20 April 1872 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: ViU, UCCL 00742)
Warrington’s article was delicious. I want to go for Timothy one of these days—& shall.1explanatory note
Our tribe are flourishing—the new cub most of all. I was very sorry to hear such sad news of Fall’s family, & sincerely hope the calamity will proceed no farther.2explanatory note
I hope to see you all when I come up to the Jubilee.3explanatory note IⒶemendation am practicing a little solo in hopes of getting a chance to sing there.
Could you jam this item into the Advertiser? I hate to see our fine success wholly uncelebrated:
Mark Twain’s new book, “Roughing It” has sold 43,000 copies in two months & a half. Only 17,000 copies of “The Innocents Abroad[”] were sold in the first two months & a half months.Ⓐemendation4explanatory note
I ordered a copy to be sent to you a couple of weeks ago. If it has been delayed, let me know.5explanatory note
letter docketed: Twain Mark | Elmira N.Y. apr. 20 72 and boston lyceum bureau. redpath & fall. apr 22 1872
“Warrington” was William Stevens Robinson (1818–76), the Boston correspondent of the Springfield Republican from 1856 until his death, and also the influential clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1862 to 1873. Redpath, his long-time friend and fellow ardent abolitionist, had called him “the bravest public man in New England, without any exception” (Redpath 1875, 153). The article that Redpath had evidently sent Clemens was a letter from Robinson to the Republican, published on 22 March, which included his reply to a bitterly sarcastic attack on him in “Topics of the Time” in the April issue of Scribner’s Monthly, manifestly written by its founding editor, Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–81) (Holland 1872 [bib12758]). Holland had pursued brief careers as a doctor and teacher in the 1840s, and was for many years an editor on the Springfield Republican (and therefore Robinson’s boss). He was also the very popular author of a half-dozen novels, narrative poems, and didactic essays, which he often signed with the pen name “Timothy Titcomb.” Redpath and Clemens both knew that Holland had recently attacked humorous lecturers in a “Topics of the Time” column entitled “Triflers on the Platform,” in the February Scribner’s (Holland 1872 [bib00994]). The rejoinder that Clemens found “delicious” said, in part:
The doctor knows that although his position in the literary and political world is appreciated well enough, only here and there a man has thought it worth while to express an accurate opinion about him. . . . Of course I have occasionally said what occurred to me in relation to his jejune style of lecturing and writing; but I have been on the whole reticent, for excellent reasons, concerning this aspect of the case. “What’s done he partly may compute,” but he can never know what I have “resisted.” . . . The diffusion of the alphabet and of what is called popular intelligence, has compelled the advent of a class of men, not literary men in a proper sense of the word, but men who are able to put the 26 letters into new and often into grammatical forms of prose and verse. Holland is one of these men; the Country Parson another; Tupper another. There are thousands of them. They are embalmed in Allibone, who takes notice of everything that gets between pasteboard covers, but they have no part in literature. It is no use to say in reply to this that there is no accounting for tastes, and that if a man or a woman says he thinks Dr Holland a better essayist than Higginson or a greater poet than Lowell, he has a right to his opinion. A man is at liberty to prefer Browning to Tennyson, for instance, or George Eliot to Thackeray. So a man may say he prefers Holland to Gail Hamilton, or vice versa. But the preference must be within or without the lines of recognized literary excellence or else criticism and comparison go for nothing. (William Stevens Robinson)
Robinson mentioned Andrew K. H. Boyd (1825–99), a Scottish minister known as the “Country Parson,” whose facile essays were widely read in America; Martin Farquhar Tupper, author of the popular Proverbial Philosophy (1838); Samuel Austin Allibone, compiler of the comprehensive Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1858–71); and editor and essayist Mary Abigail Dodge (1833–96), who used the pseudonym “Gail Hamilton.” Referring to religious orthodoxy and salvation, which Holland had discussed in the April Scribner’s article, Robinson concluded, “If I were to venture to advise Holland I should say to him that he had better not only free his mind of cant, but his head of conceit, and if then he feels the less need of being saved he will be much more worth saving than he is now.” Clemens would shortly draft his own reply to Holland (see 18 July 72 to Redpath, n. 5click to open letter).
The calamity has not been identified. George Fall’s own poor health would force his retirement in 1873 and lead to his death at age thirty-seven in May 1875 ( L4 , 11 n. 4).
Clemens may have attended the Boston World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in late June or early July (see p. 112).
No such item has been found in the Boston Advertiser. Clemens’s figure (43,000) represented orders received to date but not yet all filled, since Bliss’s edition was “short” (21 Mar 72 to Bliss, n. 2click to open letter). (By the end of April Bliss was still at least five thousand orders behind: the American Publishing Company’s royalty statement of 1 May, covering the “sale of ‘Roughing It’ since its issue,” reported 37,701 copies sold [enclosure with 8 May 72 to Perkinsclick to open letter].) Clemens’s reference to “two months & a half” suggests that he was not counting sales from the book’s formal issue date on 29 February or from its copyright date of 19 February, but from the delivery of the first bound books on 30 January. The bindery records generally support his comparison with The Innocents Abroad: by mid-October 1869, two and a half months after that book’s issue, only 12,671 copies had been bound, and by the time of the first quarterly accounting on 1 November 1869, 16,409 books had been bound (APC, 45–48, 106; L3 , 287 n. 1; RI 1993 , 876).
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L5 , 77–79.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.