To
Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett
24 January 1868 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00182)
‸☞ Read this only to the family, & then burn it—I do hate to have anybody know anything about my business. Don’t mention the terms, herein, on your life. It is business secret.‸
Hartford, Conn., Jan. 24.
Dear Mother & Sister—
This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office as I came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, & young James Gordon Bennett asked me to write impersonally twice a week for the Herald, & said if I would, I might have full swing, & abuse anybody & everybody I wanted to. I said I must have the very fullest possible swing, & he said, All right. I said “It’s a contract”—& that settled that matter. I’ll make it a point to write one letter a week, anyhow.1
But the best thing that has happened was here. This great American Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till [I ]thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I met Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, & with his usual whole-souled way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he gets a chance, he said, “Now here—you are ‸one‸ of the talented men of the age.—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.; I’ll tell you what to do, & how to do it.” And he did.2 And I listened well, & then came up here & have made a splendid contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large [ paper pages], with illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publishers’ hands by the middle of July. My per centage is to be a fifth more than they paid Richardson.3 They pay me more than they have ever paid any author except Horace Greeley.4 Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this. But I had my mind made up to one thing—I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, & a good deal of it. I told them so. I had the misfortune to “bust out” one author of standing. They had his manuscript, with the understanding that they would publish his book if they could not get a book from me (they only publish two books at a time, & so my book & Richardson’s Life of Grant will fill the bill for next fall & winter,)—so that manuscript was sent back to its author to-day. These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books you can imagine.5 [in margin: I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of May.] 6
I shall write to the Enterprise & Alta every week, as usual, I guess, & to the Herald twice a week—occasionally to the Tribune & the magazines (I have a stupid article in the Galaxy, just issued,)7 but I am not going [to] write to this, that & the other paper any more. The Chicago Tribune wants letters, but I hope & pray I have charged them so much that they will not close the contract.8 I am gradually getting out of debt, but these trips to New York do cost like sin. Sin.9
I hope you have cut out & forwarded my printed letters to Washington—please continue to do so as they arrive.10
I have had a tip-top time, here, for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno. Hooker’s family—Beecher’s relatives—& of ‸in a general way of‸ the hea Mr. Bliss, ‸also, [who ]is‸ head of the publishing firm.) Puritans are mighty straight-laced, & they won’t let me smoke in the parlor, but the Almighty don’t make any better people.11
Now don’t go & read this letter to anybody outside the family circle—I am sensitive on this point. If you have to talk, talk—but don’t read my letters.
I expect I have made the Alta people mad, but I don’t care. They did not telegraph me soon enough.12
That cursed, infernal Patent Office business Commissionership has changed round again & gone into Cox’s hands. I expect that thing is going to both take me months to accomplish it. The way I’ll waltz into some of those people in the Herald the first thing they know, will make them think the Devil himself has got loose for another thousand years. If I ever do start in, to in good earnest, to fiddle for them I’ll bet they’ll dance. I want just one private talk with Andrew Johnson when I get back to Washington, & then I’ll know what course to pursue. If they don’t want any clerks in the Departments immediately, I will “show up” their damnable rottenness for not wanting clerks.13 Love to all—good-bye. I shall be in New York 3 days—then go on to the capital.
Yrs aff’ly especially Ma,
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Bliss had evidently seen the following announcement, whose source has not been discovered: Mark Twain, one of the funniest writers of the day, who was one of the Quaker City excursionists, is preparing a volume
descriptive of their voyage. It will be published by the American Publishing company of this city, and those who have laughed over
Mark’s story of the Jumping Frog of Calaveras, Jim Wolfe and the Cats, or his inimitable letters from Italy and
Palestine, will be apt to buy it. (“City and Vicinity,” Hartford Courant, 24 Dec 67,
8) Paine, who had access to a complete version of Bliss’s letter, paraphrased the rest of its contents:
Bliss “recited the profits made by Richardson and others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid.
Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price” for each copy of his Beyond the
Mississippi; Bliss “added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright purchase, and
royalty” (MTB, 1:351). Clemens held out for a 5 percent royalty on each copy of The Innocents Abroad, rejecting a
guaranteed fee of $10,000 “cash in hand” for outright purchase, which Bliss offered as an
alternative (MTL, 1:146–47; see 27 Jan 68 to Bliss for further
details of the contract). Clemens’s choice ultimately proved financially wise: The Innocents Abroad
earned him about $14,000 in its first year of publication; in 1903 he claimed that his royalties from the first American
edition had totaled $35,000 (Hirst 1975, 317–18).
I hear no swearing here, I see no one chewing tobacco, I have found nobody drunk. What a singular country it is.
At the hospitable mansion where I am a guest, I have to smoke surreptitiously when all are in bed, to save my reputation, and then
draw suspicion upon the cat when the family detect the unfamiliar odor. I never was so absurdly proper in the broad light of day in
my life as I have been for the last day or two. So far, I am safe; but I am sorry to say that the cat has lost caste. (SLC 1868 [MT00642])
while Clemens was in the Eastern States, there came to us a statement, through the medium of the Associated Press,
that he was preparing for publication his letters which had been printed in the “Alta California.” The
proprietors of that newspaper were worth. They regarded the letters as their private property. Had they not bought and paid for
them? Could they have been written if they had not furnished the money to pay the expenses of the writer? (Brooks 1898, 99) The “statement” was probably an announcement like the one in the Courant, or a
similar, briefer one that had appeared in the New York World on 23 December and was reprinted in the Alta on 14 January: “A book is imminent, on the voyage of the Quaker City, from
the pen of ‘Mark Twain’” (“Personal,” New York World,
23 Dec 67, 4; “Personal,” San Francisco Alta California, 14 Jan 68, 1). The proprietors
evidently telegraphed Clemens protesting his decision to republish his letters without asking their permission. Clemens’s
comment here suggests that he may have sent a somewhat intemperate reply to this telegram, which probably reached him before he left
Washington on 17–19 January en route to Hartford. See 1 Feb 68 to Young, n. 1, for further details.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L2, 160–164; Paine, 937, and MTB, 1:357–58, excerpts; MTL, 1:145–46, excerpt; Davis 1954, brief excerpt.
Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 512–14.
Emendations and textual notes:
I • I | I
paper pages • pa‸ges‸ per
who • who who
Yr • [possibly ‘Ys’]
