Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Adolph H. Sutro
11 June 1872 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: Jacobs, UCCL 00755)

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Hartford, June 11.

Friend [ L ] Sutro—

Yes, I know poor Riley’s condition, from his letters to me, & although he has been loath to confess the entire seriousness of his disorder, I felt fully convinced that he would never get over it.1 I shall send him a check for $100 by this mail.2

I have been trying for weeks to get down there to see him, but my family affairs would not permit it. Our eldest child remained precariously sick for more than two months, & finally died a week ago. My wife’s health is such that I can hardly be able to absent myself from home for some time yet.3

Yr friend

Samℓ L. Clemens.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Acting on this conviction, on 22 June Clemens signed a new contract with Elisha Bliss which superseded his 6 December 1870 contract for the diamond mine book (see Contract for Diamond Mines Book). The new contract (reproduced in Revised Contract for Diamond Mine Book) gave Clemens the option of publishing the book under another pseudonym, or substituting for it a new book, since it had now become

doubtful whether the information to be received from Mr J. H Riley the party sent to Africa will on account of his ill health be sufficient to enable the sd Clemens to write a book on the subject, or if ‸it‸ is sufficient for that purpose whether it will be sufficient for him to write a book which he will be satisfied to put his own nom de plume (Mark Twain) to. ...

In case the health of sd Riley should be such as to render it utterly impossible for the said Clemens to write the book on the Diamond Fields at all, then he shall be freed from his agreement to write a book on that subject but shall proceed to prepare the other book at once—viz the one upon which he is to appear as author and on which he is to receive 10% copyright.

This new contract, in which Bliss first granted Clemens a 10 percent royalty, may signal an end to their dispute over the 7½ percent royalty on Roughing It. It was not fulfilled until June 1879, when Clemens and Bliss agreed that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), for which no contract had been drawn up, would be used to satisfy the Riley contract retroactively (8 May 72 to Perkins, n. 2; Hill 1964, 130–32; see 28 July 72 to Bliss, n. 2).

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2 Mining entrepreneur Adolph Sutro, Riley’s occasional employer in recent years, had responded to an appeal from Riley by sending him a check for $100 and visiting him at home in Philadelphia. On 9 June Sutro wrote to Clemens on Riley’s behalf. In the same letter, he acknowledged the mention of his tunnel in chapter 52 of Roughing It (he may have received one of the half-morocco copies sent out at Clemens’s order at the end of March): “I have read your book with pleasure and I think it is a capital production. I am much obliged for the kind notice you gave me” (Robert E. Stewart, 157; 20 Mar 72 to Bliss {draft}, n. 7). Complete transcriptions of the texts of Sutro’s letter of 9 June, and of his response to the present letter, dated 30 June, survived until at least 1958; their present location is unknown (Robert E. Stewart, 156–57; Stewart and Stewart, 105, 215, 222; L4, 264–65 nn. 1, 3, 340 n. 7; RI 1993, 360, 866–67).

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3 Clemens never made the projected trip to Philadelphia to visit Riley.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, collection of Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs, on deposit at Roesch Library, University of Dayton (ODaU).

glyph Previous publication: L5, 101–102.

glyph Provenance:The MS was offered for sale in 1960 (De Laney, lot 6), and again in May 1962 by Seven Gables Bookshop, when the Jacobses purchased it. They deposited their collection at ODaU in 1984.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

L • [partly formed; possibly ‘D’ or ‘H’]