29 October 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: Rosenberg, UCCL 01141)
All right—I’ll presently sail in—but you must be sure to mention me in the advertisements or I shall be as uppish & airish as any third-rate actor whose name is not made loud enough in the bills.1explanatory note
I think likely I will write the first No. tomorrow.2explanatory note
Y I wish Pope would stay north, where the material for success is in its strength: i.e. population & cash.3explanatory note
The letter Clemens answered—Howells’s reply to his two letters of 24 October—is not known to survive. Howells’s boyhood experiences on the Ohio River steamboats piloted by his uncles doubtless had primed him to accept Clemens’s proposed piloting articles (20 Feb 75 to Howells, n. 1click to open link). In a letter of 7 November 1874 to Melancthon M. Hurd, one of the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, Howells explained the acceptance in practical terms:
Our Bret Harte negotiation did fall through, but I’ve more than made good the loss by securing Mark Twain for a series of sketches next year. I’m glad you liked his little story, for I thought it wonderfully good—one of the most artistic things in its way that I’d ever seen. (Howells 1928, 1:194)
The failed negotiation with Harte evidently was to extend the 1871–72 contract by which he received $10,000 to write a dozen stories for journals then published by James R. Osgood, among them the Atlantic Monthly (see L5 , 9 n. 3). Clemens’s “wonderfully good” piece was “A True Story” (SLC 1874). Howells’s hope that the piloting series would increase circulation was not realized: see 6 Jan 75 to Houghton and Company, n. 1click to open link.
If Clemens began work on “Old Times on the Mississippi” on 30 October, he soon interrupted himself. On 1 November, the New York Herald, a morning newspaper, reported, “Mr. Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), of Hartford, is residing at the New York Hotel” (“Personal Intelligence,” 10). Clemens presumably had arrived the preceding day. His business in New York has not been determined, but was brief: he was back in Hartford by 3 November. He did not submit the first installment of “Old Times” until the third week of the month (see 20 Nov 74 to Howellsclick to open link [2nd]).
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned in 1943 by Joseph Rosenberg, who provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers.
L6 , 266; MTHL , 1:35, with omission.