3 September 1868 • Elmira, N.Y. (Transcript: WU, UCCL 02748)
(SUPERSEDED)
Inclosed you will find that “Eulogy.” I found it today in the “Excelsior Magazine.” Please hand it to your neighbor next door who asked for it.1explanatory note
If any letters come for me between now & the 17th please send them to Cleveland, “care of the Daily Herald.”Ⓐemendation 2explanatory note
Regards to all the family.3explanatory note How do you come on with the engravings—& in what manner have you decided to illustrate?4explanatory note
The actual clipping enclosed was presumably given to Bliss’s unidentified neighbor and is therefore lost. But it was doubtless a single leaf (pages 99–100) torn from the August issue of The Excelsior Monthly Magazine, and Public Spirit, which reprinted Clemens’s response to the toast to “Woman” delivered at the Washington Correspondents’ Club dinner on 11 January; see the photofacsimile in Enclosure with 3 September 1868 to Elisha Bliss, Jr.click to open letter. The Excelsior was a New York periodical “devoted to the elevation of the race,” which had published only two previous issues, for June and July. The magazine’s ultimate source for Clemens’s speech, so far as this can be determined, was the text that appeared in the New York Evening Post on 15 January (“A Eulogy of Woman by ‘Mark Twain,’” 1). Either the Excelsior editors, Miles N. Olmsted and Thomas A. Welwood, or some unidentified intervening copy, omitted one sentence that was in the Post: “She bears our children—ours as a general thing” (Wilson 1869, 335, 830, 1143, and “City Register,” 25).
The newspaper owned in part by Abel Fairbanks.
Bliss’s family consisted of his wife, Amelia Crosby Bliss—whom he had married in 1856—and their three children: Walter (1858–1917), Emma (b. 1860), and Almira (b. 1865). Bliss also had one surviving child by his first wife, who had died in 1855: Francis (Frank) Edgar Bliss (1843–1915) (biographical information on Bliss, CtHSD; Donald T. Bliss to Hamlin Hill, 11 Nov 1964, CU-MARK; New York Times: “Obituary Notes,” 17 Mar 1917, 13; “Francis Edward Bliss,” 10 Nov 1915, 13).
Bliss evidently replied that he wanted to have “pictures sandwiched in with the text” as well as full-page illustrations (5 Oct 68 to Mary Mason Fairbanks). The Innocents Abroad ultimately contained more than 230 engravings, some of which were made from photographs Clemens himself had acquired during his trip, while others were based on pictures collected and made available by fellow passenger Moses S. Beach (Hirst and Rowles, 31). The engravers may not have even begun yet to prepare the illustrations: by early February 1869 only 150 had been completed (Bliss to SLC, 10 Feb 69, CU-MARK).
Transcript (handwritten in pencil) made by Dana S. Ayer of Clemens’s now-lost MS, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU). The enclosure is separately treated below, pp. 590–91.
L2 , 245–246.
see Brownell Collection, pp. 509–11.