per Samuel C. Thompson
16 July 1873 • London, England (MS: CtY-BR, UCCL 00954)
London
July 16th
I have just written Bliss asking him to send two or sets of sheets and two casts of the pictures always by successive steamers, so that if one set is ever lost it need not stop the book. I wish you would see that this is done, and don’t let a sheet be carelessly kept back for a week or two, scaring a body to death with the idea that it is lost; but have the sheets sent in their regular order faithfully. Don’t wait for a quantity, but send it right along, signature by signature. And I have told Bliss to name the day of publication and to write Routledge about it; and that if he should change that date to telegraph to Routledge; because if Routledge makes a mistake in the publishing day of Bliss it may cost us our copy-right.1explanatory note Now you know what I have written Bliss, and you will know how to proceed.
Clemens dismissed Thompson shortly after dictating the present letter. In 1909 Thompson wrote to Clemens, recalling the circumstances of their parting and enclosing a money order as partial payment for a debt of ten pounds—a debt Clemens himself had forgotten, and quickly forgave. Thompson explained:
After a few weeks in England you found the public and social tax on your time interfered with literary work and that you might as well dispense with my services. Your memory was that I was to expect less than ten dollars a week. However, you gave me twenty pounds and said I could owe you ten pounds. So I considered it a matter of circumstances—and no cause for complaint—was eager to repay as soon as I could. As I could live as cheaply in Europe as in New York with not a ghost of chance to do anything for just the remaining midsummer days, I tramped about some and came over in the Fall.
Thompson went on to recount, in painful detail, that in the intervening years he had become a minister and served for “twenty-two years without a vacation” in a small town in New York State, trying to pay his debts (20 Apr 1909, CU-MARK). Clemens, who regarded Thompson’s letter as “tragic ... & full of pathetic human interest,” recalled how unsatisfactory this “first experience in dictating” had been, and how his “sentences came slow & painfully, & were clumsily phrased, & had no life in them” (SLC 1909, 1, 12; see also N&J1, 517, 525).
MS, Willard S. Morse Collection, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (CtY-BR). Thompson made this fair copy from the stenographic version of the letter that he had recorded in his notebook from Clemens’s dictation (CU-MARK; see N&J1, 567–68).
L5 , 417–418; MTLP, 78.
The MS is laid in a first edition copy of The Gilded Age (American Publishing Company, 1873); the Morse Collection was donated to CtY in 1942 by Walter F. Frear.