To James Redpath
3 December 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: WU, UCCL 00549)

Buffalo, Dec. 5 3.

Friend Redpath—

Joe Larned, (my partner & chief editor) has written an article on “Heat,” in our & today he will send you a dozen copies of our paper containing it. I told him I would ask you to [ talk take ]pains, from time to time, [ ap as ]opportunity offered, to talk a few minutes with a scientific man, till his curiosity was excited & then make him read the article & see what whether [ he his ]verdict favored its being a fallacy or whether it made it something better. Joe thinks it is either good & sound & [ trut true], or else the wildest & unworthiest lunacy, one or the other. When I tell you that he has devoted the off-hours of a laborious editorship of a morning paper to the to faithful work on this thing for [ thee three ] years, you will feel as I do, viz., that if you & I can do such a man a kindness, we will cheerfully do it.1

Yrs

Mark

P. S. Considering the strain I took (for a lazy man, & for pure love of shoving a genius into the light of the national sun who [ wh ]had been [wasting ]itself in the obscurity of Nevada sagebrush) to make Tom Fitch acquainted with you & get you to confer on him fame & fortune, I think he might drop me a line to tell me how he came out [ th ]on the 29th. I have seen no Boston papers.2

But whether he succeeded or not my anxiety is not moved or [ str stirred]—because I know he can succeed, & superbly, too. It is in him. If he has not made a hit this time, let work him up & sail him in again & he will make one. Then put him [in] Pugh’s course,3 & in the big courses of all the big cities for nothing, this winter, without fooling around with 20 & [ 50- ] ‸30-‸dollar engagements as I before proposed, & he can [ wall walk ]over the course next year.

Yrs in a hurry

Mark.

P. S. My s Saturday Review fraud fooled some of the boys, anyway.4

[letter docketed:] boston lyceum bureau. redpath & fall. dec 10 1870 [and] Mark Twain | Buffalo N.Y. | Dec. 3 ’70

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Larned filled more than three columns in the Buffalo Express of 3 December with his challenge to “the received hypothesis” that “Heat is some mysterious state of invisible motion imparted to the ultimate atoms of matter.” He suggested instead that it was “the variable degree of density or tension in which the so-called ‘œther’ that occupies all inter-molecular as well as all inter-planetary spaces is existing in the matter!” (Larned 1870).

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2 See 10? July 70 to Redpath and 10? July 70 to Fitch. Fitch’s 29 November lecture on “The Coming Empire”—to a full house at Tremont Temple, in the Boston Lyceum Bureau course—was chiefly a paean to California and Nevada. The Boston Morning Journal observed that “Bostonians fully coincided in the opinion expressed by the author of ‘The Innocents Abroad’” that “‘they never listened to anything so delightful before’” (“‘The Coming Empire,’” 30 Nov 70, 2). The Boston Advertiser remarked: “Mr. Fitch’s eloquence, though rather florid, is impressive, and he has a keen sense of humor with a happy knack of expressing it. Indeed, it is easy to see why Mark Twain likes him” (“‘The Coming Empire,’” 30 Nov 70, 2). Redpath’s promotional magazine for the 1871–72 season reported that during Fitch’s two-week 1870 tour he also spoke “at Attleboro’, Westboro’, Middleboro’, West Medway, Newtonville (Mass.), Biddeford (Maine), and Manchester (N.H.); from all of which places, the Bureau received eulogistic accounts of his success” (Lyceum 1871, 27).

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3 See 14 Nov 70 to Pugh.

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4 After learning from the Boston Advertiser (“Perhaps the most successful flights . . .,” 22 Oct 70, 2) that The Innocents Abroad had been reviewed by a literal-minded critic in the London Saturday Review of 8 October 1870 (“The Innocents Abroad,” 30:467–68; reprinted in Anderson and Sanderson, 39–43), Clemens wrote “An Entertaining Article,” for his December 1870 Galaxy “Memoranda.” It included a long burlesque review calling Innocents a work of “imposing insanity” and “a deliberate and wicked creation of a diseased mind,” which Clemens passed off as the Saturday Review notice. In “A Sad, Sad Business,” part of his January 1871 “Memoranda,” he confessed to the hoax and printed specimen commentaries from newspapers taken in by it (SLC: 1870, 876–78; 1871, 158–59).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Norman D. Bassett Collection, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).

Previous publication: L4, 266–268; Merwin-Clayton 1905, lot 108, excerpt.

Provenance:The Bassett Collection was donated to WU on 9 July 1955.

Emendations and textual notes:

talk take • talkke [canceled ‘k’ partly formed]

ap as • aps [‘p’ partly formed]

he his • heis

trut true • trute

thee three • theeree

wh • [‘h’ partly formed]

wasting • wasting wasting [corrected miswriting]

th • [‘h’ partly formed]

str stirred • strirred

50- • [deletion of hyphen implied]

wall walk • wallk