymologically identical with "journal"—is "diary." On 22 September he wrote Livy, "tomorrow & next day I am going to devote to my diary."¹¹ If one devotes "tomorrow & next day" to a diary, it may not be precisely a diary, of course; yet the first of the surviving entries of "London Notes" sounds very much like a diary. An entry on the second page contains, indeed, a date (anomalously parenthesized, whether by Mark Twain or the unidentified typist I cannot say):

Regent’s Park is a huge tract in the midst of London, adorned with great trees & luxuriantly carpeted with grass. And today

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(Sunday, Sept. 15) it was fine to look down the long perspective & see the hundreds of men, women & children moving hither & thither & in & out among the distant trees.

Fortunately the dailiness of these early entries, their routine, flaccid quality, is replaced by vigorous, polished, and often satiric writing, with subjects developed for publication, almost from the first page of the second Manifold Writer. That more finished material is what will primarily concern us. But before discussing those portions of the manuscript which were manifestly well on their way toward the printer, another minor but interesting aspect of "London Notes" deserves brief attention.

As we have seen, Mark Twain detached carbon copies of his shipboard notes and mailed them to his wife; he continued that practice up to page 175 of the manuscript; and I am convinced that he must have sent the originals of pages beyond 175 (the separate, heavier sheets which he would have placed on top of the Manifold Writer flimsies and would have written on in pencil) to her as well. At several points in the manuscript Clemens addresses his wife directly, and one of these comes beyond page 175 (AMS p. 198):

Livy, I am going to send that Cloak to you in a day or two, instead of waiting to bring it myself. The weather will make you need it presently. Shall send it through Routledge & Sons of 416 Broome Street, New York.

This brief entry and others like it interrupt longer and more public sections, but at one place a relatively fully developed anecdote seems to have been intended for Livy alone. "Mortimer of ‘Figaro’ dined with us and tried to crowd me into writing for his paper, but did not succeed." This would appear to be a private communication. In an even more private vein, Clemens goes on to tell how the French wife of Mortimer was "full of sympathy" for English couples who produce a child a year. She asked an Englishman whose wife had borne five children and suffered two miscarriages in seven years "if he could not prevent children, & said she could," and she added that he must be "très maladroit." That, manifestly, was not an anecdote Mark Twain would write for publication—not even something he would playfully slip into a manuscript destined for the printer in order to give Livy the pleasure of deleting it. This was a personal communication embedded in a document otherwise destined for the public.

But random jottings and diary entries and personal communications constitute together only a small part of "London Notes"—

though each element may contribute to the tone and tenor of the whole. Most of what survives consists of travel writing virtually ready to be set in type. For the portion of the manuscript which yielded most of "A Memorable Midnight Experience" the Mark Twain Papers hold both the detached and the undetached carbons. The detached carbons establish the point. On the first page of the detached carbon Mark Twain has written in a fine pencil "(From the Author’s unpublished English notes.)" and below that he has written the title of the sketch. Three pages later he has changed the name of his guide at Westminster Abbey from "Wright" to "W______." Noting, sixteen pages into the sketch’s manuscript, that he had picked up a cat and failed to dispose of her, he added "and then put her down." These pencil emendations and three other slight corrections are the only changes he made in the twenty-one surviving pages of what appears to have been printer’s copy—more than two-thirds of the text of the sketch. No manuscript survives for the three other published portions of "London Notes": these lay beyond the surviving Manifold Writer. Nevertheless, the surviving twenty-one pages of printer’s copy seem adequate evidence to lend credence to the view that Mark Twain would have regarded most portions of his "notes" as virtually press-ready.

III

As there is strong reason to believe that discrete sections of "London Notes" would have gone to the printer in the form in which we find them in the manuscript, there is also reason to believe that the sections would have been presented in the order in which we find them. On the ninth page of the Manifold Writer, near the end of the treatment of the Albert Memorial, Mark Twain provided two instructions for the printer, although, in fact, he seems never to have sent the manuscript to any printer. The first instruction was added in pencil: "(Picture of Shak’s grave.)" The second, in carbon, would appear to have been part of the original draft: "(End of Chapter.)" This instruction was subsequently cancelled, however, in the same pencil Mark Twain used to specify the location of the illustration. Two pages further we find the reason for the cancellation: there, in carbon, is a second indication of a chapter ending and a request that the printer insert a diamond form. By letting the second and correct chapter ending stand, Mark Twain provided an indication that he regarded the material that went before and came after as "in place." The indication is a slight one, of course, but in the absence of any contrary indications we are justified in accepting the sequence of sketches in the manuscript as essentially the sequence in which

