26 April 1873 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00909)
Livy darling, I have finished trimming & revamping all my MS, & to-day we began the work of critically reading the book, line by line & numbering the chapters & working them in together in their appropriate places. It is perfectly fascinating work. All of the first eleven chapters are mine, & when I came to read them right straight along without breaking, I got really interested; & when I got to Sellers’s eye-water & his clock & his fireless stove & his turnip dinner, I could hardly read for Lau laughing. The turnip dinner is powerful good—& is satisfactory now.1explanatory note
Warner failed on his description of Laura as a school-girl—as a picture of her, I mean. He had simply copied Miss Woolson’s pretty description almost word for word—the plagiarism would have been detected in a moment. I told him so—he saw it & yet I’m hanged if he didn’t hate to lose it because there was a “nip” & a pungency about that woman’s phrases that he hated to lose—& so did I, only they weren’t ours & we couldn’t take them.2explanatory note So I set him to create a picture & he went at it. I finally took a paper & pencil, had a thought, (as to phraseology) & scratched it down. I had already told him what the details of the picture should be, & so only choice language was needed to dress them in. My pi Then we read our two efforts, & mine being rather the best, we used it.3explanatory note And so it ought to have been the best. If I had been trying to describe a picture that was in his mind, I would have botched it.
We both think this is going to be no slouch of a novel, as Solomon said to the Hebrew Children.
Dined with Warner yesterday—at home today—lunch with Twichell noon tomorrow. The kitties are very frisky, now. They & the old cat sleep with me, nights, & have the run of the house. I wouldn’t take thousands of dollars for them. Next to a wife whom I idolise, give me cat—& an old cat, with kittens. How is the muggins, now, by the way. It is very melancholy here, but I don’t notice it. I’m pretty sad, but I’m used to it—it can’t phaze Ⓐemendation me. I’m an old hand at grief. Grief makes me hump myself when I’m alone, but that is taking advantages. When my family is around I am superior to it.
But I am not grieving tonight, honey. I’ve pegged away all day till this hour & done a big day’s work, & I feel as gay as a hymn. It is bed time,
Got a French version of the Jumping Frog—fun is no name for it.4explanatory note I am going to translate it literaryally Ⓐemendation, French construction & all, (apologising in parenthesis where a word is too many for me) & publish it in the Atlantic as the grave effort of a man who does not know w Ⓐemendationbut what he is as good a French scholar as there is—& sign my name to it, without another word. It will be toothsome reading.5explanatory note
Good bye my darling, I love you & I love the muggins. It Ⓐemendationis bed time, now—I got to go down & roust out the cats.
Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Elmira | N. Y. return address: if not delivered within 10 days, to be returned to postmarked: hartford ct. apr ◇◇ Ⓐemendation 11 am
See chapters 7, 8, and 11 of The Gilded Age.
The “pretty description” by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–94) has not been identified (but see French, 295 n. 13). Woolson, James Fenimore Cooper’s grandniece, was born in New Hampshire but spent her early years in Ohio. In the 1860s and early 1870s she published poems, stories with regional settings, and travel sketches in Harper’s Monthly, the Galaxy, and the Atlantic Monthly, among other journals.
The Gilded Age, chapter 6.
Thérèse Bentzon (Marie-Thérèse Blanc), in the first of two articles about American humorists, introduced Mark Twain to French readers in the 15 July 1872 issue of Revue des deux mondes (Blanc). She included her own translation of the “Jumping Frog” tale, which (according to a critic in 1910) was “remarkably accurate” but lacked the spirit of the original—hardly surprising, given her evident failure to fully appreciate the subtleties of Mark Twain’s humor. In her opinion, the tale was
one of his most popular little stories—almost a type of the rest. It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to understand, while reading the story, the “roars of laughter” that it excited in Australia and in India, in New York and in London; the numerous editions of it which appeared; the epithet of “inimitable” that the critics of the English press have unanimously awarded to it. (Henderson, 303, 304, 308)
She concluded, “Soon we will be accustomed to an American language whose delectable freedom is not to be disdained, anticipating the more delicate and more refined qualities which time will no doubt bring to it” (Tenney, 4; Blanc, 335; see also Wilson).
Clemens soon wrote this sketch, but he did not publish it in the Atlantic Monthly (7 July 73 to Bliss, n. 1click to open link).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L5 , 357–359; Wecter, 86–87; LLMT , 182–83; Davis 1977, 4, excerpt.
see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.