10 July 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: OClRC, UCCL 11312)
I heard you were sick, & am glad you are getting better again.1explanatory note
What terms did you arrive at with Routledge?2explanatory note
Yes, I told Orion he could borrow small amounts on my account, at intervals, outside the pay for those 3 articles. So it is all right.3explanatory note
Tomorrow I will fix up & forward as much MS as I have on hand. Some of it is tip-top.4explanatory note
I am now waiting a day or two till I get my old Sandwich Island notes together, for I want to put in 4 or 5 chapters about the Islands for the benefit of New England—& the world.5explanatory note When that is finished I shall come on & we will cull & cut down the MS & sock the book into the press. I think it will be a book worth reading, duly aided by the pictures. I am not scared about the result. It will sell.
I think of calling it
T Ⓐemendation FLUSH TIMESⒶemendation in the silver mines Ⓐemendation, & other Matters.a personal narrative.
By Mark Twain. (Samℓ. L. Clemens.)
How does it strike you? Offer a suggestion, if one occurs to you.
Good! We’ll run the tilt with Beecher.6explanatory note
letter docketed: ✓ andTwain | Elmira 1869 | Auth
Probably by this time Bliss had come to terms with George Routledge and Sons for an English edition of Roughing It to appear “simultaneously” with the American edition. Clemens was paid a nominal fee of £37 ($185) for the English rights ( RI 1993 , 876–77).
If Clemens actually sent this batch of manuscript, his fourth, it probably consisted of what became chapters 54–57, and may have included chapters 76 and 78 if they had not already been delivered in June ( RI 1993 , 815, 861–62).
Clemens evidently meant to make use of his 1866 notebooks, scrapbooks, Sacramento Union letters, and almost certainly the printer’s copy for an unpublished book on the Sandwich Islands he had prepared from the Union letters in 1866–67. Instead of “4 or 5 chapters,” however, he included fifteen chapters on the Sandwich Islands, all but four of them based on his Union letters ( RI 1993 , 862).
Another subscription house, J. B. Ford and Company of New York, canvassed Henry Ward Beecher’s two-volume Life of Jesus, the Christ, the first volume of which was published in September 1871, before and during the American Publishing Company’s canvass for Roughing It, which began in early December ( RI 1993 , 861, 874–75).
MS, Rowfant Club, Cleveland (OClRC).
L4 , 431–32.
The MS, presumably kept in the American Publishing Company files after receipt, was in 1899 tipped into volume 1 of The Innocents Abroad, the first volume of set 272 of the “Autograph Edition” of The Writings of Mark Twain. The book and manuscript were owned by Adrian G. Newcomb, later by Dr. and Mrs. Charles Herndon, and finally by the Rowfant Club.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.