To Charles Henry Webb
26 November 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: ViU and MoSW, UCCL 00544)

Buf. Nov. 26.

Friend Webb—

Business first. I could not consent to a new edition of the J. F. any time within two or three years without w vitiating my contracts with my present publishers & creating dissatisfaction. I would have issued the Galaxy (they belong wholly to me) & other sketches, in a couple of volumes, before this, but for the reason abovementioned.1 But when I go down to New York in the spring I want to look the whole J. F. matter over, & if there is anything fairly & strictly owing whatever is fair & right, I am perfectly willing to [do. But ] in

I have been very much ashamed of myself several times for getting in a passion & hiring a lawyer & making myself th[o]roughly uncomfortable when there was no occasion for it—but I hold that a man has got to make an ass of himself once a year anyhow, & I am sure I went along intelligently enough the balance of last year. I was very sorry, though, to make trouble that I made trouble with a friend, because that is folly of [ som such ]a particularly low grade.2

I s had seen the letter about your marriage, for it was copied everywhere & I am cordially glad you are out of the chilly ‸list of the‸ unwise, & one of us. 3 Like you, I lost ten or fifteen years of married life just by sheer carelessness in not getting married ten or fifteen years sooner, but I went according to my lights, & what more could a man do. But I am making up for it now. I never write a line for my paper,4 I do not see the office oftener than once a week, & do not stay there an hour at any time, & I never go out of the house, except for exercise, one hour twice a day. So I see nobody but my wife & visiting friends from a distance. {But we are not absolutely lonesome, because, including the servants, we have eleven in the family just now.}5 [Housekeeping ] is perfectly jolly, so long as you & your wife cordially agree on a visitor before he is invited, & I tell you we are always mighty particular to look to that. Wherefore I am enabled authoritatively to invite you & Mrs. Webb to [ rum run ]up here & spend a week with us as soon you as we get the decks clear again & you can make it convenient. I work in my particular den, from 11 AM till 3 P.M., rain or shine—but the rest of the day & night I’ll help Mrs. C. entertain you all I know how. I thank you for your invitation to drop in at 155 Madison ave., & shall promptly do so when in town.

Now why did you persist in publishing with Carleton? That snob.6

Indeed Harte does soar, & I am glad of it, notwithstanding he & I are “off,” these many months. It happened thus. Harte read all the MS of the “Innocents” & told me what passages, paragraphs & chapters to leave out—& I followed orders strictly. It was a kind thing for Harte to do, & I think I appreciated it. He praised the book so highly that I wanted him to review it early for the Overland, so that I could & help the sale out there. I told the my publisher. He ordered Bancroft to send Harte a couple of books before anybody else. Bancroft declined! I wrote a not Harte & enclosed an order on Bancroft for 2 book[s] & directing that the bill be sent deducted from my [publishers ]returns or sent to [me. Mr. ]Bancroft “preferred the money.” Good, wasn’t it? {He wrote me the other day, asking me to help get him agency for my new book for Pacific & the Orient—which I didn’t.} Well, sir, Harte wrote me the most daintily contemptuous & insulting letter you ever read—& what I want to know, is, where I was to blame? How’s that?7

Dinner is ready. We offer our warm regards & congratulations to you & Mrs. Webb.

Ys

Clemens.

Personal. | C. H. Webb Esq | Care E. P. Dutton & Co | 713 Broadway | New York.8 [postmarked:] buffalo [n.y. nov 27]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 In October 1870 existing contracts with the American Publishing Company had forced Clemens to abandon a sketchbook he hoped to give to the publishers of the Galaxy (13 Oct 70, 26 Oct 70, 31 Oct 70, all to Bliss).

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2 Clemens’s grievance concerned The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches, published by Webb in 1867, but nothing is known of the legal action he apparently initiated in 1869 and abandoned in early 1870 (22 Jan 70 to Bliss, n. 5). He did not wait until the spring of 1871 to look into the Jumping Frog matter again; instead he met and came to terms with Webb in New York in December 1870 (17 Dec 70 to Fairbanks; 22 Dec 70 to Bliss).

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3 The letter about Webb’s 11 October 1870 marriage to Elizabeth W. Shipman, of Brooklyn, has not been identified.

