To Whitelaw Reid
13 and 17 January 1873 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: DLC, UCCL 00857)

‸P. S. I always write too much for a business man to read. But I’ve scratched some out. And interlined more.‸

Hartford, Jan. [ 12 ‸13‸ ].

My Dear Reid:

Your check for $100 for Sandwich Island letters is received, & is plenty.1

You made some small alterations here & there in the MS. for which I was sincerely grateful—they happened to [be] things I regretted to have said, when the MS. was gone & it was too late.2

I do hope to have an occasional moment to scribble an article in, but it can hardly be often, for I am so hard at work that I am obliged to decline a twenty-night lecture offer that would pay me [ $12,000. ] 3 I would have to decline it if it paid me $20,000, for books pay considerably better. ‸lecturing & forego all miscellaneous literary pleasures.‸

John Hay has been doing a couple of royal lectures. I think he just lays over anything in the guild.4 ‸It is but the opinion of a Border Ruffian from Pike—but then I’m “on it” myself.‸ 5

Have just bought the loveliest building-lot in Hartford—544 feet front on the Avenue & 300 feet deep 6 —(paid for it with first six months of “Roughing It”—how’s that?) 7 & the house will be built while we are absent in England 8 —& then by & by, whenever you fellows will run up I’ll make it awful lively for you, I swear!

Ys Ever

Mark.

Jan. 17.—But it appears I’ve got to lecture, after all—at least I am wavering & am almost ready to give in—but I’ll have to talk only a mighty few times if I talk at all. On “Sandwich Islands”—& you must not report me like Fields—you’d desolate my richest property.9

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Reid had written Clemens on 11 January (CU-MARK):

UCLC31847

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2 These “small alterations” are not recoverable, since the manuscripts for the Sandwich Islands letters in the Tribune are not known to survive.

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3 This offer, yielding a per-lecture fee more than twice Clemens’s highest fee ($250) during his 1871–72 lecture tour, has not been independently corroborated, although Samuel C. Thompson, Clemens’s secretary from mid-May to mid-July 1873, recalled that Clemens told him of a similar proposal:

A bureau (Pond’s ‸Redpaths?‸ I think) got him to deliver a lecture on the Islands at the Academy of Music, New York, five evenings for $.500.00 each. At the end they offered him the same rate for thirty nights in the leading cities. He refused. The manager offered to increase the pay; but he refused. (Thompson, 78)

Redpath’s Boston Lyceum Bureau (James B. Pond was one of the partners who took over Redpath’s bureau in 1875) did not manage Clemens’s February 1873 lectures in New York City and Brooklyn, and was almost certainly not the source of the $12,000 offer (L4, 401 n. 4; Redpath 1876; 24 Jan 73 to Redpath, n. 1).

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4 Clemens had probably not attended any of Hay’s lectures but may have read newspaper accounts of them. The first, which Hay used in the Midwest in the fall, was originally called “Phases of Washington Life.” By the evening of 13 January, when he delivered it in New York’s Steinway Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, he had decided to call it “The Heroic Age in Washington” (possibly prompted by the Chicago Tribune, which had suggested “The Heroic Age of America” or “The Character of Lincoln” as titles). This lecture praised the fortitude of the country’s statesmen, especially Lincoln, during the Civil War (Thayer, 1:346–47; “Amusements,” Chicago Tribune, 19 Nov 72, 8; “Washington in War Times,” New York Tribune, 14 Jan 73, 4). On 20 December Hay delivered a second lecture, entitled “Day-Break in Spain,” at Association Hall in New York for the Young Men’s Christian Association. He described how the “Church and the Crown” had gained “absolute control” over the country, and expressed his belief that the Spanish people were now making “rapid progress toward true and orderly democracy.” The New York Tribune review of the lecture praised it as “brilliant, noble, and compact with information” (“Day-Break in Spain,” 21 Dec 72, 4).

