If you were to go to 203 Trumbull street in downtown Hartford today you would see a TD Bank location, but when the Clemenses lived in Hartford, this site at the corner of Trumbull and Asylum was home to the Allyn House, one of Hartford’s premier hotels. The imposing four-story hotel had two five-story towers and a 400-seat dining hall that ran the entire length of its west side. The Allyn House also featured a restaurant, a drugstore, a theater hall, and a soda shop that offered “Specialty of Fancy Egg Drinks.”

The Allyn House was a stop on many of Clemens’ tour schedules as he lectured and promoted the persona and work of Mark Twain. Clemens was in good company lecturing at the Allyn House which was popular with famous visitors to Hartford including Abraham Lincoln in March 1860 and Frederick Douglass in 1864 and 1883.

Clemens’ non-stop work as a touring lecturer was crucial to the economic security of his family. Despite being a well-known author, Clemens didn’t make enough from selling his books to fully make ends meet, so speaking on a range of topics from race, class, gender, and politics to his own writings, played a key role in keeping Clemens and his family financially stable. Clemens was truly an innovator, developing a career as a creative, sustaining a celebrity persona, and excelling at what we refer to today as “side-hustle culture” when that creative career doesn’t quite meet basic needs and wants.

Samuel Clemens, while performing as Mark Twain, denied being an actor but there is no doubt that he was a performer who straddled the line of respectability; living the good life as a celebrity, while struggling to make ends meet when his public facing work did not always cover the bills. Clemens/Twain had to balance these two worlds–of private and public personas–in a way akin to intentionally curating a public social media presence today, while hiding more troubling personal truths.

Scholars also see Samuel Clemens performance as Mark Twain as the connection between early vaudeville acts of the 1860s and the rise of cleaner forms of variety performance, and ultimately humorous lectures in the 1880s arguing that Mark Twain was the first stand-up comedian. The growing popularity of Vaudeville performances also gave Clemens a ready-made audience.

While the Allyn house was important in Clemens’ career, the hotel also played a role in his home life. The Allyn House was where Clemens most likely first met George Griffin who worked as a waiter there prior to becoming the Clemenses’ butler. With the ever financially precarious reality of being a working creative, Samuel Clemens nonetheless had to create and maintain an upper-middle class lifestyle afforded to him by his wife’s social circle and his celebrity image.