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

To Jane Lampton Clemens
11 June 1871 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00615)

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Elmira June 11

Dear Mother—1

15) 525 (35
45
75

I saw Pamela
yesterday, & she seemed
to me about the same
she has been all the time
since she came here. I

cannot discover that she
improves any great deal,
though I believe they2

iogra
to me to
With
like to
the cuts
country p
the West,
in giving

contend that
she is really
improving,
& very steadily,
too. Sammy

apers, sc
& would
any des

looks a good deal bet-
ter, I fancy. It seems
to me that he looks
hearty, healthy &
strong. I know
perfectly well that
some of that

phy” shown
be not un
your permi
reproduce
in my ab

nervous twitching about
the muscles of the face has subsided.3 They have
moved into a room on the
first floor, & Pamela says
it was nearly necessary, per

perhaps entirely so, that
she get on the lower
floor & save her strength
the tax of climbing the
stairs. Yesterday when
I was there she had just

received yours &
Annies letters a-
bout the debate
& the “Dunk gents.”
We were glad indeed
that Annie acquitted
herself so well &
received such cordial
praise. Where
the other side man-
aged to find ar-
guments so

much

convincing as or so
capable of able hand-
ling as to make
the negative of so
lame a question
win, is beyond my
comprehension.
They had not the ghost
of a chance, I
thought. I half
incline to the
belief that4
ry Truly
Vernol

the umpire let spread-eagle
declamation run away with his
calm judgment. I sent these
letters to Orion, & also those
giving an account of the riot-
ous otous proceedings of the
“Dunk roughs”—or was it
th the “Dunk

the “Dunk gents?” Where is Dunk?5
I cannot find it on the map—
though ours s is an old map, & has
many places left out & no
doubt this is one of them.
I am going Your police
are doubtless like the po-
lice all over the

au
“railroad
a. n. kellogg, propr
I. E.
some illu
Autob

world—mean, lazy,
worthless, cowardly thieves.
They acted, during & after your
riot, just as they would have
done in New York or any
other city in America.6 [ N ]
I am going to start out in

Tru
October & lecture
as you may d
about 3 months or three
your consent, & w
& a half. My subject is:7
I shall be p

I expect to lecture first in New England 2 [months ]
& then skip to Chicago & lecture a month in the west.
I may possibly talk in Elmira, Buffalo, Cleve-
land & Cincinnati as I go along. I think it is a
subject that will take—don’t you? I have talked

with several people about it, & they say it is the best [sub-
ject ] before the country to-day, & that if I can’t do it
happy justice I can’t do any subject justice.
Ma I will help Orion with any machine
he wants help on. When I was there the other day, we

decided that it was
best for him to peg
on along on this one
just as he is doing
until I see how
my new book is
going to pan out.
So he is working
away just the same
as before.8

Ma, I think it
likely that some men
are so consti-
tuted that

ch May 27th 1871

they will, uncider cir-
cumstances of an
irregular nature,
manifest idiosyn-
crasies of an ir-
refragable & and
even pragmatic
& latitudinarian
character, but oth-
erwise & differently
situated the reverse
is too often the case.
How does it strike you?

Yr Son

Sam.

Mrs. Jane Clemens | Care Mrs. P. A. Moffett | Fredonia | N. Y. [postmarked:] elmira n.y. jun 12 [on the flap:] oll [in JLC’s hand:] Sams scrap letter | 1871

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens wrote this letter on nine unnumbered scraps of paper, usually writing on both sides of each scrap. Three different paper stocks are represented, two from letters written to him or his publisher, with the result that someone else’s handwriting in brown (originally black) ink appears randomly beneath and around his own, which is in purple ink. One penciled calculation (on the first scrap) was even written by his wife, before he appropriated the sheet for this letter. The point of this elaborate visual joke was to tease Jane Clemens about her inveterate habit of writing letters on what Samuel C. Webster later described as “any sheet of paper that happened to be handy” (MTBus, 66). Clemens had complained in an April 1863 letter, written in Virginia City: “Ma, write on whole letter sheets—is paper scarce in St Louis?” (L1, 247). Webster cited this remark in 1946 when he asserted that Clemens had taken “considerable pains” to cure her of this habit by sending her from Nevada “a letter composed of papers of every size, color, and shape, including wrapping paper, the scraps all jumbled together and stuffed into an envelope. She spent several indignant hours sorting it out” (MTBus, 66). If Clemens did send an earlier “scraps” letter, it has not survived. It is much more probable, however, that Webster was describing the present letter at second hand, drawing on a family story and guessing, from the 1863 remark, that Clemens had sent it from the West. For a facsimile of the original letter and the procedure used to reproduce it, see Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles and the textual commentary.

