149 Asylum Str.
2
Nov. 18. 1870
Click to add citation to My Citations.
[on back of letter as folded:]
I hope you will pack up & leave for Hartford instantly & finally.
Yr Bro.
Sam.
Be hasty. Be quick. Sell out clean, in St. Louis. Leave nothing for other people to attend to.
Livy & child doing tolerably.
[ Don ] Shall you want the money?1 If so, say it.
{
Dr Clemens,
Have I been so stupid, as not to say to you I ◇ expect your brother so far as we are concerned. I thought I had said so or as much, & was waiting for report, daily as to his time of arrival &c—
He tells a good yarn in the slip sent. 3 We will give him scope for his talent here—
Wish he had been here for 10 days past. I have had a newspaper fight with Burr & Co. & all his backers over U. Races & have had to do it single handed, & think I came out in good standing— Another pen would have done better no doubt, had it had an experienced hand like your brother, at the end of it. 4 Wrote you yesterday— Frank says his baby is all right—so far as heard from possibly has gained “an ounce” 5
truly
Bliss
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
The address, in Hartford, of the American Publishing Company.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 3
Possibly a clipping from the St. Louis Missouri Democrat, where Orion was employed. Nothing by him has been
identified in the paper, however.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 4
The dispute was over American publication of John George Wood’s The Natural History of Man
(London: George Routledge and Sons, 1868–1870). The American Publishing Company had issued it as The
Uncivilized Races, or Natural History of Man (1870)—with authorization, and printing plates, from Routledge and
Sons, who wished to counter the cheap, pirated edition previously issued by John B. Burr and Company, another Hartford firm, as The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World (1870). The rivals argued their editions’
legitimacy, accuracy, and completeness in a series of letters to the Hartford Courant: “An
Explanation Called For,” 10 Nov 70, 2; “The Exact Truth,” 11 Nov 70, 2; “A Bit of Bitter
Truth,” 14 Nov 70, 2; “Truth Versus Humbuggery,” 15 Nov 70, 2; “‘The
Uncivilized Races of Men,’” 16 Nov 70, 2; “Our Last Shot,” 17 Nov 70, 2; “The
Uncivilized Races of Men,” 18 Nov 70, 2; “The War of the Races,” 19 Nov 70, 2; “The
Uncivilized Races of Men,” 21 Nov 70, 2. The first of these, signed “Justice” and offering an
ostensibly disinterested comparison, seems to have been Bliss’s stratagem for provoking the debate that followed. On 16
December 1870 the Courant printed Routledge and Sons’ summation of its position, accompanied by
Burr and Company’s formal retraction of the charges of “misrepresentation, fraud and bribery” it had
levied against the English publishers (“‘The Uncivilized Races’—A Card,”
“A Card to the Trade and Public of the United States of America,” Hartford Courant, 16
Dec 70, 2; Geer 1870, 72, 435; “New Books,” Author’s Sketch Book 1 [Nov 70]: 3).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 5
Newlyweds Frank and Frances Bliss had their first child, Elisha French Bliss, on 23 June 1871 (15 Sept 70 to Bliss and French, n. 2; “Hartford Residents,” Bliss
Family, 1).
Source text(s):MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
Previous publication:
L4, 245–46; see McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
Don • [possibly ‘Do y’]
