To Moncure D. Conway 15 May 1877 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS, correspondence card, in pencil: CU-MARK, UCCL 13402)
Tuesday, May 15.
slcMy Dear Conway—The eternal newspaper item that “Mr. John T. Raymond
will leave for England to play an engagement in London” &c &c, still circles round. Will you be so kind as to keep your eyes open & let me know the first time you
discover that he is really coming there to play. Tell me by telegraph, if necessary the
time should be short, for I shall want to run over immediately & bring an injunction
suit.1
I’m just starting off on a fortnight’s run to Bermuda to take sea air.
Harte’s play & mine (“Ah Sin”) seems to be quite a pronounced success.
Ys Ever
Mark.
Explanatory Notes
Clemens probably had seen the following, in the Hartford Courant on 15 May: Mr. John T. Raymond purposes going to London this summer. When he
arrives there he will find that a Mr. G. L. Gordon has produced a play in
Liverpool called “Millions In It,” of which the London Era says: “The play is a
success. The great central figure of the comedy-drama is Colonel Digby Chicken.
The name of the play it is soon discovered is derived from the favorite catchphrase of the impecunious colonel, who is positively brimful of hope with respect
to a multitude of odd schemes, of each of which he invariably asserts there are
millions in it.” (“Personals,” 1) In July 1876 Clemens had wanted to arrange terms with Raymond for the
performance of Colonel Sellers in England, but the contract that emerged from their
contentious negotiations in the fall of the year has not been found, so it is not known
whether they reached any agreement. If they did not, then Clemens’s contemplated
injunction would have been to stop Raymond. If terms for London were included, the
injunction would have been to protect Raymond from Millions In It, by actor and
prolific playwright George Lash Gordon (1851–95)—either a direct plagiarism of
Colonel Sellers, or an independent, but unauthorized, dramatization of The Gilded
Age—which had opened at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre in Liverpool on 16 April
1877. In any event, Raymond did not take Colonel Sellers to London until 1880 (24
July 1876 to Conway, n. 4; 27 Oct 1876 to Raymond, n. 1; George B. Bryan 1991,
1:521; Nicoll 1959, 384–85).
Source text(s):Provenance:
Purchased on 12 December 2011 from Marion N. Fay, who acquired it from one of Conway’s granddaughters.
