17 May 1873 • SS Batavia en route from New York, N.Y., to Liverpool, England (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00917)
Ask House to tell you about Whitelaw Reid. He is a contemptible cur, & I want nothing more to do with him. I don’t want the Tribune to have the book at all. Please tell Bliss not to send a copy there under any circumstances. If you feel at any time like explaining, you may tell Reid or any one that I desired this.2explanatory note
I shall probably write some letters for Herald & possibly for Advertiser.3explanatory note
We saw Boucicault, who, in some minor respects, is an ass. If you describe the outside of your trunk to him he can tell you what it’s got in it.
I will not consent to his having more than one-third for dramatising the book.4explanatory note
Yesterday I sued a New York fraud for $20,000 damages for violating my copyrightⒶemendation. 5explanatory note
We send love. , to
We are all well, & jolly.
Clemens compressed this letter onto the two sides of his calling card (3½ by 2⅛ inches). He began it on the back and completed it on the front, writing across the printed facsimile of his signature as well as the address (see Photographs and Manuscript Facsimilesclick to open link).
Reid had angered Clemens by refusing to allow Edward House to review The Gilded Age for the Tribune. In 1890 Clemens recalled that House read the manuscript during his visit to Hartford in late April 1873:
I did not have to do take the initiative with House; he asked for the things himself, & cheerfully waded through them, & made useful corrections & suggestions. . . . Well, he liked the Gilded Age, & tried wanted to do it a favor. He proposed to review it in the New York Tribune before some other journal should get a chance to give it a start which might not be to its advantage. But the project failed. He said Whitelaw Reid abused him & charged him with bringing a dishonorable proposal from Warner & me. That seemed strange; indeed unaccountable, for there was nothing improper about the House the proposition, & would not have been if it really had come from House & Warner & me. Eight or ten years later I made the a like proposition to Col. John Hay when he was temporarily editing the Tribune, & when I {i.e., he} accepted it he I inquired into the former case. He said that the explanation of that case was, that Reid did not like House, & would not have entertained a proposition of any kind from him. However, I had taken House’s report at its face value; & as his effort to do me a service had apparently gotten him into trouble I felt that the effort & the result placed me under a double obligation to him. I withdrew my smile from Reid, with a & did not speak to him again for twelve or thirteen years—1886; then I asked him to do a certain kindness for House, & he said he would, & kept his word. (SLC 1890, 6–9)
The exchange with Hay occurred in 1881, when William D. Howells wanted to review The Prince and the Pauper for the Tribune. Hay published Howells’s review on 25 October (Howells 1881), after requesting advice from Reid, who counseled:
As to Twain. It isn’t good journalism to let a warm personal friend & in some matters literary partner, write a critical review of him in a paper wh. has good reason to think little of his delicacy & highly of his greed. So, if you haven’t published it yet, I wld. think of this point before doing so. If you have, there’s no harm done. But, as you remember we agreed, years ago, a new book by Twain is not (as he modestly suggested) a literary event of such importance that it makes much difference whether we have our dear friend Howells write the review, or whether indeed we have any review. (Reid to Hay, 25 Sept 81, RPB-JH; see also Monteiro and Murphy, 53)
The last sentence alluded to Clemens’s letter of 20 April 1873 to Reid, which had clearly offended. In 1907, long after Clemens had quarreled with House over the dramatization of The Prince and the Pauper, Clemens expanded his account of his estrangement from Reid:
Reid and Edward H. House had a falling out. House told me his side of the matter, and at second-hand I got Reid’s side of it—which was simply that he considered House a “blatherskite,” and wouldn’t have anything to do with him. I ranged myself on House’s side, and relations between Reid and me ceased; they were not resumed for twenty-two years; and then not cordially, but merely diplomatically, so to speak. . . . In justice to Reid I confess that . . . I found out that he was right concerning Edward H. House. Reid had labeled him correctly; he was a blatherskite. (AD, 28 Aug 1907, CU-MARK)
Reid confided his own version of the matter to Kate Field, in a letter of 17 July 1873:
[George W.] Smalley and yourself both speak of Mark Twain. I hear he says that he has a quarrel with The Tribune. If so, it is simply that The Tribune declined to allow him to dictate the person who should review his forthcoming novel. His modest suggestion was that Ned House should do it, he having previously interested House in the success of the book by taking him into partnership in dramatizing it. There is a nice correspondence on a part of the subject which would make pleasant reading; and if Twain gives us trouble, I’m very much tempted to make him a more ridiculous object than he has ever made anybody else. (Whitelaw Reid Papers, DLC)
The “nice correspondence” must have included Clemens’s letter of 20 April 1873 to Reid. (For Clemens’s planned revenge on Reid, see N&J2, 355–56, 417–25; for Smalley, see 11 June 73 to Miller, n. 2click to open link.
