2 August 1873 • (2nd of 2) • Edinburgh, Scotland (Goodspeed’s Book Shop 1926?, item 793c, UCCL 05816)
Have Ⓐemendationjust telegraphed you to squelch that pamphlet (if you are publishing it). I find by reading over those Herald letters that ⒶemendationI don’t like them at all—& besides, the Herald people have added paragraphs & interlineations, & not pleasant ones, either.1explanatory note So I know it will be better for you & better for me to stop the pamphlet. I don’t want to do anything that can injure the novel.2explanatory note We shall be in London during the month of September. Curse those letters!
In 1907 Clemens recalled the Herald’s editing of his letters:
I had been helping the London newspaper men fetch the Shah of Persia over from Ostend, I being for forty-eight hours in the service of Dr. Hosmer, London representative of the New York Herald. I had dictated an account of the excursion covering two or three columns of the Herald, and had charged and received three hundred dollars and expenses for it—a narrative which seemed to the Herald to lack humor, a defect which the New York office supplied from its own resources, which were poor and coarse and silly beyond imagination. (AD, 28 Aug 1907, CU-MARK)
(For an example of these “poor and coarse” additions, see 4 Aug 73 to Yates.) Clemens was well paid, however, for his five contributions. In a letter of 12 September 1873 to Whitelaw Reid, George Smalley commented: “The Herald seems to be going in for all sorts of things, and money no object. I was wrong in telling you Twain had $100, gold, a column, for the Shah; it was $125, or, actually, £25, and they counted in the display heads, wh. came to £69! This is what Mark says” (Whitelaw Reid Papers, DLC). Thompson later recalled that Clemens said the first letter alone was worth $500, but Smalley’s contemporary estimate is probably more accurate (Thompson, 89).
The Gilded Age.
Goodspeed’s Book Shop 1926?, item 793c. The transcription published in Goodspeed’s later catalog, Goodspeed’s Book Shop 1927?, item 4633b, is identical except for a corrected typographical error, ‘that’ for ‘than’ at 425.4. Both catalogs describe the letter as an “A. l. s., 2 pp., Edinburgh, Aug. 2, n.y.”
L5 , 425.