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

To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
5 November 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01280)

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Oct. 5.1

Friend Bliss:

You may let Williams have all of Tom Sawyer that you have received. He can of course make the pictures all the more understandingly after reading the whole story. He wants it, & I have not the least objection, because if he should lose any of it I have got another complete MS. copy.2

I think you had better rush Dan’s book into print, by New Year’s, if possible, & give Tom Sawyer the early spring market. I don’t want to publish in the summer—don’t want to wait till fall—shall have a bigger book ready then.3

What have you heard from England in the way of a proposition for Tom Sawyer? I have an offer from the Routledges (which I haven’t answered), & if you have heard nothing from over there, I propose to write the “Temple Bar” people. Drop me a line about this, will you?4

Frank said he would send the infernal Type-Writer to Howells. I hope he won’t forget to afflict Howells with it.5

I wish you would send me a couple of copies of the Sketch Book, & also all the Sketches that were left out in making it up. I do not want to lose them.6

Didn’t you make that correction of the paragraph smouched from “Hospital Days?” Twichell has an uncorrected copy.7

Yrs

Clemens.

[letter docketed in pencil:] check mark [and in ink:] Sam’l Clemens | Nov. 5 ″75 | Sam’l Clemens | For Year 1875

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 The correct date is confirmed by the docket inscribed by someone at the American Publishing Company, who also altered “Oct” to “Nov” in the dateline.

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2 Truman (True) W. Williams (1839–97), the chief illustrator of The Innocents Abroad and Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, was soon to have the same responsibility for Tom Sawyer. (He had also contributed to Roughing It and The Gilded Age.) Williams’s alcoholism made Clemens cautious about employing him. The text Williams was given to work from was Clemens’s own manuscript of Tom Sawyer, but how much of it Bliss had as yet “received” is not known. Howells currently had the secretarial security copy, which was presumably complete, although not entirely up to date (L3, 142 n. 5; L5, 412 n. 3; RI 1993, 857–58, 869).

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3 Dan De Quille’s Big Bonanza was not issued by the American Publishing Company until July 1876. The firm published Tom Sawyer in December of that year (APC 1866–79, 134; TS, 25). For the “bigger book,” see the previous letter, n. 9.

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4 Neither Bliss’s reply, nor the offer from George Routledge and Sons, Clemens’s authorized English publisher, is known to survive. The Routledge offer may have accompanied the royalty payment on its Gilded Age that Clemens acknowledged with the following receipt:

$355.86

Hartford Nov. 10 1875.

Received of Mr. J. L. Blamire (‸agent‸ for Messrs. George Routledge & Sons) $355.86, currency, being the remainder of royalties due me on Gilded Age up to June 30, 1875.

Samℓ. L. Clemens

(Routledge Agreement Book A–K, 186, Routledge, in Grenander 1975, 3)

The present Routledge proposal for Tom Sawyer evidently was unsatisfactory, and an attempt in 1876 to come to terms with the firm was unsuccessful. George Bentley, editor of Temple Bar magazine, had solicited articles from Clemens, but no evidence has been found that the two men negotiated for Tom Sawyer. The English edition of the book was published by Chatto and Windus in June 1876 (TS, 18–20; 15 Jan 75 to Howells).

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5 Howells had received the typewriter from Frank Bliss on Wednesday, 3 November, about four and a half months after Clemens offered it, and almost a year after he first purchased it. Clemens shortened this time frame in his later account of the machine’s peregrinations:

That early Boston machine was full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to-day has virtues. After a month or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. He was reluctant, for he was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly towards them, and he remains so to this day. But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me, and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not believe myself. He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.

He kept it three months, and then returned it to me. I gave it away twice after that, but it wouldn’t stay; it came back. Then I gave it to our coachman, Patrick McAleer, who was very grateful, because he did not know the animal, and thought I was trying to make him wiser and better. As soon as he got wiser and better he traded it to a heretic for a side-saddle which he could not use, and there my knowledge of its history ends. (AD, 27 Feb 1907, CU-MARK)

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6 Of the eighty-one sketches Clemens had proposed including in Sketches, New and Old, only sixty-three were actually used. The printer’s copy consisted of marked-up copies of two earlier sketchbooks (both published in England), and several manuscripts; both books are in the Mark Twain Papers, and the surviving manuscripts are there and in other archives (see ET&S1, 633–34; SLC 1872, 1874). Bliss may have sent Clemens the omitted sketches on 17 November, the day he “sent to house” three copies of the book (APC 1876).

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7 Although Clemens had demanded that this sketch be excised from Sketches, New and Old (see 22 and 27 Sept 75 to Howells), Bliss’s initial response was to tip in the following slip at page 299 of the copies that he had already bound:

ERRATUM.

By an error of the publishers the above sketch “From ‘Hospital Days’” was inserted in this book. It should not have been, as Mark Twain is not the author of it. It will not appear in any future edition.

The American Publishing Company had sent Twichell a half-morocco copy on 1 November, charging $1.50 to Clemens’s account. On page 299, Clemens inscribed a substitute for the missing notice: “{The above paragraph was deliberately stolen from Miss Woolsey’s charming book, by my conscienceless publisher, ‘because, it would just fill out the half-page right!’}” (CtY-BR). On 23 October another of Clemens’s friends, political cartoonist Thomas Nast, was sent a cloth-bound copy, which had Bliss’s notice in place (APC 1876). Nast promised Clemens in a letter of 9 November (CU-MARK):

After I have read it, I will give you the benefit of my valuable judgement upon it, at present I think that the short piece “from hospital days” is the best thing it contains, and am so sorry that the publishers will commit the error of leaving it out next time.

Later printings of the book did omit the sketch, while continuing to list it in the table of contents.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

glyph Previous publication: L6, 585–587; Brownell 1943, 2, with omissions; Parke-Bernet 1938, lot 126, excerpt; MTLP, 92–93.

glyph Provenance:see Mendoza Collection in Description of Provenance. The MS was sold to C. W. Force in 1938 from the collection of George C. Smith, Jr. By October 1942 it was owned by George H. Brownell. A Brownell TS of the letter is at WU (see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance).