Collins and Ward left Chicago on Monday, 19 January as planned, stopping for the night in Detroit, where they stayed at the Russell House Hotel. The Detroit Evening News happily reported that Collins ‘wanted to see more of Detroit’. More probably he wished to avoid another night on the train.

By Thursday, 22 January, they were back in Boston, but did not return to the Tremont Hotel. Instead they chose the St James, perhaps after coming to the same conclusion that Dickens did on his return to the US when he wrote to his subeditor that the Tremont had ‘become contemptible’.

Concerns at home of both a business and personal nature directed Collins's attention toward London, necessitating his writing to his solicitor, William Tin-dell about an unsanctioned revival of The New Magdalen at an unsuitable venue, and a problem with the lease on the home he shared with Martha Rudd. He also, for the first time, suggested that the financial panic was having an effect on his audiences.

However, by 28 January, Collins seemed to have regained his energy. Writing to Schlesinger, he good-naturedly blamed his manager for failing to tell him about a reading in Salem, Massachusetts, and accepted an invitation to dine with his friend on Saturday.

Collins read to a full house at the Essex Institute in Salem on Friday, 30 January, as part of the Institute Course. The reading began at 7.15 so that he might catch the train back to Boston afterwards. The reports once again asserted that as a novelist he was second to none, but as a reader, ‘the least said about him, the better’.

At 2.00 the following afternoon, Collins made his second Boston appearance, this time at the Tremont Temple, a large hall used on Sundays by the Union Temple Church. The audience was ‘satisfactory in both numbers and appreciation’. The review made special mention of ‘the charm of the reader's delivery’ and called the entertainment ‘in every respect a success’ which must have proven ‘very satisfactory to its leading spirit’.