To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
10 July 1871 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: OClRC, UCCL 11312)

Elmira, July 10.

Dear Bliss:

I heard you were sick, & am glad you are getting better again.1

What terms did you arrive at with Routledge?2

Yes, I told Orion he could borrow small amounts on my account, at intervals, outside the pay for those 3 articles. So it is all right.3

Tomorrow I will fix up & forward as much MS as I have on hand. Some of it is tip-top.4

I am now waiting a day or two till I get my old Sandwich Island notes together, for I want to put in 4 or 5 chapters about the Islands for the benefit of New England—& the world.5 When that is finished I shall come on & we will cull & cut down the MS & sock the book into the press. I think it will be a book worth reading, duly aided by the pictures. I am not scared about the result. It will sell.

I think of calling it

[ T ] [FLUSH TIMES]

in the

[ silver mines ],

& other Matters.

===

a personal narrative.

===

By Mark Twain.

(Samℓ. L. Clemens.)

———

How does it strike you? Offer a suggestion, if one occurs to you.

Good! We’ll run the tilt with Beecher.6

Ys

Mark.

[letter docketed:] [Twain
Elmira 1869
Auth]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens was replying to Bliss’s letter of 7 July (CU-MARK):

UCLC31776

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2 Probably by this time Bliss had come to terms with George Routledge and Sons for an English edition of Roughing It to appear “simultaneously” with the American edition. Clemens was paid a nominal fee of £37 ($185) for the English rights (RI 1993, 876–77).

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3 See 21 June 71 to OC and MEC.

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4 If Clemens actually sent this batch of manuscript, his fourth, it probably consisted of what became chapters 54–57, and may have included chapters 76 and 78 if they had not already been delivered in June (RI 1993, 815, 861–62).

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5 Clemens evidently meant to make use of his 1866 notebooks, scrapbooks, Sacramento Union letters, and almost certainly the printer’s copy for an unpublished book on the Sandwich Islands he had prepared from the Union letters in 1866–67. Instead of “4 or 5 chapters,” however, he included fifteen chapters on the Sandwich Islands, all but four of them based on his Union letters (RI 1993, 862).

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6 Another subscription house, J. B. Ford and Company of New York, canvassed Henry Ward Beecher’s two-volume Life of Jesus, the Christ, the first volume of which was published in September 1871, before and during the American Publishing Company’s canvass for Roughing It, which began in early December (RI 1993, 861, 874–75).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Rowfant Club, Cleveland (OClRC).

Previous publication: L4, 431–32.

Provenance:The MS, presumably kept in the American Publishing Company files after receipt, was in 1899 tipped into volume 1 of The Innocents Abroad, the first volume of set 272 of the “Autograph Edition” of The Writings of Mark Twain. The book and manuscript were owned by Adrian G. Newcomb, later by Dr. and Mrs. Charles Herndon, and finally by the Rowfant Club.

Emendations and textual notes:

T • [partly formed]

FLUSH TIMES • [capitals simulated, not underscored]

silver mines . . .a personal narrative • [small capitals simulated, not underscored]