23 November 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 02496)
Herewith is the proof. In spite of myself, how awkwardly I do jumble words together; & how often I do use three words where one would answer—a thing I am always trying to guard against. I shall become as slovenly a writer as Charles Francis Adams if I don’t look out. {That is said in jest; because of course I do not seriously fear getting so bad as that. I never shall drop so far toward his & Bret Harte’s level as to catch myself saying “It ought must have been wiser to have believed that he could might Ⓐemendationhave accomplished it if he could have felt that he would have been supported by those who should have &c., &c., &c.,”}Ⓐemendation 2explanatory note The reference to Bret Harte reminds me that I often accuse him of being a deliberate imitator of d Dickens; & this in turn reminds me that I have charged unconscious plagiarisms upon Charley Warner; & this in turn reminds me that I have been delighting my sould for two weeks over a bran new & beau Ⓐemendationingenious way of beginning a novel—& behold, all at once it flashes upon me that Charley Warner originated the idea 3 years ago & told me about it! Aha! So much for self-righteousness! I am well repaidⒶemendation. Here are 108 pages of MS, new & clean, lying disgraced in the waste paper basket, & I am beginning the novel over again in an un-stolen way.3explanatory note I would not wonder if I am the worst literary thief in the world, without knowing it.
It is glorious news that you like Tom Sawyer so well. I mean to see to it that your review of it shall have plenty of time to appear before the other notices. Mrs. Clemens decides with you that it the book should issue as a book for boys, pure & simple—& so do it I. It is surely the correct idea. As to that last chapter, I think of just leaving it off & adding nothing in its place. Something told me that the book was done when I got to that point—& so the strong temptation Ⓐemendationto put Huck’s life at the widow’s into detail instead of generalizing it in a paragraph, was resisted.4explanatory note Just send Sawyer to me by Express—I enclose money for it. If it should get lost it will be no great matter.5explanatory note
Company interfered last night, & so “Private Theatricals” goes over till this evening, to be read aloud.6explanatory note Mrs. Clemens is mad, but the story will take that all out. This is going to be a splendid winter night for fireside reading, anyway.
I am almost at a dead stand-still with my new story, on account of the misery of having to do it all over again.
We-all send love to you-all.
Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK):
Olivia’s letter to Elinor Howells is not known to survive. The manuscript Howells promised to send was his review of Sketches, New and Old. Clemens had prompted him in his letter of 4 November.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835–1915), was trained as a lawyer, but practiced only briefly. He rose from lieutenant to brigadier general in the Massachusetts cavalry during the Civil War, then became a writer on railroads and politics, a public official, and later a historian. His two-part study, “Of Some Railroad Accidents,” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November and December 1875; neither article contained this sentence.
Scholars have not agreed about whether Clemens deleted a chapter from the end of Tom Sawyer. It now seems clear, however, that Bernard DeVoto was correct in asserting that Clemens must have written the book’s brief “Conclusion,” which follows chapter 35, to replace a now lost “last chapter.” DeVoto rightly pointed out that the “Conclusion” was written after Howells returned the secretarial copy, since it appears there in Clemens’s own hand. He further speculated that in this omitted chapter Clemens began Huckleberry Finn “prematurely” by describing Huck’s life with the widow Douglas (DeVoto, 11; see also SLC 1982, xxix). But this conjecture contradicts Clemens’s statement here that he had successfully “resisted” the temptation to write more about “Huck’s life at the widow’s”—a clear indication that the chapter to be “cut” (whether chapter 35 or one that followed it in the manuscript) could not have expanded upon this subject. Walter Blair noted this contradiction, and decided that Clemens must have been alluding to material about Huck that he had deleted from chapter 35 (several passages, of undetermined content, were clearly cut out of the manuscript). He concluded that it was this chapter that Howells proposed to omit, but that Clemens decided to retain it, merely adding the “Conclusion” to complete the tale (HF, xxv). What seems to have gone unnoticed is that when Clemens said “something told me the book was done when I got to that point,” he was referring not to the proposed omission, but to the chapter that preceded it. If Blair were correct, then Howells proposed to omit chapter 35, which serves as a satisfactory conclusion with no obvious departure in matter or manner from the rest of the book, and Clemens thought of concluding his story with chapter 34, after Injun Joe’s money is counted. (The amanuensis copy shows that Clemens made no revision of the chapter divisions after Howells had read the book.) It seems far more likely that there was indeed another chapter that Clemens removed (and evidently lost or destroyed), but that its contents were not what DeVoto supposed. The “Conclusion” that replaced it probably gives a better hint of what the omitted chapter contained. “When one writes a novel about grown people,” the author says, “he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where best he can.” Clemens expressed to Howells his original idea of carrying his characters into adulthood more than once before abandoning it. As late as 21 June 1875 he wrote, “Since there is no plot to the thing, it is likely to follow its own drift, & so is as likely to drift into manhood as anywhere—I won’t interpose.” By 5 July, however, he had changed his mind: “I have finished the story & didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood.” Although Clemens never took Tom “into manhood” in the surviving Tom Sawyer manuscript, he could easily have “drifted” into doing so in a concluding chapter. Howells’s advice seems to have prompted him to remember his own doubts, and so to omit the chapter, adding in the “Conclusion” that “it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.”
Howells had the amanuensis copy of Tom Sawyer. At least part of the original manuscript was at the American Publishing Company (5 Nov 75 to Blissclick to open link).
The first installment of Howells’s story appeared in the November Atlantic Monthly (Howells 1875–76). The interfering visitors have not been identified.
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L6 , 594–97; MTL , 1:266–68; MTHL , 1:112–13.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.