To James Redpath
22 September 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: MH-H, UCCL 01264)

Hartford, Sep. 22

My Dear Redpath:

I perceive that I was unconsciously trying to swindle you! But I jumped to the conclusion that the per centages would reach $600, & that only about 3 or 4 days of your time would be required. Now you just look & see if you offered me better terms. For instance: I would have to g devote 6 or 8 days of my time to getting ready to deliver a lecture in Boston, & also one day to go there & another to return. Say about 2 weeks, in effect, used up—all for $350. You see you didn’t know what an outlay of my time was required for one lecture, & I didn’t know (or didn’t think) how much of yours was required in order to properly work up a week’s lecture-business.

I hated to seem to go back on you when you were in a close place, & yet I could not afford the time necessary to prepare for a single lecture for $350 multiplied by 8. I could but ill spare it, even at that large figure. So I hunted around for some way of making the la ost days pay for themselves, & struck upon a plan which I thought might pay us both. I made the trifling mistake of figuring your per centage at a 10 per cent result, whereas 5 per cent wouldn’t accomplish that, perhaps!1 Still, Brelsford confessed to me that the gross receipts of my 2 night[s] of Roughing It at Steinway reached about $36002 (& there was no “stir” about the Bonanza regions then, though there is now.)3

I am saying all this only to show that if s I seemed to be mean I wasn’t trying to be, nevertheless. There are some people I like to be as illiberal with as possible, but you are not one of them, Redpath.

However, the result is a lucky one for me (& I wish it were also for you,) because I find that I could not deliver those lectures without gouging the time right out of the midst of a long, solid literary job which would suffer most seriously by the interruption.4 Because I stopped to fool with the play of Col. Sellers, I never succeeded in getting settled down to work & again & finishing, ‸until‸ two months ago, a book which would have been completed twelve months ago, but for the interruption.5 I never have lectured without losing a great deal of money by it (no matter what the fee,) & so you can understand my reluctance to meddle with fire that has burnt me so often. And besides I absolutely loathe lecturing, for its own sake!

Look in on me, here, & I will do ditto with you presently, when I must go to Boston on business.6

Yrs Ever

Mark.

P. S. Ever so many thanks for Simmons & Wall’s letter.7

[letter docketed:] [boston lyceum bureau. ]james redpath. sep 25 1875

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The recent correspondence in which Clemens and Redpath discussed arrangements for the November series of “Roughing It” lectures mentioned in the previous letter is not known to survive.

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2 Clemens seems to have confused his two Sandwich Islands lectures for the Mercantile Library Association of New York, on 5 and 10 February 1873, with his single “Roughing It” lecture for that organization, on 24 January 1872. All three were at Steinway Hall. Cassius M. Brelsford, listed in the 1872 and 1873 New York City directories as “manager” and then “president” of the Cooper Union, may have been a volunteer member who arranged lectures for the association. Clemens and the association disagreed about his fee for the Sandwich Island lectures. In 1873 he estimated the gross proceeds to be four thousand dollars, of which he was entitled to half. Instead, he received only thirteen hundred (L5, 31–33, 34 n. 1, 280–81, 295–96; Wilson: 1872, 135; 1873, 144; information courtesy of the Mercantile Library Association).

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3 See 24 Mar 75 to Bliss, n. 2.

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4 The first of several allusions, in the fall and winter of 1875, to an unidentified literary project or projects. This one may have been merely a subterfuge, however (see the next letter and 4 Nov 75 to Howells, n. 9).

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5 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

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6 On 6 October 1875 Redpath sold the Redpath Lyceum Bureau to George H. Hathaway and James B. Pond, who continued the business under the same name. In “To Our Patrons,” in the September 1876 Lyceum magazine, Redpath explained that he had “formally severed his connection with the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, on account of the state of his health.” He continued to be active as a journalist. Hathaway had been “connected with the Bureau from its establishment” in Boston in 1868 (Lyceum 1876, 5). He managed a Chicago branch for two years before joining Redpath and George L. Fall in Boston. Pond had been the lecture agent for Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young’s nineteenth wife, when he came to the bureau in 1874, and he remained in the Boston office at the end of her tour (Lyceum 1874, 6; Pond, xxii, xxv; Eubank, 84, 107; Horner, 252).

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7 Unidentified.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, Autograph File).

Previous publication: L6, 539–541.

Provenance:bequeathed to MH in 1918 by Evert Jansen Wendell (1860–1917), a Harvard alumnus and collector of theater memorabilia (Dickinson, 332–33).

Emendations and textual notes:

boston lyceum bureau • bost[o u]reau. [stamped off page]