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5 A “Border Ruffian” was literally “a member of the pro-slavery party in Missouri who in 1854–58 crossed the border into Kansas to vote illegally”; here Clemens used it to mean merely “troublemaker.” To be “on it” meant to be skilled in something, or to understand it (Mitford M. Mathews, 1:165, 2:1160; Ramsay and Emberson, 160; 26 Jan 72 to Redpath, n. 2).

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6 The Clemenses had been planning to build a house in Hartford since early March 1871, seven months before relocating there and renting the Hooker residence. In mid-November 1871, while Clemens was away lecturing, Olivia inspected a lot in the Nook Farm area owned by Hartford attorney Franklin Chamberlin (1821–96), who had purchased a large tract of land from Nook Farm’s founders in 1864. The following month she discussed other possibilities with friends and neighbors. The lot the Clemenses had just purchased from Chamberlin for $10,000 was apparently not the one Olivia had previously considered (see 22 Jan 73 to Mouland for a slightly different report of its dimensions). According to the deed, dated 16 January 1873, its northern boundary ran westward along Farmington Avenue from a point 350 feet west of Forest Street to the river (the north branch of Park River); its western boundary was the river itself; and its eastern boundary ran south to the land of Francis Gillette. Chamberlin later sold adjoining small portions of land to the Clemenses. The first of these, for which they paid $1,000 on 22 March 1873, was a small wedge along their eastern boundary, measuring 25 feet on the north, “about 300 feet” on the east and west, and 40 feet on the south (Land Records, Town of Hartford, 148:632–63; Van Why, 5, 7; L4, 338, 347, 371, 523–24 n. 2; Schwinn, 1:5; Salsbury, 424; Elisabeth G. Warner to George H. Warner, 14 Nov 71, CU-MARK; 16 Mar 81 to PAM, NPV).

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7 The first quarterly royalty payment that Clemens received for Roughing It, on 8 May 1872, was for $10,562.13, representing a 7½ percent copyright on 37,701 books; by 5 August he had received an additional $7,863.37, for 28,611 books. By January 1873 the book had earned him about $20,600 (8 May 72 to Perkins; 20 Apr 72 to Redpath, n. 4; Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 5 Aug 72, CU-MARK; RI 1993, 890–91).

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8 George and Lilly Warner, who were building a house on Forest Street immediately south of the Clemenses’ lot, recommended their own architect, Edward Tuckerman Potter (1831–1904), who had designed St. John’s Episcopal Church in East Hartford, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford, and the Church of Heavenly Rest in New York, as well as many other churches and private residences. The house he planned for the Clemenses was in a style described as “High Victorian Gothic.” Potter was assisted by a junior partner, Alfred H. Thorp (1843–1917), who had studied in Paris under Honoré Daumet. Thorp served as the primary site supervisor during construction, which had begun by the time the Clemenses left for England in May. Charles E. Perkins represented them in their absence, mediating between the architects and the general contractor, John B. Garvie (Landau, 8, 111, 136, 147, 152, 381; Salsbury, 6, 9; MTB, 1:481; Van Why, 4–5, 55–56; Schwinn, 1:21; Geer 1872, 67, 215; information courtesy of Marianne Curling of the Mark Twain House).

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9 On 4 January the Tribune printed a “nearly in full” account of James T. Fields’s “Masters of the Situation,” a lecture on “reminiscences and characteristics of eminent men” delivered at New York’s Association Hall on 3 January for the Young Men’s Christian Association. On 15 January the Tribune also published a verbatim transcription of the lecture in the “Lectures and Letters—Extra Sheet,” a publication separate from the daily issue, which also included reprintings of Clemens’s Sandwich Islands letters. Clemens regularly protested “infernal synopses” of his own lectures (L4, 522; New York Tribune: “Masters of the Situation,” 4 Jan 73, 1, 8; “Ready To-Day: Tribune Lecture Extra. No. 2,” 15 Jan 73, 6; original printing of the “Extra Sheet,” CU-MARK).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC).

Previous publication: L5, 269–71.

Provenance:The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).

Emendations and textual notes:

12 ‸13‸ • 12 3

$12,000. • [period doubtful]