UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO H. L. BATEMAN DURING HIS TOUR OF THE UK TWAIN (Mark, 1835-1910, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens, American Author of Tom Sawyer)

Fine Unpublished Autograph Letter Signed “S. L. Clemens” to Mr BATEMAN (Hezekiah Lithicum, 1812-1875, American Actor and Manager) asking him to “pardon me, but I’m called to Paris on a matter of important business & shall not get back in time to meet my dinner engagement with you - a thing which I do most sincerely regret...”, 1 side 8vo., The Langham, 1st July no year but

In January 1864, with America in the throes of civil war, Bateman moved with his family from Brooklyn, New York, to London, managing a variety of actors and concert artists before assuming management of the Lyceum Theatre in 1871. Following his sudden death on 22th March 1875 The Times declared that ‘he stood gallantly forward as the promoter of an intellectual and morally irreproachable drama at a day when the theatrical world was threatened with a deluge of vice and frivolity’. Clemens frequented the home of Hezekiah Bateman during his English tour of 1872–3, socialising with the actor Henry Irving and the journalist and novelist Joseph Hatton, among others. On 25th June 1873 he had ‘transplanted his party to a suite in the six-storey, six-hundred room Langham Hotel on Regent Street at Oxford Circus complete with billiard room, where he had stayed during his first visit. The palatial Georgian hostelry, completed in 1865 as the first European “grand” hotel, proclaimed itself the largest building in London. Surely it presented the largest bill. All of this suited Mark Twain whose callers now included Robert Browning, the self-exiled Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, and various Cabinet members, playwrights, and authors. Not since Benjamin Franklin was received as a “sage of antiquity” by the French in 1776 had an American enjoyed such veneration in Europe’ (Ron Powers, Mark Twain:a life, 2005). Clemens had travelled to England for the first time in August 1872, making two further trips between then and early 1874. This letter is not in L. Salamo and H. Elinor Smith, eds., Mark Twain’s letters, which records two other letters of 1st July 1873 (to Moncure D. Conway and Joaquin Miller) in which Twain refers to his imminent trip to Paris, and a further letter of 4th July to Moncure Conway in which he states ‘I have given up Paris altogether for the present, because the Shah’s movements are so uncertain’.

Item Date:  1873

Stock No:  42215      £2750

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