To
Elisha Bliss, Jr.
2 August 1873 • (2nd of 2) • Edinburgh, Scotland
(Goodspeed’s Book Shop 1926?, item 793c, UCCL 05816)
Friend Bliss—
[Have ]just telegraphed you to squelch that pamphlet (if you are publishing it). I find by reading over those Herald letters [that ]I don’t like them at all—& besides, the Herald people have added paragraphs & interlineations, & not pleasant ones, either.1 So I know it will be better for you & better for me to stop the pamphlet. I don’t want to do anything that can injure the novel.2 We shall be in London during the month of September. Curse those letters!
Yrs.
Clemens.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
I had been helping the London newspaper men fetch the
Shah of Persia over from Ostend, I being for forty-eight hours in
the service of Dr. Hosmer, London representative of the New York Herald. I had dictated an account of the
excursion covering two or three columns of the Herald, and had charged and received three hundred dollars
and expenses for it—a narrative which seemed to the Herald to lack humor, a defect which the New
York office supplied from its own resources, which were poor and
coarse and silly beyond imagination. (AD, 28 Aug 1907, CU-MARK) (For an example of these “poor and
coarse” additions, see 4 Aug 73 to Yates.) Clemens was well
paid, however, for his five contributions. In a letter of 12 September
1873 to Whitelaw Reid, George Smalley commented: “The Herald
seems to be going in for all sorts of things, and money no object. I was
wrong in telling you Twain had $100, gold, a column, for the
Shah; it was $125, or, actually, £25, and they
counted in the display heads, wh. came to £69! This is what
Mark says” (Whitelaw Reid Papers, DLC). Thompson later
recalled that Clemens said the first letter alone was worth
$500, but Smalley’s contemporary estimate is
probably more accurate (Thompson, 89).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L5, 425.
Emendations and textual notes:
Edinburgh, Aug. 2. • [reported, not quoted]
[¶] Have • [no ¶] Have
that • than