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2 This and four other scraps evidently came from a letter to Isaac E. Sheldon asking permission to syndicate the text and eleven illustrations of “The House That Jack Built” from the (Burlesque) Autobiography. The letter, which Sheldon must have forwarded to Clemens, was apparently from Ansel Nash Kellogg (1832–86), editor and publisher of the New York Railroad Gazette, and owner of the A. N. Kellogg Newspaper Company of Chicago, a syndicate that supplied 240 country newspapers with “auxiliary sheets” or “insides”—full newspaper sheets printed weekly on one side only with features, illustrations, telegraph news, and advertising, to which a subscriber could add local matter on the blank side (Mrja, 180–82; Rowell, 205–7). No evidence has been found that Clemens agreed to the request, or that he answered the letter.

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3 See 7 June 71 to OC and MEC, n. 2.

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4 This scrap and the last one came from a letter of which little more than the dateline and part of the complimentary close and signature survive. The writer, “Vernol,” has not been identified.

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5 The Fredonia Censor of 31 May 1871 reported that on the evening of 30 May (Decoration Day) a band of ten or fifteen “rowdies” from neighboring Dunkirk, who were “intoxicated and turbulent,” caused a disturbance aboard a Fredonia horsecar, injuring the driver, who had tried to restrain them (“Riotous Doings,” 3).

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6 The Dunkirk rowdies had, for the most part, escaped the police, causing the editor of the Fredonia Censor to remark that “if we have no material here for policemen able to cope with the Dunkirk roughs who invade the village hereafter, let some be advertised for and imported. That failing, start a Vigilance committee. Rope enough will be cheerfully donated to give each rowdy a separate noose” (“The Two Rioters . . .,” 7 June 71, 3).

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7 Possibly a scrap that originally followed here has been lost, but it is much more likely that Clemens intentionally left this sentence unfinished.

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8 See 7 June 71 to OC and MEC, n. 3.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK). For a photofacsimile of this letter, see Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles. Clemens seems to have deliberately varied the shapes of these nine scraps, which were torn (not cut) from at least three different sources. Seven of the nine came from two letters he received, one of which Olivia Clemens used first, as evidenced by her penciled calculations on the scrap he tore from it. Clemens’s text cannot be read by fitting the scraps together, as in a jigsaw puzzle. Instead he wrote on both sides of each scrap, successively, except in two cases. In these instances one of the two sides shows only the original inscription of his source. The text has been transcribed with the usual conventions, except that some alterations are presented more literally than they otherwise might be (‘uncider cir-’ rather than ‘unci under cir-’), and the type is also line for line with the original, chiefly because that was the least arbitrary way to render the text in discrete but intelligible fragments. The actual shapes of the scraps are only approximated by the type and by an editorial outline—again, as the least arbitrary way of representing some shape. Each outline appears twice, representing each side of the scrap in the intended order. The transcription also includes the words or parts of words left over from the source letter, even though these were not intended in the ordinary sense to be read, and their placement relative to Clemens’s inscription can only be approximated.

glyph Previous publication: L4, 403–407; Chester L. Davis 1978, 2–3; Christie 1993, lot 23.

glyph Provenance:The letter was returned to Clemens, presumably after the death of his mother or sister. It was among those letters which, in the 1950s, Clara Clemens Samossoud gave or sold to Chester L. Davis, Sr. After his death in 1987, it became part of the collection of Chester L. Davis, Jr. Purchased for CU-MARK in 1993 through the Joseph Z. and Hatherly B. Todd Fund.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

N • [partly formed]

months • month[ white diamond ] [obscured by foxing]

sub-|ject • sub-| [je]ct [obscured by foxing]