Explanatory Notes
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Apparatus Notes
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MTPDocEd
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INTRODUCTION
1. An Unexpected Success

Roughing It was published in February 1872, a year and a half after Mark Twain began it. His second major book, it was also his second major success, comparable in some ways to his first, The Innocents Abroad (1869). Like Innocents, it was a thickly illustrated six-hundred-page volume published by Elisha Bliss and the American Publishing Company of Hartford and sold exclusively by subscription, at least in the United States. But because Innocents had been pirated in England and Canada, Clemens tried to make sure that Roughing It would not be, publishing it “simultaneously” in London through George Routledge and Sons. Just one year after publication, the combined English and American sales stood at ninety-three thousand copies, with royalties in excess of twenty thousand dollars. By Clemens’s own standards, these numbers represented an undeniable success—despite his worst fears to the contrary.

The success of Roughing It makes it easy to overlook, or discount, the author’s fears for his book, especially since his usual attitude toward it was fiercely upbeat: “We shall sell 90,000 copies the first 12 months,” he wrote typically to Bliss, “I haven’t even a shadow of a doubt of that.”1 But Clemens did have his doubts about Roughing It. Ten months before publication he was expecting it to be “a tolerable success—possibly an excellent success if the chief newspapers start it off well.” Three months before publication he was a little less confident: “If the subject were less hackneyed,” he told his wife, “it would be a great success.” Yet even that pessimistic forecast pales beside what he recalled telling his friend David Gray in early 1872, as the book was being issued: “You will remember, maybe, how I felt about ‘Roughing It’—that it would be considered pretty poor stuff, & that therefore I had better not let the press get a chance at it.”2

Acting on this belief, Clemens at first vetoed the distribution of review copies, even to the “chief newspapers.” As a result, only a handful of reviews ever appeared, and sales plummeted just six months after publication. He blamed this unexpected decline on the “engravings & paper,” and [begin page 798] on the “original lack of publicity,” admitting to Bliss that he had misjudged the importance of “early prompt notoriety,” which he had been “afraid of & didn’t want” until he was “dead sure of 50,000 subscriptions to R. I.”3

For a month Clemens made few exceptions to this ban, but among them were Charles Dudley Warner on the Hartford Courant, and William Dean Howells at the Atlantic Monthly. In late May 1872, when Clemens saw Howells’s comments, he thought the book might be a critical success after all:

The “Atlantic” has come to hand with that most thoroughly & entirely satisfactory notice of “Roughing it,” & I am as uplifted & reassured by it as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto. I have been afraid & shaky all along, but now unless the N. Y. “Tribune” gives the book a black eye, I am all right.4

Favorable though it was, this review failed to prompt any others: only three have been found later than May, and two of these Clemens himself solicited from the New York Tribune.5

Clemens’s relief at Howells’s praise is obvious. It is less obvious why he felt “afraid & shaky all along,” or why he thought of his book as a guiltily begotten “mulatto,” or even as “pretty poor stuff.” Clemens’s uneasiness was caused by two different but related concerns. First was the subject of the West itself. On the one hand, he realized that it had become suddenly “hackneyed,” even as he worked to complete his manuscript: too many journalists had already published books describing their recent tours of California and Nevada. For this reason he was prevented from writing a comic travelogue like Innocents, and was instead forced to remember and therefore transform his personal experiences “on the ground” between 1861 and 1866. On the other hand, despite his own delight in the “vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains,” there were members of his audience who regarded slang and dialect, and the rough societies in which they flourished, as “coarse” and “low”—unfit subjects for literature, save perhaps in the refining hands of Bret Harte. Clemens therefore had at least some grounds for doubting whether, in Roughing It, he would, as he put it, “ ‘top’ Bret Harte again or bust.”6

Clemens’s second concern, which increased his uneasiness about the first, may be thought of simply as the multitude of problems he encountered in trying to write and publish Roughing It. These ranged from what [begin page 799] he referred to in 1882 as a “lapse of facility” in composing the early chapters,7 to the belated discovery that Bliss had been cutting corners with the “engravings & paper,” making books that might be regarded in more than one way as “pretty poor stuff.” Such problems ran counter to Clemens’s expectations: Roughing It proved much more difficult to write than Innocents, his only basis for comparison.

He had written Innocents in the spring and summer of 1868, published it within a year, and had since begun to receive an astonishing income from it—nearly $14,000 in the first year. “I mean to write another book during the summer,” he told Mary Mason Fairbanks on 6 January 1870. “This one has proven such a surprising success that I feel encouraged.” Producing the next book seemed at first a rather simple matter, in part because he believed he could always abandon the narrative form altogether, choosing instead to simply reprint his various sketches. On 22 January, for instance, he wrote Bliss that he was suing Charles Henry Webb to regain control of the Jumping Frog (1867), hoping to break up the plates “& prepare a new Vol. of Sketches, but on a different & more ‘taking’ model.” He was confident about the next book, whatever it turned out to be: “I can get a book ready for you any time you want it—but you can’t want one before this time next year—so I have plenty of time.”8

Clemens had less time than he thought, for during the next fifteen months he would be constantly interrupted by personal and family crises that eventually drove him to “a state of absolute frenzy,” and inevitably delayed the book.9 Three weeks after Clemens signed a contract for it, Olivia’s father died, leaving her deeply depressed. One month later a visiting schoolmate of hers (Emma Nye) contracted typhoid and, after weeks of feverish hallucinations, died in the Clemenses’ own bedroom. Five weeks after that, Olivia gave birth (prematurely) to her first child, Langdon, who was never strong and would not survive his second year. And when the child was just three months old, she herself contracted typhoid—from which she recovered slowly, once she was expected to recover at all.

But Clemens’s inability to finish Roughing It “during the summer,” or even within the five months his contract allowed him, is explained only in part by the lugubrious events of 1870–71. In particular, those events do not explain why he created half a dozen distractions during this same period. Just two months after deciding to write the book, he contracted to supply a monthly column for the New York Galaxy—a commitment so demanding that it alone could have stopped his progress on the book. In [begin page 800] addition, he undertook negotiations and preparations for three other books, long before he had completed Roughing It.

Before he had finished, Clemens admitted that for long periods during the book’s composition he was unable to be “thoroughly interested” in his subject.10 His penchant for self-interruption and this inability to be “interested” in his subject were closely related phenomena, although Clemens himself seems not to have recognized it at the time. They belong to a pattern of behavior which he eventually accepted as normal, adapting to it by learning to “pigeon-hole” manuscripts when they got “tired, along about the middle.”11 Encountering such resistance for the first time, however, must have been alarming—an open invitation to self-doubt, and to fault finding, since there were many people and things he could blame for his slow progress. But writing this book was Clemens’s first, naive experience with what proved to be his invariable pattern when writing fiction. This fact has not been noticed before, but it explains a good deal about how he wrote Roughing It.

By far the most important obstacle to such an explanation, however, has been the loss of Clemens’s manuscript printer’s copy, which was probably discarded once the book was in type. Without access to this document, it has been virtually impossible to understand, with any precision, Clemens’s letters describing his progress and recording (usually by page or chapter number) how far he had written.12 Now, for the first time, we propose a conjectural reconstruction of this missing document, which amounts to a map of what the printer’s copy initially contained, and how [begin page 801] it was revised before publication. The reconstruction was prepared by counting the words in each chapter of the first edition and arithmetically deriving from them the pagination of the printer’s copy, taking into account which passages were probably handwritten, and which were revised printings (usually newspaper clippings).13 Two charts are provided on pages 814–15: Figure 1 represents chapters 1–11, which were transmitted and revised together; Figure 2 represents chapter 12 through appendix C. Since these charts estimate pagination for the whole text by relying on word counts, they help to identify most of the pages and chapters to which Clemens himself referred during composition. And since Clemens’s references are independent of the estimates in the charts, they (and several other documents) constitute a significant check on the accuracy of the reconstruction.14

2. A Book about the Far West

Choosing the subject of his second long book was, for Clemens, essentially a process of elimination: testing an old idea (writing about his experiences in the West) against a series of newer ideas. Until he signed the contract in July 1870, he toyed provocatively with the alternatives—publishers as well as subjects. He could write a “telling book” about England. He had heard from a subscription house in Philadelphia “offering unlimitedly.” He thought his “Noah’s Ark book” would be a “perfect lightning-striker.” The Appleton company wanted him to do a “humorous picture-book.” He gathered “material enough for a whole book” during a visit to Washington in early July (almost certainly the germ of The Gilded Age).15 And the idea of a new sketchbook persisted as an easy alternative to writing [begin page 802] something new. In fact, the first surviving indication that he had chosen the West as his topic came on 29 May 1870, in a letter to Mrs. Fairbanks: “Well, I guess we shall have to go with you to California in the Spring, for the publishers are getting right impatient to see another book on the stocks, & I doubt if I could do better than rub up old Pacific memories & put them between covers along with some eloquent pictures.”16 This remark implies his acceptance of a topic previously considered, and it assumes that the actual writing would be put off until the spring of 1871—a plan that makes sense only if he intended to satisfy Bliss’s needs with something else, presumably a sketchbook, which he could make ready “any time.”

Albert Bigelow Paine thought that it was Bliss who “proposed a book which should relate the author’s travels and experiences in the Far West.” If so, Paine’s assertion is now the sole evidence for it. More than a week after Clemens recorded his decision to “rub up old Pacific memories,” he turned aside a suggestion from Bliss: “I like your idea for a book, but the inspiration don’t come.”17 What Bliss proposed is not known, yet even if it was the western book, Clemens had anticipated him. Certainly a book based on his western experiences was not a new idea to him.

Six years earlier, Clemens had chosen the same subject (or one very like it) for what would have been his first book—a book he planned to write, and may have begun, before leaving California. All that is known of this project is contained in a letter he wrote from San Francisco on 28 September 1864 in response to a letter (now lost) from his brother and sister-in-law (Orion and Mollie) in Nevada, to whom he had earlier confided this literary ambition. “I would commence on my book,” he replied to their prodding, but he and Steve Gillis were “getting things ready for his wedding. . . . As soon as this wedding business is over, I believe I will send to you for the files, & begin on my book.”18

The “files” Clemens referred to in 1864 were probably the same as the “coffin of ‘Enterprise’ files” which, in early March 1870, he finally did ask Orion to send him from St. Louis, acknowledging their receipt in Buffalo on 26 March—several months before he signed a contract for his second book.19 These files were surely one reason that Roughing It at first seemed a relatively easy book to write. The files were scrapbooks filled with clippings of his work in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, but also of work by various other hands in the Enterprise and other Nevada and California newspapers. To judge from the surviving scrapbooks, the clippings documented Orion’s activities as well as his own, and included even multiple copies of work Clemens had published routinely in the West: everything [begin page 803] from local columns and letters in the Enterprise and the San Francisco Morning Call, to long, carefully crafted sketches in the Californian and the Golden Era.20

For Clemens, the scrapbooks held out the promise of two kinds of help. Some, perhaps most, of their clippings would simply remind him of the facts—incidents, people, and stories from his western years. But others, especially clippings of his own work, could surely be revised and reprinted as chapters in the book. Like Innocents, the new book would be a fundamentally factual account, a personal narrative of a real trip—with the trip providing an automatic source of coherence, as well as an excuse for humorous digression. But unlike Innocents, which Clemens had written within a year of the voyage it recounted and largely by cobbling together newspaper letters composed during that voyage, Roughing It had to be written five to ten years after the events it described, and without the help of any such contemporary account, save what could be salvaged from the scrapbooks—supplemented by whatever collateral material Orion was able to provide.

Between their arrival on 26 March 1870 and the signing of the contract in mid-July, the scrapbooks may well have prompted Clemens to write two long western sketches: “The Facts in the Great Land Slide Case,” published in the Buffalo Express on 2 April and later revised and reprinted in chapter 34 of Roughing It; and “A Couple of Sad Experiences,” about his notorious western hoaxes (“Petrified Man” and “A Bloody Massacre near Carson”), written no later than April and published in the June Galaxy, but not reprinted (or even mentioned) in the book. But as a source of ready-made chapters about Nevada and California, the scrapbooks turned out to be much less useful than Clemens had anticipated. He used scarcely anything of his own from the Enterprise, and nothing at all of what he had published in the San Francisco Morning Call, the Californian, and the Golden Era. Samuel C. Thompson, who was briefly Clemens’s [begin page 804] private secretary the year after he published Roughing It, recalled that he “seemed to have no great esteem for his newspaper contributions. They were too hurried and shallow. He told me that in preparing to write ‘Roughing It,’ he searched newspaper files covering years of his writings and got no help from them.”21

Although Roughing It may have been conceived as early as 1864, it was finally written at a time of greatly heightened interest in literature about the West—especially humorous short fiction and “dialect” poetry. Bret Harte and John Hay, both friends of Clemens’s, achieved instantaneous celebrity in 1870–71 through their dialect poems.22 Clemens himself was not much interested in poetry, but he was interested in dialect, and he was already well known for his western sketches. In a 27 December 1870 editorial in the New York Tribune, entitled “The Western School” (promptly reprinted in Clemens’s Buffalo Express), Hay announced that a “vigorous and full-flavored literature is growing up in the West. The period of echoes and imitations, of feeble reproductions of bad models . . . has gone by, and a school of writers is now coming up on the further side of the Alleghenies who have a message of their own to deliver, and who are uttering it in a way distinctly their own.” Hay cited George Horatio Derby (John Phoenix) as the “leader and founder” of this “field of eccentric fiction,” which had “since been so successfully worked by Mr. Francis Bret Harte and Mark Twain.”

The well-earned and legitimate success of these two gentlemen has given occasion to those indolent and ill-informed reviewers who have read nothing of the earlier efforts of the Western school, and only the most recent sketches of the two clever Californians who have taken the public by storm, to imagine that these two writers have a monopoly of Western subjects, and that any hunting in the same preserves is arrant poaching.23

Hay was in fact protesting a recent tendency to treat Bret Harte as the founder and sole legitimate member of this “Western school,” and to regard all others (including Hay himself) as Harte’s incompetent imitators.

For his part, Clemens felt personally indebted to Harte, telling Thomas Bailey Aldrich just a month after this editorial appeared that Harte had “trimmed & trained & schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs & [begin page 805] chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.” Clemens was thinking especially of Harte’s most recent help, for Harte had “read all the MS of the ‘Innocents’ & told me what passages, paragraphs & chapters to leave out—& I followed orders strictly.”24 But Clemens also felt keenly competitive with Harte, who was rising meteorically in the eyes of the eastern literary establishment, even as Clemens struggled with the manuscript of Roughing It. During this period, Clemens reviewed Harte’s Poems in a way that suggests where he felt the competition between them was most intense:

The true genius of Bret Harte is found in his vividly dramatic California sketches, far more than in any poem that he has written, and his permanent rank in American literature will depend more upon the cultivation that he gives to it in that description of writing than upon any thing that he can continue to do in the odd vein of the “Truthful James” ballads.25

Clemens’s own rank in American literature could not have seemed to him certain or permanent when he wrote this review—but he had written and published dozens of sketches about the West, especially California. Now he had to confront the problem of how to make a book-length narrative from such materials.

Clemens’s 1867–68 newspaper correspondence and even The Innocents Abroad contained many examples of his impulse to reminisce about his western experiences.26 But the true precursor of a narrative about the West arose from his longstanding interest in it as a lecture topic. As early as January 1867, he wrote Edward P. Hingston that he intended to speak in New York and other eastern states “on California & perhaps on other subjects.” Although Clemens did not write such a lecture that year, in May 1868 he again expressed his intention to “get up a lecture on California.”27 The following year he finally drafted his first narrative about the West, specific plans for which he described in a 10 May 1869 letter to James Redpath, his lecture agent. Clemens conceived the subject both as a lecture topic and as the subject of some newspaper letters he planned to write while revisiting California—and thus essentially in the mode of a tourist’s contemporary report:

[begin page 806] If I go to California I shall write a dozen letters to the N. Y. Tribune, & if you can have them copied wholly or in part, it will be well—especially as the title of next winters lecture will be “Curiosities of California.” Haven’t written it yet, but it is mapped out, & suits me very well. [Mem. Nearly all the societies wanted a Cal. lecture last year, & of course it will be all the better, now, when the completion of the Pacific RR has turned so much attention in that direction. There is scope to the subject, for the country is a curiosity; do. the fluctuations of fortune in the mines, where men grow rich in a day & poor in another; do. the people—for you have been in new countries & understand that; do. the Lake Tahoe, whose wonders are little known & less appreciated here; ditto the never-mentioned strange Dead Sea of California; & ditto a passing mention, maybe, of the Big Trees & Yo Semite.28

Clemens never did return to California, nor did he ever deliver “Curiosities of California,” but he did write it. By 5 July he had “written more than enough for a lecture,” which he said “must be still added to & then cut down.” Only a single fragment of what he wrote has survived in manuscript (a description of Lake Tahoe),29 perhaps because he soon made use of the rest of it in the Buffalo Express—though not as a single narrative, but as a series of loosely connected articles. If we assume that he wrote “Curiosities of California” about as he described it to Redpath, then he probably published it between 16 October 1869 and 29 January 1870 as the so-called “Around the World” letters, five of which he subsequently reused in Roughing It.30 It may have been the potential of this protonarrative which led Clemens to ask Orion for the scrapbooks in early March 1870.

