Explanatory Notes        Apparatus Notes (Ⓐ)
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MTPDocEd
To Gertrude Kellogg
22? September 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (Paraphrase: Gertrude Kellogg to SLC, 24 September 1876,
CU-MARK, UCCL 13038)
(SUPERSEDED)

Your very kind letter came duly to hand. I thank you for it and for your thoughtfulness in speaking a good word for me to the Bureau people in Boston as I have heard you did.

I think you are right in your ideas of moderate prices, to start with, and I so stated the matter to Messrs Hathaway & Pond.1explanatory note

Textual Commentary
Provenance:

See Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.

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

Explanatory Notes
1 

This paraphrase is drawn from the following letter (CU-MARK) :

UCLC32422
48 Fourth Place. B’klyn
                                             N. Y.
Dear Mr. Clemens,

Your very kind letter came duly to hand. I thank you for it and for your thoughtfulness in speaking a good word for me to the Bureau people in Boston, as I have heard you did.

I think you are right in your ideas of moderate prices, to start with, and I so stated the matter to Messrs Hathaway & Pond. After all, I shall not leave the stage just yet for I have accepted an engagement at Booth’s Theatre beginning in December. I may fill a few reading engagements before that but I don’t think it best to carry on two branches of business at once. I am afraid one or the other would come to grief.

Thanking you most sincerely and with all good wishes,

I am Yours Truly,
Gertrude Kellogg.

Kellogg had won critical praise in 1874 as Laura Hawkins in the original New York production of Clemens’s Gilded Age play, Colonel Sellers . In December 1876 at Booth’s Theatre, in New York, she was in the company that supported Lawrence Barrett in King Lear and Richard III. In 1878 and 1879, as a reader for the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, owned since late 1875 by George H. Hathaway and James B. Pond, she gave well-received recitations from Shakespeare, Robert Browning, and others. She subsequently returned to the stage ( L6 , 355 n. 2, 541 n. 6, 650; Odell 1927–49, 10:177; “Amusements,” New York Tribune, 1–18 Dec 76, various pages; Lyceum 1878–79, 4, 35–36; “Death List of a Day,” New York Times, 21 Apr 1903, 9).