1 January 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, postal card, in pencil, with clipping,
damage emended: Axelrod, UCCL 00849)
Howells, I would like to write a few articles for the Atlantic in the new & popular low-comedyⒶemendation vein called
boxed: scrofulous humor Ⓐemendation
if they would be acceptable.
Happy New Year’s!1explanatory note
us postal card. | write the address on this side—the message on the other W. D. Howells, Esq. 37 Concord avenue Cambridge Mass. no postmark visible
Clemens pasted in the clipping scrofulous humor which he had taken from an advertisement for Vegetine in that morning’s Hartford Courant. Vegetine was a patent medicine advertised in newspapers across the country as a “blood remedy,” claiming to cure “Scrofulous Humor . . . Cancerous Humor . . . Mercurial Diseases . . . Tumors,” and more (“The ‘Lost Art’ Recovered,” Hartford Courant, 1 Jan 1876, 2; “The Great Blood Remedy,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Dec 1875, 3). Although damage to Clemens's postcard makes the words illegible, Howells's reply confirms their presence here (CU-MARK; Howells’s letters to Clemens are included in this edition courtesy of W. W. Howells):
Jan. 4, 1876.
Yes, my dear old fellow, on Scrofulous Humor or any other comic subject, except Theology which I'm now reserving for our holy land contributor C. D. W. I would be mighty glad, as you know well enough, to have something from you every month.
—We were both—Mrs. Howells and I—getting up a bad state of feeling towards you both, because you had n't made any sign of existence for so long, when your jumping-frog came luridly hopping along, and looking as if he had just got out of a pond of H. fire. Now we are all right again, and we join in best wishes for your continued health and prosperity.— How does the novel? The more I think back over your boy-book the more I like it.— Is it true that you're going to Europe in the spring?
Yours ever,
W.D. Howells
“C. D. W.” was author Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), a hartford neighbor of the Clemenses', who was on an extended trip to Europe and the Near East that began on 8 October 1874 and ended on 1 July 1876. The trip produced seven articles for the Atlantic Monthly in 1875–76, as well as two books. Clemens himself contributed only three sketches to the Atlantic Monthly in 1876: “A Literary Nightmare,” “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” and “The Canvasser’s Tale,” in February, June, and December, respectively (SLC 1876). His “jumping-frog” was not a copy of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches (SLC 1867), as previously thought ( MTHL , 1:118 n. 3). Rather, it was one of his 1876 New Year’s cards. The card Clemens sent to the Howellses, probably on 30 or 31 December 1875, his first known communication with them since 23 November, has not been recovered (for another example of it, see the next letter). Clemens’s novel presumably was the unidentified work he had been writing in late 1875. His “boy-book” was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (SLC 1876; see 18 Jan 1876 to howells, n. 3).
MS, postal card, in pencil, with clipping, damage emended, in the collection of Todd M. Axelrod in 1983, when seen by the editors.
The Rendells, unknown date, lot 167, partial publication; The Rendells, 1979?, no. 143, lot 15, partial publication.
Offered for sale by the Rendells in the late 1970s, the MS became part of the Axelrod Collection by 1983.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.