Explanatory Notes        Apparatus Notes (Ⓐ)
This text has been superseded by a newly published text
MTPDocEd
To Moncure D. Conway
27 May 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NNC, UCCL 01336)
(SUPERSEDED)
Hartford May 27.
My Dear Conway:1explanatory note

I enclose postal card received from Bliss something over a week ago. Shall call there this afternoon & see if he has shipped the pictures. I think I will also tell him to make plates of the bigger pictures, too, & then if you find you can use them, all right.

Your news sounds exceedingly good. BeⒶemendation sure & send me those propose those prospective newspaper notices of the book, so that I can slide them into print, here, from time to time.

While you’re sending me an early copy of the book, please send me two or three.

June 15 (only a very few days after this reaches you), we shall take up summer quarters at Elmira, N. Y. It is not in order that we may be under the protecting wing of a Young Men’s Christian Association, but merely that we may roost on the summit mer of the neighboring range of highlands & be safe from the heats of the season.2explanatory note Letters addressed

remainder of letter missing

Textual Commentary
Previous Publication:

MicroPUL, reel 1.

Provenance:

The Conway Papers were acquired by NNC sometime after Conway’s death in 1907.

More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.

Explanatory Notes
1 

Clemens answered the following letter from Conway (CU-MARK), which in part answered his letters of 25 Marchclick to open link, 9 Aprilclick to open link, and 16 Aprilclick to open link:

UCLC32346
2 Pembroke Gardens
                                         London May 6, ’76
My dear Clemens,

The last revise of the last proof of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, By Mark Twain’, passed out of my hands three days ago and it cannot be long before that hero walks into my study in a dress neat enough to excite the Huckleberrian disgust.

Chatto & Windus are convinced that they can make no use of the American letter-press in this country. It is true that the shape of your Sketchbook is not unknown in this country, but only in connection with ‘toybooks’ or 2d class things like Cassell’s. From my recollection of the Tom Sawyer pictures which you showed me they are much the same in size as those of your Sketchbook; and we have examined the latter very closely, and discover that there is not a single picture in it—initial or other—which we could not file down to suit our normal English shape without impairing the subject of the picture in the East i.e., least . If in the Sawyer series there be any such sketch it ought not to cost much to photograph it so that we can have it engraved &c on this side.

Let us therefore know by letter how many pictures there are, and what electroes of the same without letter press will cost. Let the letter press be dismissed from consideration altogether.

Your little preface reads excellently: it would have been impertinent for me to write any introduction or preface. I shall send you earliest copy. I am preparing some notices of the press, at whose criticisms I expect to be much surprised, and for whose authors I shall inquire diligently among my literary friends.

Wish you could have heard Professor Clifford sing ‘Punch in the presence’ at a dinner party Wednesday, (at the piano—tune composed by himself.) It was real fun.

Atlantic Monthly is reprinted here: notice good, but ‘A Bad Boy’ is not to be mentioned on the same day with Tom S.

Ever yours
M D Conway

In his final sentence, Conway alluded to the opening of Howells’s review of Tom Sawyer in the May Atlantic Monthly:

—Mr. Aldrich has studied the life of A Bad Boy as the pleasant reprobate led it in a quiet old New England town twenty-five or thirty years ago, where in spite of the natural outlawry of boyhood he was more or less part of a settled order of things, and was hemmed in, to some measure, by the traditions of an established civilization. Mr. Clemens, on the contrary, has taken the boy of the Southwest for the hero of his new book, and has presented him with a fidelity to circumstance which loses no charm by being realistic in the highest degree, and which gives incomparably the best picture of life in that region as yet known to fiction. (Howells 1876, 621; for the full review see Reviews of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer click to open link)

Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy was published in 1869 (Aldrich 1869). It probably was William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79), professor of applied mathematics at University College, London, who performed the jingle from Clemens’s “A Literary Nightmare” (SLC 1876).

2 

The Elmira Young Men’s Christian Association had recently offended Conway (see 26 Feb 76 to Conwayclick to open link, n. 5).

Emendations and Textual Notes
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