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4 See 27 Mar 70 to the Langdons, n. 5.

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5 In addition to Clemens, Olivia, and Langdon, five servants and two probable visitors can be identified as current members of the Buffalo household: coachman Patrick McAleer; housekeeper and cook Ellen White; the unnamed replacement for Harriet, the maid fired on 15 April; “Auntie” Smith, Langdon’s nursemaid; Mrs. Brown, Langdon’s wet nurse; and Olivia Lewis Langdon and Ida Langdon, recently invited (16 Apr 70 to Crane; 11 Nov 70 to Ford; 14 Nov 70 to Charles J. Langdon; 19 Nov 70 to Olivia Lewis Langdon).

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6 In February 1867 George W. Carleton offended Clemens in rejecting the Jumping Frog book, which Webb published about three months later (L2, 12–14, 19 n. 2). Carleton published four of Webb’s books: Liffith Lank; or, Lunacy (1866), The Wickedest Woman in New York (1868), Parodies (1876), and Sea-weed and What We Seed: My Vacation at Long Branch and Saratoga (1876).

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7 Harte’s letter to Clemens is not known to survive. Hubert H. Bancroft did not continue as the American Publishing Company’s West Coast representative: the agency for Roughing It went to Anton Roman, another San Francisco bookseller and publisher. (Bancroft’s letter of “the other day” probably was the one Clemens received from him in October: see 8–13? Oct 70 to Bliss.) Harte’s assistance in revising the manuscript of The Innocents Abroad, resulting in extensive deletions and other alterations, is fully discussed in Hirst 1978, 1–34. His long review of Innocents, which appeared in the Overland Monthly for January 1870, found the book to be an exception to the poor stuff usually issued by subscription publishers, “a joyous revelation—an Indian spring in an alkaline literary desert” proving that “Mr. Clemens deserves to rank foremost among American humor-ists” (Harte 1870 [bib11297], 100, 101). Clemens conceivably influenced, as repayment, the Buffalo Express’s flattering notice, on 30 April 1870, of the “exquisite art” of Harte’s The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co., 1870), but he almost certainly did not write it (“New Books,” 2). Harte was “soaring” in November 1870 as a result of “Plain Language from Truthful James” (sometimes also called “The Heathen Chinee”). First published in the Overland Monthly for September 1870 (Harte 1870 [bib01085]), the poem was reprinted in newspapers and cheap broadsides, throughout the United States and abroad, and “like a popular song or a vaudeville joke became the property of the man in the street”—although Harte thought it “the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote” (George R. Stewart 1931, 179–81). Soon after, Harte turned down an appointment as “Professor of Recent Literature and Curator of the Library and Museum” at the University of California in Berkeley, for an annual salary of $3,600, a refusal that was widely reported. In early 1871 he went east, in order to exploit his fame there: see 3 Mar 71 to Riley, n. 6 (Hart 1987, 419–20; Thomas, 1:162–63; Bierce; San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser: “Journalistic Muffs,” 27 Aug 70, 8; “Mr. Frank Bret Harte . . . ,” 24 Sept 70, 5; Elmira Advertiser: “Personal,” 28 Sept 70, 4; Pittsburgh Gazette: “Generalities,” 29 Sept 70, 1).

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8 Webb’s business address until around May 1872. Nothing has been learned of his responsibilities at Edward P. Dutton and Company, booksellers and publishers chiefly of religious and juvenile books, but the firm helped promote the adding machine he patented in 1868 (Seventy-five Years, 34–37, 39; Wilson: 1869, 316, 1153; 1870, 340, 1268; 1871, 324, 1204).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU), is copy-text for the letter; MS, Washington University, St. Louis (MoSW), is copy-text for the envelope.

Previous publication: L4, 247–250; MTLP, 4 n. 1, brief excerpt.

Provenance:letter deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963; when MoSW acquired the envelope is not known.

Emendations and textual notes:

do. But • do.—| But

som such • somuch

Housekeeping • House-|keeping

rum run • rumn

publishers • [sic]

me. Mr. • me.—|Mr.

n.y. nov 27 • [] y. no [v 27] [badly inked]