To William Dean Howells
26 January 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: NN-B and MH-H, UCCL 02483)

Hartford, Jan. 26.

My Dear Howells: 1

When Mrs. Clemens read your letter she said: “Well, then, wherever they go, in March, the direction will be southward & so they must give us a visit on the way.” I do not know what sort of control you may be under, but when my wife speaks as positively as that, I am not in the habit of talking back & getting into trouble. Situated as I am, I would not be able to understand, now, how you could pass by this town without feeling that you were running a wanton risk & doing a daredevil thing. I consider it settled that you are to come in March, & I would be sincerely sorry to learn that you & Mrs. Howells feel differently about it.

The piloting material has been uncovering itself by degrees, until it has exposed such a huge hoard to my view that a whole book will be required to contain it if I use it. So I have agreed to write the book for Bliss. I won’t to be able to run the articles in the Atlantic later than the September number, for the reason that a ‸subscription‸ book issued in the fall is worth $10,000 more to me than ‸has a much larger sale than‸ if issued at any other season of the year. It is funny when I reflect that when I originally wrote you & proposed to do from 6 to 9 articles for the magazine, the vague thought in my mind was that 6 might exhaust the material & 9 would be pretty sure to do it. Or rather it seems to me that that was my thought,—can’t tell at this distance. But in truth 9 chapters don’t now seem to more than open up the subject fairly & start the yarn to wagging.2

I’ve been sick abed ‸several days,‸ for the first time in 21 years.3 How little confirmed invalids appreciate their advantages. I was able to read the English edition of the Greville Memoirs through without interruption, take my meals in bed, neglect all business without a pang, & smoke 18 cigars a day.4 I try not to look back upon these 21 years with a feeling of resentment, & yet the partialities of Providence do seem to me to be slathered around (as one may say) without that gravity & attention to details which the real importance of the matter would seem to suggest. However, there are so many things to attend to & look after in a universe so unnecessarily large as this one, that after all, the real o wonder is that more people are not overlooked than are.

I have just received some pictures of the Madam—not astonishingly good, but I can get her to a gallery only once in 4 years, & so am pretty glad to have any at all. I am sure you said you wanted one, & promised us Mrs. Howells’s & the children’s, too—so I venture to enclose one & look for the fulfillment of your oath. I’m afraid to send one to Aldrich lest he’ll be dreading another deluge!5

Yrs Ever

Mark

P. S.—Look here! Yes, it will do to let [ my me] know by the middle of February, & then I do hope you will decide to make the steamboat trip. Of course you mustn’t go if Mrs. Howells’s desires should remain in any degree against it, for that would impair your enjoyment of it too much, & hers likewise—but I will live in the [ H ] hope that Providence will delvelop an interest in this expedition, & if that once occurs the thing will clip right along to the entire satisfaction of all parties concerned. You mark my words.6

S. L. C.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK):

UCLC32099

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Howells presumably was laboring to meet Atlantic Monthly responsibilities. In a 24 January letter to his father, he reported himself “stalled” on the history of Venice that he long contemplated, both as a book and as a series of articles, but never completed (see Howells: 1979, 55–56 n. 2; 1980, 37 n. 1).

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2 The “whole book” became, of course, Life on the Mississippi. In it Clemens published revised versions of his seven “Old Times on the Mississippi” Atlantic Monthly articles as chapters 4 through 17. He did not complete the book as planned, however. It was not until 1883, after he had made a return trip to the Mississippi River, that he wrote and published it—but not through Elisha Bliss’s American Publishing Company (see 29 Nov 74 to Redpath, n. 2).

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3 Evidently an allusion to the bout of “cholera in St Louis” that Clemens also recalled in 1869 (see L3, 246).

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4 The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV. and King William IV., by Charles Greville (1794–1865), edited by Henry Reeve, was first published in three volumes by Longmans, Green and Company in London in 1874. Clemens’s annotated copy of volume 1 of the second edition (also 1874) survives in the Mark Twain Papers (Gribben, 1:279). Greville’s tenure as clerk of the privy council (1821–59) included most of the period his work covered (1820–37).

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5 Clemens must have received additional prints of the unidentified photograph that Olivia had sent to Mollie on 27 December. It is not known, however, whether he enclosed one with this letter: the picture he enclosed in his 23 April 1875 letter to Howells might have been the one alluded to here, sent belatedly. For the explanation of the “deluge,” see 18 Dec 74 to Aldrich, n. 5, and 31 Dec 74 to Aldrich, n. 2.

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6 The manuscript of this postscript and the manuscript of the letter proper have long been separated and are preserved in different libraries (see the textual commentary). Since it is clear that both reply to Howells’s 24 January letter, they have been reunited here.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B), is copy-text for the body of the letter. MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark pfMS Am 1784.3 [26]), is copy-text for the postscript.

Previous publication: L6, 356–58; MTL, 246–47, with omission; MTHL, 1:61, 62–63, postscript printed as a separate letter; Kiralis, 2, excerpt.

Provenance:see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

my me • mye

H • [partly formed]