By the end of July Clemens had tentatively settled on the idea of a book about the West. According to Paine, Bliss came to Elmira in “early July” to negotiate the contract for Roughing It, but he seems not to have come before the middle of the month. On 4 July, Clemens wrote Bliss to say that he would be in Elmira “10 days or 2 weeks yet,” and to urge him to “Come—come either here or to Buf.”31 On the same day, however, Clemens took the train to Washington, D.C., returning to Elmira no sooner than 10 or 11 July. On 5 July, the Washington correspondent of the Sacramento Union had “quite a chat with him” in Washington:

[begin page 807] Mark appears to be a very devoted husband. His old friends in Nevada and California will remember how he used to smoke pipes, and quaff lager and dress rather slouchily. Well, all this is changed. He now dresses with good taste, never drinks or smokes. Such, alas! are some of the results of marriage. Undoubtedly he looks all the better for it, and perhaps it is this that lends a finer quality of late to his humor, which used occasionally to have a touch of grossness in it. But in all other respects he is the same old “Mark” of yore. He is under contract to write a new book, and wants to go off, as soon as his father-in-law is well enough, to some quiet nook in England or some other part of the world where nobody knows him, and there write it. It must be ready by next March.32

This interview shows that Clemens was already committed to publishing his next book with Bliss, ten days before the formal contract was drawn up and signed. The original draft of that contract, in Bliss’s hand, indicates that it was “made this 15th day of July, AD 1870, at Elmira.” In it Clemens agreed to write a “manuscript for a book upon such subject as may be agreed upon,” and to deliver it “as soon as practicable, but as early as 1st of January next if they the sd company shall desire it. Said manuscript to contain matter sufficient for a book of about 600 pages octavo.” The contract forbade Clemens “to write or furnish manuscript for any other book unless for said company, during the time said manuscript & book are being prepared & sold.” And it stipulated that the American Publishing Company would “publish the said book in their best style—to commence operations at once upon receipt of manuscript & to push it through with all the despatch compatible with its being well done in text & illustrations.” The company also agreed to “a copyright on every copy sold of seven & one half per cent of the retail or subscription price.”33

In 1906 Clemens recalled in some detail—not all of it trustworthy—how he and Bliss had arrived at this percentage:

I had published “The Innocents” on a five per cent. royalty, which would amount to about twenty-two cents per volume. Proposals were coming in now from several other good houses. One offered fifteen per cent. royalty; another offered to give me all of the profits and be content with the advertisement which the book would furnish the house. I sent for Bliss, and he came to Elmira. . . . I told Bliss I did not wish to leave his corporation, and that I did not want extravagant terms. I said I thought I ought to have half the profit above cost of manufacture, and he said with enthusiasm that that was exactly right, exactly right. He went to his hotel and drew the contract and brought it to the house in the afternoon. I found a difficulty in it. It did not name “half profits,” but named a seven-and-a-half per cent royalty instead. I asked him to explain that. I said that that was not the understanding. He said, “No, it wasn’t,” but that he had put in a royalty to simplify the matter—that 7½ per cent. royalty represented fully half the profit and a little more, up to a sale of a hundred thousand copies; that after that, the Publishing Company’s half would be a shade superior to mine.

I was a little doubtful, a little suspicious, and asked him if he could swear to that. [begin page 808] He promptly put up his hand and made oath to it, exactly repeating the words which he had just used.34

The contract did not name the subject of the new book, but the omission was deliberate, as Clemens explained to Orion on the day he signed it:

Per contract I must have another 600-page book ready for my publisher Jan. 1, & I only began it to-day. The subject of it is a secret, because I may possibly change it. But as it stands, I propose to do up Nevada & Cal., beginning with the trip across the country in the stage. Have you a memorandum of the route we took—or the names of any of the Stations we stopped at? Do you remember any of the scenes, names, incidents or adventures of the coach trip?—for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot down a foolscap page of items for me. I wish I could have two days’ talk with you.35

Orion did indeed have a memorandum book of the trip, which he promptly sent. He also agreed to write out some notes about their Nevada experiences, although these would not be ready until early November. Clemens did not, however, really begin writing on 15 July. Almost two weeks later he told his mother and sister that he was “going to write a 600-page 8vo. book (like the last) for my publishers (it is a secret for a few days yet.) It will be about Nevada & California & must be finished Jan 1. I shall begin it about a month from now. By request, Orion has sent me his notebook of the Plains trip.”36

Meanwhile, Bliss evidently voiced a suspicion that Clemens was unhappy with the terms of the contract, and was considering another publisher. On 2 August, Clemens reassured him in such candid terms that the letter still serves as a useful corrective of his 1906 recollections:

You know I already had an offer of ten per cent from those same parties in my pocket when I stipulated for 7½ with you. I simply promised to give them a chance to bid; I never said I would publish with them if theirs was the best bid. If their first offer had been 12½ I would merely have asked you to climb along up as near that figure as you could & make money, but I wouldn’t have asked anything more. Whenever you said that you had got up to what was a fair divide between us (there being no risk, now, in publishing for me, while there was, before,) I should have closed with you on those terms. I never have had the slightest idea of publishing with anybody but you. (I was careful to make no promises to those folks about their bid.)

You see you can’t get it out of your head that I am a sort of a rascal, but I ain’t. I can stick to you just as long as you can stick to me, & give you odds. I made that contract with all my senses about me, & it suits me & I am satisfied with it. If I get only half a chance I will write a book that will sell like fury provided you put pictures enough in it.37

[begin page 809] Four days later, on 6 August, Olivia’s father died. Although Clemens had already decided not to begin on his book until late August, Jervis Langdon’s death ensured that he could not write anything else in August either. The funeral was held in Elmira on 8 August, the will probated on 12 August, and a memorial service conducted on 21 August.38 Clemens refrained from publishing anything in the Buffalo Express until 25 August, when “Domestic Missionaries Wanted” appeared.39 Presumably by then, or shortly thereafter, he also began on the book, for he wrote Orion on 2 September:

I find that your little memorandum book is going to be ever so much use to me, & will enable me to make quite a coherent narrative of the Plains journey instead of slurring it over & jumping 2,000 miles at a stride. The book I am writing will sell. In return for the use of the little memorandum book I shall take the greatest pleasure in forwarding to you the third $1,000 which the publisher of the forthcoming work sends me—or the first $1,000, I am not particular—they will both be in the first quarterly statement of account from the publisher.40

Orion’s journal served Clemens as an indispensable tool in writing the overland chapters (1–20). He relied on it for names, distances, times, landmarks, several particular incidents, and even its day-by-day account of the journey. He treated the original record like an outline, from which he could diverge at will without losing the essential thread of actual events. Especially at this early stage of composition, he seems also to have adhered closely to its chronology, and even its language. For example, when Orion noted on the fifth day, “Arrived at the ‘crossing’ of the South Platte, alias ‘Overland City,’ alias ‘Julesburg,’ at 11 A. M., 470 miles from St. Joseph,” Clemens reproduced Orion’s sentence almost verbatim, adding only a concluding phrase of his own: “At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the ‘Crossing of the South Platte,’ alias ‘Julesburg,’ alias ‘Overland City,’ four hundred and seventy miles from St. Joseph—the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.”41

Even with such help in hand, however, Clemens’s circumstances did not favor rapid composition. On the last day of August he wrote to his sister:

We are getting along tolerably well. Mother i.e., Mrs. Langdon is here, & Miss Emma Nye. Livy cannot sleep, since her father’s death—but I give her a narcotic every night & make her.

[begin page 810] I am just as busy as I can be—am still writing for the Galaxy & also writing a book like the “Innocents” in size & style. . . . I have got my work ciphered down to days, & I haven’t a single day to spare between this & the date which, by written contract I am to deliver the MSS. of the book to the publisher.42

Within days Clemens reported that Emma Nye had become “right sick—she cannot go on to Detroit yet awhile, where she is to teach.” But he also reported progress on his manuscript: “I have written four chapters of my new book during the past few days, & I tell you it is going to be a mighty starchy book—will sell, too.”43 Two days later, on 4 September, he fired off a salvo of reassurance to Bliss:

During past week have written first four chapters of the book, & I tell you the “Innocents Abroad will have to get up early to beat it. It will be a book that will jump right strait into a continental celebrity the first month it is issued. Now I want it illustrated lavishly. We shall sell 90,000 copies the first 12 months. I haven’t even a shadow of a doubt of that. I see the capabilities of my subject.44

His subject was now no longer a secret, for on 7 September the Elmira Advertiser reported that “Mark Twain’s new book, which is to be published next spring, is to be an account of travel at home, describing in a humorous and satirical way our cities and towns, and the people of different sections.”45

Clemens was soon obliged to confess that he had “no time to turn round” because Emma Nye was “dying in the house of typhoid fever (parents are in South Carolina) & the premises are full of nurses & doctors & we are all fagged out.”46 Still, he must have continued to write, for by 15 September he had completed two more chapters, which took him up through noon on the fifth day, at the end of chapter 6. By now he was already looking ahead to the ninth day, the subject of what became chapter 10, described in Orion’s journal as “Breakfast at Rocky Ridge Station, 24 miles from ‘Cold Spring,’ and 871 miles from St. Joseph.”47 Clemens had his own very particular memory of that day, which he had recalled the previous winter in his seventh “Around the World” letter:

At the Rocky Ridge station in the Rocky Mountains, in the old days of overland stages and pony expresses, I had the gorgeous honor of breakfasting with Mr. Slade, the Prince of all the desperadoes; who killed twenty-six men in his time; who used to cut off his victims’ ears and send them as keepsakes to their relatives; and who bound one of his victim’s hand and foot and practiced on him with his revolver for [begin page 811] hours together—a proceeding which seems almost inexcusable until we reflect that Rocky Ridge is away off in the dull solitudes of the mountains, and the poor desperadoes have hardly any amusements. Mr. Slade afterward went to Montana and began to thin out the population as usual—for he took a great interest in trimming the census and regulating the vote—but finally the Vigilance Committee captured him and hanged him, giving him just fifteen minutes to prepare himself in. The papers said he cried on the scaffold.48

But Clemens felt the need for more documentation of Slade’s history than he could find in the scrapbooks, or in Orion’s journal. He therefore wrote to the postmaster of Virginia City (Montana Territory), who was Hezekiah Hosmer, former chief justice of the territorial supreme court:

Buffalo, Sept. 15.

Dear Sir:

Four or five years ago a righteous Vigilance Committee in your city hanged a casual acquaintance of mine named Slade, along with twelve other prominent citizens whom I only knew by reputation. Slade was a “section-agent” at Rocky Ridge station in the Rocky Mountains when I crossed the plains in the Overland stage ten years ago, & I took breakfast with him & survived.

Now I am writing a book (MS. to be delivered to publisher Jan. 1,) & as the Overland journey has made six chapters of it thus far & promises to make six or eight more, I thought I would just rescue my late friend Slade from oblivion & set a sympathetic public to weeping for him.

Such a humanized fragment of the original Devil could not & did not go out of the world without considerable newspaper eclat, in the shape of biographical notices, particulars of his execution, etc., & the object of this letter is to beg of you to ask some one connected with your city papers to send me a Virginia City newspaper of that day if it can be done without mutilating a file.

If found, please enclose in LETTER form,
   else it will go to the office of Buffalo “Express”
   & be lost among the exchanges.

I beg your pardon for writing you so freely & putting you, or trying to put you to trouble, without having the warrant of an introduction to you, but I did not know any one in Virginia City & so I ventured to ask this favor at your hands. Hoping you will be able to help me

I am, Sir,

Your Obt. Serv’t

Mark Twain.49

Hosmer’s reply to this appeal has not been found, but it was very likely he who referred Clemens to Thomas J. Dimsdale’s little book, The Vigilantes of Montana (1866), a compilation of newspaper stories Dimsdale had written and published in the Montana Post in 1865–66. Hosmer may even have realized that Dimsdale’s book would be hard to find in Buffalo, and therefore sent Clemens a copy of it—if not immediately, then probably within a month or two. The exact timing remains uncertain, because even though Dimsdale’s book became the explicit source for much of what Clemens said about Slade in chapters 10 and 11, he did not complete those chapters until mid-March 1871.

[begin page 812] Bliss had, meanwhile, asked Clemens to contribute to the trade newspaper he was starting up as an advertising medium for the American Publishing Company’s books. On or about 21 September, Clemens dashed off a note in reply: “Yes, will furnish article for paper. . . . Finished 7th or 8th chap. of book to-day, forget which—am up to page 180—only about 1,500 1500 more to write.”50 This statement, however, cannot be taken literally as a reference to chapters 7 and 8 as they were published in Roughing It—nor is it obvious why, having written “up to page 180,” Clemens then had “only about 1500 more to write.” Just where was he in the process of composition? To answer that question, it is first necessary to explain the reconstruction charts in greater detail.

3. Composition Begins, September–December 1870

Roughing It was, in most ways, a typical subscription book. Bliss published a salesman’s prospectus containing selected pages and illustrations from it. Both the prospectus and the book contained highly particular tables of contents and lists of illustrations, which can be compared with each other and with the texts and illustrations they refer to. Inconsistencies between the lists and the texts may, of course, be simple errors, but they may also reflect incomplete correction or revision. In this particular case, the bibliographical evidence of the prospectus is much richer than usual because Bliss began its production substantially before Clemens had completed his manuscript. Issued in November 1871, the first prospectus (Pra) was so filled with signs of incompleteness and inadvertence that Bliss took the equally unusual step of issuing a revised and corrected form of it (Prb) two months later. Much of what can now be pieced together about the history of composition and revision (especially the evolution of the early chapters, represented in Figure 1) depends on the evidence of “errors” in Pra—errors, that is, in the sense that they refer to or are part of an earlier form of the text than the one finally published in Roughing It.

The wording of some of the column headings in the charts also needs clarification: “clippings,” “real page nos,” and “equiv page nos” (for “equivalent page numbers”). It is not self-evident why Clemens said on 21 September 1870 that he had only “about 1500 more pages to write.” Several later statements show that he believed he needed a total of 1800 pages of printer’s copy to make a 600-page book—three pages of printer’s copy for each book page, an empirical average that took into account the variable [begin page 813] space needed for the illustrations.51 Yet when 1800 is reduced by 180 to 1620, that number does not seem a plausible approximation of “about 1500,” even if it is assumed that Clemens was rounding off to the nearest hundred.

This statement is, in fact, the earliest indication we have that Clemens sometimes counted the pages of the Roughing It printer’s copy, as he had earlier done with Innocents, in a way that took into account the larger number of words typically contained in a page made up wholly or in part from clippings. That Clemens used clippings to help make up the printer’s copy for both Innocents and Roughing It is now well established. One of the three surviving pages of the Roughing It manuscript (reproduced in facsimile on page 816) amply demonstrates how such clippings were mounted and then altered in the margins. (The page is extant because it was discarded after Clemens further revised it.) In June 1868, when the printer’s copy for Innocents was nearly complete, Clemens told Mrs. Fairbanks that he was “writing page No. 1,843. 2,343.” But the printer’s copy was never much longer than about 1300 pages: a manuscript chapter about Spain (very near the end of the book, and ultimately omitted from the text) was numbered 1289 through 1331. And in April 1869, when Bliss needed to cut the manuscript to fit within 650 book pages, Clemens wrote that he hoped “there won’t be a necessity to cut much, but when you say you are only to the 800 or 900th page you don’t comfort me entirely, because so much of the 400 or 500 pages still left are reprint, and so will string out a heap.”52 So it is clear that when he wrote Mrs. Fairbanks in June 1868, he added first 500, then 1000, pages to the real total of about 1343 pages. His hesitation between the two larger figures (1843 and 2343) shows that he was actually multiplying the same 500 pages of “reprint” (i.e., clippings from the San Francisco Alta California) first by two, then by three, so that the total equaled what he would have had if everything were in his handwriting. Clemens must have realized that he had incorrectly evaluated the length of his Innocents printer’s copy, since he ultimately had too much material. Now, with Roughing It, he seems to have decided that a clipping page contained four times the number of words on a holograph page—not merely two or three, as he had earlier calculated. So if a holograph page averaged 84 words (as assumed here), Clemens counted a clipping page as 336 words—the equivalent, in other words, of four holograph pages (4 × 84 = 336 words), or three more pages than were actually in the copy (real pages). It is this method of counting which explains his otherwise puzzling arithmetic here and in later statements about his

[begin page 816]

Manuscript page numbered 968, removed from what is now chapter 46. It contains a clipping from the Buffalo Express for 8 January 1870. Reproduced from the original in the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library (CU-MARK).

[begin page 817] progress—and which accounts for the headings on those columns of numbers in Figures 1 and 2.


[begin page 814] [begin page 815]

In the printed book, Figures 1 and 2 occur on pp. 814–15. The figures’ complex tables are available in PDF format.


How far had Clemens progressed with his book in September 1870, when he had written “up to page 180”? Figure 1 indicates that at the earliest “mappable” stage of composition, in March 1871, the last page in chapter 8 was 170, nine pages shy of what Clemens himself had said the previous September (assuming that “up to page 180” refers to the first page of chapter 9). In making this statement, however, Clemens may have considered that the clipping from the New York Times in chapter 4, which was slightly over one page long, was equivalent to five holograph pages. That would make the equivalent last page of chapter 8 number 174, just five pages shy of the number Clemens assigned it (179).53

If each clipping page that Clemens prepared was considered to contain the equivalent of four holograph pages, then he could reduce the total number of pages he needed by four times the number of clipping pages he used, or planned to use. If he estimated, for instance, that he would prepare 30 pages of clippings, then simple arithmetic shows that having written 180 pages of holograph, he could also count as “in hand” some 120 pages (4 × 30) which would result from these 30 clipping pages, for a total of 300 pages in hand—leaving him 1500 pages still to write.

Collation shows that by the time Clemens completed his book late in the fall of 1871, he had used more than 130 pages of clippings. But in September 1870, at the outset of composition, he expected to use many fewer, largely because he had not yet decided to reuse any of his 1866 letters to the Sacramento Union. Within a few weeks of his 21 September note to Bliss, he probably was able to count the clipping pages he planned to use from the Buffalo Express, and by December he had prepared nearly all of these by mounting and revising them for resetting. By that time, however, his plans for them had changed: he now intended to include them in a new sketchbook, rather than in Roughing It. On 22 December he told Bliss that he had “arranged” the principal sketches for this sketchbook, and by [begin page 818] sometime in January 1871 he had produced a working table of contents.54 When the sketchbook was again postponed, some of these mounted clippings found their way back into Roughing It: revised versions of “Around the World” letters 1, 3, 4, and 5, as well as “The Facts in the Great Land Slide Case,” all first published in the Express. If we count the number of clipping pages they represent—that is, if we count only the Express clippings Clemens planned at the outset to use in Roughing It—the total is 25. If he had used that figure (25) to compute the number of pages still left to write, the result would have been 1520, or “about 1500.”55

Although Clemens said on 21 September that he had reached the end of chapter 8, Figure 1 indicates that chapters 1–8 as first drafted differed in several ways from their published form. Chapter 6, for instance, was probably only about eleven manuscript pages, roughly half as long as the published version—lacking perhaps a long section in the middle. Chapter 8 ended with the pony-express passage, which now begins the chapter, and it began with the story of Bemis and the buffalo, which now fills all but the last three pages of chapter 7. The anecdote about Eckert and the cocoanut-eating cat, which now occupies the last three pages of chapter 7, was almost certainly not in the manuscript at all, for the references it makes to Siam have been shown to derive from Anna H. Leonowens’s English Governess at the Siamese Court, which Fields, Osgood and Company did not publish until December 1870, and which Clemens did not buy and read until sometime in 1871.56 Finally, chapter 7 was very likely given over to something that Clemens eventually left out of the book entirely—a description of Overland City (or Julesburg), “the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.”57

On or about 28 September (one week after finishing the “7th or 8th chap.”) Clemens may also have written to his former colleagues on the Enterprise for help similar to the kind he had asked of Hezekiah Hosmer. The Enterprise reported:

Mark Twain’s new book is to be all about his experience in California and Nevada and coming to this coast by the Overland stages. It will be a volume of 600 pages octavo. He has started in on it, but at last accounts was two days’ journey the [begin page 819] other side of Salt Lake with it; so we need not get excited here about the “chief amang us” for some time to come. His book will be out in April next.58

Two days’ journey “the other side” of Salt Lake City put Clemens on the ninth day, crossing the Continental Divide, which he described in chapter 12. He had not, presumably, heard yet from Hosmer on the subject of Slade, and he would leave chapters 10 and 11 incomplete until March.

