20 April 1873 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00903)
Private & conf.
My Dear Reid, you have manifestly tried to do us a good turn on the novel, but in speaking facetiously instead of seriously, I am afraid you have hurt us. I Ⓐemendation wanted you to do us a genuine good turn & give us a fair & g square good send-off. I have not allowed my publisher to know the book was a novel; Warner has foreborne to mention it in his paper; I have kept my brother quiet (he is an editor,)—& all because we wanted the first mention to come from the Tribune, so that it might start from the most influential source in the land & start right.
And now you give us a notice which the carries the impression to the minds of other editors that we are people of small consequence in the literary world, & indeed only triflers; that a novel by us is in no sense a literary event. Half the papers in America will not see that you were meaning to say a pleasant word for us & simply chose an unfortunate way of doing it: they will merely see that you give us a stickful of pleasantry down in a corner—& every man of in them will take his cue from you, (as they all do) & will act accordingly.1explanatory note You paid my life-raft article a grave, dignified compliment, full of Tribune character, & straightway all the papers see that my suggestion was sensible—& you know they never would have so regarded it if you had kept silence or had chaffed the article.2explanatory note
Now I hold that a◇ novel from us is a literary event, (though it may sound pretty egotistical) & it deserved from you two stickfuls of brevier, gravely worded, & an honorable place in your chief editorial columns. I am not a man of trifling literary consequence. The voluntary & unsought subscriptions to my next book already run up into thousands—though no man knows what the book is to be, or what subject it will treat of. These people simply say, “I don’t care—put my name down.” Now you know that that is unusual. “Roughing It” had 43,000 subscribers already booked, the day it issued from the press. The “Innocents Abroad” (now 3½ years old) sold 12,000 copies this last year—sells 2 2,000 1000 Ⓐemendationa month right along—which looks as if it had entered permanently into the let literature Ⓐemendationof the country.3explanatory note These things all mean this: that I have a good reliable audience in this country—& it is the biggest one in America, too, if I do say it myself. So a novel from me alone would be a literary event, & be a good deal in the nature of a literary event, & the Tribune, to be just, should have made it so I appear, I think.
In confidence I wish to say that young Bennett has been trying for several months to get me to write for the Herald, & some time ago sent a man up here to argue the case with me. Sent a telegram from Europe the other day asking when he will see me there. The day after Ⓐemendation I told his man messenger no, & said I was writing a book & couldn’t break into it with newspaper work, you dropped a line asking for Sandwich Island letters & I put down this novel in the midst of a chapter & put in two whole days in on the S. I. letters. The spirit of the novel got into them & they had a good public reception.4explanatory note Now confound you when I want you to do something for me, you shove my novel at the world as if neither it nor its father amounted to much! This isn’t fair—I swear it is not fair.
Now this Christian Union notice5explanatory note of an absolutely worthless book, will make many & many a newspaper man say l Laudatory things of the bantling. Such a notice from you of our novel would have been truthful & would have launched us into absolutely certain success. If our novel isn’t worth ten such messes of ill-digested stuff as this Metropolisville Ⓐemendation thing, I will agree to eat it, without condiments. Our novel will have some point to it & will mean something, & I think it will not be snubbed & thrown aside, but will make some men talk, & may even make some people think. But of course my saying so does not make it so. All I claim is that it is the literary event of the season—& that I stick to. Your notice of it is not ten hours old, in Hartford, & yet it is talked of here more now than an other another Ⓐemendationman’s book would be in a week—& not because I live here for I an am Ⓐemendationnot known here.
I think you fellows meant well by us—indeed you could have no reason to mean otherwise—but you could have given us a splendid send-off & not stepped outside the proprieties of the occasion in any way. I am sorry to make you read so long a letter, but Lord knows that what your paper says about a book of mine is a serious thing to me. I fancy that what able people sa Ⓐemendation might say about your Essay upon journalism was a matter of solicitude with you.6explanatory note So, under the circumstances you must overlook the length of this screed.
SLC circled the three-line insertion below
Title,
“The Gilded
Age.”