Mark Twain intended to present them. I shall next provide an account of the contents in that order and venture along the way a few remarks on the plans Mark Twain seems to have had for the further development of his "Notes" and on some of the reasons for his finally abandoning the book.¹²

The lost initial eighty-seven pages of "London Notes" must have treated, in addition to the uneventful voyage, the landing in Liverpool, the trip to London, and Clemens’ first sight-seeing excursion, which took him to Stratford. The eighty-eighth page opens with an anecdote about an American thief who fled to England and tried to pass himself off as a native. He managed to ape British pronunciation successfully, "but he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham hotel, & the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon & the grave of Shakespeare—& those things betrayed his nationality." Clemens was staying at the Langham, and it would appear that the lost section of the "Notes" must have discussed that favorite haunt of visiting Americans. And it must also have described the excursion he had made to Stratford in the company of the American publisher James R. Osgood some five days before he wrote about the thief’s self-disclosure.¹³ Mark Twain’s own self-disclosure as alien, interloper, and outsider frequently provides comedy and establishes reader-sympathy in his travel books and his personal narratives: something in that vein seems to have culminated in the story of the thief.

Another episode which almost certainly occupied some space in the lost pages also makes the author the target of the humor. On the train from Liverpool to London, as Paine tells the story, Clemens

noticed that the gentleman opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was absorbed in a green-covered volume. He was so absorbed in it that, by and by, Clemens’s curiosity was aroused. He shifted his position a little and his eyes caught the title. It was the first volume of the English edition of The Innocents Abroad. This was gratifying for a moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even smiled during the hour of his steady reading.¹⁴

These episodes, if I am correct in my assumption that they were part of the manuscript, presented Mark Twain in his most ingratiating role, the Sufferer. Perhaps it was unfortunate, even lamentable, that once he arrived in London his suffering was over. He was lionized by all. As Paine states the case, "The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of London rather overwhelmed him—and made him timid."¹⁵

The subjects which Mark Twain touches upon in the remaining

pages of the first notebook include the Queen’s reception of Henry Stanley, the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, and the Brighton Aquarium. These are the passages I have characterized as diary-entries. They are followed by the aside to his wife about the American journalist with the French wife who understands family-planning. That takes us into the surviving Manifold Writer, which opens with short sketches of Temple Bar, the City, and London street names. These passages differ from Mark Twain’s customary notebook jottings only in the avoidance of elliptical and fragmentary sentences. All the entries in this section seem to have been destined for expansion. The kind of expansion Mark Twain had in mind for some of them we can infer from the most elliptical of them all: "J. R. Toole & the old clo’ man of Dublin." Sixteen years later Toole was to tell that story to the author of his Reminiscences.¹⁶

The British actor J. R. Toole was widely known for his portrayal of Dickens’ tatterdemalion "Dodger," but his fame had not reached an old-clothes purchaser in Dublin. The "old clo’ man" noticed the trig Toole in a Dublin post office and, not suspecting that he was the celebrated comic actor, asked if he could call upon him and bid on his cast-off clothing. After the old man had renewed that request on several occasions, Toole agreed: "I invited him to come to me at Brunswick Street, and I would show him what I had in his way." What he has "in his way," of course, is the Dodger costume. The comic possibilities here are obvious, although they are largely unrealized in Toole’s Reminiscences: the old man’s Irish speech and his mounting disillusionment about the fine gentleman’s wardrobe would seem ready-made for Mark Twain. Why then did he fail to exploit them? Possibly because the story would have been third-hand, but more probably because it would have illuminated neither his personal travel experience nor the American experiences he took abroad with him, as the alternating European and American materials in such books as A Tramp Abroad do. On the Quaker City excursion Mark Twain had met many odd characters, American and foreign, and during his Tramp through Germany and Switzerland he would meet many more, but in London he encountered only "the great ones," and they made him "timid."

The Mark Twain who wrote the next section, however, was anything but timid. Quite up to the standard of The Innocents Abroad, full of genial but devastating wit, it concerns itself with the Albert Memorial, which "prodigiously" glorified "the COMMONPLACE." In the case of this sketch the question is not why Mark Twain failed to achieve his purpose: he achieved it stunningly.