The evidence of the next few months suggests that Clemens was having difficulty writing much beyond chapter 12. A dozen years later, he recalled that his problem was caused by his having given up smoking “during a year and a half”:

As I never permitted myself to regret this abstinence, I experienced no sort of inconvenience from it. I wrote nothing but occasional magazine articles during pastime, and as I never wrote one except under strong impulse, I observed no lapse of facility. But by and by I sat down with a contract behind me to write a book of five or six hundred pages—the book called “Roughing it”—and then I found myself most seriously obstructed. I was three weeks writing six chapters. Then I gave up the fight, resumed my three hundred cigars, burned the six chapters, and wrote the book in three months, without any bother or difficulty.59

Although it shortens the time span, this recollection seems to be an accurate description of his difficulty, though perhaps not of its true or only cause. At any rate, Clemens did not resume his daily cigars until early 1871. (In mid-December 1870 he was still permitting himself to smoke only “from 3 till 5 on Sunday afternoons.”)60 The “lapse of facility” in composition actually lasted from September 1870 through most of March 1871.

On 29 September, at about ten o’clock in the morning, Emma Nye died in the Clemenses’ Buffalo bedroom. Exhausted by the ordeal, Clemens and his wife left for a week’s visit with his sister and mother (who had recently moved into their new home in Fredonia, New York), returning to Buffalo on 6 or 7 October. (His sister, Pamela, returned this visit shortly thereafter, staying for several weeks, at least in part because Olivia’s first pregnancy was then in its seventh month.) While in Fredonia, Clemens sent Bliss a contribution (not identified) for his trade newspaper—but work on the book had obviously been interrupted, and his attention began increasingly to be diverted to other projects.61 A week after returning to Buffalo, he wrote Bliss that he had “a notion to let the Galaxy publishers have a volume of old sketches for a ‘Mark Twain’s Annual—1871’—provided [begin page 820] they will pay me about 25 per cent. . . . What do you think? Write me at once—& don’t discourage me.” But he also confessed that he was “driveling along tolerably fairly on the book—getting off from 12 to 20 pages (MS.) a day. I am writing it so carefully that I’ll never have to alter a sentence, I guess, but it is very slow work. I like it well, as far as I have got. The people will read it.” On the same day he answered a question from Mrs. Fairbanks, implying that he had made less progress than he had expected: “My book is not named yet. Have to write it first—you wouldn’t make a garment for an animal till you had seen the animal, would you? I am getting along ever so slowly—so many things have hindered me.” He had not written to her earlier, he said, “because I am in such a terrible whirl with Galaxy & book work. . . . I never want to see a pen again till the task-hour strikes next day.”62

Clemens assumed that the burden (or lure) of writing for the magazine was affecting his capacity to sustain interest in the book. Five days later he told Francis Church that he would probably retire from the Galaxy in April “because the Galaxy work crowds book work so much.” But he did not resign immediately, he said, because he was “very fond of doing the Memoranda, & take a live interest in it always—& so I hang on & hang on & give no notice.” On 26 October, when he read Bliss’s inevitable objection to the book of Galaxy sketches, he replied that it was “too late now to get out the annual” anyway. But he took issue with Bliss’s notion that “writing for the Galaxy” hurt the sale of his books: “I cannot believe it. It is a good advertisement for me—as you show when you desire me to quit the Galaxy & go on your paper.” Still, if someone could prove that he was harming his reputation by writing for the Galaxy, he would “draw out of that & write for no periodical—for certainly I have chewed & drank & sworn, habitually, & have discarded them all, & am well aware that a bad thing should be killed entirely—tapering off is a foolish & dangerous business.”63

That Clemens was beginning to feel inhibited, if not yet “seriously obstructed,” in his efforts to write may also be inferred from his pursuing research into Slade and other matters. When he saw Bliss’s first issue of the Author’s Sketch Book at the end of October, he found several promising sources among the books advertised:

Say, now, Bliss, if I were a publisher, I would send you a book occasionally, but here I am suffering for the “Col’s” book, & for “Beyond the Missippi” & for the “Indian Races,” & especially for the “Uncivilized Races,” & you never say “boo” [begin page 821] about sending them. You must give me the “Uncivilized Races & the “Col’s,” anyhow.64

Bliss must have sent some of these books, but the request shows that Clemens had probably not drafted chapter 14 or 15, since passages in each suggest his familiarity with one of the books he asked for: Albert Deane Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi. He had certainly not completed chapter 19, which explicitly refers to another of them, John George Wood’s The Uncivilized Races, or Natural History of Man. Clemens owned and annotated a copy of Wood’s book—and no doubt of Richardson’s as well, although his copy is not known to survive—in addition to a copy of (Colonel) Albert S. Evans’s Our Sister Republic: A Gala Trip through Tropical Mexico in 1869–70; all three books were published in 1869 or 1870 by the American Publishing Company or its subsidiaries.65

Soon there were additional distractions. During Pamela’s visit she had apparently suggested that if Orion were to succeed with the “machine” he was trying to invent, he needed a job that would give him more free time. On the last day of October, therefore, Clemens wrote Bliss, casually proposing quite another sort of favor.

Say, for instance—I have a brother about 45—an old & able writer & editor. He is night editor of the Daily St Louis Democrat, & is gradually putting his eyes out at it. He has served four years as Secretary of State of Nevada, having been appointed to the place by Mr. Lincoln—he had all the financial affairs of the Territory in his hands during that time & came out with the name of an able, honest & every way competent officer. He is well read in law, & I think understands book-keeping. He is a very valuable man for any sort of office work, but not worth a cent outside as a business man. Now I would like to get him out of night-work but haven’t any other sort to offer him myself. Have you got a place for him at $100 or $150 a month, in your office? Or has your brother? Let me hear from you shortly, & do try & see if you can’t give him such a place.

In a final paragraph, Clemens made sure Bliss got the point: “When is your paper coming out? Did you ever receive the article I sent you for it from Fredonia? Tell me.”66 Two days later, Bliss cheerfully took the hint: “Yours recd Yes I got your article. ‘It is accepted’ (a. la. N.Y. Ledger) Thanks for same— . . . How would your Bro. do for an editor of it?” Clemens immediately sent this reply to Orion, urging him to “throw up that cursed night work & take this editorship.”

[begin page 822] Bliss offered me in effect $4,000 a year to edit take this berth he offers you—& so he has confidence in his little undertaking. He is shrewdly counting on two things, now—one is, by creating a position for you, he will keep me from “whoring after strange gods,” which is Scripture for deserting to other publishers; &, 2d, get an occasional article out of me for the paper, a thing which would be exceedingly occasional otherwise. He is wise. He is one of the smartest business men in America, & I am only a dullard when I try to pierce conceive all the advantages he expects to derive from having you in the employ of the Am. Pub. Co. But all right—I am willing.67

On 7 November, Olivia gave birth prematurely to Langdon. Four days later, Clemens told Orion that his wife was “very sick,” and that he did not believe the baby would “live five days.” At the same time he thanked Orion for sending “such full Nevada notes—though as they have just come & I am stealing a few minutes from the sick room to answer a pile of business letters, I haven’t read a sentence of them yet.” These notes have not been found, and Clemens may have done no more than glance at them; in early April 1871 he admitted to Orion that he had misplaced them.68

Olivia’s older sister, Susan Crane, had been visiting the Clemenses when Langdon arrived, and she remained to help care for Olivia and the baby until 12 November, when her place was taken briefly by Mrs. Fairbanks, visiting from Cleveland. On 19 November, after Fairbanks’s departure, Clemens wrote his mother-in-law that Olivia “lets me go up to the study & work, (which I ought not to do & yet I am so dreadfully behind hand that I get blue as soon as I am idle).” Later that month, he reported that he worked “in my particular den, from 11 AM till 3 P.M., rain or shine.”69 Even so, it is unlikely that during this month he advanced the narrative much past chapter 19, in which he could now make use of Wood’s Uncivilized Races. Most of his time was instead devoted to installments for the Galaxy—and part of it surely went to hatching plans for other projects, the first of which emerged in a 30 November letter that asked Bliss for an advance of $1500:

I have put my greedy hands on the best man in America for my purpose & shall start him to the diamond fields of South Africa within a fortnight, at my expense.

I shall write a book of his experiences for next spring, (600 pp 8vo.,) spring of ’72 & write it just as if I had been through it all myself, but will explain in the preface that this is done merely to give it life & sparkle. & reality.

Demanding absolute secrecy and a royalty of 10 percent, Clemens went so far as to copy this letter (lest anyone steal the idea) before sending the original to Bliss. So completely did his new idea eclipse the western book that only in the next-to-last postscript of this long letter did he remember [begin page 823] to mention, somewhat lamely, that “Mrs Fairbanks (my best critic) likes my new book well, as far as I have got.” (Fairbanks had returned home more than a week earlier.) Clemens’s infatuation with his book-by-proxy scheme betrays the inventor’s pride in his invention, but the invention itself suggests how he may have diagnosed his problem with the western book—that is, as a lack of interest, due in part to the distance in time of his experiences. “I don’t care two cents whether there is a diamond in all Africa or not,” he wrote Bliss, “the adventurous narrative & its wild, new fascination is what I want.”70 The diamond-mine book (which was never really begun, let alone published) now seems a chimera, but it would be hard to find a more succinct expression of Clemens’s frustration with his western materials—especially if one considers that he obviously believed, for almost a month, that he could write about someone else’s recent adventures more easily than he could about his own relatively remote ones.

By Clemens’s own account, it would be several years before he learned that virtually any book he started to write was “pretty sure to get tired, along about the middle, and refuse to go on with its work until its powers and its interest should have been refreshed by a rest and its depleted stock of raw materials reinforced by lapse of time.” In 1906 Clemens recalled encountering such an interruption at “page 400” of the manuscript for Tom Sawyer, where “the story made a sudden and determined halt and refused to proceed another step.” That was probably in 1872, when he had written only about 100 pages, although he would eventually write another 400 before being interrupted by a second “halt.” What he could do about such interruptions became clear only after he began writing those 400 pages in 1874:

When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon-hole two years I took it out one day and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work at other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on.71

In the fall of 1870, Clemens knew that he was “obstructed” in the composition of his western book, but it is unlikely that he understood why or what to do about it. He seems to have alternated between pushing stubbornly ahead (trying in various ways to make himself write) and switching off, with more or less deliberation, to “other things.” Just three days after [begin page 824] announcing his diamond-mine scheme to Bliss, for instance, he declined an invitation to write for the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette on the grounds that

work is piled on me in toppling pyramids, now—which figure represents a book which I am not getting out as fast as I ought—& I am obliged to say that I could not take half a column more on any terms. I would like exceedingly well to write for the Gazette (the only Weekly paper I ever wanted to own,) but as we steamboatmen used to say, “I’ve got my load.”72

Yet “loaded” though he was, just one week later he had launched another project, quite unrelated to the western book, fully expecting to complete it before the month was out. On 7 or 8 December he telegraphed his Galaxy publishers, offering them a “pamphlet” that he wanted to publish in time for the holidays. On the morning of 9 December, Isaac Sheldon telegraphed his reply: “We will publish it & give you half of all profits.” In a letter written the same day, Sheldon promised to “do our very best as to getting it out in time &c &c,” but warned that it was “now of course late in the season to get out a book and there are always delays we can never calculate on.”73 This “book” became the fifty-page pamphlet known as Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, which would not be published, as it turned out, until early March 1871.

The day after Sheldon’s telegram, 10 December, Clemens “shot off to New York to issue a pamphlet, & staid over 7 days,” not returning to Buffalo until 17 December. While in New York, he stayed at the Albemarle Hotel and (as he later confided to Twichell) “smoked a week, day & night.”74 Free (at least momentarily) from domestic concerns, and fully occupied with projects other than the western book, Clemens soon took the opportunity to postpone his original deadline. He spent the week only in part on the pamphlet, for which he sought to hire an illustrator, Edward F. Mullen, eventually settling for Henry Louis Stephens instead.75 He began his week in negotiations with Charles Henry Webb, from whom he succeeded in buying control of the Jumping Frog. On 11 December, he wrote an obituary letter about his old friend Reuel Gridley, whose “Famous Sanitary Flour Sack” he would treat at some length in chapter 45 of Roughing It. He gave this letter (signed “s. l. c.”) to the New York Tribune, which published it two days later.76 Perhaps while delivering this manuscript to the Tribune offices, Clemens called on several professional colleagues, including managing editor Whitelaw Reid and Reid’s first lieutenant, John [begin page 825] Rose Greene Hassard, as well as a recent addition to the Tribune editorial staff, John Milton Hay.

4. Distractions, December 1870–March 1871

Clemens had become better acquainted with Hay through their mutual acquaintance in Buffalo, David Gray. Raised on the banks of the Mississippi, Hay shared Clemens’s midwestern roots and to some extent his literary tastes and ambitions. In December 1874, when Clemens published his first installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi” in the Atlantic, Hay declared it “perfect—no more nor less. I don’t see how you do it. I knew all that, every word of it—passed as much time on the levee as you ever did, knew the same crowd and saw the same scenes—but I could not have remembered one word of it all. You have the two greatest gifts of the writer, memory and imagination.”77 At this time in 1870, Hay was enduring a mixed reaction to “Little-Breeches,” which he had published (signed with his initials only) in the Tribune for 19 November, and which had since been widely reprinted. In a conversation that must have occurred during Clemens’s week-long visit to New York between 10 and 17 December (in 1905 Clemens remembered only that it had been “in 1870 or ’71”), they discussed this reaction. Clemens recalled that “Hay made reference to mention of the current notion that he was an imitator; he did not enlarge upon it, but he was not better pleased by it than you or I would be.” And Clemens also mentioned that his talk with Hay was “incidentally” the occasion of his “getting acquainted with Horace Greeley”:

It was difficult to get an interview with him, for he was a busy man, he was irascible, and he had an aversion to strangers; but I not only had the good fortune to meet him, but also had the great privilege of hearing him talk. The Tribune was in its early home, at that time, and Hay was a leader-writer on its staff. I had an appointment with him, and went there to look him up. I did not know my way, and entered Mr. Greeley’s room by mistake. I recognized his back, and stood mute and rejoicing. After a little, he swung slowly around in his chair, with his head slightly tilted backward and the great moons of his spectacles glaring with intercepted light; after about a year—though it may have been less, perhaps—he arranged his firm mouth with care and said with virile interest:

“Well? What the hell do you want?”78

[begin page 826] It is not too much to suppose that for Clemens, such gruff treatment demanded revenge—or at least poetic justice.

On 13 December, Clemens wrote Bliss again about the diamond-mine book, this time inviting him to come to New York to discuss it, which Bliss promptly did.79 And at about the same time, Clemens met with his intended proxy for the diamond-mine book, John Henry Riley, who had come up from Washington for that purpose. Later in the week Clemens received an invitation to join Whitelaw Reid, and “one or two friends, not more” over a “quiet bottle of wine” at the Union League Club, but by then he was too busy to accept.80

Well aware that he was progressing too slowly to meet his deadline for the western book, Clemens proposed to Bliss that he (rather than the Galaxy publishers) first publish a sketchbook in 1871, postponing the western book until later the same year—the very alternative he had had in mind since at least January 1870. Bliss tentatively accepted this change, in part because Clemens promised to discuss it further, in Hartford, as soon as his New York business was over. But instead of going to Hartford, Clemens returned to Buffalo, where on the afternoon of 17 December he telegraphed Bliss: “Got homesick. Will come shortly with sketches & manuscript.” Bliss replied that he was “most disappointed at your not coming here, & so was Twitchell— . . . Your Brother is here & we are getting at work in earnest. . . . Let me know about Mss. & also about the sketches & come on & have a talk if possible.”81 These references (and Bliss’s reply, quoted below) establish that Clemens expected to work on both books simultaneously, which meant submitting the western book in sections, as he completed them. But it would be mid-March before any manuscript for the western book was sent to Bliss, and early June before Clemens himself carried a later part of it to Hartford.

On 20 December, Clemens returned to Bliss the signed contract for the diamond-mine book: “Riley is my man—did I introduce him to you in New York? He sails Jan. 4 for Africa. . . . Riley is perfectly honorable & reliable in every possible way—his simple promise is as good as any man’s oath. I have roomed with him long, & have known him years. He has ‘roughed it’ in many savage countries & is as tough as a pine-knot.”82 Two days later he acknowledged the $1500 advance “for the foreign expedition,” [begin page 827] then launched into great detail about the sketchbook, trying to goad Bliss into immediate action:

You’d better go to canvassing for the vol. of sketches now, hadn’t you? You must illustrate it—& mind you, the man to do the choicest of the pictures is Mullin—the Sisters are reforming him & he is sadly in need of work & money. Write to Launt Thompson the Sculptor, (Albemarle Hotel, New York) about him. I did so want him for that satire but didn’t know he was sober now & in hospital.

Make out a contract for the sketch-book (7½ per cent.) & mail to me.

I think the sketch-book should be as profusely illustrated as the Innocents.

