Elmira
My Dear Miss Anna—1
Make it 600 pages, ‸octavo,‸ prices ranging from $3.50 up to $5 according to binding. Each of those 600 pages will contain 350 words——so you can see how much MS is required.2
About the [letters. Your ] engraved card will make your name unmistakable & show whence you come. I was an entire day—from breakfast [unrtil ] evening—writing the 30 or 44 40 pages I put into those few introductory letters. And now you suggest that those people will have forgotten about you!
Good God! {Which expression Livy will mark out, so I may as well do it myself} 3
No indeed—if they have forgotten, on their heads be it!4
Livy & babies & Langdons & Cranes all well—all send love.5
Yrs in an awful push of work,6
S L Clemens.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Dickinson’s confused apology was for misspelling Clemens’s name in her 23 June letter to him
(28 June 74 to Dickinson, n. 1).
will do his best to get it up in the best style—with new illustrations &c. I am inclined to
think—from my knowledge of the man that this is the best he will do—and it lies with you to say whether this
will be satisfactory. He says he can arrange for an English copyright for you if you wish—there are various matters of
detail to be talked about if you agree— (Anna E. Dickinson Papers, DLC) Dickinson and Bliss never came to terms, and consequently she never published a book through the American
Publishing Company or its subsidiaries. It is not known if the book she was working on for Bliss was among those later published
through other houses. None of them was commercially successful, although two received some favorable critical response: A Paying Investment (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1876), her plea for compulsory education for children,
technical institutes to train workers, and government intervention to prevent poverty and crime; and A Ragged
Register (of People, Places and Opinions) (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1879), her reminiscences (Chester, 106, 166, 173, 197–98).
Dickinson had not always thought so well of Clemens. In 1873, in a letter to her mother, she characterized him as a
“vulgar boor” (see L3, 66 n. 2, which, however, misidentifies her correspondent).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L6, 180–181.
Emendations and textual notes:
letters. Your • letters.—|Your
unrtil • [‘r’ partly formed]