The question, rather, is why he failed to publish the sketch and to incorporate it into a book. A press report of a speech he had given to a London audience seems to have come to the attention of Mrs. Fairbanks in Cleveland. She responded by letter of 26 October:

"Say nothing irreverent—make your wit exquisite (as you know how) not broad—touch lightly, rather tenderly upon departed goodness, even if it was not greatness (see Albert memorial) and then I’ll just settle back to my knitting and dream of your glory."¹⁷ That letter must have reached him more than a month after he had written his sketch on the commonplace Prince and his Memorial. There are compelling reasons to believe that Mark Twain had decided to go to England to win the approbation of people like Mrs. Fairbanks on both sides of the Atlantic. If doing that required the development of an exquisite wit and a tender touch, he was, for a time, willing to suppress his raucous self. That may explain his failure to publish this sketch. It may also explain the absence of the familiar figure of Mark Twain-the-Disturber-of-the-Peace from all of "English Notes."

His next topic is the British Museum. It proves good for a few one-liners like "I wonder how the mummies walked, with all those bandages on," but reverence and even awe dominate Mark Twain’s account: "I am not capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum—it seems as if I do not know any but little words, & weak ones.

Words do not fail him, however, in the following section, "A Memorable Midnight Experience." This is the longest, the best sustained, and the most polished passage in the manuscript—an admirable performance, surely, and yet one that falls short of Mark Twain’s best descriptive prose. The time and place, midnight in the deserted Westminster Abbey, should have led to a dramatic realization of the narrator, should have rendered him a felt presence, an audible voice; but the recognizable Mark Twain is nowhere to be found: the words he assigns to himself, any person of good sense could as well have spoken.

Mark Twain’s stock method of rendering himself a felt presence, an audible voice, in his travel books was to surround himself with traveling companions—sometimes imaginary (Mr. Brown in the Sandwich Island Letters) and sometimes real (Dan and the Doctor in The Innocents Abroad). The next section, which reports the ritual election of the new Lord Mayor of London, contains a cryptic interlined addition—it is in the original carbon—which must have been a reminder for a revision and expansion of the passage: "Jones questioned both these men [the candidates for Lord Mayor?] and his

parasite put in his jaw." Neither Jones nor his parasite appears elsewhere in "English Notes." We cannot be sure that Mark Twain’s plan was to develop these characters as traveling companions or as persons with whom he would interact, but it is apparent that he intended them to enliven a drab narrative. It needed it.

The second half of the manuscript touches briefly on Magdalen College, Oxford, mentions some curious ways of customs officials, and then launches into the first of two fully developed sketches, an encomium on the art of Gustav Doré. Mark Twain’s enthusiasm for the paintings he had viewed at London’s Doré Gallery tempted him to revert for a moment to the philistinism of The Innocents: "If Doré had lived in the time of those infernal Old Masters the people would have worshiped him. He would utterly have eclipsed that absurd Raphael, & he would have made it warm for the Rev. Michael G. Angelo himself." But as an apparent afterthought, Mark Twain added at the end of that paragraph, "(Quotation from a critical American.)" We know full well whose thoughts Mark Twain was "quoting" here, of course, and the lack of quotation marks around the attack on the Old Masters confirms our conviction. Yet consistent with his effort to present a more "respectable" persona, he seems to have planned to assign his philistine sentiments to a nameless "critical American." That was another of his habitual roles which he felt constrained to abandon.

The other sketch, ostensibly a description of Old Saint Paul’s but actually a description of its "back yard," is a parody of tourists’ guide-books. The sketch is funny enough, but it is interesting to note that Mark Twain must laugh at guide-books, for the monuments described in the guide-books are themselves protected from laughter by strong taboos.

The dreary dialogue between Mark Twain and a waiter generated by a misunderstanding about "sole" and "soul" and some diffuse observations on English eating habits bring the Manifold Writer to its inconclusive conclusion. What lay beyond? Probably one additional Manifold Writer, which would have contained the political sketch "Property in Opulent London," for Clemens could hardly have gathered the material for that sketch early enough for it to have been included in the lost portion of the first notebook. The two other portions of the abandoned book which remain to be accounted for were probably not written in Manifold Writers, for they date from after his return home: the security of carbon copies would not have been necessary. The first of these in order of composition, I am convinced, is "Some Recollections of a Storm at Sea," a spirited

and amusing account of an anxious moment on Clemens’ return to America aboard the Batavia in November. Here Mark Twain is the Sufferer again. He juxtaposes his shabby fears and the stalwart courage of the Captain and a character he calls "the Cardif Giant." No sooner, it seems, had Mark Twain left England than he recovered his old and serviceable self.

