10 May 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: AuMS, UCCL 10692)
May 10.
Your letter has just reached me. I venture to reply—but very briefly, for you will doubtless be gone before my letter reaches New York.1explanatory note
I think it hardly worth while to try to enter into any arrangement, because, although I am engaged upon a book, it is in such a leisurely way that I scarcely expect to have it completed within a year.2explanatory note
t Thanking you for the compliment of your offer, I am, dear sir,
Frederick William Haddon (1839–1906), born in England, went to Melbourne, Australia, in 1863, becoming a contributor to and subeditor of the Melbourne Argus. In 1864 he became co-editor and in 1865 editor of the Melbourne Australasian, and then, in 1867, returned to the Argus as editor, a post he held until 1898. He had written to Clemens around 3 May, probably from the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, where he stayed on the final leg of a tour that had also taken him to India, continental Europe, and England. His letter does not survive, nor is it known when he left New York (Mennell, 208; Woods, 4:313–14; “Personal Notes,” New York Times, 3 May 74, 6).
Haddon may have proposed serializing a book by Mark Twain in the Melbourne Argus. Clemens’s “leisurely” writing was on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (AuMS).
L6 , 147.
donated in 1957 by Haddon’s daughter.