Hartford May 27.
My Dear Conway:
I enclose postal card received from Bliss something over a week ago.1 Shall call there this afternoon & see if he has shipped the pictures. I think I will also tell him to make plates of the bigger pictures, too, & then if you find you can use them, all right.
Your news sounds exceedingly [good. Be] sure & send me those propose those prospective newspaper notices of the book, so that I can slide them into print, here, from time to time.
While you’re sending me an early copy of the book, please send me two or three.
June 15 (only a very few days after this reaches you), we shall take up summer quarters at Elmira, N. Y. It is not in order that we may be under the protecting wing of a Young Men’s Christian Association, but merely that we may roost on the sum‸mit‸ mer of the neighboring range of highlands & be safe from the heats of the season.2 Letters addressed
[unknown amount of text missing]
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
The enclosed postal card has not been found. Clemens replied to the following letter from Conway (CU-MARK), which in part answered his letters of 25 March, 9
April, and 16 April: It probably was William Kingdon Clifford (1845-79), professor of applied mathematics at University College, London, who performed the jingle from Clemens’s “A Literary Nightmare” (SLC 1876f). In his final sentence, Conway alluded to the opening of
Howells’s review of Tom Sawyer
in the May Atlantic Monthly: —Mr. Aldrich has studied the life
of A Bad Boy as the pleasant reprobate led it in a quiet old New England town twenty-five or thirty years ago, where in spite of the
natural outlawry of boyhood he was more or less part of a settled order of things, and was hemmed in, to some measure, by the
traditions of an established civilization. Mr. Clemens, on the contrary, has taken the boy of the Southwest for the hero of his new
book, and has presented him with a fidelity to circumstance which loses no charm by being realistic in the highest degree, and which
gives incomparably the best picture of life in that region as yet known to fiction. (Howells 1876, 621) Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy was published in 1869 (Aldrich 1869). For the full review see the Appendix “Reviews of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”
The Elmira Young Men’s Christian Association had recently offended Conway (see 26 Feb 1876 to Conway,
n. 4).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
MicroPUL, reel 1.
Provenance:
The Conway Papers were acquired by NNC sometime after Conway’s death in 1907.
Emendations and textual notes:
good. Be • ~.— | ~
