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Add to My CitationsTo Richard Edwards
per Olivia L. Clemens
16 July 1877 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS, correspondence card: CLjC, UCCL 11826)
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Quarry Farm
em spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceElmira July 16th

em spaceslcem spaceMr Richard Edwards

My dear Sir

The permission you ask to use three pages from my Mississippi Sketches in your reader I c have great pleasure in granting—1

Very sincerely yours

Sam. L. Clemens – per O.L.C.

Explanatory Notes

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1 Richard Edwards (1822–1908), originally from Wales, was a prominent educator. After nearly twenty years as a schoolteacher and principal, he earned a Master of Arts degree from Harvard in 1863, and became an ordained minister in 1873. Since 1876 he had been pastor of the Congregational Church in Princeton. In addition to editing several periodicals for teachers, he produced an “Analytical Series of Readers,” intended to “teach young persons to appreciate and to read good English” (Edwards 1867, 3). More than eighty thousand copies of the readers were sold between 1866 and 1875. The “three pages” that he asked permission to publish were from the fourth installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” in the April 1875 issue of the Atlantic Monthly: from “There used to be an excellent pilot on the river” through “And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn’t he do if he was dead!” Edwards included the passage in The Student’s Reader, supplying the title “The Somnambulist Pilot” (Edwards and Boltwood 1877, 43–46; SLC 1875d, 451–52; Loomis 1932, 97–102, 125–28, 180–87).



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MS, correspondence card, CLjC.

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Sotheby’s catalog, sale of 10–11 December 1993, lot 253, partial publication.

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Purchased at Sotheby’s in 1993.