11 January 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, in pencil: NN-BGC, UCCL 02497)
Indeed we haven’t forgotten the Howellses, nor scared up a grudge of any kind against them; but the fact is I a was under the doctor’s hands for four weeks on a stretch, & have been disabled from working for a week or so beside. I thought I was well, about ten days ago, so I sent for a short-hand writer & dictated answers to a bushel or so of letters that had been accumulating during my illness. Getting everything ship-shape & cleared up, I went to work next day upon an Atlantic article, which ought to be worth the $20 per page (which is the price they usually pay for my work, I believe) for although it is only 70 pages MS (less than 2 days work, counting by bulk,) I have spent 3 more days trimming, altering & working at it. I shall put in one more day’s polishing on it, & then read it before our Club, (here which is to meet at our house Monday evening the 24th inst. I think it will bring out considerable discussion among the gentlemen of the Club—though the tittle title of the article will not give them much notion of what is to follow—this titlele being “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” 2explanatory note——which reminds me that today’s Tribune says there will be a startling article in the current Atlantic, in which a being which is tangible but invisible will figure—exactly the case with theⒶemendation sketch of mine which I am talking about! However, mine can lie unpublished a year or two as well as not—though I wish that contributor of yours had not me interfered, with his coincidence of heroes.3explanatory note
But what I am coming at, is this: won’t you & Mrs. Howells come down Saturday the 22d, meet a gang & remain to the Club on Monday night? We always have a rat[t]lingⒶemendation good time at the Club, & we do want you, to come, ever so much. Will you? Now say you will. Mrs. Clemens & I are persuading ourselves that you w twain will come. Mrs
I’m My volume is of Sketches is doing very well, considering the times; received my quarterly statement today from Bliss, by which I perceive that 20,000 copies have been sold. Ⓐemendation —or rather, 20,000 had been sold 3 weeks ago; a lot more, by this time, no doubt. 4explanatory note
I am on the sick list again—& was, day before yesterday—but on the whole I’m getting along.
This letter replied, in part, to Howells’s letter of 4 January (see 1 Jan 1876 to Howells, n. 1).
The current members of the Hartford Monday Evening Club (see 15 Feb 1873 to Trumbull, L5 , 297 n. 2) were: Isaac Hill Bromley (1833-98), of the New York Tribune editorial staff; Horace Bushnell (1802-76), former minister of Hartford's North Church of Christ (later Park Congregational Church), who died on 17 February; Frank W. Cheney (d. 1909), treasurer of his family's silk manufactory and an insurance executive; Austin C. Dunham (1833-1917), a wool merchant; William B. Franklin (see 28 Apr 1876 to Franklin, n. 2); William Hamersley (1838-1920), Connecticut state attorney since 1869; his father, William James Hamersley (1808-76), journalist, book publisher, and former Hartford mayor; Joseph R. Hawley (see 5 Apr 1876 to the editor of the Hartford Courant, n. 1); Caleb Sprague Henry (1804-84), Protestant Episcopal clergyman, author, and educator; F. A. Henry, a lawyer; Richard Dudley Hubbard (1818-84), lawyer and Democratic governor of Connecticut (1877-79); Cyrus Frederick Knight (1831-91), rector of the Parish of the Incarnation (Episcopal); Robert Meech, former rector of Christ Church (Episcopal); Dwight Whitfield Pardee (1822-93), Connecticut supreme court judge; Edwin Pond Parker (1836-1920), pastor of the Second Church of Christ (Congregational); Charles E. Perkins (1832-1917), Clemens's lawyer; Henry C. Robinson (1832-1900), insurance executive and former mayor of Hartford; Nathaniel Shipman (1828-1906), U.S. district court judge; Calvin Ellis Stowe (1802-86), retired professor of theology and husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe; Nathaniel J. Burton, James Hammond Trumbull, and Joseph H. Twichell (see 8 Jan 1876 to Clark, n. 1); and Charles Dudley Warner (annotation in L2, L3, L5, and L6; Cheney 1954, 13-21; Trumbull 1886, 1:113, 115, 117-18, 132, 385, 406, 408, 620, 624; “Death of Colonel Cheney,” Hartford Courant, 5 June 1909, 5). It is not known how many of the members attended Clemens's 24 January reading. Warner, for example, was still abroad (1 Jan 1876 to Howells, n. 1). Twichell made the following record of the occasion in his journal:
Jan. 24. Monday Evening Club met at M.T.’s.—M.T. Essayist. He read an article about ¾ of an hour long, in which was described an interview between himself and his Conscience—very finely written serious in its intent though vastly funny and splendidly, brilliantly read. I think when published, it will be pronounced one of his best. (Twichell 1874–1916, 2 [1876]: 7)
The Tribune reported that the Atlantic Monthly for February would include “a singular and striking tale, entitled ‘Manmat’ha,’ by Mr. C. A. De Kay of New-York,” which “treats of an invisible but tangible being” (“Literary Notes,” 10 Jan 1876, 6). The story was a fantasy about a man’s romance with an invisible woman (De Kay 1876).
The 1 January 1876 statement, sent by Frank Bliss, showed that 19,337 copies of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old , published in late September 1875, had been sold in its first quarter, generating a royalty of $4,580.16. The statement also showed the following sales figures: 1,205 copies of The Gilded Age (1873-74) , royalty $213.28 (with an equal amount going to Charles Dudley Warner); 1,208 copies of Roughing It (1872) , royalty $317.20; 1,653 copies of The Innocents Abroad (1869) , royalty $297.42 ( L6 : 14 Sept 1875 to Howells, 535 n. 2; 22 and 27 Sept 1875 to Howells, 541; Scrapbook 10:24, CU-MARK).
Howells replied (CU-MARK):
Howells evidently did not read “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” until or shortly after he visited Hartford in March (see 13 Mar 1876 to Howells). He eventually published it as the lead article in the Atlantic for June 1876 (SLC 1876h). Howells’s troublesome story was “Private Theatricals,” serialized in the Atlantic from November 1875 through May 1876 (Howells 1875–76). Sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward (1830–1910) was an old Ohio friend of Howells’s (Howells 1979a, 88 n. 4).
MS, in pencil, NN-BGC.
MTL , 1:270–71; MTHL , 1:118–19.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.