21 June 1872 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: ViU, UCCL 00758)
We are very much obliged for the books,2explanatory note & shall take pleasure in reading them to the youngster.
I have just finished revising the Innocents & shall forward it to you Monday.3explanatory note
I expect to be in N. Y. next Wednesday, at the house of my friend Slote, of 121 William street,4explanatory note & will try hard to look in on you.
I will write the prefaces as you suggest & forward them to you.5explanatory note
Blamire was the New York agent for Clemens’s London publishers, George Routledge and Sons; his office was at 416 Broome Street. The firm had maintained a New York City office since 1854 (Welland, 15).
Unidentified.
Clemens, writing on Friday, had marked a copy of the first American edition of The Innocents Abroad to serve as printer’s copy for the Routledges’ authorized edition. Collation reveals that he made over four hundred revisions—removing slang, toning down the humor, and making his narrator less ignorant and bumptious. These changes were in part a response to English reviews of the book—in particular, one in the London Saturday Review, which (for example) declared, “Mr. Mark Twain here verges on buffoonery” (30 {8 Oct 70}: 467–68; see also the London Athenaeum, 24 Sept 70, 395–96; both reviews are reprinted in Anderson and Sanderson, 36–43; see Hirst, 365–77; L4 , 267, 268 n. 4, 283; Arthur L. Scott). The Routledges, who had made quick work of the two sketchbooks in the spring, were able by 24 August to announce their “Author’s English Edition” of Innocents ( ET&S1 , 591; 31 Mar 72 to Osgood, n. 4click to open link; SLC 1869, 1872 [MT01068], 1872 [MT01061]).
Daniel Slote’s blank-book and stationery manufacturing firm—Slote, Woodman and Company—was located at 119 and 121 William Street; his home address was 28 West Forty-ninth Street (H. Wilson 1872, 1122).
Blamire’s prompting letter is not known to survive. For Clemens’s prefaces to the English edition of The Innocents Abroad, see the next letter, and 16 or 17 July 72click to open link, and 21 July 72, all to Blamireclick to open link.
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L5 , 109–110.
The MS was almost certainly one of four letters from Clemens to Blamire, the property of Frances H. S. Stallybrass, offered for sale in 1950 by Sotheby’s in London (Sotheby 1950, lot 186). Stallybrass was the daughter of William Swan Sonnenschein, a director of Routledge and Sons after the company’s reorganization in 1902 (Mumby, 148–49; Mumby and Stallybrass, 5, 20). Clifton Waller Barrett deposited the MS at ViU on 16 April 1960.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.