3 December 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: WU, UCCL 00549)
Joe Larned, (my partner & chief editor) has written an article on “Heat,” in our & today he will send you a dozen copies of our paper containing it. I told him I would ask you to talk take Ⓐemendationpains, from time to time, ap as Ⓐemendationopportunity offered, to talk a few minutes with a scientific man, till his curiosity was excited & then make him read the article & see what whether he his Ⓐemendationverdict favored its being a fallacy or whether it made it something better. Joe thinks it is either good & sound & trut trueⒶemendation, or else the wildest & unworthiest lunacy, one or the other. When I tell you that he has devoted the off-hours of a laborious editorship of a morning paper to the to faithful work on this thing for thee three Ⓐemendation years, you will feel as I do, viz., that if you & I can do such a man a kindness, we will cheerfully do it.1explanatory note
P. S. Considering the strain I took (for a lazy man, & for pure love of shoving a genius into the light of the national sun who wh Ⓐemendationhad been wasting Ⓐemendationitself in the obscurity of Nevada sagebrush) to make Tom Fitch acquainted with you & get you to confer on him fame & fortune, I think he might drop me a line to tell me how he came out th Ⓐemendationon the 29th. I have seen no Boston papers.2explanatory note
But whether he succeeded or not my anxiety is not moved or str stirredⒶemendation—because I know he can succeed, & superbly, too. It is in him. If he has not made a hit this time, let work him up & sail him in again & he will make one. Then put him in Pugh’s course,3explanatory note & in the big courses of all the big cities for nothing, this winter, without fooling around with 20 & 50- Ⓐemendation 30-dollar engagements as I before proposed, & he can wall walk Ⓐemendationover the course next year.
Mark.
P. S. My s Saturday Review fraud fooled some of the boys, anyway.4explanatory note
letter docketed: boston lyceum bureau. redpath & fall. dec 10 1870 and Mark Twain | Buffalo N.Y. | Dec. 3 ’70
Larned filled more than three columns in the Buffalo Express of 3 December with his challenge to “the received hypothesis” that “Heat is some mysterious state of invisible motion imparted to the ultimate atoms of matter.” He suggested instead that it was “the variable degree of density or tension in which the so-called ‘œther’ that occupies all inter-molecular as well as all inter-planetary spaces is existing in the matter!” (Larned 1870).
See 10? July 70 to Redpathclick to open link and 10? July 70 to Fitchclick to open link. Fitch’s 29 November lecture on “The Coming Empire”—to a full house at Tremont Temple, in the Boston Lyceum Bureau course—was chiefly a paean to California and Nevada. The Boston Morning Journal observed that “Bostonians fully coincided in the opinion expressed by the author of ‘The Innocents Abroad’” that “‘they never listened to anything so delightful before’” (“‘The Coming Empire,’” 30 Nov 70, 2). The Boston Advertiser remarked: “Mr. Fitch’s eloquence, though rather florid, is impressive, and he has a keen sense of humor with a happy knack of expressing it. Indeed, it is easy to see why Mark Twain likes him” (“‘The Coming Empire,’” 30 Nov 70, 2). Redpath’s promotional magazine for the 1871–72 season reported that during Fitch’s two-week 1870 tour he also spoke “at Attleboro’, Westboro’, Middleboro’, West Medway, Newtonville (Mass.), Biddeford (Maine), and Manchester (N.H.); from all of which places, the Bureau received eulogistic accounts of his success” (Lyceum 1871, 27).
After learning from the Boston Advertiser (“Perhaps the most successful flights . . .,” 22 Oct 70, 2) that The Innocents Abroad had been reviewed by a literal-minded critic in the London Saturday Review of 8 October 1870 (“The Innocents Abroad,” 30:467–68; reprinted in Anderson and Sanderson, 39–43), Clemens wrote “An Entertaining Article,” for his December 1870 Galaxy “Memoranda.” It included a long burlesque review calling Innocents a work of “imposing insanity” and “a deliberate and wicked creation of a diseased mind,” which Clemens passed off as the Saturday Review notice. In “A Sad, Sad Business,” part of his January 1871 “Memoranda,” he confessed to the hoax and printed specimen commentaries from newspapers taken in by it (SLC: 1870, 876–78; 1871, 158–59).
MS, Norman D. Bassett Collection, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).
L4 , 266–268; Merwin-Clayton 1905, lot 108, excerpt.
The Bassett Collection was donated to WU on 9 July 1955.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.