22? February 1868 • Washington, D.C. ( MTB , 1:359–60; Paine, 938;
MS, envelope only, ViU, UCCL 00199)
(SUPERSEDED)
I have made a superb contract for a book, &Ⓐemendation have prepared the first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty—Ⓐemendationbut I will bet it never sees the light. Don’t you let the folks at home hear that. That thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, & now shows no disposition to let me use them. I have done all I can by telegraph, & now await the final result by mail.1explanatory note I only charged them for 50Ⓐemendation letters what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern papers, & now they want to publish my letters in book form themselves,Ⓐemendation to get back that pitiful sum.2explanatory note
I rather expectⒶemendation to go with Anson Burlingame on the Chinese embassy.3explanatory note
Mrs. Orion Clemens | Keokuk | Iowa postmarked: washington d.c. feb 22 ’68 free Ⓐemendation franked by Clemens: Wm M Stewart | USS
In both of the printed sources for this letter, the manuscript of which is lost, Paine said it was addressed to Orion—not Mollie—Clemens. But the letter’s injunction not to “let the folks at home hear” of the Alta problem makes sense only if Clemens was writing to someone away from home. Orion would have been puzzled by such an instruction, since he was living “at home” in St. Louis, but Mollie was living with her parents in Keokuk, Iowa. And since Clemens had already told the St. Louis family (Jane, Pamela, and Orion) about his “superb contract” (24 Jan 68 to JLC and familyclick to open link), it seems unlikely that he would repeat himself to them a month later. Having recently received from Mollie three clippings of his Alta dispatches (mentioned as received in 21 Feb 68 to JLC and familyclick to open link), Clemens did have reason to write her a letter, and soon he demonstrably did so, as the envelope he addressed to her, postmarked 22 February, establishes. In another letter written at this time but now lost, Clemens must have also informed Pamela of his problem, swearing her to strict confidence even with members of the family (just as he later did in respect to his pending engagement to Olivia Langdon). Pamela evidently confided the information to Orion, but not to Mollie, and probably not to Jane—for in April, Orion was obliged to explain to Mollie why he had known about the problem but had not told her: “Pamela thought Sam had enjoined strict privacy on her, and I said nothing to you because she thought Sam would be displeased if privacy to that extent was not kept” (OC to MEC, 10 Apr 68, CU-MARK). Paine reported that when Clemens first heard about the Alta’s plans (ostensibly from Joseph Goodman), he “got confirmation of the report by telegraph” ( MTB , 1:359). Clemens must have learned the bad news and “done all he could by telegraph” within a day of writing the previous letter to Orion (on 21 February), which does not mention the problem. It is therefore extremely likely that the envelope transcribed here, and the letter fragment that Paine said was addressed to Orion, belong in fact to each other, and that the letter itself was written no earlier than 21 and no later than 22 February, the date of the postmark.
Noah Brooks recalled the Alta editors’ response to the news—which they had certainly heard by 14 January—that Clemens planned to reuse his Quaker City letters:
Although up to that moment there had been no thought of making in San Francisco a book of Mark Twain’s letters from abroad, the proprietors of the “Alta California” began at once their preparations to get out a cheap paper-covered edition of those contributions. An advance notice in the press despatches sent from California was regarded as a sort of answer to the alleged challenge of Mark Twain and his publishers. This sent the perplexed author hurrying back to San Francisco in quest of an ascertainment of his real rights in his own letters. (Brooks 1898, 99)
No copy of this “advance notice” has been found, but whether Clemens saw it or was otherwise apprised of the Alta’s plans, he was evidently persuaded on or about 22 February to telegraph for permission to reuse the letters, something he had declined to do earlier (Jan 68 to JLC and PAMclick to open link). The “final result by mail” which he then awaited came about two weeks later, on or about 8 March. A California newspaper, reprinting an item from a still-unidentified “Eastern exchange” (published sometime in mid-March), summarized the situation with some authority:
Mark Twain has got a scrape on his hands. He had written several hundred MS. pages for a book for one of the Hartford publishing houses, expecting to make his letters to the Alta California useful for the bulk of his book. These letters were fifty, for which $2,500 in gold coin had been paid. Mark telegraphed to California for permission to use the letters. His telegram was, of course, an admission that the Alta had the right to the letters. He got a letter last week, refusing the requested permission. This broke up the Hartford contract, and sent him spinning to the Pacific coast, to break somebody’s head. (“Mark Twain in Trouble,” Marysville Calif. Appeal, 9 May 68, 3)
Clemens had, in fact, received his $1,250 fare in currency, or “greenbacks,” plus $500 in gold (equivalent to $700 in currency), for a total of about $1,950, or “less than two thousand dollars” (see 15 Apr 67 to JLC and family, n. 1click to open link).
In Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), Paine implied that this closing comment about Burlingame and the previous paragraph both belonged to the 21 February letter to Orion. But Paine’s redaction of this same passage, published in the May 1912 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine (Paine, 938), included the comment about Burlingame and the previous paragraph, but omitted any part of the 21 February letter to Orion. Likewise, when he published the letter to Orion in Mark Twain’s Letters (1917), he omitted both the Burlingame comment and the previous paragraph. It is therefore much more likely that the Burlingame comment is part of this letter to Mollie than part of the earlier letter to Orion.
MS, envelope only, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU). There is no copy-text for the letter itself, which is based on two independent transcripts:
P1 and P2 derive independently from a common source, a transcript made directly or indirectly from the now-lost letter MS, either by or for Paine (see pp. 508–9). Although the transcript may have been a copy of the complete MS, both P1 and P2 are manifestly incomplete. It is also possible that the MS itself was incomplete when Paine or his transcriber copied it, which might explain why Paine thought the letter was to Orion in St. Louis, even though the text indicates that the person being addressed was not ‘at home’ in St. Louis (see p. 199 n. 1). In both P1 and P2, the first four sentences are apparently quoted directly from Paine’s transcript, and the final sentence (199.9) is paraphrased. In P2, however, Paine inserted four lines of commentary and an extract from the previous letter to Orion (21 Feb 68) between the quotation and the paraphrase, thus apparently attributing the paraphrased sentence to the earlier letter. In P1, however, Paine clearly attributed the sentence to this letter, and he did not include it in the MTL text of 21 Feb 68 to Orionclick to open link.
L2 , 198–200; none known except P1 and P2.
The MS of the letter is not known to survive; the envelope was deposited at ViU on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.