"Livy darling, it was flattering, at the Lord Mayor's dinner, tonight, to have the nation's honored favorite, the Lord High Chancellor of England, in his vast wig & gown, with a splendid, sword-bearing lackey, following him & holding up his train, walk me arm-in-arm through the brilliant assemblage, & welcome me with all the enthusiasm of a girl, & tell me that when affairs of state oppress him & he can't sleep, he always has my books at hand & forgets his perplexities in reading them!" (10 November 1872)

On his first trip to England to gather material for a book and cement relations with his newly authorized English publishers, Samuel Clemens was astounded to find himself hailed everywhere as a literary lion. America's premier humorist had begun his long tenure as an international celebrity. Meanwhile, he was coming into his full power at home. The Innocents Abroad continued to produce impressive royalties and his new book, Roughing It, was enjoying great popularity. In newspaper columns he appeared regularly as public advocate and conscience, speaking on issues as disparate as safety at sea and political corruption. Clemens's personal life at this time was for the most part fulfilling, although saddened by the loss of his nineteen-month-old son, Langdon, who died of diphtheria. Life in the Nook Farm community of writers and progressive thinkers and activists was proving to be all the Clemenses had hoped for.

The 309 letters in this volume, more than half of them never before published, capture the events of these years with detailed intimacy. Thoroughly annotated and indexed, they are supplemented by genealogical charts of the Clemens and Langdon families, a transcription of the journals Clemens kept during his 1872 visit to England, book contracts, his preface to the English edition of The Gilded Age, contemporary photographs of family and friends, and a gathering of all newly discovered letters written between 1865 and 1871. This volume is the fifth in the only complete edition of Mark Twain's letters ever attempted, and the twenty-fourth in the comprehensive edition known as The Mark Twain Papers and Works of Mark Twain.

Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith are editors with the Mark Twain Project in The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. Editorial work for this volume was generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by donations to The Friends of The Bancroft Library from the Barkley Fund.

“Mark Twain is our greatest . . . Mark Twain. He is not, properly speaking, a novelist nor ‘just’ a journalist nor polemicist. He is simply a voice like no other. The only mystery to him is this: was he a great comic actor who could also write much as he acted, or was he a great writer who could also act, like Dickens? Some evidence of how he did both is now at hand in the form of the 309 letters that he wrote in the years 1872-3, when he first visited England and took the country by storm as a performer. . . . These are very much the letters and thoughts of a businessman-actor-writer with a gift for comedy. He is, in short, a star on tour as well as a writer with an ever-alert eye for incidents to be used in such later books as A Connecticut Yankee and The Prince and the Pauper.”—Gore Vidal, London Sunday Times

“Salamo and Smith are to be commended for the incredible depth, range, and detail of their work. Their scholarship is impeccable, their erudition extensive—one has the feeling that they could probably account for almost every hour of Twain’s life.”—Choice

"The fifth volume in the definitive edition of Twain's correspondence. . . . A model of documentary editing. . . . "One of the joys of teaching literature—I assert without apology—is that we get to read other people's mail, occasionally even letters explicitly proscribed. 'Please don't let a word of this letter get into print—these things are from private conversations & the footprints must be all covered up carefully before they see the light,' Twain wrote . . . from London in November 1872."—Gary Scharnhorst, Western American Literature

"comprehensively annotated . . . There is not a boring letter herein."—Charles C. Nash, Library Journal

"Salamo and Smith (members of the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library, Univ. of California) are to be commended for the incredible depth, range and detail of their work. Their scholarship is impeccable, their erudition extensive."—Kirkus Reviews

"Another superb volume graces one of the major documentary projects of our era, the Mark Twain Papers complete works."—To Wit: Official Newsletter of the American Humor Studies Association

"A rich feast . . . one of the year's most impressive scholarly feats"—William Baker, Antioch Review

"One of the great scholarly enterprises of the century. Since the 1970s the . . . members of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California have been turning out magnificent editions of the writer's letters, notebooks, travel narratives and fiction. If you want to enjoy, and to understand fully, the genius of Mark Twain, the California editions are the only texts to have."—Michael Shelden, London Telegraph

"Hard-core researchers who can't help still admiring substantial scholarship will sigh with pleasure but also boggle at the depth and fineness of detail, at the recovery of facts that had apparently disappeared down the stream of time. . . . Even the shrewdest literary snoop will wonder, 'How did the editors find out that?' "—Louis J. Budd, Mississippi Quarterly

"Lengthy, encyclopedic, enlightening, and often wonderfully entertaining footnotes . . . between the texts of the letters and the voluminous editorial commentary, Mark Twain's Letters project promises to become the most comprehensively detailed reconstructed life of a genius ever seen."—Robert Hurwitt, Berkeley Express

Emblem of approval for the highest standards in scholarly editing, The Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association

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