14 August 1876 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS facsimile: CU-MARK, UCCL 01358)
I am very much obliged for your letter, & the copy of Mr. Taylor’s.1explanatory note I agree with Mr. Taylor, that the story as it stands is doubtless not dramatizable; but by turning & twisting some othe of the incidents, discarding others & adding new ones, that sort of difficulty is overcome by these ingenious dramatists. But I haven’t the head to do it. I meant to put in a ridiculous spelling-scene, historical & arithmetical classes, &c (country school fashion,) but forgot it—but I’d have it in the play. IⒶemendation hope Mr. Byron can & will do the play. I have written your father lately about him—he was my first choice any way, but he did not answer the letter I long ago wrote him on the subject.2explanatory note There’s a little prodigy of an actress here, too—Matilda Heron’s young daughter.3explanatory note I would enjoy seeing this girl & the young girl you speak of playing Tom & Huck. It would be a strong team.
Lucky father, you’ve got, who can take his family4explanatory note & skip over to Paris with less trouble than we can go to New York. I am obliged to envy him.
My books have arrived at last; very handsome & attractive, they are.5explanatory note ’Twas a great pity you didn’t cut out that newspaper notice & enclose it. I receive a great many newspapers now (at Hartford) but left no orders to have them sent here, for I don’t want to be seduced by newspapers when I ought be at work. I shall write home & have the servants keep all the papers hereafter & also save what are now on hand.6explanatory note
Please tell your father I am not going to allow him to do the thousand p splendid things he is doing in behalf of this book & then worry over those electrotype pictures besides. He must do the thing that is the least trouble to him, & charge the damage to me. Use them—destroy them—or return them—whichever is the least trouble. I sent the item of the price they would cost (the original document, not a copy, I think) & so I supposed Chatto was satisfied with the figure, when the electros were ordered; but I can see by your father’s last letter that my item was never received & that the pictures were ordered on the risk that they would cost but little more here than they would in England.7explanatory note—which is probably the case. I’d never pay Bliss till he shows me the electrotypers bill, if it falls to my lot to take the pictures on my shoulders.
Well, mistakes are bound to occur—folks can’t help them. With my best regards to all the Pembroke Garden household (though it seems odd that one should live in two 2 Pembroke Gardens, which is mere reckless extravagance,) I am
The letters from Eustace Conway—Moncure's seventeen-year-old son—and Tom Taylor do not survive.
Now just two weeks short of her thirteenth birthday, Hélène Stoepel (1863–1937), daughter of famed actress Matilda Heron (1830–1877) and German-born composer and musician Robert Stoepel (1821–87), had made her stage debut at age six, appearing in Medea with her mother. In 1875, under the stage name Bijou Heron, she played Oliver Twist. While still twelve she became the youngest actress to play Juliet, in the balcony scene, at Augustin Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre (New York Times: “An Old Musician Dead,” 2 Oct 1887, 16; “Mrs. Henry Miller, Producer’s Mother,” 20 Mar 1937, 19; Daly 1917, 160, 187).
See 6 and 7 Jan 1876 to PAMclick to open link, n. 3.
Copies of the English edition of Tom Sawyer.
If Clemens wrote such a letter it has not been found.
Moncure Conway’s most recent letter is now lost (see 1 Aug 1876 to Conwayclick to open link, n. 1).
MS facsimile, CU-MARK.
MicroPUL, reel 1.
A typed transcript in CU-MARK indicates that the MS was at one time in the Justin Turner Collection.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.