To Charles Dudley Warner
13 May 1873 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: PBL, UCCL 00915)

Hartf Elmira, 13th

My Dear Warner:

There was no use for “about 600 pages” in the contract, & the putting them there was foolish surplusage. I want Bliss to take them out. That will leave it that we contract to furnish to him the MS of a book called the Gilded Age—& that is entirely sufficient. There never was [ n ]any sense in sticking in that stupid reference to the number of pages. Don’t you If you suggest the [ aut ]alteration while the MS. is still in your hands there won’t be any trouble or anything disagreeable.1

The baby was sick & kept us up all ‸awake seven-tenths of the‸ night—seems better today. Livy rusty—I too.

Ys in haste (of packing up)

Samℓ. L. Clemens

‸Care Geo. Routledge & Sons
Publishers—
The Broadway,
Ludgate Hill
London, E. C.‸

Never mind Lackland. In his prosperity—then in his adversity—& finally in his lunatic death in a house of d by the side of the corpse of his only friend—he is perhaps better suited to the stage than a book.2

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The contract remained unchanged (Contract for the American Publishing Company Gilded Age). Clemens’s sensitivity on this minor point probably owes something to his frustration in 1871, when he had difficulty producing enough manuscript to make Roughing It six hundred pages long (RI 1993, 872–73).

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2 Major Lackland figures in chapter 10 of The Gilded Age, where he is reported to have died “wholly alone and friendless,” leaving “certain memoranda” that show Laura is not the natural child of Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins (SLC 1873–74, 100–101). Since Lackland does not die “by the side of the corpse of his only friend,” it seems likely that Warner declined the advice in the present letter and revised the chapter to resolve whatever problem he had identified, eliminating in the process this melodramatic detail. Warner would have made his changes on the manuscript itself, or possibly on the proofs (see Hill 1965, 142). None of the proofs, and only five pages of manuscript, are known to survive from chapter 10 (the changes would have been on pages 258–63, and the first surviving page is 264).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the Robert B. Honeyman Collection, Linderman Library, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (PBL).

Previous publication: L5, 365–366.

Provenance:The Honeyman Collection was donated to PBL in March 1957.

Emendations and textual notes:

n • [partly formed]

aut • [‘t’ partly formed]