To William Dean Howells
5 July 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: NN-B, UCCL 01247)

July 5.

My Dear Howells:1

I have finished the story & didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but autobiographically—like Gil Blas.2 I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person. If I went on, now, & took him into manhood, he would just be like all the one-horse men in literature & the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. It is not a boy’s book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.

Moreover, the book is plenty long enough, as it stands. It is about 900 pages of MS., & may be 1000 when I ‸shall‸ have finished “working up” vague places.; so it would make from 130 to 150 pages of the Atlantic—about what the Foregone Conclusion made, isn’t it?3

I would dearly like to see it in the Atlantic, but I doubt if it would pay the publishers to buy the privilege, or me to sell it. Bret Harte has sold his novel (same size as mine, I should say) to Scribner’s Monthly for $6,500 (publication to begin in Septembrer, I think,) & he gets a royalty of 7½ per cent from Bliss in book form afterward. He gets a royalty of ten per cent on it in England (issued in serial numbers) & the same royalty on it in book form afterward, & is to receive an advance payment of five hundred pounds the day the first No. of the serial appears.4 If I could do as well, here & there, with mine, it might possibly pay me, but I seriously doubt it.—though it is likely I could do better in England than Bret, who is not widely known there.

You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things—but then my household expenses are something almost ghastly.

By & by I shall take a boy of twelve & run him on through life into (in the first person) but not Tom Sawyer—he would not be a good character for it.5

I wish you would promise to read the MS of Tom Sawyer some time, & see if you don’t really decide that I am right in closing with him as a boy—& point out the most glaring defects for me. It is a tremendous favor to ask, & I expect you to refuse, & would be ashamed to expect you to do otherwise. But the thing has been so many months in my mind that it seems a [relief to] snake it out. I don’t know any other person whose judgment I could venture to take fully & entirely. Don’t hesitate about saying no, for I know how your time is taxed, & I would have honest need to blush if you said yes.

Osgood & I are “going for” the puppy Gill on infringement of [trademark].6 To win one or two suits of this kind will set literary folks on a firmer bottom. The N. Y. Tribune doesn’t own the world—I wish Osgood would sue it for stealing Holmes’s poem. Wouldn’t it be gorgeous to sue Whitelaw [Read] for petty larceny? I will promise to go into court & swear I think him capable of stealing pea-nuts from a blind pedlar.7

Mrs. C. grows stronger. Susie is down with a fever. Kindest regards to you all.8

Yrs Ever

Clemens

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK), which replied to his of 21 June and 25 June and also touched on matters discussed during Howells’s 12 and 13 June visit to Hartford:

UCLC32193

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Exactly when Clemens became acquainted with the renowned soprano Clara Louise Kellogg (1842–1916) is not known. In November 1875 he was still trying to introduce Francis Boott’s music to her (see 4 Nov 75 to Howells). In 1877 Howells sold the dramatic rights to A Counterfeit Presentment to Lawrence Barrett, who appeared in it for one season (Howells: 1877; 1979, 150–51). Henry Houghton hoped to help persuade Clemens to serialize Tom Sawyer in the Atlantic Monthly by promising to stop the unauthorized newspaper reprinting that would reduce the market for the book version. The Atlantic had not tried to impede the widespread reprinting of Clemens’s “Old Times on the Mississippi” articles (see 6 Jan 75 to Houghton and Company, n. 1).

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2 Alain René Le Sage’s famous picaresque romance (1715–35), which Clemens had read in 1869 (L3, 440–41).

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3 Howells’s Foregone Conclusion appeared in six installments in the Atlantic Monthly, from July through December 1874, totaling about ninety-two pages.

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4 Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy was serialized in Scribner’s Monthly from November 1875 through August 1876. The American Publishing Company issued the book in September 1876. In 1907 Clemens claimed that Bliss was prompted to sell the serial rights because he “realized that ‘Gabriel Conroy’ was a white elephant” (AD, 4 Feb 1907, CU-MARK, in MTE, 281). Scribner’s actually paid $6,000, which Bliss and Harte shared equally. Frederick Warne and Company of London intended to issue the work in thirty parts, but only two parts, dated October and November 1875 (comprising chapters 1–12), have been found. They published a three-volume edition in May 1876 (L5, 135 n. 2; Harte: 1875–76; 1876; 1997, 112 n. 1; Harte to SLC, 24 Dec 75, CU-MARK, in Harte 1997, 125–26; BAL, 3:7281).

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5 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) was, of course, the partial realization of this plan. Although Clemens did not take Huck Finn into manhood, on more than one occasion he considered portraying both him and Tom Sawyer in old age (see HH&T, 15–20).

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6 See 31 May 75 to Gill. Osgood wrote to Howells on 3 July: “In spite of all, our friend Gill has used your name on the back of his book between ‘Praed’ and ‘Poe.’ Do you propose to stand it, or will you join your publisher in stopping it? I have written to Mark Twain, whose name is also there” (MH-H). (Osgood’s letter to Clemens has not been found.) Gill’s list—which was printed on the spine of the first volume in the Treasure- Trove series, Burlesque—included authors represented in forthcoming volumes. According to an announcement in the New York World for 17 May, Howells’s “Mrs. Johnson” (1868) was to be among the contents of Essay (originally intended as the first volume), and Story, the second volume, was to include a “specimen” by Mark Twain (“Literary Notes,” 17 May 75, 2; see 31 May 75 to Gill, n. 1, and 13 July 75 to Osgood, n. 2).

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7 For an explanation of the grudge Clemens had been carrying against Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune, since May 1873, see L5, 367–69. The present offense occurred on 4 June, when the Tribune reprinted Holmes’s “Grandmother’s Story of Bunker-Hill Battle” from “an admirably attractive, illustrated brochure to be issued this week by James R. Osgood & Co. of Boston” (“The Battle of Bunker Hill,” 8). The newspaper flagrantly disregarded a note in the pamphlet, appended to the copyright statement: “As this poem is written expressly for this Memorial, and not intended for publication elsewhere, the Publishers request that it be not copied or reprinted” (Memorial, 1). Although Osgood did not sue Reid, on 17 June 1875 he had filed a “bill in equity” against Frank Leslie, who pirated the same poem in the “Centennial” issue of his Illustrated Newspaper, restraining him from “further publication and sale” and requiring an accounting of profits and payment of damages (“Dr. Holmes’s Bunker Hill Poem,” New York Times, 18 June 75, 3). No copy of the issue containing the poem has been found.

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8 Howells answered (CU-MARK):

UCLC32194

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Howells apparently forgot to enclose the music by Francis Boott (see 13 July 75 to Howells).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).

Previous publication: L6, 503–6; MTB, 1:547, excerpt; Paine 1917, 785–86, and MTL, 1:258–59, with omission; MTHL, 1:91–94.

Provenance:see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

relief to • relieft to [false start]

trademark • trade-|mark

Read • [sic]