10 May 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01089)
Everybody gets a taste of my venom these days—you among the rest.1explanatory note But you are responsible for precious little of my spiteful mood. I am harassed & made furious by many other things. A loafing vagabond swindles Dubuque in my name & that spiritless & dirty community let him go. I employ a lawyer here to plan the rascal’s capture, & the first move he makes proves him a fool. A sheriff starts after the culprit & he turns fool—& rascal, I judge.2explanatory note
Then with every newspaper paragraph I wr Ⓐemendation or paragraph I write in my present petulant state I prove myself a fool, & make trouble.3explanatory note
Then a fraud in San Francisco dran matizes the Gilded Age & makes a great hit with it—especially with the character of Col. Sellers. But I’ve got him foul, because I copyrighted the thing as a drama a year ago. He will have to lay down his stolen goods.4explanatory note
My pamphlets are delayed unreasonably.5explanatory note EverythingⒶemendation goes wrong & I’m in a never-ending state of harassment.
But no matter. Bad Ⓐemendation luck always runs its course; to meddle with it & try to mend it only makes it worse. When I am in my right mind I fold my hands & stir not when it is raining bad luck. But I seem helpless to do it this time. However, all in good time the thing will change & then the current will flow serenely again.
I hope you & Mollie will thrive where you are going—& I hardly see how you can help it. Forty dollars a month from the houses on that farm is a living, in itself. So I hope the change is going to be a change to prosperity & contentment—for you are aging & it is high time to give over dreaming & buckle down to the simplicities & the realities of life.6explanatory note
Orion Clemens Esq | 40 W. 9th st. | New York. return address: If not delivered within 5 days, please return to S. L. Clemens, Elmira, N. Y. postmarked: elmira n. y. may 11 Ⓐemendation
The “venom” was probably in a letter (now lost) of late April or early May in which Clemens enclosed “a check for $700 & another for $200” (see the previous letter). Orion’s answer, to which Clemens now replied, has also been lost: Clemens sent it to Howells in the next letter, with an explanation of its contents.
See 24 Apr 74 to the editor of the Dubuque Herald click to open letter and 27 Apr 74 to Brown, n. 4click to open letter.
The newspaper paragraphs may have included work on a letter for the New York World (see 6–29 May 74 to Stillsonclick to open letter). After his arrival at Quarry Farm on 5 May, Clemens may have resumed work on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. By 10 May, however, he had set it aside to work on his Gilded Age play, which he finished by 15 July. He then returned to Tom Sawyer and continued to work on it until 2 September, reaching the end of chapter 18, before he temporarily set it aside once again (see 25 Feb 74 to Fairbanks, n. 4click to open letter; 10 May 74 to Howells, n. 2click to open letter; 15 and 16 July 74 to Wattclick to open letter; and 4 Sept 74 to Brownclick to open letter).
Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One (25 Feb 74 to Fairbanks, n. 6click to open letter; 7 May 74 to Spoffordclick to open letter) was being printed at the Hutchings Printing House, in Hartford. Clemens planned to distribute the twenty-five-cent pamphlet through the American News Company of New York, which was to sell it at newsstands and railway stations. Although the pamphlets were ready by early June, few if any copies were ever offered for sale. Louis Brush, then the manager of the Hutchings shop, provided the information for the following article in 1910:
It seems that Mark Twain had the idea of getting out such a series, for sale by the news company on the trains; it will be remembered that some of Dickens’s and Thackeray’s novels were published serially in this way. Twain got the first number all ready. A Hartford artist was engaged to illustrate the magazine and the little pamphlet was put in type and printed. Then Twain wandered one day into the office of the American Publishing Company, his regular publishers, and told them about his enterprise. “Why you can’t do that,” they said. “You have signed a contract to publish nothing for sale except through us.” So Mark Twain was left with 100,000 copies of his Mark Twain’s Sketches, No. 1, on his hands, and an expense of $4,000 to the bad. He went down to see Mr. Brush, who was manager of the Hartford concern that did the printing, and told him sorrowfully to destroy the whole batch. “Let me think it over,” said Mr. Brush. He thought about it and finally the idea came to him to print advertisements on the back page of the cover, and sell the edition to the advertisers, who would give the pamphlets away. The plan worked out all right; an insurance company, or perhaps several, bought the edition, put their advertisements on the back and gave the Sketches away. That did not violate the contract, since the pamphlets were not sold—and Mark Twain saved his $4,000. (“Memories of Mark Twain,” Illustrated Buffalo Express, 1 May 1910, sec. 1:3)
Clemens’s 29 December 1870 contract with the American Publishing Company, fulfilled in 1875 with Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, did not prohibit publication with other firms. But his other current contract, dated 22 June 1872 (for the abandoned project with John Henry Riley, about the South African diamond mines), did have such a clause. It was not fulfilled until 1876, with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In 1870 Bliss had invoked a similar clause in his Roughing It contract to stop a proposed “Mark Twain’s Annual,” and in 1871 Bliss barely refrained from invoking it to stop another small pamphlet, Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (SLC 1871; see ET&S1 , 435–36; L4 , 209, 212–13, 218, 247, 258–65, 268, 281–82, 320–21, 566–68; L6 , 101–2, 633). Nothing is known about Clemens’s financial investment in the Sketches. Number One pamphlet. The buyout proposal remembered by Brush did not come until 22 August 1877, when William C. Hutchings, the former owner of the Hartford print shop (which had since closed) and now an agent of the Aetna Life Insurance Company of Hartford, wrote Clemens:
My dear Mark,—I have an opportunity to realize $30000 by disposing of the entire lot of “Sketches” pamphlets to the Aetna Life Ins. Co.
They will print their advertisement on back cover page, as per enclosed sample, (nothing printed on the inside covers,) and circulate the pamphlets at convenience.
I hope you have no objection to my realizing as above on what is absolutely dead property to me otherwise. It’s a small amount, comparatively, but situated as I am at present the $30000 will be a perfect God-send. (CU-MARK)
Hutchings’s sample does not survive, nor does Clemens’s reply, which must have been affirmative. Jacob Blanck reported two known states of the pamphlet: one with the back cover blank, and a second with an advertisement for the Aetna Insurance Company giving “assets for January 1, 1877” ( BAL , 2:3360; Geer 1873, 39, 82).
See the previous letter.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L6 , 143–145.
see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.