Traveling with Twain

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) befriended Mary Fairbanks (he called her Mother Fairbanks) on the steamship Quaker City during a five-month tour in 1867 of Europe and the Holy Land, the subject of his bestselling The Innocents Abroad. He dreamed of buying a share of the Cleveland Herald, owned by Fairbanks’ husband, becoming a Herald editor and settling down with Livy Langdon, his wife to be. “You shall be managing editor,” he wrote to her, “that is to say, you’ll manage the editor.” Though he could not afford in the end to buy part of the Herald, he purchased Livy’s wedding band in Cleveland and chose the city as the first on his debut lecture tour of 1868. “Made a splendid hit last night and am the ‘lion’ today,” he wrote the day following his lecture to 1,200. Almost $100,000 in debt in 1895 he returned to Cleveland at close to 60 to begin a yearlong, 53,000-mile world lecture tour designed to pay creditors every dollar he owed them. In Cleveland he lectured to 2,600, including 200 newsboys positioned on the Music Hall stage behind him. “Why with their scufflings and horse-play and noise,” he huffed, “it was just a menagerie.”

October 3