To-day I arranged enough sketches to make 200 134 pages of the book (200 words on a page, I estimated—size of De Witt Talmage’s new book of rubbish.) I shall go right on till I have finished selecting, & then write a new sketch or so. One hundred of the pages selected to-day are scarcely known.83

Bliss replied cautiously, on 28 December: “Yours of 22nd rec’d. Glad to hear you are progressing with the Books— . . . Yes we will have Mullen illustrate the sketch book all right. . . . Are you coming on? Will canvass for Sketch book as soon as Prospectus is ready for it.”84 Clemens would need to be reminded more than once in 1871 that canvassing for a book could not begin until its prospectus was ready, which required a major portion of the manuscript. Oblivious to this hint, he replied on 3 January, trying to turn up the pressure on Bliss: “Name the Sketch book ‘Mark Twain’s Sketches’ & go on canvassing like mad. Because if you don’t hurry it will tread on the heels of the big book next August. In the course of a week I can have most of the matter ready for you I think. Am working like sin on it.85 The next day he sent Bliss the manuscripts for two (possibly three) “new” sketches, specifying that “the one about the liar is to be first one in the book,” and insisting that Orion make security copies for all of them before they were sent to the artist for illustration. On 5 January he added a postscript: “The curious beasts & great contrasts in this Pre-duluge article offer a gorgeous chance for the artist’s fancy & ingenuity,” he wrote. “Send both sketches to Mullen—he is the man to do them, I guess. Launt Thompson, Albemarle Hotel, will find him when wanted.”86 The “Pre-duluge article” was an extract from the still incomplete “Noah’s Ark book.” The “one about the liar” was undoubtedly the Sandwich Islands sketch about Markiss, soon to be published in the Galaxy as “About a Remarkable Stranger” and eventually reprinted as chapter 77 of Roughing It. (The third “new” sketch, if any, has not been identified, although it may have been one that Clemens had listed as “Sailor Story,” and that may in turn have become chapter 50 in Roughing It.) Clemens presumably wrote [begin page 828] these “new sketches” only after preparing clippings of those he intended to reprint from the Express and the Galaxy, including “Around the World” letters 1, 3, 4, and 5, as well as “The Facts in the Great Land Slide Case”—all listed in the table of contents he drafted for the sketchbook, but all used ultimately in Roughing It.87

This “halt” in the composition of Roughing It gave Clemens’s “tank” time to refill. But it also gave him time to reflect on the hazards of his subject. The West, which in May 1869 had seemed to have “scope” and timeliness because of the recent “completion of the Pacific RR,” had by early 1871 been so often written about that Clemens could rightly call it hackneyed.88 In 1869–70 alone his fellow journalists had published half a dozen books on western travel, all based in part on sketches they had written for newspapers or magazines. Prominent among these were Richardson’s revised edition of Beyond the Mississippi, Samuel Bowles’s Our New West), J. Ross Browne’s Adventures in the Apache Country, and Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Heart of the Continent. Clemens must have been made increasingly aware that the West as described by passing visitors was no longer a novelty.

Clemens was also conscious of the risks he ran in renouncing journalism to write books—an intention he recorded as early as 26 October, and firmly embraced by 3 March 1871.89 John Hay was also pondering a career in literature. “The Western School” (his 27 December editorial in the Tribune) was his manifesto for a group in which he implicitly included himself.

There will not be many writers who will equal the contagious drollery of Mark Twain. It may be long before we find another that can touch so deftly the hidden sources of smiles and tears—and that can give us so graphic a picture of Western living in a style so vivid and so pure that we may call it in praise and not in criticism “almost the true Dickens”—as Mr. Harte has done. But there are many good and honest literary workmen who have grown up in the great West, not unmindful of its strange and striking lessons. Some of them, Howells among the best, have already given some earnest of the promising future. Others are just rising into notice. Let them be received with candor and judged by what they say—not by what others have said.90

[begin page 829] Even as Clemens worked to complete the printer’s copy for the sketchbook, Hay published the second of his Pike County ballads, “Jim Bludso (of the Prairie Belle),” in the 5 January Tribune, again signing it simply “J. H.” Clemens immediately reprinted the poem in the Buffalo Express and—in a letter not known to survive—wrote Hay praising it, but also suggesting a way to improve its authenticity. Hay replied on 9 January with a draft that adopted Clemens’s suggestion. He also alluded to their previous discussion of the hostile reaction to “Little-Breeches”: “The opposition is getting beaten out I think. Some of the heathen still rage furiously and the words of their mouths are ‘ribaldry’ ‘plagiarism B.H’ and ‘vulgar blasphemy.’ But there are compensations. ‘The Atlantic’ and Harpers and the Aldine have all asked me for some more foul vulgarity—and alack! I have not time to write it.”91 Clemens probably received this reply just before leaving for Cleveland, where he had to be by 11 January. On that day, he wrote Hay extending an invitation to join him (and probably David Gray) in a new “enterprise”—presumably a new journal. On 14 January, Hay declined this offer, but added:

I cannot forbear telling you how much I have been encouraged and gratified by your generous commendation of my verses. I have sometimes thought that the public appreciation was a compound of ignorance and surprise—but when you, who know all about the Western life and character, look at one of my little pictures and say it is true, it is comfortable beyond measure.

Another thing has rather tickled me this morning. No New York paper except Wilkes’ has ever copied my rhymes—they were frightfully low, you know. The last London Spectator prints “Little-B.” with editorial compliments.92

Hay’s experience in publishing “low” verse (Pike County vernacular used to disguise a subversive point of view)93 doubtless warned Clemens that he, too, might be accused of “foul vulgarity” for what he had written, or planned to write, about the West. He had, in fact, just been accused by [begin page 830] Every Saturday of plagiarizing Bret Harte.94 And it was against Harte’s work that both he and Hay could expect to be judged. According to the Philadelphia Bulletin:

The poetry and prose of Bret Harte have made their great hit chiefly by reason of the novelty and marked uniqueness of their style. The style, as Mr. Harte created it, is singular for its delicate handling of rough themes and rough language. There is a subtle refinement thrown over the coarsest phases of California life, that recommends itself to the most cultivated taste, and has introduced Mr. Harte’s books wherever there is the power to discriminate between vulgarity and the poetry of vulgar things.

But it has grown to be a great affliction that, all over the country, pert imitators of Bret Harte have sprung up, thrusting their pretensions to rival his exquisite art upon the public, and only succeeding in the production of a mixture of coarse vulgarity and profanity, which this low grade of scribblers fancy to be like the poetry of Bret Harte. . . . Harper’s Weekly has a poet named John Hay, who is a victim of this Harte disease. He is a master of slang, in its lowest, vulgarest, most profane forms. He fancies that he is imitating Bret Harte, while he is disgusting all intelligent readers, not only by his stupid ignorance of what constitutes the glamour of Harte’s work, but also by the common grossness of both thought and language.95

But Hay’s experience must also have been encouraging, because he clearly had won a large popular audience as well as the more enlightened one represented by Howells at the Atlantic Monthly. Two days after Hay published “The Western School,” he wrote to ask Howells:

Have you ever seen a piece of dialect I wrote,—“Little Breeches”? It has had an appalling run. It is published every day in hundreds of papers. Two political papers in the West have issued illustrated editions of it. I mention this to show what a ravenous market there is for anything of the sort. I can’t do it—but you could. That Western novel of yours must not be much longer delayed.96

It is a fair guess that Hay said much the same thing to Clemens about his book on the Far West (“I can’t do it—but you could”).97

Even before he received Hay’s reply, however, Clemens had decided to give up journalism. On 14 January he told Webb: “I dassent. I made up my mind solidly day before yesterday that I would draw out of the Galaxy with the April No. & write no more for any periodical—except, at long [begin page 831] intervals a screed that I happened to dearly want to write.”98 Meanwhile, Orion finished copying the two (or three) manuscript sketches within a week of their arrival in Hartford, and on 16 January Bliss set off with them to New York, intending to hire Mullen. He returned to Hartford a week later, on 23 January, without succeeding. Orion reported that Bliss had “hunted for Mullin and Lant Thompson, or whatever his name is, two days. He found the latter’s office in the hands of the plasterers. He is going back to-morrow and will find Mullin.” But Bliss clearly had his doubts about the publication strategy Clemens had proposed to him. Even before going to search for Mullen, therefore, he allowed Orion to tell his brother that he, Bliss, “hardly” knew “whether it is good judgment to throw the Sketch Book on the market & interfere with the Innocents.”99 On 25 January, Orion reiterated Bliss’s view: “About the sketch-book interfering with the Innocents—Bliss says he is going on with the sketch-book, and you will see which is right. The substance is that the new book will outsell the old one, and few people want to buy two books from the same author at the same time.”100 Even before this letter reached him, however, Clemens had conceded the point:

I believe you are more than half right—it is calculated to do more harm than good, no doubt. So if you like the idea, suppose we defer the Sketch Book till the last. That is, get out the big California & Plains book first of August; then the Diamond book first March or April 1872—& then the Sketch book the following fall. Does that strike you favorably?101

Three days later, he had developed this scheme into an elaborate but quite unrealistic plan to publish the western book as early as May—even though he had scarcely begun to write it. The inference is all but inescapable that Clemens was trying to force himself to write:

Tell you what I’ll do, if you say so. Will write night & day & send you 200 pages of MS. every week (of the big book on California, Nevada & the Plains) & place finish it all up the 15th of April if you can without fail issue the book on the 15th of May—putting the sketch book over till another time. For this reason: my popularity is booming, now, & we ought to take the very biggest advantage of it.

I have to go to Washington next Tuesday & stay a week, but will send you 150 MS pages before going, if you say so. It seems to me that I would much rather do this. Telegraph me now, right away—don’t wait to write. Next Wednesday I’ll meet you in N. Y—& if you can’t come there I’ll run up & see you.

You could get a cord of subscriptions taken & advertising done between now & April 15. I have a splendid idea of the sagacity of this proposition.

Telegraph me right off.102

[begin page 832] No manuscript was sent, or presumably called for. On Tuesday, 31 January, Clemens telegraphed “E. Bliss or Frank” before taking the train from Buffalo to New York: “Have an appointment at Grand Hotel eleven tomorrow can you be there at noon Clemens.”103

That evening or early the next morning, Clemens checked into the Grand Hotel and, presumably on the morning of 1 February, met with Francis Church to negotiate a resolution of his Galaxy contract. Then he met with Bliss to discuss the western book.104 They evidently agreed to issue it in May, just as Clemens had proposed in his most recent letter, even though there was scarcely time to make such a deadline. Clemens also promised to contribute something from the book manuscript to the American Publisher, the first issue of which was to appear within a month.

On the evening of 2 February, Clemens took the train to Washington, where he planned, among other things, to lobby for legislation affecting the Langdon estate.105 On 6 February, Susan Crane, who was staying with Olivia and the baby, wrote him in Washington:

Livy has consented to allow me to write you that she is not well, and has not been since you went away. She has had some fever, no appetite, no power to sleep, & great depression of spirits. Livy did not like that, so I did not say it. . . .

Now why I write is this, or why Livy allows me to write. If your business would take you over into next week, Livy feels that it would be almost unendurable but if your knowing these facts, would help you to close it this week, or defer it, she is willing to have you know how she is.106

Olivia had typhoid fever, although no one yet realized it. Clemens was depressed by the news of his wife’s condition, but stayed in Washington to attend a dinner given in his honor by Samuel S. Cox (a Langdon family friend) on the evening of 7 February. The dinner was interrupted by a telegram from Buffalo, which summoned Clemens home. The danger of his wife’s illness was clear, and he sought frantically to cancel his “Memoranda” for the March Galaxy, lest its publication make him seem to jest in the presence of death.107 For the same reason, he telegraphed Bliss not to print the sketch he had sent in October for the Publisher. Throughout the next week Olivia’s condition threatened to prove fatal: “We cannot tell what the result is going to be. Sometimes I have hope for my wife,—so I have at this moment—but most of the time it seems to me impossible [begin page 833] that she can get well. I cannot go into particulars—the subject is too dreadful.”108

One week later, however, she was guardedly better, and Clemens was again trying to work on the western book. “Return to me, per express, the ‘Liars’ & the other 2 sketches—right away” he wrote Orion. “Livy is very, very slowly & slightly improving, but it is not possible to say whether she is out of danger or not—but we all consider that she is not.” The same day he gave an equally sober report to Whitelaw Reid: “My wife is still dangerously ill with typhoid fever, & we watch with her night & day hardly daring to prophecy what the result will be.”109

One week later still, Clemens had decided not only to leave journalism, but to leave Buffalo, ostensibly on his doctor’s advice.110 He put both the house (which had been a wedding gift from Olivia’s father) and his share in the Express up for sale. “I quit the Galaxy with the current number,” he told Riley on 3 March, “& shall write no more for any periodical. Am offered great prices, but it’s no go. Shall simply write books.”111 On 4 March he replied to Orion, who had returned the “Liars” sketch and one or two others, and who (at Bliss’s suggestion) had urged him to begin sending book manuscript—at least in part so the next issue of the Publisher could fulfill the promise of a contribution from Mark Twain.112 Clemens explained that he had wanted the “Liars” sketch back in order to “work it into the California book—which I shall do. But day before yesterday I concluded to go out of the Galaxy on the strength of it—& so I have turned it into the last Memoranda I shall ever write & published it as a ‘specimen chapter’ of my forthcoming book.” He made it clear that he had broken with the Galaxy, and would not write for it now under any circumstances. Somewhat casually, however, he also seemed to say that he was unable, or unwilling, to write anything for the Publisher, at least for the time being:

Now do try & leave me clear out of the Publisher for the present, for I am endangering my reputation by writing too much—I want to get out of the public view [begin page 834] for a while. I will am still nursing Livy night & day & cannot write anything. I am nearly worn out. We shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattrass then,) & stay there till I have finished the California book—say three months. But I can’t begin work right away when I get there—must have a week’s rest, for I have been through 30 days’ terrific siege. That makes it after the middle of March before I can go fairly to work—& then I’ll have to hump myself & not lose a moment. You & Bliss just put yourselves in my place & you will see that my hands are full & more than full. When I told Bliss in N. Y. that I would write something for the Publisher I could not know that I was just about to lose fifty days. Do you see the difference it makes?

In short, Clemens acknowledged that he had written nothing in February (twenty-eight days), and did not expect to write anything in March until he had gone to Elmira and taken a week’s rest (another twenty-one days). Still, it is clear from the same letter that he remained sympathetic to Bliss’s needs for the Publisher:

Just as soon as ever I can, I will send some of the book MS., but right in the b first chapter I have got to alter the whole style of one of my characters & re-write him clear through to where I am now. It is no fool of a job I can tell you, but the book will be greatly bettered by it. Hold on a few days—four or five,—& I will see if I can get a few chapters fixed & send to Bliss.

I have offered this dwelling house & the Express for sale, & when we go to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home till the book is finished, but writing a book, & reap if it proves to be a poor book we have very little doubt that Hartford will be the place. We are almost certain of that.113

Bliss wrote on 7 March, evidently before this letter had arrived, having “just returned from N.Y.” He identified two reasons for wanting the book manuscript as soon as possible:

I was in hopes Orion found something from you on my return but poor Ori says he has nothing from you relating to matters. I asked him to write you a few days ago in regard to the Ms. for the book. We ought soon to get our artists on it so as to have them to do all in good style—What do you think about it?

If we are to get it out in May it must soon be here. Now then if you have got as far as to give us something I think it would be well to get at it very soon. And now about an article for our paper. We trust you will not disappoint us this month. We have made a good start & got well underway & we want to keep on steadily. Send us on as soon as possible something good for it & send your bill in it & we will send check at once. Am happy to hear your wife is out of danger & getting on which I do through Mr. Twitchell.

Hoping to hear from you soon on these subjects.114

As Clemens predicted, within five days of his 4 March letter he had finished his alteration of “the whole style” of one of his “characters,” at least up through what was then chapter 8. The character in need of alteration was almost certainly the narrator himself. New (and old) evidence discussed [begin page 835] below suggests that Clemens was pruning out some too-knowing remarks of a “tenderfoot” version of himself.115

At any rate, Clemens was by this time clearly reconciled to publishing one or more chapters in the Publisher:

Tell Bliss “all right”—I will try to give him a chapter from the new book every month or nearly every month, for the Publisher.

I have got several chapters (168 pages MS.) revised & ready for printers & artists, but for the sake of security shall get somebody to copy it & then send the original to him.116

The next day, however, Clemens reported having sent only “160 MS pages . . . to be copied,” expecting to “have it back next Tuesday,” when he would “ship it to Bliss & mark a chapter to be transferred to the Columns of the Publisher.”117 Clemens may simply have held back or destroyed eight pages. But if the reconstruction in Figure 1 is approximately correct, “160 MS pages” would not have taken him through the end of what he was then calling chapter 8 (later 7, and the start of 8), so there is at least one other possibility—that he mistakenly wrote “160” for “168.” Such an error seems somewhat more likely because the conjectured end of chapter 8, the pony-express incident, clearly was copied at this time along with what preceded it.118

Although Clemens had certainly drafted sections of his manuscript beyond chapter 9, he must have left chapter 10 unfinished, for in the same 10 March letter he begged Orion to

sit down right away & torture your memory & write down in minute detail every fact & exploit in the desperado Slade’s life that we heard on the Overland—& also describe his appearance & conversation as we saw him at Rocky Ridge station at breakfast. I want to make up a telling chapter from it for the book—& will put it in the Publisher too, as soon as the agents begin to canvass.

Orion promptly met this request on 11 March.119 Clemens incorporated most of his brother’s details almost immediately into chapter 10, which, [begin page 836] together with chapter 11 (presumably drafted earlier, upon receipt of Dimsdale’s book), completed the first batch of book manuscript he would send to Bliss—probably on 18 March.

Before Orion’s letter about Slade was written, however, Clemens received two letters from Hartford—one from Orion dated 8 March, and one from Bliss (now missing), probably written on the same day—making reply (but also clearly overreacting) to his casual refusal of 4 March to write for the Publisher. (Clemens had retracted this refusal almost immediately, and without prompting, in the two letters written on 9 and 10 March, before he received this double blast from Orion and Bliss on 10 March.) A sample of Orion’s badgering will explain, almost by itself, the sulfurous reaction Clemens had to it. Orion vowed, among other things, that he and Bliss would

hunt up any information you want, and do anything else you want done, if you will only write. He is in earnest. He is decidedly worked up about it. He says, put yourself in our place. A new enterprise, in which “Twain” was to be a feature, and so widely advertised. He receives congratulations in New York at the Lotus Club that you and Hay are to write for the paper. Everybody likes it. It starts out booming. Are you going to kick the pail over? Think of yourself as writing for no periodical except the Publisher. . . . Squarely, you we must have something from you or we run the risk of going to the dickens. Bliss says he will pay you, but we must have something every number. If you only give us a half column, or even a quarter of a column——give a joke or an anecdote, or anything you please—but give us something, so that the people may not brand us as falsifiers, and say we cried “Twain,” “Twain,” when we had no “Twain.” If you don’t feel like writing anything, copy something from your book. Are you going to let the Galaxy have a chapter and give us nothing? If you don’t feel like taking the trouble of copying from the book say we may select something. We shall have time enough if you send some chapters in four or five days, as we you proposed.120

Clemens wrote on the envelope of this missive, “Still urging MSS.” But he fully vented his unhappiness with it in a long letter, begun on 11 March and finished after “two days ‘to cool’ ”:

Now why do you & Bliss go on urging me to make promises? I will not keep them. I have suffered damnation itself in the trammels of periodical writing and I will not appear once a month nor once in three months, either. in the Publisher nor any other periodical . . . .

You talk as if I am responsible for your newspaper venture. If I am I want it to stop right here—for I will be damned darned if I, am not going to have another year of harassment about periodical writing. There isn’t money enough between hell & Hartford to hire me to write once a month for any periodical. . . .

Why, confound it, when & how has this original little promise of mine (to “drop in an occasional screed along with the Company’s other authors,”) grown into these formidable dimensions—whereby I am the father & sustainer of the paper & you have actually committed yourselves, & me too with advertisements looking in that direction? . . .

I don’t want to even see my name anywhere in print for 3 months to come. As for being the high chief contributor & main card of the Publisher, I won’t hear of it for a single moment. I’d rather break my pen & stop writing just where I am. Our [begin page 837] income is plenty good enough without working for more; & sometimes I think I’m a sort of fool for going on working, anyhow . . . .

I must & will keep shady & quiet till Bret Harte simmers down a little & then I mean to go up head again & stay there until I have published the two books already contracted for & just one more beside, which latter shall make a ripping sensation or I have overestimated the possibilities of my subject . . . .

The man who says the least about me in any paper for 3 months to come will do me the greatest favor. I tell you I mean to go slow. I will “top” Bret Harte again or bust. But I can’t do it by dangling eternally in the public view.

In spite of his irritation, Clemens added a postscript to the letter: “Shall ship some book MS. next Wednesday”121—that is, on 15 March—a deadline which he did not quite meet, postponing his shipment until 18 March, the day he and Olivia left Buffalo for Elmira.

On 17 March Clemens replied to Bliss, who had been trying to resolve their differences by rational explanation.122 His reply suggested that rational explanation was irrelevant. It also confirmed that his progress on the western book had been minimal since December.

Out of this chaos of my household I snatch a moment to reply. We are packing up, to-night, & tomorrow I shall take my wife to Elmira on a mattrass, with—for she can neither sit up nor stand—& will not for a week or two. . . . In three whole months I have hardly written a page of MS. You do not know what it is to be in a state of absolute frenzy—desperation. I had rather die twice over than repeat the last six months of my life.

Now do you see?—I want rest. I want to get clear away from all hamperings, all harassments. I am going to shut myself up in a farm-house alone, on top an Elmira hill, & write—on my book. I will see no company, & worry about nothing. I never will make another promise again of any kind, that can be avoided, so help me God.

Take my name clear out of the list of contributors, & never mention me again—& then I shall feel that the fetters are off & I am free. I am to furnish an article for your next No. & I will furnish it—that is just the way I make ruin myself—making promises. Do you know that for seven weeks I have not had my natural rest but have been a night-&-day sick-nurse to my wife—& am still—& shall continue to be for two or three weeks longer——yet must turn in now & write a damned humorous article for the Publisher, because I have promised it—promised it when I thought that the vials of hellfire bottled up for my benefit must be about emptied. By the living God I don’t believe they ever will be emptied.

It is scarcely surprising that under these circumstances Clemens’s opinion of his work was decidedly gloomy:

The MS I sent to be copied is back but I find nothing in it that can be transferred to the Publisher—for the chapter I intended to use I shall tear up, for it is simply an attempt to be full funny, & a failure.

When I get to Elmira I will look over the next chapters & send something—or, failing that, will write something—my own obituary I hope it will be.123

It is likely that the chapter Clemens threatened to “tear up” was eventually left out of the book. If so, no text for it has ever been found, and its contents remain unknown and to a large degree unknowable. And yet certain [begin page 838] things about it fall within the range of reasonable conjecture. It is clear, for instance, that some chapter originally preceded the Bemis incident, and that it was even set in type later that spring, as Bliss began work on the prospectus. The evidence for this conclusion is a small, bibliographical detail in the prospectus (Pra), which has long been known but never fully explained: two pages from the Bemis story, identical to the text as it appeared on pages numbered 62 and 63 in the first edition, are found in Pra on pages numbered 77 and 78—fifteen pages further along than where they ended up in the book.124 The most likely explanation for these higher page numbers is that at the time Pra was first set in type, there was enough manuscript somewhere before the Bemis story to make fifteen book pages (text and illustrations), which were removed before Pra was published in November. Such a reduction could have come piecemeal from several chapters, but probably included one large block (presumably a chapter), and must have been authorized by Clemens sometime in August 1871. These revisions are discussed in greater detail below.

Something can also be conjectured about the likely content of the chapter that preceded Bemis and the buffalo, and the reasons for Clemens’s dissatisfaction with it, if we assume that the reference to Overland City at the end of chapter 6 is a vestigial forecast of what originally followed it: “the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.” If Clemens had written a chapter about the quaint manners and odd characters of Overland City, its humor apparently struck him now as strained (“simply an attempt to be funny, & a failure”). It may even have been largely in this chapter that the condescending “style” of his narrator (“strangest, quaintest, funniest”) most required revision. If it seems implausible that he wrote such a chapter in the first place, it may help to recall the report in the 7 September 1870 Elmira Advertiser (published within days of his writing the first four chapters), which characterized his new book as “an account of travel at home, describing in a humorous and satirical way our cities and towns, and the people of different sections.”125

Despite the impulse to tear up this chapter, Clemens probably did not do so at this time—although his unhappiness on rereading it perhaps made him conclude, prematurely as it happened, that the first eight chapters contained nothing suitable for the Publisher. He and his family were in Elmira by 19 March, one day after he evidently sent Bliss all of the manuscript for what was then chapters 1–11 (some 258 pages)—even though only two-thirds of it (“168 pages”) had been copied for security.

After sending it, he may have looked through “the next chapters,” but [begin page 839] he found nothing there for the Publisher. On 20 March, however, he wrote Bliss that he had found something to contribute: it was in then chapter 8, which had in fact been copied along with the rest. He probably enclosed his security copy of it, referring Bliss and Orion to the original manuscript, which (as the postscript just below his signature shows) he assumed was by then already in Hartford:

Here is my contribution (I take it from the book,) & by all odds it is the finest piece of writing I ever did. Consequently I want the people to know that it is from the book:

Head it thus, & go on:

The Old-Time Pony-Express

of the Great Plains.




small type [Having but little time to write volunteer-contributions, now I offer this in chapter from

By Mark Twain.

small type. [The following is a chapter from Mark Twain’s forthcoming book & closes with a life-like picture of an incident of Overland stage travel on the Plains in the days before the Pacific railroad was built.—Ed. Publisher.

[From along about the 160th to 170th page of the MS.] It begins thus:

“However, in a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our necks & watching for the pony-rider” &c.—Go on to end of chapter.

P. S. Even Before the book is printed I shall write that bull story over again (that precedes the pony) or else alter it till it is good—for it can be made good—& then you can put that in the Publisher too, if you want to.

Yrs. Clemens

You got the Book MS, of course?

Refer the marginal note to Orion, about postage. But I I feel sure I am wrong, & that it was Four Dollars an ounce instead of Two— —make the correction, if necessary  Read proof very carefully, Orion—you need send none to me.126

It is clear that Clemens did not have his own manuscript of the pony-express passage before him, for otherwise he would simply have given its first page number, rather than saying it began “along about the 160th to 170th page of the MS.”127 (He seems to have remembered the approximate page, but could not check his memory against the security copy, which would not have preserved the original page numbers.) In fact, his ability to quote the first nineteen words of the passage, and his way of referring to it (“Here is my contribution”), would seem to make it all but manifest that he enclosed his security copy of the passage with the letter—both to make it easier to find it in his original manuscript, and to transmit the “marginal note” mentioned in the final postscript. It is also clear that the passage, [begin page 840] which he described for the Publisher’s audience as “a chapter,” did not begin a chapter, as it ultimately would in the book, but instead ended one (“Go on to end of chapter”), the beginning of which he also identified: “that bull story . . . that precedes the pony” can only refer to the Bemis tale, which ultimately began chapter 7 in the book, where it would be followed by the story of Eckert and the cat, which Clemens would supply in August to fill in when he turned the pony-express passage into the beginning of chapter 8.128

5. Real Progress, March–June 1871

Having sent off the first eleven chapters of his manuscript,129 Clemens seems to have taken the “week’s rest” he earlier said he needed, while continuing to nurse Olivia through her convalescence. On 23 March, for instance, Charles Langdon, the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher, and Clemens attended an evening meeting of a local literary society, where Clemens spoke briefly: “Mr. Twain’s address was concluded by saying that he had a sick wife at home, and that he had duties which he could not delegate, and with the President’s permission he would retire, as his faith in doctors was rather limited.” The next day, 24 March, his old friend Joseph T. Goodman arrived in Elmira.130 Goodman’s visit would grow into several months, and provide Clemens with badly needed encouragement about [begin page 841] his western book. He and Goodman clearly discussed writing a novel together at this time (probably to be set in Washington, D.C.), but it is likely that shortly after arriving in Elmira, Goodman read Clemens’s manuscript for the western book—at least insofar as he could by relying on the incomplete security copy and any further manuscript chapters Clemens had drafted by that time. Clemens would tell Orion on 18 April that Goodman was “up here at the farm with me,” and that he was “going to read my MSS critically,” but the likelihood is strong that by then Goodman had already read substantial portions of the manuscript.131

In a 1910 interview, after Clemens’s death, Goodman recalled for a San Francisco reporter that it had frequently been his “privilege” to read Mark Twain’s “works in manuscript, before they were sent to the publishers.”

I recollect his giving me the manuscript of “Roughing It” to read one afternoon when I was visiting him in the early seventies. He had made a great hit with “The Innocents Abroad,” and he was afraid he might not sustain his newly acquired reputation with “Roughing It.” When I began to read the manuscript Sam sat down at a desk and wrote nervously. I was not reading to be amused, you understand, but was studying critically the merits of his writings.

I read along intently for an hour, hardly noticing that Sam was beginning to fret and shift about uneasily. At last he could not stand it any longer, and in despair he jumped up exclaiming, “Damn you, you have been reading that stuff for an hour and you have not cracked a smile yet. I don’t believe I am keeping up my lick.”132

Paine, who also interviewed Goodman and heard this story directly from him, published a rather more detailed account, and possibly one that profited from Clemens’s own recollection of the facts. According to Paine, it

was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh enthusiasm in the new book. Goodman arrived just when the author’s spirits were at low ebb.

“Joe,” he said, “I guess I’m done for. I don’t appear to be able to get along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable. I’m afraid I’ll never be able to reach the standard of The Innocents Abroad again. Here is what I have written, Joe. Read it, and see if that is your opinion.”

Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens went over to a table and pretended to work. Goodman read page after page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it. Clemens watched him furtively, till he could stand it no longer. Then he threw down his pen, exclaiming:

“I knew it! I knew it! I am writing nothing but rot. You have sat there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am making of myself. But I am not wholly to blame. I am not strong enough to fight against fate. I have been trying to write a funny book, with dead people and sickness everywhere. Mr. Langdon died first, then a young lady in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at the point of death all winter! Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die myself!”

“Mark,” said Joe, “I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you have ever written. I have found it perfectly absorbing. You are doing a great book!”

[begin page 842] Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel. He was a changed man instantly. He was all enthusiasm, full of his subject, eager to go on. He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay there and keep him company and furnish him with inspiration—the Pacific coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from him. Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his plans would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old Comstock days.133

The first contemporary sign that Clemens’s interest had been rekindled came slightly more than a week after Goodman’s arrival. On 4 April, he wrote Orion:

In moving from Buffalo here I have lost certain notes & documents—among them the what you wrote for me about the difficulties of opening up the Territorial government in Nevada & getting the machinery to running. And now, just at the moment that I want it, it is gone. I don’t even know what it was you wrote, for I did not intend to read it until I was ready to use it. Do Have you time to scribble something again to aid my memory. Little characteristic items like Whittlesey’s refusing to allow for the knife, &c are the most illuminating things—the difficulty of getting credit for the Gov’t—& all that sort of thing. Incidents are better, any time, than dry history. Don’t tax yourself—I can make a little go a great way.134

Clemens had misplaced the notes that Orion had sent the previous November, and the specific details mentioned here indicate that on 4 April he was preparing to write what became chapter 25. Indeed, four days later, on 8 April, he recorded being up “to the 6 570th page,” conjecturally the next-to-last page of chapter 24, about the Mexican plug.135 These facts would seem to confirm that during October, November, and December, at least, Clemens had in fact made some progress beyond chapter 12, if only because it seems unlikely that he wrote all of chapters 12–24 (more than 300 pages) in the two weeks between 25 March and 8 April.

On the other hand, much of what Clemens had written seems to have been still in draft form: he clearly continued to revise chapters 12 and following during March and April. One of the three surviving manuscript pages (reproduced in facsimile on page 843) shows, in fact, that he must have revised chapter 12 sometime after 13 March, when he received Orion’s letter about Slade. Chapter 12 covers the final part of the journey to Salt Lake City and is, in general, notably dependent on Orion’s journal for names, distances, and particular incidents, as well as for occasional phrasing.136 But the journal barely mentions another landmark that Clemens treated rather fully in chapter 12—the east-west stream on the Continental Divide—stating merely, “Near this Station are the Pacific Springs, which issue in a branch, taking up its march for the Pacific Ocean.” Clemens’s cue for the incident in chapter 12 was therefore almost certainly not

[begin page 843]

Unnumbered manuscript page, removed from what is now chapter 12. Reproduced from the original in the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library (CU-MARK).

[begin page 844] Orion’s journal, which he had had since August, but Orion’s letter about Slade, which he received in March. That letter began by describing South Pass, “where the clouds looked so low, where we saw the first snow, and where a spring with waters destined for the Atlantic stood within a man’s length (or within sight) of another spring whose waters were about to commence a voyage to the Pacific.”137 If Clemens wrote (or elaborated) his own description of this stream only after reading Orion’s 11 March letter, then the unnumbered manuscript page—clearly a draft, not even quite filling the page—was written no earlier than mid-March. It contains a version of the “snapper” used to conclude this incident, which, by the time it appeared in the prospectus, had been condensed into a two-sentence paragraph: “I freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home, and dropped it in the stream. But I put no stamp on it and it was held for postage somewhere.”138 Gone from this final version is any hint of the narrator’s sweetheart (“she”) in New Orleans (“the old city”)—perhaps because such details were not compatible with his having “never” been “away from home” before.

An early version of the first page of chapter 18, about crossing “an ‘alkali’ desert,” also survives in manuscript. The page (reproduced in facsimile on page 845) is numbered “423,” and the chapter is numbered “20,” altered from “19,” indicating that the number of the “desert” chapter was at least one higher than its final number in the first edition. A higher chapter number is confirmed by the evidence of Pra, which included several pages from chapters 15, 16, 21, 23, and 24, anachronistically identified as chapters 16, 17, 22, 24, and 25—that is, one chapter number higher than in the book. Where, prior to chapter 15, was a full chapter deleted? The answer is suggested by the author’s footnote at the end of chapter 14, which refers the reader to the appendixes for “a brief sketch of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain Meadows massacre.” That reference, together with some minor discrepancies in chapter 13, makes it all but certain that the material in the appendixes was originally part of these chapters on Mormonism. The “Brief Sketch of Mormon History” (appendix A) may have belonged originally in chapter 13—perhaps following Clemens’s reference to having “picked up a great deal of useful information and entertaining nonsense,” not otherwise mentioned. If so, that might explain why references

[begin page 845]

Manuscript page numbered 423, removed from what is now chapter 18. Reproduced from the original in the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library (CU-MARK).

[begin page 846] in the next paragraph to visiting “the king,” and to the king’s “high-handed attitude toward Congress,” occur without the king or his offenses against Congress being clearly identified—something the last paragraph in what became appendix A had done, noting that

Brigham Young was the only real power in the land. He was an absolute monarch—a monarch who defied our President—a monarch who laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital—a monarch who received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the United States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.139

Likewise, the material that became appendix B, “The Mountain Meadows Massacre,” was very likely a separate chapter, perhaps following chapter 14, and therefore preceding the one remaining reference to the subject in chapter 17. But however these chapters were in fact configured, the likelihood is great that they originally included the material on Mormonism preserved in the appendixes. When the words in the appendixes are counted as if they were part of the manuscript for chapters 13–15, the calculated page number for the start of chapter 18 is 424—quite close to the actual number on the surviving draft page, 423.140

Although Clemens sent Bliss only eleven chapters on 18 March, he knew perfectly well that the contract obliged Bliss “to commence operations at once upon receipt of manuscript.” He therefore added a postscript to his 4 April note to Orion which expressed his impatience for Bliss to begin illustrating and typesetting what he had sent: “Is Bliss doing anything with the MS I sent? Is he thinking of beginning on it shortly?”141 His anxiety to see illustrations and typesetting begin is the more remarkable because, having sent those chapters rather in haste than otherwise, he soon found that they needed more work. On 8 April he replied to another letter (now lost) from Orion, who apparently asked whether he and Bliss should use the manuscript of the Bemis episode for the Publisher and for the book, or wait for the revision promised in Clemens’s first postscript of 20 March. Clemens repeated his original instructions, with one condition:

If I don’t add a postscript to this, tell Bliss to go ahead & set up the MSS & put the engravers to work. My copy is down at the house & I am up here at the farm, a mile & a half up a mountain, where I write every day.

I am to the 6 570th page & booming along. And what I am writing now is so much better than the opening chapters, or the Innocents Abroad either, that I do wish I could spare time to revamp the opening chapters, & even write some of them over again.

[begin page 847] I will read the bull story when I go down, & see whether it will do or not. It don’t altogether suit me, but maybe I shan’t I shall alter it very little, anyway. I don’t want it to go in the same number of the paper with the pony sketch. Mind, I never want two articles of mine in the same number. Put it in the next if you choose.

But on reading his security copy that evening, Clemens was unable to resist the temptation to revise it—and not just in the Bemis chapter. He therefore did add a postscript, which referred explicitly to changes in chapter 6, in the Bemis incident, and in other chapters not specified:

Leave out the yarn about Jack & “Moses.” It occurs about 117th page. Stop Close the chapter with these words

“and when they tried to teach a subordinate anything that subordinate generally “got it through his head”—at least in time for the funeral.


