29 November 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: ViU, UCCL 01157)
Can’t lecture this winter; but I have a notion of going west about May 1, to make a lagging journey down the Mississippi, dining pilots & pumping stuff out of them for a book—& paying & making expenses & making money by talking “Roughing It” thrice in New York, once in Cleveland, twice in Chicago, once Ⓐemendationin Louisville, twice in St Louis, once in Memphis, & twice in N. Orleans. This is my idea, provided I can finish my present book by May 1—& no doubt I can.1explanatory note Would like you to do the th Ⓐemendationtrip both for me & with me—but should want you to have a sort of leatherhead Ⓐemendationto go before us all the time, & attend to minor arrangements & details, because I should want you yourself to stay right with me from the first day to the last, & talk, & lie, & have a good time Ⓐemendation. Think this over & see what notion you arrive at about it.2explanatory note
Clemens did not finish drafting this book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, until July 1875.
Redpath’s response has not been found. Clemens’s work on what became “Old Times on the Mississippi” in the Atlantic revived the idea of a book about the river, which in 1871 he had claimed would become a “standard work” ( L4 , 499). The notion of a river trip as the necessary basis for such a book dated from at least March 1866. Clemens continued for many months to plan a trip like the one he outlined here. In December 1874 Howells proposed a New Orleans trip to him (see 12 Jan 75 to Howells, n. 1click to open link); in January and February 1875 he unsuccessfully urged Howells, Osgood, and Hay to accompany him there and down the Mississippi that spring; and in the early spring he spoke of going in May or June. He finally made such a trip, but without lecturing, in the spring of 1882. His companions then were Osgood, who published Life on the Mississippi the following year, and Roswell H. Phelps, a Hartford stenographer, who filled a notebook with Clemens’s dictated observations ( N&J2 , 431–74).
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L6 , 298–299.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.