7explanatory note
Now just see if you can’t do us a real outspoken good turn that will leave a strong wholesome impression on the public mind—& then command our services, if they can be of use to you. Title of novel is, “The Gilded Age.”
enclosure: 8explanatory note
Clemens was alarmed by the New York Tribune notice of 19 April (see the previous letter, n. 1). It appeared in the bottom right corner of the editorial page (6), set in minion, rather than in the slightly larger brevier (equivalent to eight-point type), which was “generally used for editorial matter” (Pasko, 70). The principal Tribune editorials were set in brevier, with minion used for briefer notes on the same page covering topics of less importance. Clemens’s alarm was prompted by the facetious tone of the notice, not merely its minion ranking, and is largely explained by his sensitivity to the slightest hint that he was not to be taken seriously. Significantly, he thought the notice implied that he and Warner were only “triflers,” the same word that stung when Josiah G. Holland used it to belittle him as a lecturer (see 18 July 72 to Redpathclick to open link). Warner was coeditor of the Hartford Courant. Orion Clemens had been on the editorial staff of the Hartford Evening Post since around mid-September 1872, a position he was about to leave (25 Sept 72 to OLC, n. 11click to open link; 5 May 73 to OC and MEC, n. 1click to open link).
See 9 Apr 73 to Reid, n. 3click to open link, and the enclosure with the letter.
Clemens’s claim about the early sales of Roughing It is inaccurate: orders for “43,000 subscribers” were not on hand until over two and a half months after the first books came from the bindery (18 Mar 72 to Howells, n. 2click to open link; 20 Apr 72 to Redpath, n. 4click to open link). Clemens also exaggerated the sales of The Innocents Abroad: only 8,409 copies were bound in 1872, and 2,731 in January–April 1873, for an average of fewer than 700 per month ( RI 1993 , 890; APC, 106–7).
James Gordon Bennett, Jr., became managing editor of the New York Herald in 1866 and succeeded his father as editor in chief in June 1872. In 1867 the younger Bennett secured four unsigned letters from Clemens on the Quaker City voyage (only one of them identified as his), and enlisted his services the following winter as an anonymous correspondent from Washington ( L2 , 55 n. 3, 106–7 n. 2, 115–16, 160). Clemens may have dismissed Bennett’s messenger the day before he received Reid’s letter of 28 December 1872 asking for an article “on any topic” (see p. 263), or on 4–5 January, before he received Reid’s telegram (now lost) requesting a second article on the Sandwich Islands (3 Jan 73 to Reid [2nd] click to open link; 6 Jan 73 to Reidclick to open link). By late December he had evidently begun to write The Gilded Age.
See the enclosure and note 8.
Reid had delivered a lecture at the University of the City of New York on 4 April 1872, addressing a proposal to create a school of journalism. His speech was reported at length in the Tribune and published from his manuscript in Scribner’s Monthly for June (“Schools of Journalism,” New York Tribune, 5 Apr 72, 1–2; Whitelaw Reid; Cortissoz, 1:236–37). Reid was publicly and privately committed to raising the professional level of journalism in the United States.
Clemens squeezed in and circled the title here because his first mention, on the bottom of his final page, was cramped for lack of space and difficult to read.
Clemens cut this clipping from the Christian Union of 16 April 1873 (7:301). This weekly (begun in 1867 as the Church Union) had been edited since 1870 by Henry Ward Beecher, and during his tenure evolved from a religious journal into a “general family periodical” (Mott 1957, 422–24). One of the current members of its editorial staff was Edward Eggleston (1837–1902), a former lay preacher in the Methodist church who had become a popular success as an author and editor, publishing The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 and The End of the World in 1872. His Mystery of Metropolisville, a melodramatic novel about a real-estate boom in Minnesota, was serialized in Hearth and Home beginning in 1872. Orange Judd and Company issued it as a book in early April 1873 (Hart, 224; “Alphabetical List of Books Just Published,” Publishers’ Weekly 3 [12 Apr 73]: 378). James Russell Lowell (1819–91), the author of two collections of Biglow Papers (1848 and 1867), was the dean of American dialect versifiers, as Clemens explicitly acknowledged in his scornful remark on the clipping itself: “Lowell & Eggleston on the same level!” Clemens was not alone in deprecating Eggleston’s latest book. William Dean Howells had reviewed his first two books with some enthusiasm in the Atlantic, but did not review Mystery of Metropolisville, later calling it “disappointing . . . for though it showed a good sense of character and the story was interesting, it was not so fresh as The Hoosier Schoolmaster, and it had not such poetic elements as The End of the World. It was not an advance; it was something of a retrogression” (Howells 1874, 745–46). Clemens himself referred to the book somewhat less scornfully in March 1879 (N&J2, 303).
MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC), is copy-text for the letter. Clemens cut the enclosed clipping from the New York Christian Union for 16 Apr 73 (7:301); it survives with the letter, glued to the top of the first page—probably not by Clemens—and is photographically reproduced.
L5 , 346–350.
The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.