To Moncure D. Conway
24 July 1876 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: NNC, UCCL 01351)
(SUPERSEDED)

Elmira, N. Y., 24th.

My Dear Conway:

My English copy of “Tom” hasn’t arrived yet.—miscarried.

I’ve found out where the wildly-floating extracts that puzzled me so much, came from. From your Cincinnati letter, you [shrewd] man! I happened to run across the entire letter in a Hartford paper, extracts & all.1 Much obliged to you, but you know that. Chas. Dudley Warnery (just arrived home,) writes me yesterday: “I read & greatly enjoyed Tom Sawyer coming over on the steamer. You know Conway reads it to his Congregation, Sundays.”2

Look here;—if you know, pretty certainly, what Toole and Sothern clear per week in London on a fair average, please drop me a cablegram like this:

“Mark Twain, Hartford. One. One.”3 T

The first “One” stands for Toole, & means £100. The second stands for Sothern & means £100. But suppose Toole’s average one man’s average per week is £50 or £30 or £20, put the word Fifty or t Thirty or twenty; & suppose ’tother man’s average is £150 or £250, put it thus: “One-half”—(meaning one-&-a-half,) or “two-half.”

Remember, the right left hand word in your telegram stands for Toole’s average & the right-hand one for Sothern’s. If you say “Three” or “Four” it means £300 or £400.

You see I am friends with Raymond again, & want to arrange English terms with him if I can.4

If you haven’t had any talk with Mr. Tom Taylor yet about dramatizing Tom Sawyer, what do you think about preferring Henry J. Byron? He is a humorist himself, & maybe Taylor isn’t.5

I wrote Byron 6 or 8 months ago, through my lawyer (Mr. Perkins,) inquiring if he would join me in getting up a play. (I had S Tom Sawyer in my mind but did not say so, if I remember rightly.) He lost the letter—found it ten days ago, & writes ‸me‸ that he thinks he would like to. I have instructed Perkins to write him & say you will see him about “Tom” if you have made no dramatic arrangements already. (Did not say you were going to apply to Taylor—mentioned no names.)6

I wish to you to get Tom dramatized & charge me £50 for your trouble & bother, whether the play succeeds or fails. I want my name coupled with the dramatist’s, & take out copyright on both sides. If the dramatist is willing to own the play in Great Britain & her provinces for his share, & let me own the play exclusively in the United States, that is satisfactory. Or I will pay him a sum down, for the MS., & a further sum contingent upon success. Or, if I can’t do any better, I will own ⅔ of the play & he the other ⅓, on [both] sides of the water. Or, if that won’t do, we will just own the play equally on both sides of the water.

And I do hope Byron or Taylor will do the job. If they won’t, can you find another man?

If you’ll get the thing done for me & it makes a success, I insist upon paying you an additional £50, so as to partly pay you for your trouble.

Byrons

I have a young genius of a girl in my eye, here, to take the part of Tom or Huck (whichever turns out to be the principal character7—for I want the play to depart from the book as widely as the dramatist chooses, even though he leave the book’s incidents out entirely). I would enlarge that part myself, if it did not already preponderate in the play, & try to make a lucrative “one-character” drama of it——wherein lies the cash. “Sellers” has paid me $23,000 clear, this season.

Byron’s address is “Southern Lodge, St. Ann’s Road, Brixton, London. , G. I.

Yrs Ever

Samℓ. L. Clemens.

P. S.—What I would like still better, is this: I to own the play wholly, both in Britain & America; & the dramatist to be paid in this way: he to receive one-half of the play’s earnings until his share, so received, shall am have reached £1000; or, if that is too little, £1500; or, if that is too little, £2000; & after that, he to receive nothing more. I like this plan better than any other.—& it is the justest. If he can dramatize it on a acceptably at all, he can do it in a month, & the second or third of these sums is good enough pay for a month’s literary work where your materials are mainly furnished to hand. So I think I would try him with this proposition first, & then fall back on the others if necessary. I suppose it is likely ‸possible‸ he will require some pay, whether the play succeeds or not. If he does, we’ll get his figure.

My idea is to have the several parts parts (both sexes) played by small women, unless I can get a good juvenile gang to go with my juvenile “first walking lady.”

