Since I live near Hartford and know much about Samuel Clemens, I think I must set the record straight here. Clemens wanted to declare bankruptcy after he blew everything he had on the Paige Compositor (an early linotype machine). When his fellow speculators relinquished their interests in the machine, Clemens took up the gauntlet alone, eventually pouring $3000 a month in the invention until, at length, it was given a trial run at the Chicago Tribune. The improbable contraption was a bust, whirling a machine shop of parts out the windows of the newspaper's composing room. It was then that Clemens decided to declare his insolvency. However, bankruptcy would have created an enormous problem in the 1890s for a cult hero of literature. Speaking engagements would have dried up and Clemens would have been forced back to the drudgery of writing, at a time when he was completely spent. So he and his family closed up their Hartford home in 1893 and went on the European tour that you reference.
Incidentally, Clemens was a very self-centered pig of a man. While on the Europeon tour, Oxford bestowed an honorary doctorate on him and he never let anyone forget it. He even wore the cap and gown to his own daughter's wedding a number of years later. What kind of person would upstage his own daughter on her wedding day? Apparently Samuel Clemens' kind of man!
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