Accompanying this, is the bull story, altered the way I want it. Don’t put it in till about the fourth No. of the paper.

OVER.

Tell Bliss to go ahead setting up the book just as it is, making the corrections marked in purple ink, in some 20 or 30 pages which I shall mail to-night—possibly in this envelop.

Ys

Sam

P. S.—Monday—Am to 610th page, now.142

By the time Clemens finished and mailed this letter on 10 April (Monday), he had written as far as page 610, which probably fell near the start of chapter 27, about the trip to Humboldt, the virtual beginning of his “silver fever.” And although the original letter no longer has its enclosures, he probably did send with it (or separately, soon thereafter) both “the bull story, altered the way I want it,” and an additional “20 or 30 pages” of “corrections marked in purple ink,” which he asked that Bliss follow in setting up the eleven chapters already in hand. Both the revised “bull story” and these “corrections” were presumably in the form of altered and augmented pages from Clemens’s security copy, which thereby grew even more incomplete. (Because Clemens used his typical purple ink, the changes were visibly distinct from the ink of the copy, evidently a different color.) Although none of the enclosures survives, it is still possible to make some informed guesses about what they contained.

The “Jack & ‘Moses’ ” yarn, which Clemens here identified as beginning on “about” page 117 of the manuscript, was ultimately included in chapter 6 despite this instruction to omit it (the revised closing words for the chapter were also rejected). If, as Figure 1 indicates, chapter 6 began on page 114, then the “Jack & ‘Moses’ ” story would have begun on page 126, not 117. The discrepancy indicates that among the revisions Clemens may have made at this time was the addition of up to nine pages toward the beginning of chapter 6, thus forcing the “Jack & ‘Moses’ ” episode back [begin page 848] to its present position.143 The new material may have been designed to spell out more clearly, in preparation for chapters 10 and 11 on Slade, exactly how the “division-agent” fit into the hierarchy of stagecoach employees. Some evidence for this conjecture is provided by Orion’s Slade letter (11 March), which implied that Clemens may have mistakenly referred to Slade as a conductor: “My impression is that he was a division agent, from Overland City to Salt Lake—having several conductors under him. . . . Slade was not a conductor. He had the conductors and drivers under him.”144 The somewhat disjointed style of chapter 6 may result from a revision designed to correct this error by introducing the division-agent to a narrative that originally described the conductor. Clemens’s addition of nine pages (nearly doubling the chapter’s original eleven pages) may even have suggested to him that he could now leave out “Jack & ‘Moses’ ” entirely. Moreover, it seems necessary to speculate that then chapter 7, which Clemens had found so unsatisfactory even as he sent it to Bliss in March, was now submitted to further revision—chiefly by the addition of material. These 10 April “corrections” totaled, conjecturally, twenty-five pages: nine pages added to chapter 6, and sixteen to then chapter 7. There certainly were, in addition, changes to the Bemis story, which was now “the way I want it”—conjecturally, ten pages longer than before (see Figure 1).

Given the limitations of the evidence, the precise size and location of these changes must remain in doubt. But whatever “corrections” were actually made in April, their net effect was to increase the length of the manuscript between chapter 6 and then chapter 8, without changing the original pagination. (Clemens could not have renumbered his pages because the printer’s copy was in Hartford.) These added pages might well have been distributed in some other way, but their total could not have been very different. Without the bulk they added, there would be no way to explain why pages 62–63 of the Bemis story were forced back to pages 77–78 in the initial Pra typesetting, for if all the material, including then chapter 7 (later removed in proof), were present in the original manuscript, thus affecting its pagination, the conjectural first page of the pony-express passage would be forced well beyond the range of pages 160–70, to which Clemens assigned it.

Two days after sending this letter, Clemens was in New York.145 Probably [begin page 849] by the time he returned to Elmira, Orion’s reply was waiting for him. The letter itself has not survived, but it evidently reported Bliss’s reluctance to begin on the prospectus without more manuscript in hand, or at least without a more representative selection from it. Orion seems also to have requested permission to put “Jack & ‘Moses’ ” in the Publisher, and even to have suggested further revision of the Bemis episode for the Publisher in order to distinguish it from an ostensibly similar account by another one of Bliss’s authors, Thomas W. Knox. On 18 April, Clemens responded coolly to such meddling:

Since Knox has printed a similar story (so (the same “situation” has been in print often—men have written it before Knox & I were born,)—let the Bull story alone until it appears in the book—or at least in the “specimen” chapters for canvassers. That is to say, Do not put it in the paper, at all. I cannot alter it—too much trouble. . . .

P. S. No—I won’t print Jack & Moses. I may lecture next winter, & in that case shall want it.146

On the same day, Clemens left Elmira for Buffalo “to finish the sale of my ‘Express’ interest,” as he told Mrs. Fairbanks. The next day he completed this errand, picked up his mail at the Express office, and apparently met briefly with his friend David Gray.147 The Buffalo Courier reported on 21 April:

While Mark Twain was here, the other day, he received by mail a copy of “What I Know About Farming.” A note on the fly-leaf, in a chirography that is already historical, read as follows:

To Mark Twain, Buffalo; who knows even less about my farming than does

Horace Greeley.

Isn’t the common report that Mr. Greeley don’t know anything about joking a reprehensible slander?148

Clemens did not immediately acknowledge this gift from his recent famous acquaintance. When he did, probably in early May, it must have been after Greeley’s joke at his expense had received some coverage in the press (reprinting the Buffalo Courier), for he evidently protested Greeley’s [begin page 850] “public” criticism of him. Clemens was, at any rate, in a foul mood during the last week of April. Orion’s meddling had merely annoyed him, but shortly after returning from Buffalo, he received a truly disheartening letter from Bliss, probably on Monday, 24 April. Bliss wrote that he was about to begin work on the prospectus, and that he planned to “get it out very quickly,” but felt the need to clarify what Orion had already communicated:

I fear your brother has written in a manner to give you wrong impressions of my views. I have said to him that the first part of a book alone, is not sufficient to make a proper prospectus of. I of course cannot get up full plate engravings, until I know the subject, & then it is well to have a variety of matter in it—I have not spoken of the position of affairs thinking it of no acc, but perhaps, it might be well to say, that standing where I do, with so many agents all over, coming in contact with the masses, I can feel the pulse of the community, as well as any other person; I do not think there is as much of a desire to see another book from you as there was 3 months ago. Then anything offered would sell, people would subscribe to anything of yours without overhauling or looking at it much. Now they will inspect a Prospectus closer, & buy more on the strength of it, than they would have done a few months ago.

Knowing this to be so, I feel particularly anxious to get out a splendid Prospectus one brim full of good matter, of your own style— I want to reawaken the appetite for the book—& know of no better means than to show them slices of a rich loaf, & let them try it— Consequently I said to your brother, “if he has anything particularly fine lets have it for prospectus.”

Bliss also mentioned that he had already “made selections from Mss. here for Pros.,” suggesting that if Clemens had “any choice cuts further along in the book for it” that he should “send them on” and Bliss would “heave them in.” Bliss continued, “Your brother says he wrote you Knox had written up something similar to the Bull story—I never saw it & do not know anything about it. It Yours struck me as a good thing, every way. Your first chap. is splendid—smacks of the old style—”149

These afterthoughts scarcely blunted Bliss’s point, which was that Clemens’s delay in finishing his manuscript had cost him ground with his audience and, by implication, that he now needed Bliss’s help to reverse that loss.150 Clemens was clearly depressed by Bliss’s testimony, and perhaps by other evidence, telling Mrs. Fairbanks on 26 April: “I am pegging away at my book, but it will have no success. The papers have found at last the courage to pull me down off my pedestal & cast slurs at me—& that is simply a popular author’s death rattle. Though he wrote an inspired book after that, it would not save him.”151 It is not known which newspapers he thought were casting “slurs” at him, or just what occasioned their criticism. But on Sunday, 30 April, a week after reading Bliss’s remarks, he reproached Orion for writing him “discouraging letters”: “Yours stopped [begin page 851] my pen for two days—Bliss’s stopped it for three. Hereafter my wife will read my Hartford letters & if they are of the same nature, keep them out of my hands. The idea of a newspaper editor & a publisher plying with dismal letters a man who is under contract to write humorous books for them!” Yet Clemens went on to make clear that he was steadily at work on his book. His inability to write had lasted no more than a week, in clear contrast with the longer intervals of indifference he had experienced the previous fall and winter.

I sent Bliss MSS yesterday, up to about 100 pages of MS.

Don’t be in a great hurry getting out the specimen chapters for canvassers, for I want the chapter I am writing now in it—& it is away up to page 750 of the MS. I would like to select the “specimen” chapters myself (along with Joe Goodman, who writes by my side every day up at the farm). Joe & I have a 600-page book in contemplation which will wake up the nation. It is a thing which David Gray & I have talked over with David Gray a good deal, & he wanted me to do it right & just & well—which I couldn’t without a man to do the accurate drudgery and some little other writing. But Joe is the party. This present book will be a tolerable success—possibly an excellent success if the chief newspapers start it off well—but the other book will be an awful success. The only trouble is, how I am to hang on to Joe till I publish this present book & another before I begin on the joint one.

When is the selection to be made for the specimen chapters?152

If on 30 April Clemens was “away up to page 750 of the MS.,” Figure 2 indicates that he was probably at the end of chapter 34 (a revision of “The Facts in the Great Land Slide Case”) or the start of chapter 35 (the trip to Esmeralda). Neither chapter was selected for the prospectus, which in fact included nothing from chapters 25–37; of the two, the tale of the landslide case seems more likely to have inspired Clemens’s enthusiasm.

The 100 pages of manuscript Clemens mentioned to Orion as having been sent “yesterday” (29 April) are identical with what, three days later, he told Bliss he had sent “yesterday” (2 May): “I mailed you the 12th, 13th, 14th & 15th chapters yesterday, & before that I had sent you the previous 11 chapters.”153 Chapters 12–15 describe arriving in Salt Lake City and encountering Mormons. As Figure 2 shows, the page numbers of chapters 12–15 ran from 259 to 358 (exactly 100 pages), but only if it is assumed that they included material later removed and, later still, relegated to the appendixes. Clemens also told Bliss that his book was by then “half done,” so he had accumulated many more pages than he sent—probably some 900 equivalent pages, placing him near the end of chapter 40 (the first of two chapters on the blind lead) by 3 May.154

[begin page 852] On 8 or 9 May, Clemens received Greeley’s somewhat testy and defensive reply to his letter of thanks:

Mark:

You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming. I never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truely enough the inspiration of genius. If you will really betake yourself to farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what you don’t know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging criticism, but will give you my blessing.

Yours,

Horace Greeley.155

Greeley’s notoriously difficult handwriting was the subject of innumerable jokes and anecdotes in the press, but this letter was the first Clemens himself had ever received from him. Their brief exchange, part of which was even then being reported in the newspapers, may well have suggested to Clemens the basic comic story of chapter 70, which concerns someone driven mad while corresponding with Greeley “about a trifle of some kind,” only to discover that their correspondence had become “the talk of the world.”156 Clemens’s first letter from Greeley became, in any case, the physical model for the only slightly exaggerated imitation of it, reproduced as a pseudo-facsimile in chapter 70.157 Greeley’s letter arrived during the most intensive period of book composition that Clemens had yet experienced, but the Sandwich Islands setting of chapter 70 suggests that it was probably not written until July, or even August, when Clemens again wrote Greeley (on another matter), and when the need for additional manuscript had become more apparent.

On Monday, 15 May, less than two weeks after he declared himself “half done,” Clemens counted himself well past the halfway point:

I have MS. enough on hand now, to make (allowing for engravings) about 400 pages of the book—consequently am two-thirds done. I intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week & take it along; but I am because it has chapters [begin page 853] in it that ought by all means to be in the prospectus; but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work, now (a thing I have not experienced for months) that I can’t bear to lose a single moment of the inspiration. So I will stay here & peg away as long as it lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have already written, & then cull from the mass the very best chapters & discard the rest. I am not half as well satisfied with the first part of the book as I am with what I am writing now. When I get it done I want to see the man who will begin to read it & not finish it. If it falls short of the Innocents in any respect I shall lose my guess.

When I was writing the Innocents my daily “stent” was 30 pages of MS & I hardly ever got beyond it; but I have gone over that nearly every day for the last ten. That shows that I am writing with a red-hot interest. Nothing grieves me now—nothing troubles me, bothers me or gets my attention—I don’t think of anything but the book, & don’t have an hour’s unhappiness about anything & don’t care two cents whether school keeps or not. It will be a bully book. If I keep up my present lick three weeks more I shall be able & willing to scratch out half of the chapters of the Overland narrative—& shall do it.

You do not mention having received my second batch of MS, sent a week or two ago—about 100 pages.

If you want to issue a prospectus & go right to canvassing, say the word & I will forward some more MS—or send it by hand—special messenger. Whatever chapters you think are unquestionably good, we will retain of course, & so they can go into a prospectus as well one time as another. The book will be done soon, now. I have 1200 pages of MS already written, & am now writing 200 a week—more than that, in fact; during past week wrote 23 one day, then 30, 33, 35, 52, & 65. —part of the latter, say, nearly half, being a re-print sketch. How’s that?158

By this time Clemens had clearly shifted to counting by equivalent pages. So when he said that he had “1200 pages of MS,” he was probably near the end of what became chapter 51, with 1202 equivalent pages (but only 1100 real pages). Twelve hundred equivalent pages were “two-thirds” of the eighteen hundred pages he thought he needed: enough, by his reckoning, “to make (allowing for engravings) about 400 pages of the book,” which was to be 600 pages long. His arithmetic makes sense in other ways as well: if he had 900 equivalent pages on 3 May, and had written more than 30 pages a day “nearly every day for the last ten,” he would have added approximately 300 pages. His increased rate of progress may have had something to do with his subject: in chapter 42 he began to describe his experiences as a newspaper reporter in Virginia City. But his new-found speed was also due to his increased use of clippings in this section of the book (chapters 34, 37, 38, 46, and probably 51 all relied extensively on clippings), which now made it virtually necessary to count by equivalent pages.

Since Clemens wrote this letter on a Monday (15 May), the extraordinary string of daily stints “during the past week” can be plausibly assigned to Monday through Saturday, 8–13 May. It is therefore likely that he began on 8 May with 23 pages, a stint that corresponds to chapter 44 (puffing stocks), estimated at 25 pages (see Figure 2). The second day’s stint, on 9 May, was 30 pages, which corresponds to chapter 45 (Reuel Gridley and [begin page 854] the flour sack), estimated at 24 pages (only a fair approximation of 30). The third stint, on 10 May, was 33 pages, which corresponds to chapter 46 (Nevada nabobs), estimated at 31 equivalent pages. The fourth stint, on 11 May, was 35 pages, which corresponds to chapter 47 (Scotty Briggs and Buck Fanshaw’s funeral), estimated at 36 pages. The fifth stint, on 12 May, was 52 pages, which corresponds to chapters 48 (western desperadoes and the vagaries of jury trials) and 50 (Captain Ned Blakely): 25 plus 24 pages, or 49 pages, a good approximation of 52.159 And the sixth and last stint, on 13 May, was 65 pages, “nearly half” being “a re-print sketch,” which is to say, clippings. If this stint does indeed correspond to what became chapter 51 (the Weekly Occidental, with the poem called “The Aged Pilot Man”), estimated at 62 pages, the only part of it that could have been “re-print” was the poem. This suggests that the poem was in fact set from a clipping of the lost Occidental or even the Enterprise—although no such printing has been found.160

Having just written chapter 48 (on the failings of the jury system) on 12 May, Clemens concluded his 15 May letter somewhat giddily, with a dedication for the book which was not, in the end, adopted:

It will be a starchy book, & should be full of snappy pictures—especially pictures worked in with the letter-press. The dedication will be worth the price of the volume—thus:

To the Late Cain,

This Book is Dedicated:

Not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on account of sympathy with him, for his bloody deed placed him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking: but out of a mere humane commiseration for him in that it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea.

Nor could he resist a gloating postscript about his reputation, which had recuperated, without Bliss’s help, in less than three weeks’ time: “The reaction is beginning & my stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books & almanacs, am flooded with lecture invitations, & one periodical offers me $6,000 cash for 12 articles, of any length & on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.”161 Bliss replied almost immediately, on 17 May:

[begin page 855] Your favor recd Am glad to hear from you. Sorry to hear you are not going to call on us to day. However it may be for the best as I think you are in the mood to do good work, at which I heartily rejoice

Glad to know you are so pressed with overtures for work.

We intend to do our part towards making your book, what it should be, viz in illustrations. We shall try to have just the kind in that will suit—& think we shall succeed. I think it would be well to have Prospectus out soon as practicible as agents are anxious for it—still lets have the best stuff in it. I have no doubt you have ample matter now to select from, therefore suppose you do as you suggest, send another batch on, of selected chapters if you think best & I will get right to work—Suppose you send on such a lot, marked with what in your opinion is particularly good, & let me then make up prospectus matter from it & get engraving for it under way.

Send the Mss. by express it will come then safely. I will put bully cuts into it, such as will please you

Think this will be the plan if it suits you. I assure you nothing shall be wanting on my part, to bring it out in high style—I reckon I can do it.162

Nearly four weeks had passed since Bliss had said he was beginning on the prospectus. Clemens’s reply to this latest request for his “best stuff” is not known, but he probably did not send any more manuscript in May. On 1 or 2 June, however, he carried his third batch of manuscript to Hartford. This third batch probably extended from chapter 15 (his 16) through 51 (his 50), omitting chapters 36 and 49, which were probably added later. He may also have submitted some “selected” chapters” from later in the narrative which he thought especially suitable for the prospectus.163

Shortly before Clemens made this delivery, David Gray published an announcement of the book which was obviously informed by Clemens himself: “Mark Twain’s new book, same size and style as the ‘Innocents Abroad,’ and as copiously illustrated, will be published in the fall, and will appear simultaneously in England and America. Dealing as it does with certain hitherto unrecorded phases of western life, it will be of historic value as well as aboundingly humorous.”164 This is the earliest known public reference to Clemens’s plan to publish his western book “simultaneously” in England with George Routledge and Company—a step that would establish a valid English copyright, provided English publication preceded American by a day or so. Clemens had asked Bliss to arrange the matter with Routledge, probably soon after learning in March 1870 that only simultaneous publication could protect the book in England.165

[begin page 856] Clemens did not stay in Hartford long enough to read proof, or even to revise chapters 1–15, which were already in Bliss’s hands. On 5 or 6 June he returned to Elmira, where he may have begun one more chapter. He did not, at this time, write what became chapter 52 (Virginia City mining statistics, probably added in August or even later), nor did he write chapter 53 (Jim Blaine’s ram story), which he probably finished on 10 August, when he told Olivia of having written “a splendid chapter today, for the middle of the book.”166 But he may well have begun chapter 54 (the Chinese in the West) in early June, for its first paragraph reads, in part: “As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.” This sentence could not have been written before 3 June, when the news report that Clemens saw appeared in the New York Tribune:

a chinaman stoned to death by boys.