Originally, when I thought of dramatizing the book myself, it was my purpose to close with just one scene where Tom or Huck, after an interval of fifty years, an absence from the village of half that of 40 ‸or‸ ‸50 or 60‸ years, comes on the stage, addle-pated with age, and thinks he recognizes on & is again united to his former schoolmates, whereas it is only their grandchildren; & they are unpleasantly disturbed by the old chap’s gushing attentions. Whereupon, enter Jo Harper & some more of the superannuated.8 The main trouble is, those parts would always be taken by local sticks. But suggest it to [the] dramatist.9

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Conway’s 10 June 1876 “London Letter” appeared in the Cincinnati Commercial on 26 June (Conway 1876). Devoted entirely to the English edition of Tom Sawyer, published on 9 June, it contained numerous quotations, brief extracts, and bits of plot summary, as well as the entire fence-painting episode from chapter 2. That episode and other extracts were reprinted from the Commercial in: the New York Evening Post on 28 June; the Boston Evening Transcript on 29 June, 30 June, and 6 July; the Hartford Courant on 30 June; The Chicago Tribune on 3 July; The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on 10 July; the Philadelphia Sunday Republic on 23 July; and probably in other papers as well. The Hartford Times reprinted the full Conway letter on 8 July. Clemens evidently was so pleased with this means of generating publicity that he adopted it himself. On 26 July the Hartford Courant printed “The Boy, the Beetle and the Dog. A Sketch from Mark Twain’s ‘Tom Sawyer,’ in Press.” This extract from chapter 5 of the book was not among the excerpts in Conway’s Cincinnati Commercial letter. It was reprinted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on 28 August, and probably elsewhere (Budd 1999, 167).

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2 Warner had returned to Hartford from Europe and the Near East on 1 July (see 1 Jan 76 to Howells, n. 1). His exact remark, in his 23 July letter, was: “I read and greatly enjoyed Tom Sawyer coming over on the steamer. You know Conway reads it to his congregation, on Sunday” (CU-MARK). Conway, a Unitarian, was pastor of South Place Chapel, Finsbury, London.

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3 John L. Toole and Edward A. Sothern, leading English comic actors. Clemens was acquainted with Toole and perhaps with Sothern as well (see L5, 159–60, 175 n. 1, 505–6, 592 n. 13; L6, 62 n. 2, 352, 468–69 n. 6).

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4 Clemens had a checkered relationship with John T. Raymond, star of Colonel Sellers (the Gilded Age play), disliking his performance as Sellers and clashing with him about the play’s finances (see L6, passim). Raymond finally took the play to London in 1880, opening at the Gaiety Theatre on 19 July and closing prematurely after only three weeks, a decided failure (London Times, 22 July 80, 4; London Examiner, 24 July 80, 889–90; Pall Mall Gazette, 19 July–9 Aug 80, 11–12, 11 Aug 80, 12).

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5 In late 1873 Clemens had attempted unsuccessfully to meet with Taylor, the playwright and staff member of Punch, to discuss dramatization of The Gilded Age (see L5, 538–39, 541–42; L6, 10). Henry J. Byron (1834–84) was the author of numerous farces and comedies and also appeared on the stage in his own works.

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6 None of the correspondence between Clemens, Perkins, and Henry J. Byron is known to survive.

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7 Twelve-year-old Bijou Heron, who had experience in boy roles (see 14 Aug 76 to Eustace Conway, n. 3).

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8 On 21 July 1875, the date that copyright was entered under number 7620 for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, copyright was entered under number 7621, on the basis of a one-page synopsis, for Tom Sawyer. A Drama. That synopsis concluded: “Fifty Years Later.—Ovation to General Sawyer, Rear-Admiral Harper, Bishop Finn, and Inspector Sid Sawyer, the celebrated detective” (SLC 1875). Subsequently in 1875, and in 1876, Clemens evidently wrote thirty-three pages of this play. On 1 February 1884 copyright was entered under number 2377, on the basis of a scene-by-scene synopsis, for a second, completed drama, Tom Sawyer. A Play in 4 Acts (SLC 1875–84; SLC 1884; Lehr 1982, 1, 12; Dramatic Compositions 1918, 2:2346). For further details of these dramatizations and a text of the 1884 play, as well as discussion of Clemens’s nearly thirty years of plans to portray Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as adults, see HH&T, 15–20, 243–324, 400–402.

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9 Conway replied (CU-MARK):

UCLC32401

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Scottish-born William Black (1841–98) was especially known for his popular novels that successfully blended fiction and travel writing and featured charming portrayals of female characters. It is not known if he called on Clemens.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Copy-text:

MS, Conway Papers, NNC.

Previous publication: MicroPUL, reel 1.

Provenance:The Conway Papers were acquired by NNC sometime after Conway’s death in 1907.

Emendations and textual notes:

shrewd • shr shrewd [corrected miswriting]

both • boths [false start]