28 February 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CtY-BR, UCCL 01056)
My dear Friend—we are all delighted with your commendations of the Gilded Age1explanatory note—& the more so because some of our newspapers have set forth the opinion that Warner really wrote the book & I only added my name to the title-page in order to give it a large sale. It is a shameful charge to make. I wrote the first eleven chapters—every word & every line—Warner never retouched a sentence in them, I believe. I also wrote chapters 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 43, 45, 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, & portions of 35, 49, & 56. So I wrote 32 of the 63 chapters entirely, & part of 3 others beside.2explanatory note
The fearful financial panic hit the book heavily, for we published in the midst of it. But nevertheless in the 8 weeks that have now elapsed since the day we published, we have sold 40,000 copies—which gives ◇ £2,400 £3,000 Ⓐemendation royalty to be divided between the authors. This is really the largest two-months’ sale which any American book has ever achieved (unless one excepts the cheap edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin). The average price of our book is 16 shillings a copy—Uncle Tom was 2 shillings a copy. But for the panice our sale would have been doubled, I verily believe. I do not believe the sale will ultimately go over 100,000 copies. 3explanatory note
I shipped to you, from Liverpool, Darley’s Illustrations of Judd’s “Margaret,” which (the waiter at the Aldelphi Hotel agreeing to ship it securely per parcel delivery,) & I do hope it did not miscarry, for we in America think a deal of Darley’s work. I shipped the novel (“Margaret”) to you from here a week ago.4explanatory note
Indeed I am thankful for the wifies & the child—& if there is one individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly & uniformly & unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce him & prove him. In my opinion, he don’t exist. I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me 4 years ago, & I may still be, to the rest of the world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me.
Success to the Mark Twain Club!—& the novel shibbolleth of the whistle. Of course any member, rising to speak, would be required to preface his remarks with a keen respectful whistle at the chair—the chair recognizing the speaker with an answering shriek—& then as the speech proceeded, its gravity & force would be emphasized & its impressiveness augmented by the continual interjection of whistles in place in of punctuation-pauses; & the applause of the audience would be manifested in the same way. Suppose you just gather the Judge, & your brother & your Jock & Mr. Barcalay, & an utter stranger or two about your fireside Ⓐemendation & give the thing an experimental trial to see how it will work. I would like to see it tried in Parliament, too, just for the sake of the sparkle & variety it would impart to the proceedings.5explanatory note
I’ve been trying to sing the Judge’s delicious Mic-Mac-Methuselah-Mc Per Fairshon song, but I can’t exactly get the right swing to it.6explanatory note
They’ve gone to luncheon, & I must follow. With strong love from us both,7explanatory note
Brown, the Scottish physician and author whom the Clemens family befriended in Edinburgh in 1873, had written to acknowledge the gift copies of The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and The Gilded Age that Clemens had arranged to have sent the previous November (see L5 , 428–29 n. 2, 462; CU-MARK):
Brown was more candid about his opinion of The Gilded Age in a letter of 18 January to the Reverend John Forsyth, a chaplain and professor at West Point: “It is powerful but unequal—& lacks the true storytelling knack” (PHi; L5 , 441 n. 4). “Megalopis” was Brown’s nickname for Susy. Henry P. Stearns was a physician and the superintendent at the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane in Hartford. Alexander Russel, the editor of the Edinburgh Scotsman, and his wife entertained the Clemenses at their country home in August 1873. Clemens’s “dear boy” was his son, Langdon, who died on 2 June 1872. The source of the remark by John Bright, an English statesman, has not been found ( L5 , 97–101, 396, 427–30; Geer: 1873, 128; 1874, 134, 293).
Reviews of The Gilded Age were decidedly mixed, with the unfavorable prevailing over the favorable in vehemence if not in number. Clemens probably had in mind a review in the Chicago Tribune, although he did not characterize it accurately: the critic found the work of both authors “too inferior for recognition,” and called the book “a fraud to the reading public” (“The Twain-Warner Novel,” 1 Feb 74, 9). For Clemens’s 1906 account of this “shameful charge,” and for representative reviews, see L5 , 464–69, and 25 Feb 74 to Fairbanks, n. 7.click to open link
An American Publishing Company statement of 12 March 1874 indicates that between 11 December 1873, when the first copies of the American edition of The Gilded Age (officially published on 23 December) arrived from the bindery, and 28 February 1874, 35,181 copies were sold, at an average cover price of $3.68. The total 10 percent royalty due to the authors was $12,833.95. Clemens’s one-half share, paid on 14 March, was $6,337.82 (after a deduction of about $80 for gift copies), less than the $7,500 (£1,500) he expected. Nevertheless, his estimate reflected the total that the firm began to advertise on 2 March: 40,000 copies sold “in 60 days” (“Mark Twain and Warner’s Book,” Hartford Courant, 2 Mar 74, 3). It is possible that this figure represented the number of orders received, some of which had not yet been filled. Certainly the financial panic that began on 18 September 1873—for a time shutting down the stock market and paralyzing the banking and monetary systems of the United States—and continued for several years helped depress sales of The Gilded Age as well as other subscription books. On 12 January 1874, the New York Herald reported: “The Hartford Subscription Book business is on the decline. Out of 12,000 agents who were selling new books the majority are out of employment, and instead of the expected sale of 250,000 copies this season the total sales have only reached about 60,000” (“Literary Chit-Chat,” 3). Put in that context, early sales of The Gilded Age seem more than respectable. Nevertheless, especially given the negative reviews, the record of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)—100,000 sold in the first five months and more than 300,000 sold in the first year—would have been out of reach even in good times. (Clemens had previously used Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel as a benchmark in reporting sales of The Innocents Abroad: see L3 , 440, and L4 , 58.) By the end of 1874, after a year in print, 50,385 copies of The Gilded Age had been received from the bindery. By the end of 1879, when American Publishing Company records break off, the six-year total was only 56,521 ( L5 , 440–41 n. 2, 461–62, 636; check dated 14 Mar 74, signed by Elisha Bliss, CtHMTH; “Statement of Sales of Gilded Age,” in Bliss to Warner, 12 Mar 74, CtHT-W; APC 1866—79, 97, 100, 211; Hart: 1950, 111; 1983, 780–81).
Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, by Sylvester Judd (1813–53), was originally published in 1845 and first issued in a revised form in 1851. Clemens owned an 1871 edition (Boston: Roberts Brothers). The book he had sent from Liverpool was Compositions in Outline, by Felix O. C. Darley, from fudd’s Margaret, published in New York in 1856 with two imprints, J. S. Redfield and W. J. Middleton, but evidently not published in England. Clemens owned a copy with the Middleton imprint. Darley (1822–88) was a prolific illustrator of humor, fiction, poetry, and popular history (Gribben, 1:174, 361; Hamilton 1958, 101–16).
Clemens’s Autobiographical Dictation of 5 February 1906 explains his and Brown’s allusions to whistling:
It seems incredible that Dr. John should ever have wanted to tell a grotesque and rollicking anecdote. Such a thing seems so out of character with that gentle and tranquil nature that——but no matter. I tried to teach him the anecdote, and he tried his best for two or three days to perfect himself in it—and he never succeeded. It was the most impressive exhibition that ever was. There was no human being, nor dog, of his acquaintance in all Edinburgh that would not have been paralyzed with astonishment to step in there and see Dr. John trying to do that anecdote. It was one which I have told some hundreds of times on the platform, and which I was always very fond of, because it worked the audience so hard. It was a stammering man’s account of how he got cured of his infirmity—which was accomplished by introducing a whistle into the midst of every word which he found himself unable to finish on account of the obstruction of the stammering. And so his whole account was an absurd mixture of stammering and whistling—which was irresistible to an audience properly keyed up for laughter. Dr. John learned to do the mechanical details of the anecdote, but he was never able to inform these details with expression. He was preternaturally grave and earnest all through, and so when he fetched up with the climaxing triumphant sentence at the end—but I must quote that sentence, or the reader will not understand. It was this:
“The doctor told me that whenever I wanted to sta- (whistle) sta- (whistle) sta- (whistle) ammer, I must whistle; and I did, and it k- (whistle) k- (whistle) k- (whistle) k—ured me entirely!”
The Doctor could not master that triumphant note. He always gravely stammered and whistled and whistled and stammered it through, and it came out at the end with the solemnity and the gravity of the Judge delivering sentence to a man with the black cap on. (CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:46–47)
The “Judge” was Brown’s friend Alexander Nicolson (1827–93), a sheriff substitute (an undersheriff who hears cases) and also a lawyer, writer, and scholar of Gaelic and Greek. Clemens met him and the others mentioned here—George Barclay, Brown’s son, John (Jock), and Brown’s younger brother, William—in Scotland in 1873 (Brown to SLC, several letters in 1873–74, 8 June 76, CU-MARK; Barclay to SLC, 28 Feb 76, 5 May 76, CU-MARK; L5 , 427, 429 n. 5, 441 n. 4).
Nicolson “was popular in society, and his stories and songs, such as ‘the British Ass’ and ‘Highland Regiments’ ditty, live in the memory of those who heard them delivered by their author” (Stronach, 14:499).
Brown replied (CU-MARK):
Brown’s wife, Catherine, died in 1864. Clemens met John Lothrop Motley, a historian and diplomat, in London in 1873. The “poor accounts of Motley” were no doubt about his health: since July 1873 he had been suffering from the affliction that would claim his life in 1877. Senator Charles Sumner was a bitter political enemy of President Grant’s. His recent death, on 11 March, no doubt occasioned Brown’s remarks, but no personal connection has been discovered. The close friendship between Sumner and Motley was believed to be the principal reason that Grant dismissed Motley in 1870 from his post as minister to Great Britain. Blair Atholl was some sixty miles north of Edinburgh ( L5 , 392 n. 1, 429 n. 3; Motley to Oliver Wendell Holmes, 17 Apr 74, in Motley, 2:376–77)
MS, Willard S. Morse Collection, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (CtY-BR).
L6 . 53–57; MTB , 1:505, excerpt; Paine 1917, 782–83, and MTL , 1:214–16, with omission.
The Morse Collection was donated in 1942 by Walter F. Frear. At that time the MS was laid in a copy of The Gilded Age (American Publishing Company, 1873).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.