The remaining sketch, "Rogers," is the most difficult to date. The "bland, serene human curiosity" of the title is an English gentleman whose suit "seemed coeval with the Conquest" and whose shoes "would hardly hold walnuts without leaking," yet who believed in his heart that his attire made him the envy of all.¹⁸ A preliminary sketch for that more memorable sufferer from folie des grandeurs, Colonel Sellers of The Gilded Age? Quite the opposite, I believe, for the last line of "Rogers" provides an inconspicuous hint of the period of its composition. Mark Twain concludes that Rogers "died at sea, last summer."¹⁹ "Last summer" is the only indication of a relatively remote past time in all of "English Notes." Like The Innocents Abroad, "English Notes" reports sequential events and impressions in what we might call an "immediate past tense." In "Rogers" we encounter something different: events recalled from a winter past, a summer having intervened. Considering how close to "the facts" Mark Twain sticks in all his travel writings, it seems likely that some months had intervened in reality before he wrote that sketch, that he wrote it well after he and Charles Dudley Warner had set to work on The Gilded Age in January, 1873, and that he may even have written it after they had finished the novel. Sellers would be in that case the source for Rogers, not Rogers for Sellers. The London publisher Charles Henry Hotten prefaced his 1873 Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain with an essay in which he mentions that Mark Twain was reported to be writing a new work "Upon the Oddities and Eccentricities of the English."²⁰ The Englishman Rogers, whose eccentric features seem to have been modeled upon an American portrait, in fact a composite Clemens family portrait, Colonel Sellers, is an arresting indication of how little that was odd or eccentric Mark Twain had encountered in England. Rogers hailed from Missouri; he would have put up at the Langham if he could have afforded it.

I have suggested a number of problems which hampered Mark Twain in his attempt to make a book of his "English Notes." He was probably unaware of some of those problems, but others he understood quite clearly. In 1878, he summed them up for an interviewer from the New York World. Asked "Why have you never written a

book on England?" he furnished a reply which may properly end this inquiry:

I have spent a good deal of time in England (your question is not a new one to me) and I made a world of notes, but it was no use. I couldn’t get any fun out of England. It is too grave a country. And its gravity soaks into the stranger and makes him as serious as everybody else. When I was there I couldn’t seem to think of anything but deep problems of government, taxes, free trade, finance—and every night I went to bed drunk with statistics. I could have written a million books, but my publisher would have hired the common hangman to burn them. One is bound to respect England. . . but she is not a good text for hilarious literature.²¹

 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

*Research for this article was supported by a grant from the American Philosophical Society.

NOTES

    ¹Item 3360 in Jacob Blanek, Bibliography of American Literature, Vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). Blanck lists two of the half-dozen surviving states of the pamphlet, which did indeed remain in print until 1877. On the title of the pamphlet no consensus has developed. I shall refer to it as Sketches No. 1.
   ²New York: Slote, Woodress, 1878.
   ³I am preparing a reconstructive edition of ‘English Notes" for inclusion in one of the volumes of the Shorter Travel writings in the Iowa-California Edition of The Works of Mark Twain.
   ⁴"Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion," in An Idle Excursion (London: Chatto & Windus, 1878), p. 1.
   ⁵ALS, Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The brief quotations from unpublished portions of the manuscript of ‘English Notes" and from unpublished correspondence of Mark Twain are reproduced through the courtesy of the Trustees of the Mark Twain Estate, copyright © 1976 by the Mark Twain company.
   ⁶Dixon Wecter, ed., The Love Letters of Mark Twain (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 176.
   ⁷Ibid.
   ⁸SLC to OLE, 1 Sept. 1872. ALS, Mark Twain Papers.
   ⁹DV #69, Mark Twain Papers.
   ¹⁰ALS, Mark Twain Papers.
   ¹¹The Love Letters of Mark Twain, p. 178.
   ¹²The first publications of other excerpts from "London Notes" are as follows: "An Expatriate," "Stanley and the Queen," and "At the British Museum," in Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1912), pp. 465–70; "The Albert Memorial," "Old Saint Paul’s," and "The British Museum," in Bernard DeVoto, ed., Letters From The Earth (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) pp. 171–80.
   ¹³The Love Letters of Mark Twain, p. 177.
   ¹⁴ Paine, p. 459.
   ¹⁵Ibid., p. 461.
   ¹⁶Reminiscences of J. L. Toole, Related by Himself and Chronicled by Joseph Hatton (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1892), pp. 213–16.

    ¹⁷Mary Mason Fairbanks to SLC, 26 October 1872, Mark Twain Papers. For the speech to which Mrs. Fairbanks was responding, see Paine, pp. 1630–32.
   ¹⁸Sketches No. 1, pp. 13–14.
   ¹⁹Ibid., p. 16.
   ²⁰p. xxxvii.
   ²¹New York World, 11 May 1879, p. 1

170.