Thompson noted in his autobiography, “Clemens, provoked about a certain New York editor and the ‘Gilded Age,’ was the more willing to write a series of letters for the ‘New York Herald’ on the visit of the Shah to England” (Thompson, 89). Clemens wrote five letters for the Herald about the state visit of Nasred-Din, the shah of Persia (SLC 1873 [MT01123], 1873 [MT01124], 1873 [MT01125], 1873 [MT01126], 1873 [MT01127]; see 17 or 18 June 73 to Young, n. 1click to open link). A New York correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, who must have interviewed Clemens shortly before the Batavia’s departure, remarked:
Who would have thought it? The extremely staid and dignified Boston Advertiser has actually engaged “Mark Twain” to contribute to its columns; and he will soon begin to be funny at so much per 1,000 words. I did not think this of the Advertiser; but then the world moves, and even the Advertiser must move with it. (Colstoun 1873)
No 1873 travel letters from Clemens to the Advertiser have been found.
On 19 May Clemens and Warner registered a copyright for a “Dramatic Composition” entitled The Gilded Age: A Drama (Copyright Office Receipt No. 5604D, CtHT-W). Dramatist Dion Boucicault was the well-known Irish-born author of Arrah-na-Pogue and other immensely popular plays. He did not collaborate on a stage version of The Gilded Age. In April 1874 an unauthorized dramatization of the book was performed in San Francisco. Clemens protested, purchased the script from its author, Gilbert S. Densmore, thoroughly revised it, and then first had it produced for the 1874–75 season, with John T. Raymond as Colonel Sellers, and Gertrude Kellogg (or, in several performances, Kate Field) as Laura Hawkins. It earned Clemens very substantial royalties for a few years ( L4 , 149 n. 3; MTB , 1:517–18; 5 May 74 to Charles Dudley Warner, CU-MARK; 3 Nov 74 to the Hartford Evening Post, CU-MARK; Kiralis; see French, 242–55, and Schirer, 41–48).
In a sworn affidavit written in his own hand and dated 16 May, Clemens claimed that a “month or so ago” he had been visited by Benjamin J. Such, who asked him to “write a sketch for an advertising pamphlet which he was about to publish.” Clemens declined that request, but granted Such permission to reprint one sketch, free of charge, from “a London edition of certain sketches of mine”:
I made a mark in the index opposite to each of the ones I liked; gave him the book & told him I would prefer that he should use one of the sketches thus marked.
Traveling on the Erie road yesterday (May 15) I found the newsman Blauvelt selling this pamphlet with this extraordinary feature in the title page: “Revised & selected for this work, by Mark Twain!” I never rev And furthermore, the pamphlet contained five of my sketches instead of one. And furthermore still, it contained (with my name attached) a bit of execrable rubbish entitled “A Self-Made Man,” which I never wrote!—could not write, indeed, unless freighted with more
My sketches are copyrighted in my own name.
I consider a volume of them worth (to me) not less than $25,000, & certainly would not publish a volume of them unless I felt sure of getting that much for it—one of my reasons being that I consider that an author cannot bunch a mass of disconnected humorous sketches together & publish the same without sickening the public stomach & damaging his own reputation. (SLC 1873 [MT01119], 2–4)
The Such pamphlet had reprinted five sketches from A Curious Dream; and Other Sketches (SLC 1872): “A Curious Dream,” “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship,” “The New Crime,” “Back from ‘Yurrup,’” and “More Distinction.” It also included “A Self-Made Man” and several other sketches by unidentified authors. The sixty-three-page pamphlet bore the title Fun, Fact & Fancy: A Collection of Original Comic Sketches and Choice Selections of Wit and Humor on its paper cover. The title page read A Book for an Hour, Containing Choice Reading and Character Sketches. A Curious Dream, and Other Sketches, Revised and Selected for This Work by the Author Mark Twain ( BAL 3352). In a bill of complaint prepared on 16 May by attorney Simon Sterne (to whom Clemens had been introduced by Edward House {House to Sterne, 16 May 73, CtHMTH}), Clemens sought an injunction to prevent any further sales of the pamphlet, payment to him of all profits realized, payment of $25,000 damages (not $20,000, as he told Warner), and reimbursement for “the costs and disbursements of this action” (Sterne, 4; Feinstein, 15–22). On 19 May a New York Supreme Court justice granted a temporary injunction, which was made permanent on 12 June. The case was resolved on 11 July, when the original injunction was modified to allow Such to publish one of the sketches that Clemens had originally selected. Clemens was awarded ten dollars in costs, but no profits or damages. Such was not allowed to use the nom de plume “Mark Twain” on the pamphlet’s title page, and could merely state on its cover that it contained “amongst other things a Sketch by ‘Mark Twain.’” Such understandably did not reissue his pamphlet under these new conditions (documents relating to Clemens v. Such, CtHMTH; Feinstein, 38–44).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L5 , 367–370; MTLP , 76–77.
donated to CU-MARK in January 1950 by Mary Barton of Hartford, a close friend of the Warners’, who had owned it since at least 1938.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.