San Francisco, June 2.—The police are endeavoring to arrest a gang of boys who stoned to death an inoffensive Chinaman on Fourth-st. yesterday afternoon. Dozens of people witnessed the assault, but did not interfere until the murder was complete. No attempt was then made to arrest the murderers.167

But if Clemens began chapter 54 after returning home on 5 or 6 June, by 9 June he apparently felt so relieved at having delivered some fifty chapters to the publisher that he stopped work on the book altogether. The next day he wrote his lecture agents, Redpath and Fall, that “without really intending to go into the lecture field,” he had written “a lecture yesterday just for amusement & to see how the subject would work up,” but having “read it over,” he had now decided to “deliver it.”168 Clemens spent the rest of the month working on this lecture, and, when he grew dissatisfied with it, on two others. He also managed to write, or at least revise for publication, four magazine articles, three of which he sent, on 21 June, to Bliss:

Here are three articles which you may have if you’ll pay $100 or $125 $125 for the lot, according to the present state of your exchequer—& if you don’t want them I’ll sell them to “Galaxy,” but not for a cent less than three times the money—have just sold them a short article (shorter than either of these,) for $100. . . .

Have you heard anything from Routledge? Considering the large English sale he made of one of my other books (Jumping Frog,) I thought may be we might make something if I could give him a secure copyright.— There seems to be no convenient way to beat those Canadian re-publishers anyway——though I could can go over the line & get out a copyright if you wish it & think it would hold water.169

[begin page 857] It is likely that Clemens did not again work on the book manuscript until the end of the month. On 27 June he told Orion: “I wrote a third lecture to-day—& tomorrow I go back on the book again.” On 29 June he reported writing “2 chapters of the book to-day—shall write chapter 53 to-morrow.”170 The two chapters were probably his chapters 51 and 52, which became chapter 54 (the account of the Chinese community, begun earlier in June) and chapter 55 (the “Prodigal,” and Clemens’s brief stint as chief editor of the Enterprise). His chapter 53, probably completed on 30 June, would eventually become chapter 56 (about tiring of Virginia City and leaving for San Francisco).

6. Finished at Last, June–December 1871

Back in Hartford, Bliss and Orion had begun to have the illustrations drawn, engraved, and electrotyped—at least for those chapters selected for the prospectus. Bliss had said in April (with only eleven chapters to choose from) that he had already made a selection—and indeed, out of the first eleven chapters, all but three (6, 9, and 11) were represented in the prospectus. If he followed normal procedure, Bliss would have ordered and received engravings for most of the illustrations in these chapters before ordering any type set, so that the first proofs could show the illustrations in place. Some evidence indicates that he was, to a degree, bypassing normal procedure for this book,171 but it was still desirable to give the manuscript to the illustrators as soon as possible.

Bliss hired at least three artists: Edward F. Mullen, whom Clemens had wanted to hire for the Burlesque Autobiography, and then for the sketch-book, in December and January; Roswell Morse Shurtleff (1838–1915), later a successful landscape painter; and True W. Williams.172 All three artists had earlier drawn illustrations for Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi, and Shurtleff and Williams had both provided drawings for The Innocents Abroad. All of the new drawings would be engraved by the firm of Fay and Cox in New York, which had also done the work for Beyond the Mississippi and Innocents, among others.

Williams was the principal artist for the book, signing fifty-four drawings (usually with his distinctive monogram) and contributing at least as many more that were not signed.173 He received the first, as well as the [begin page 858] largest, assignment of manuscript—possibly in May, when Bliss had chapters 1–15, or in June, when he also had chapters 16–50 (15–51, as later numbered in the book). His hand is evident starting with the clear likeness of the author in chapter 1, in which Mark Twain sports the same checked trousers that he wears in Williams’s drawings for Innocents. Over half of Williams’s signed drawings appear in chapters 2–37, but many of the later drawings are his as well. (In chapter 62, he may even have managed to sneak in a portrait of himself as “Williams,” the captain’s nemesis: see page 427.) Shurtleff signed the frontispiece and the full-page drawing of South Pass for chapter 12. Fourteen additional illustrations bear his initials or monogram, the earliest in chapter 42 and the last in chapter 79, for a total of sixteen.174 Mullen signed only four drawings—one in chapter 38, one in chapter 43, and two in chapter 67175—although he likewise contributed several more that are unsigned.

In addition to commissioning the drawings for Roughing It, Bliss followed the common practice of reusing engravings from earlier books, especially those published by his own company and its subsidiaries. He took engravings from Thomas W. Knox’s Overland through Asia, Nelson Winch Green’s Mormonism, Junius Henri Browne’s Sights and Sensations in Europe, as well as from Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi and Evans’s Our Sister Republic. He also used seven illustrations from J. Ross Browne’s Adventures in the Apache Country, presumably by purchasing a set of electrotypes from Browne’s publisher, Harper and Brothers. In all, Bliss reused thirty-three illustrations from known sources.176 In addition, [begin page 859] Roughing It included some twenty-five illustrations for which no previous publication has yet been found, but which are likely to have been taken from standard or stock sources, rather than drawn and engraved specifically for the book.

In early June, with the first fifty-one chapters now in hand, Orion presumably read the manuscript through for the first time, and in mid-June wrote his brother praising it. Clemens replied on 21 June: “Am very glad, indeed, you think so well of the book. I mean to make it a good one in spite of everything—then the illustrations will do the rest. When the prospectus is out I believe Bliss will sell 50,000 copies before the book need be actually issued.”177 Orion’s comments are lost, but it was almost certainly he who wrote the following squib in the July American Publisher: “A New Book by Mark Twain.—The American Publishing Company, of Hartford, has in hand manuscript for a new book by Mark Twain. It is a lively account of travel and a stirring recital of adventures in the Far West. He was miner and reporter, and had some experiences, which, though sober reality, will tax credulity.”178 This last reference suggests that Orion had read at least as far as chapters 40 and 41, about the blind lead. David Gray, on the other hand, probably did not have a chance to read the manuscript, although on 20 July he published a description that must reflect Clemens’s private remarks about it—albeit inaccurately: “Mark Twain’s new book will be published by the American Publishing Company, of Hartford, Connecticut. It will describe a journey to California in the ‘flush times’ of 1849, or scenes in the early history of the Golden State, with probably much piquant personal matter. It is intended to serve as a companion volume to ‘Innocents Abroad.’ “179

Despite this talk about publication, Clemens was well aware that he had still not completed his manuscript. On 27 June, therefore, he had Olivia write to Mrs. Fairbanks, postponing their planned July visit to Cleveland: “Mr. Clemens feels that it will be a month or six weeks before his book will be finished.” Clemens himself added an apologetic postscript: “I have lost so much time that I am obliged to give it up. This book has been dragging along just 12 months, now, & I am so sick & tired of it. If I were to chance another break or another move before I finish it I fear I never should get it done.”180 Orion was conscious of the same problem, [begin page 860] and in late June wrote his brother asking when to expect the next installment of printer’s copy. Clemens replied on 2 July: “My MSS? Shall bring it there myself before long. Say 2 to 4 weeks hence. Am just finishing Chapter 56. Have already nearly MS enough, but am still writing—intend to cut & cull liberally.”181 Chapter 56 would become chapter 59, about his adventure with a San Francisco beggar. If he was still writing the chapters in sequence, he must have written chapter 57 (San Francisco pioneers), 58 (the earthquake in San Francisco), and 59 between 30 June and 2 July.182 Even so, he did not have “nearly MS enough” to complete his book: he was still some 450 pages short of the 1800 he thought he needed. Not for the last time did his eagerness to be done mislead him about where he stood. Orion replied on 4 July:

I am glad you are going ahead on the book. Some of the artists’ drafts for the pictures have come. I told Frank to take the tree out of Carson and put the auctioneer on the horse. He said he would take the tree out, but people here wouldn’t understand the idea of an auctioneer on a horse. Another has him taking his rider over a pile of telegraph poles—another bucking—and another going through a gate, raking his rider off with the top beam. He is a ragged looking horse.183

The drawings Orion mentioned here were for chapter 24 (the Mexican plug), which was eventually included almost in its entirety in the prospectus. Frank Bliss, who was presumably helping his father prepare the book, followed Orion’s advice, despite his concern that eastern readers would not understand the auctioneer’s being seated on a horse. No tree appears in any of the pictures of Carson; one illustration shows the horse bucking; and another shows him taking his rider over a post-and-rail fence.184 Only the drawing of the horse “going through a gate, raking his rider off with the top beam” was discarded. It is apparent that the Blisses and Orion were passing judgment on preliminary drawings, before they were sent off to be engraved.

Three days later (on 7 July), Bliss replied to Clemens’s letter of 21 June:

[begin page 861] Thanks for your contributions I have been sick 10 days, flat on my back, much of the time—& feel hard yet. . . . Have got the engravings mill driving—& shall make a merry book of it And now, would like all the Mss. you have to be able to select subjects for full page engravings—want all I can of those to go in the book prospectus—And now another thing we have said nothing about. What is to be the title— This is a matter of some importance you know, & necessary for the Prospectus, unless we say we dont know it yet & call it the “Unnamed” & wait for developments, to christen it—

Let me know your wishes early as possible— Shall have prospectus ready early as possible to get the cuts ready, & make a sweep of the board—this fall— This & Beecher’s Life of Christ—will have the field & I’ll bet we win185

This letter confirms that some large part of chapters 1–23 was already in production, since with the “engravings mill driving,” Bliss would soon be able to begin the typesetting. He was eager to have the subjects for full-page illustrations chosen and the plates completed, since the time required for that, rather than for typesetting, would determine when the prospectus could be done (“Shall have prospectus ready early as possible to get the cuts ready”). Clemens replied in his turn on 10 July:

I heard you were sick, & am glad you are getting better again.

What terms did you arrive at with Routledge? . . .

Tomorrow I will fix up & forward as much MS as I have on hand. Some of it is tip-top.

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. 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

FLUSH TIMES

in the

silver mines,

& 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.186

It remains uncertain just how many more chapters, if any, Clemens did “fix up & forward” after writing this letter. But this fourth batch probably contained only what became chapters 54–57, plus chapters 76 (Maui’s Iao Valley and Haleakala) and 78 (Clemens’s first lecture in San Francisco). [begin page 862] Chapters 76 and 78 must have been submitted at this time (if not sooner), out of sequence, for both were well represented in the prospectus, albeit as chapters 73 and 75.187 The presence of a shared typographical feature also strongly suggests that chapters 1–57, 76, and 78 were in Bliss’s hands substantially before the remaining chapters (58–75, 77, and 79): they all appear in the book with headings in type size A, while all the remaining chapter headings are in type size B.

This difference was clearly inadvertent, the result of using different typesetters for the two sets of chapters, or of using the same typesetters, but only after a long interval, so that they forgot (or were unable for other reasons) to use the same size type in the second set as they had in the first.

Clemens’s letter of 10 July also makes it apparent that his intention even then was to include only a relatively small number of chapters on the Sandwich Islands—“4 or 5” at the end of a narrative principally devoted to “flush times” in Nevada. Back in December he had indicated that he still thought of the Sandwich Islands as the subject for a book he intended to write: “I am going to do up the Islands & Harris. They have ‘kept’ 4 years, & I guess they will keep 2 or 3 longer.”188 Presumably over the next three weeks in July, he culled his own notebooks and scrapbooks for possible material. He almost certainly made use of the printer’s copy he had already prepared in 1866–67 from his Sacramento Union letters for a book on the Sandwich Islands, which he had submitted—unsuccessfully—for publication. And he ultimately included not “4 or 5” but fifteen chapters on the Sandwich Islands—all but four of them based on his original letters to the Union, clippings of which he pasted up and revised to serve as printer’s copy.189 Only about one-fifth of the material published in the twenty-five Union letters was used in the book: twelve letters were not used at all, while portions ranging from one-sixth to four-fifths were extracted from the remaining thirteen. Clemens probably wrote very little new material for the Sandwich Islands chapters, relying instead on the work he had done in 1866–67. The unusual number of simple errors in these chapters in the first edition also suggests that they were rather hurriedly prepared. By the time Clemens had chosen the material for them, it [begin page 863] was clearer than it had been on 10 July that “Flush Times in the Silver Mines” was no longer an appropriate title. On 3 August, just days before Clemens arrived in Hartford, Bliss copyrighted another possibility, “The Innocents at Home,” which served as the interim title for several weeks.190

On 2 or 3 August, Clemens left Elmira for New York, where he stayed briefly before taking the train to Hartford on about 5 August.191 He probably brought with him all the remaining printer’s copy—some 460 equivalent pages—except for those few chapters he would add in August, or even later. He remained in Hartford for almost the entire month, working on proofs for some portion of the early chapters (possibly only those chosen for the prospectus), and revising the printer’s copy for chapters not yet sent to the illustrators or typesetters. On 10 August, five days after setting to work, he summarized his progress for Olivia:

I wrote a splendid chapter today, for the middle of the book. I admire the book more & more, the more I cut & slash & lick & trim & revamp it. But you’ll be getting impatient, now, & so I am going to begin tonight & work day & night both till I get through. It is a tedious, arduous job shaping so such a mass of MS for the press. It took me two months to do it for the Innocents. But this is another sight easier job, because it is so much better literary work—so much more acceptably written. It takes 1800 pages of MS to make this book?—& that is just what I have got—or rather, I have got 1,830. I thought that just a little over 1500 pages would be enough & that I could leave off all the Overland trip—& what a pity I can’t.192

The “splendid chapter” has been conjecturally identified as chapter 53 (Jim Blaine’s ram story).193 The calculated pages in Figure 2 correspond [begin page 864] exactly to Clemens’s own statement: when he arrived in Hartford with his final chapters he had a total of 1806 equivalent pages (1488 real pages); his new chapter added 24 pages, bringing the total to 1830 equivalent pages (1512 real pages). This amount of material would still not, as it turned out, be enough for a 600-page book—partly because of revisions Clemens would soon make in the first fifteen chapters, but chiefly because his estimates of the equivalence between printer’s copy and book pages were too high (overcorrected from his estimate for Innocents). The need for more copy, however, would become apparent to him, and to Bliss, only as he worked through the proofs during August, and even somewhat later that fall.

It was probably during August that Clemens read proofs for chapters 1–25—or at least the chapters in this section that were needed for the prospectus. His intention to “cull & cut down the MS,” especially in the “Overland trip,” was not entirely relinquished, for he evidently decided at last to remove the chapter he had wanted to tear up back in March (then chapter 7). Figure 1 illustrates the revisions in chapters 7–9 which were set in motion by this deletion, made after the early chapters were in type. Clemens probably wrote and inserted the anecdote about Eckert and the cocoanut-eating cat after the Bemis episode, which was now chapter 7 (rather than chapter 8), at least in part so that the pony-express passage could begin (instead of end) what was now chapter 8. But in order to make chapter 8 a normal length (five, rather than three, book pages), he divided chapter 9 so that the opening passage, about Scott’s Bluffs Pass, now ended chapter 8.194 Chapter 9 was thereby reduced to about three-fourths its original size, while the chapter numbering remained intact. That these changes were made only after the first twelve or so chapters were typeset is indicated by at least two things: (a) the absence of the Eckert episode from the analytical Contents, even though the other changes in chapter division were incorporated there, and (b) the typesetters’ failure to change the Pra folio numbers (77–78) to their correct book pages (62–63) in the Bemis incident, even though the Eckert episode (68–69), which now followed Bemis, was correctly paged.195 Also in August, presumably, Clemens [begin page 865] went on to revise chapters 13–15, about the Mormons, reducing the amount of “dry history” in chapter 13, and eliminating chapter 15 altogether, although not at this point with the intention of printing the excised material in appendixes. This last change did affect the chapter numbering in a way that was not corrected in Pra: it caused parts of chapters 15, 16, 21, 23, and 24 to be anachronistically identified there as chapters 16, 17, 22, 24, and 25.

Clemens no doubt made other changes in the text of the early chapters. The running headline on the last page of chapter 1 (“hermaphrodite steamer”) may refer to a remark that was cut out at the last moment (this chapter exactly fills its last page in the first edition). Similarly, the last subheading in the Contents for chapter 3 (“Warning to Experimenters”) may refer to a passage that is no longer present, suggesting that the chapter was revised in proof without a corresponding revision in the Contents.

It may also have been in August that Clemens added chapter 36 (Nevada quartz mills) to his manuscript—in this case, before the surrounding chapters had been typeset.196 Clemens must have added roughly twenty pages to his manuscript somewhere between chapters 15 and 46, for if he did not, the calculated pages for chapter 46 would be too high to include the page number (“968”) on the draft manuscript page from that chapter.197 That the added pages came in chapter 36, however, is only a reasonable guess. No illustrations were specifically drawn for it: three of its four engravings were demonstrably reused from other works, and the fourth, a tailpiece, appears to be a stock engraving.

Late in August, or sometime in the next few months, Clemens must also have added three more chapters to his manuscript, somewhere between chapter 46 and chapter 76, since chapters 73 and 75 in the prospectus became chapters 76 and 78 in the book. The most likely candidates are chapter 49 (shooting affrays in Virginia City), which is made up largely of Enterprise clippings, and which lacks any illustration except for a stock tailpiece; chapter 52 (mining statistics and techniques), which is also based on clippings, and which appears to be illustrated exclusively from borrowed engravings (the source for only one of its three engravings has actually been found); and chapter 75 (the exploration of Kilauea crater), whose four engravings include at least two stock drawings, and possibly three. Chapter 75, which is not based on a Sandwich Islands letter to the Union, may have been the sketch originally called “Fearful Adventure” in Clemens’s draft table of contents for the sketchbook, written no later than January 1871. If so, then the piece was available in January, but presumably [begin page 866] not included until, like the other added chapters, there was little time to commission drawings for it.198

By 17 August, Clemens had probably reached the proof for chapter 20 (Horace Greeley and Hank Monk), for on that day he wrote to Greeley:

I am here putting my new book on California &c., to press, & find that in it I have said in positive words that the famous episode Hank Monk anecdote has no truth in it refers to an episode which never occurred.

