Explanatory Notes        Apparatus Notes (Ⓐ)

Source: Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Conn ([CtHMTH])

Cue: "Mine & Bret"

Source format: "MS, correspondence card, in pencil"

Letter type: "correspondence card"

Notes:

Last modified:

Revision History: Paradise, Kate

Published on MTPO: 2022

Print Publication:

This edited text supersedes the previously published text
MTPDocEd
To Charles E. Perkins
3 August 1877 • 2nd of 2 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS, correspondence card, in pencil: CtHMTH, UCCL 01464)
Elmira, Aug. 3.

slcMine & Bret Harte’s shares from the new play “Ah Sin” will come to you from Parsloe. Please place both shares to my credit at Bissell’s & tell me the amount. Harte shan’t have a cent till his entire indebtedness to me is paid.1explanatory note

Ys Truly
S L Clemens

If Harte inquires, tell him that is my verdict.2explanatory note

Textual Commentary
Source text(s):

MS, correspondence card, in pencil, CtHMTH.

Previous Publication:

MicroPUL, reel 1.

Provenance:

See Perkins Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.

Explanatory Notes
1 As of early 1877 Harte’s indebtedness to Clemens amounted to $1,700 (24 Jan 1877 to Bliss, n. 1). In addition, Clemens had advanced Parsloe $1,000 to cover the cost of staging Ah Sin “for its first performance,” and Harte and Parsloe each agreed to repay Clemens one-third of that amount out of their share of the profits. Maze Edwards, who worked for Parsloe’s agent, Horace Wall’s Dramatic Bureau in New York, was charged with collecting and sending the proceeds from Ah Sin to Perkins, who deposited them with George P. Bissell and Company, Clemens’s Hartford bankers (agreement signed by Clemens on 30 Dec 1876, and Harte and Parsloe on 5 Jan 1877, CU-MARK; Edwards to SLC, 8 Aug 1877, CU-MARK).
2 

Harte, who stayed in Washington instead of attending the New York debut of Ah Sin, sent the following appeal to Augustin Daly at about this time (Daly 1917, 236–37):

There is, I believe, somewhere up in Hartford an agent and lawyer of Mr. Clemens, who is at some time to furnish accounts &c.—to me possibly—but he doesn’t, he says, know anything about the play since it was played in Washington. I don’t want any accounts from you or Parsloe, only a single expression of your opinion as to whether the play was or was not successful, and as one of its authors, this does not seem to me to be an inconsistent request or calculated to wound anybody’s—say Parsloe’s—sensitive nature. It is the mere courtesy of business.

Send me a line.

Yours truly,

Bret Harte.

A. Daly Esq.

5th Ave. Theatre

Daly may have transmitted this request to Clemens, advising him to give Harte a full accounting. On 20 August Parsloe told Clemens that Edwards would send Harte a record of “Receipts etc to date, and this will be continued until further notice” (CU-MARK). The following day, Perkins forwarded a letter from Parsloe to Harte, and wrote to Harte himself, presumably apprising him of Clemens’s instructions (neither letter has been found; Perkins to SLC, 21 Aug 1877, CU-MARK). At the end of August, Harte went in person to see Edwards to get “figures.” Edwards let Clemens know, and confided, “I’m glad he’s arrived at the opinion that in the arrangement he is, nobody” (Edwards to SLC, 31 Aug 1877, CU-MARK).

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