I got this from a newspaper editor, who said he got it from you. I never knew of his telling a lie—but to make sure will you please endorse his statement if you can—or deny it if you must? —so that I can leave my remark as it is; or change it if truth requires. 199

Clemens had made the statement he referred to in a footnote at the end of chapter 20—a footnote he had probably supplied at the behest of Joseph Goodman, when Goodman had read his manuscript back in March and April.200 It is not known how, or even whether, Greeley replied to Clemens’s question.

On 19 August Clemens heard from his friend Adolph Sutro, who was planning to leave for Europe later in the month, but would be in New York for some days prior to departure. Clemens wrote him from Hartford:

Got your letter to-day. When do you sail? Can’t you run up here for one day? I’m awful busy on my new book on Nevada & California. And by the way you might tell me something about the tunnel that would make an interesting page, perhaps. It was about another matter that I wanted to see you principally & very particularly, but one might as well kill various birds with one stone.201

[begin page 867] Clemens may have just drafted chapter 52, on mining statistics and techniques, which prompted him to ask Sutro for information about his tunnel. Sutro must have telegraphed Clemens shortly after arriving at the Gilsey House on 22 August, for two days later Clemens telegraphed him there: “When do you sail? how long shall you remain in NY when leave & whither?” Sutro evidently replied that he sailed on 30 August, for on 25 August Clemens again telegraphed: “All right will see you in New York before you sail.” Clemens almost certainly met with Sutro in New York between 26 and 28 August, and returned to Hartford almost immediately, telegraphing from there on 29 August, “How long will tunnell be when finished,” a question that assumes a previous conversation.202

At any rate, it was from Hartford on 30 August that Clemens found himself “peremptorily called home by sickness” in his family. The next day he wrote Orion from Elmira: “We have scarcely any hope of the baby’s recovery,” although his fears soon proved groundless. On 2 September, the Hartford Courant reported that Clemens had just spent “a month” in Hartford, and that he had left “a few days ago” after “attending to matters connected with the publication of his new book, ‘The Innocents at Home,’ which is to be brought out by the American Publishing company of this city.”203

It remains uncertain exactly how much of the book Clemens saw in proof by the end of August, but it could not have been much more than chapters 1–25. Three months later, on 6 December, Bliss reported that type had been set only up through page 300 (the second page of chapter 43), but since portions of chapters 46, 51, 76, and 78 had by then already appeared in Pra, they might have been ready for proofreading as early as August. Bliss’s statement indicates, however, that while Clemens may have added chapter 52 in August, he did not supply the concluding footnote to it until sometime in December, for it reflects a communication from Sutro received after Clemens departed Hartford: “Since the above was in type, I learn from an official source that the above figure is too high. . . . The tunnel will be some eight miles long, and will develop astonishing riches.”204 This note, which Clemens must have supplied on [begin page 868] proofs sent to him on his lecture tour, may be usefully contrasted with a revision in chapter 27, where he inserted a parenthetical addition rather than a footnote, presumably before the passage was typeset. On the second page of chapter 27, William Clagett is identified parenthetically as “now member of Congress from Montana,” a fact that could not have been added before 9 August, when the election results were first published in the New York Tribune.205

Langdon soon recovered from the immediate threat to his health, and much of September was given over to other matters, including Clemens’s two visits to Washington to patent his elastic garment strap, which he had invented in August while working on his manuscript. Clemens was in Washington on 7–9 September, returned to Hartford a day or two later, and then went on to Elmira on the afternoon of 13 September.206 On 15 September he asked Redpath to send his lecture schedule to Hartford, because he and his family planned to “take up our permanent residence” there on “the last day of this month,” and because he had “to read proof half the winter.”207 The letter implies that he did not expect to complete the proofreading before he went on tour in mid-October.

On 17 September, Clemens and Olivia went to Buffalo “to pack up for Hartford.”208 From Buffalo, on 19 or 20 September, he again went to Washington in pursuit of his patent, returning to Buffalo by 22 September. Interviewed by the Washington National Republican just outside the patent office, Clemens seized the occasion to remind a recent correspondent of their memorable first meeting:

Mark Twain says that Horace Greeley first put the idea into his head, and set him to thinking on the abstruse subject of suspenders. When he first saw the veteran editor the extraordinary set of his trowsers, half in and half out of his boots, attracted his attention, and he at once set to work to see if he could not devise some plan of making them hang more gracefully. He thinks that he has succeeded, and that if Mr. Greeley will only use “Twain’s patent suspenders” his pantaloons will in future become the envy and admiration of the New York World, and that Mr. Greeley will have no occasion, during the long life that is before him, to ask the World editors to discuss his arguments and let his pantaloons alone.209

Back in Buffalo, Clemens reported that he and Olivia were still “packing our furniture & shipping it to Hartford & we are in a mess—house upside [begin page 869] down—my wife sick—can’t leave her bed for perhaps a week yet—& yet we must take possession of our house in Hartford Oct. 1.”210 These various activities suggest that little proofreading was possible during most of September, even if proofs were available.

By 1 October Clemens was in Hartford and, though preoccupied with other matters, in a better position to examine proofs when and if they were ready. On 3 October, Orion wrote to Mollie that Clemens was extremely busy, and would “be over in a day or two”:

Besides his renting and moving, all the sale of his house, the Langdon business, his lectures soon to commence, and his book just going into the printer’s hands. Isn’t that enough to bother one poor mortal?

I saw his artist (Williams) to-night climbing a lamp post, and offering to go to the top, for the amusement of some loafers in front of Tim Dooley’s Saloon. Bliss told me this morning that Williams was on a spree.211

Orion’s remark about the “book just going into the printer’s hands” must refer to some portion of the text following chapter 24 which had been illustrated and was now going to the typesetters.

On 9 October, Clemens asked Redpath for details about his lecture schedule: “Send along the first end of my list & let me see where I am to talk. Please send a copy to my publisher, E. Bliss Jr. 149 Asylum st Hartford—for I must read proof for the next month or so.”212 Clemens’s estimate—that he would finish proofreading by mid-November at the latest—was optimistic, for there were certainly problems, even before he left Hartford on 13 October to begin his tour. Before leaving, he probably settled the question of the title, since that was necessary for the prospectus, and he may well have seen some further proof.213 On 19 October, after only six days (and three lectures), Clemens wrote Bliss from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania:

I brought the desert chapter away with me, to write it up—but it is no use; I am driven to death, with travel, lecturing & entertaining committees. It will be two weeks before I can get a chance to write up this chapter. I remember the heavy work it was to write it before, & I wish that man had the MS stuffed in his bowels that wrote lost it. If time presses, just leave the whole chapter out. It is all we can do.214

[begin page 870] Clemens referred not to chapter 20 (with its allusion to the Great American Desert),215 but to chapter 18, which describes crossing “an ‘alkali’ desert” west of Salt Lake City. It is apparent that the illustrators or the typesetters had lost part of the manuscript for this chapter, and that Bliss had asked Clemens to rewrite it, relying on what had survived.216 (Clemens’s suggestion that Bliss leave out the “whole chapter” if the attempt to rewrite it failed shows that not all of it had been lost.) Despite his temptation to give up, Clemens soon did rewrite the text. Since in the opening paragraph he correctly recalled at least one detail from Orion’s journal—that the stage station was “forty-five miles from the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three from the end of it”—it seems likely that this passage was in the portion Clemens “brought . . . away” with him. The rest of the chapter could have been recreated from memory. Toward the end Clemens even offered a jocular excuse for a “narrative” that might “seem broken and disjointed, in places.”217 And there were other signs of strain: the chapter contains only one illustration, a tailpiece that is a stock engraving, suggesting that the text was lost before it could be illustrated. Finally, the chapter heading was clearly set by a typesetter who had either forgotten, or never knew, how to match the letterspacing of the other chapter headings, even though he used the correct size of type (“size a”). Such details imply that the chapter was typeset much later than the surrounding chapters. Compare the letterspacing in the headings for chapters 17, 18, and 19:

Two weeks into his lecture tour, on 31 October, Clemens wrote Olivia from Milford, Massachusetts, that he had received no mail at the previous day’s lecture site, Brattleboro, Vermont: “I got no letters at Brattleboro. None had come. None in the post office, either. No proofs from Bliss. Brattleboro is unreliable, I guess.” This statement may mean that he had received no proof at all since leaving on tour. On 8 November, he lectured in Hartford, and could have picked up (or delivered) proofs, although no indication has been found that he did either. He passed through Hartford [begin page 871] again on 19 November, three days before the first copies of the prospectus came from the bindery on 22 November.218 By 27 November, he had seen a copy, for he wrote Olivia:

I think Bliss has gotten up the prospectus book with taste & skill. The selections are good, & judiciously arranged. He had a world of good matter to select from, though. This is a better book than the Innocents, & much better written. If the subject were less hackneyed it would be a great success. But when I come to write the Mississippi book, then look out! I will spend 2 months on the river & take notes, & I bet you I will make a standard work.219

About ten days later, probably on 8 December, Clemens received a package from Bliss, who sent printed signatures instead of proofs:

We send you all the parts of the book we have printed so far. We have set up to page 300—but plates not finished up yet. They are now finishing as we have begun to print— We are kept back—by here & there a cut not yet done— I could send you nothing except what I do unless I send my set of proofs which I cannot possibly spare— We have started presses & shall now have to finish up to keep them running— The electrotypers have not finished up as they like to shave down a bit at a time to make of equal thickness—220

Bliss had printed no more than eighteen signatures (since signature nineteen comprised pages 289–304), and probably fewer. He had typeset, but not yet printed, page 300 (the second page of chapter 43). His reason for not sending proofs seems somewhat specious: why was his own set the only one available? Perhaps by this late date he wanted to prevent Clemens from making further revisions, since that would interfere with keeping the presses “running.”

Bliss’s letter, and other evidence, have led to the inference that Clemens did not read proof for the last third of his book. The other evidence is the appearance in the first edition of some sixteen cases of terminal punctuation followed by a dash (“last word.—First word”) between page 426 (in chapter 58) and page 532 (in chapter 74). The absence of this form of punctuation from any earlier part of the text has led to the conclusion that Clemens did not read or correct proof for any text beyond chapter 57—for if he had, he would surely have removed the superfluous [begin page 872] dashes.221 Terminal dashes, however, occur frequently in The Innocents Abroad, even in chapters for which we are certain that Clemens read proof, simply because the proofreader ignored his corrections. And in Roughing It the dashes occur in the same late chapters that have now been identified as a group by their anomalous “type size b” chapter headings (58–75, 77, 79). Therefore the terminal dashes are, in all likelihood, more evidence that the compositors for these late chapters were not instructed as carefully as the compositors for the early ones had been. In addition, Clemens’s comments about two of the illustrations suggest that he did read at least some proof for chapters in the final third of his text.

In chapter 44 (on page 309 of the first edition) Clemens almost certainly added the following sentence in proof: “[My revenge will be found in the accompanying portrait.]” He referred to the “portrait of mr. stewart” that appeared on page 310 (page 289 of the present edition), which he probably first saw in page proof. Likewise, in chapter 54, he presumably added (or modified) the following sentence on first-edition page 392: “They always send a bill, like this below, pinned to the clothes.” Here he referred to the untitled illustration of four Chinese characters (page 370 of this edition), which he probably also first saw in proof.222 Since both references occurred on pages later than 300, and since Bliss said that he had set only up to page 300 by 6 December, it follows that Clemens saw and corrected proofs after that date, including at least one page that fell in the final third of the book (page 392 of the first edition).223

By early January Bliss had realized that the printer’s copy was still not long enough to make what the first prospectus promised the reader, “Between 600 and 700 Octavo Pages.”224 The last page of the final chapter was only 570, and since Clemens was still on tour, there was no likelihood of his writing anything new. No documents have been found to tell us whether it was Bliss or Clemens who thought of adding appendixes to fill out the missing thirty pages. Either one could have suggested using the material that in August Clemens had removed from chapters 13 and 15 on [begin page 873] the Mormons, which was now reset in small (extract) type. The footnote referring the reader to appendixes A and B must also have been added at this time, in the blank space on the last page of chapter 14. For appendix C Clemens almost certainly supplied material he had already written, but then set aside. He may have drafted it while he was writing Roughing It, or while preparing the sketchbook, but he clearly did not include it in the original printer’s copy. Appendix C is devoted to a relatively recent incident in Virginia City, and reprints a long article that first appeared in January 1870. Its relevance to the subject and period of Roughing It is at best remote, suggesting that it too was added solely to make the book longer: appendix C made the final page number 591. Accordingly, the revised prospectus (Prb), which came from the binders in late January, claimed that the volume would consist of “Nearly 600 Octavo Pages.”225

The earliest known public announcement of the book with its correct title, probably based on the information in the recently published prospectus (Pra), appeared in the Buffalo Courier for 30 November:

—Mark Twain’s forthcoming book is to be entitled “Roughing It,” and will describe life in Nevada during the silver mining times, with a trip to the Sandwich Islands by way of an episode. It will be a companion volume to “The Innocents Abroad,” and will contain between 600 and 700 pages, with several hundred engravings. It will be sold only by subscription.226

On 8 December, Clemens telegraphed Redpath that he had decided to “talk nothing but selections from my forth-coming book Roughing it, tried it last night suits me tip top.”227 Among the first to hear this evolving selection was David Gray, who described it on 9 December in the Buffalo Courier:

The subject of his lecture, scarcely a day old, was “Roughing It: Being Passages From My Forthcoming Book,” and it promises to become in his hands perhaps the most interesting of his public performances. Gracefully deprecating the possible suspicion that he is out as a book canvasser, Mark proceeds in this lecture to cull from his unpublished volume a melange of passages—grave and gay, descriptive and humorous—which are in his very best style, and as varied and lively in their character as can be conceived. His pictures of the journey across the continent in stage-coach times; of the life in Nevada during the “flush” period of that territory’s history, and of the strange personages he there encountered, are simply inimitable. The narrative branches off occasionally into one of those extraordinary and elaborate “yarns” for which he alone has a patent, and it encloses, also, frequent bits of word-painting which would make his fame as a serious speaker if he were not inveterately a humorist.228

[begin page 874] If Roughing It may be said to have evolved from the lecture called “Curiosities of California,” it now gradually evolved back into a lecture much like what we know about its ancestor. On 10 December, Clemens wrote Mrs. Fairbanks:

Am writing a new, tip-top lecture about California & Nevada—been at it all night—am still at it & pretty nearly dead with fatigue. Shall be studying it in the cars till midnight, & then sleep half the day in Toledo & study the rest. If I am in good condition there, I shall deliver it—but if I’m not just as bright as a dollar, shall talk A. Ward two or three nights longer & go on studying. Have already tried the new lecture in two villages, night before last & night before that—made a tip-top success in one, but was floored by fatigue & exhaustion of body & mind & made a dismal failure in the other—so now I am reconstructing & re-writing the thing & I’ll fetch ’em next time.229

Bliss was no doubt eager to take advantage of the publicity that Clemens’s new topic provided, and with prospectuses finally available, he was ready to enlist agents to sell the book.230 On 11 December he began to advertise:

“TO BOOK AGENTS.”

Mark Twain’s new book is ready for canvassers. It is a companion volume to INNOCENTS ABROAD. Don’t waste time on books no one wants, but take one people will stop you in the streets to subscribe for. “There is a time to laugh,” and all who read this book will see clearly that time has come. For territory or circulars address AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO., Hartford, Conn.231

By 19 December, a more specific appeal for agents began to appear:

Mark Twain’s NEW BOOK is now ready for canvassers. It contains over 600 pages of reading matter, with 250 engravings, designed expressly for this work, by the best artists in the country. Agents now at work upon it are meeting with unparalleled [begin page 875] success. Agent at Circleville, O., reports 25 orders in 2 days; one at Louisville, Ky., reports 175 orders in 8 days; one at Middletown, Conn., reports 200 orders in 12 days; one at Cincinnati, O., reports 250 orders in 12 days. Early applicants secure choice of territory. For circulars, terms, &c., address NETTLETON & CO., 161 Elm street, Cincinnati, Ohio.232

These figures show that canvassing began in Cincinnati as early as 7 December, the day after Bliss formally copyrighted the book. The orders were placed, of course, without any actual books in hand: the first bound books were not delivered until February.

Meanwhile, Clemens continued his lecture tour in various towns and cities of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. On 24 January 1872, just a day after the revised prospectus (Prb) issued from the bindery, he gave his Roughing It lecture at Steinway Hall in New York. The next day, his performance was described by a knowing but anonymous hand in the New York Tribune:

If there are those who fondly think that the popularity of the American humoristic school is on the decline, they would have been bravely undeceived by a visit to Steinway Hall last night. The most enormous audience ever collected at any lecture in New-York came together to listen to “Mark Twain’s” talk on “Roughing It.” Before the doors were opened $1,300 worth of tickets had been sold, and for some time before Mr. Clemens appeared the house was crammed in every part by an audience of over 2,000. A large number were turned away from the door, and after the close of the evening’s entertainment the officers of the Library Association warmly urged Mr. Clemens to repeat his lecture for the benefit of those who were disappointed.

It was not only financially that the lecture was successful. There was never seen in New-York an audience so obstinately determined to be amused. There was hardly a minute of silence during the hour. Peals of laughter followed every phrase, the solemn asseverations of the lecturer that his object was purely instructive and the investigation of the truth increasing the merriment. At several points of the lecture, especially the description of Mr. Twain’s Mexican Plug, the Chamois of Nevada, and the Washoe Duel, the enjoyment of the audience was intemperate. A singular force and effectiveness was added to the discourse by the inimitable drawl and portentous gravity of the speaker. He is the finest living delineator of the true Pike accent, and his hesitating stammer on the eve of critical passages is always a prophecy—and hence, perhaps, a cause—of a burst of laughter and applause. He is a true humorist, endowed with that indefinable power to make men laugh which is worth, in current funds, more than the highest genius or the greatest learning.233

Clemens had no difficulty identifying the author of such praise:

The statements in this notice were made to me on the platform at the close of the lecture, by the President of the Mercantile Library Asso’n, while trying to have me repeat the lecture; and as Col. John Hay was the only other person listening, he necessarily wrote this notice & besides he is the only man in New York who can speak so authoritatively about “the true Pike accent.”234

[begin page 876]
7. Publication

The first copies of Roughing It came from the bindery on 30 January 1872, but were probably not released to agents for several weeks. On 8 February, the Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular reported the book “almost ready for publication.” On the same day the Hartford Courant said it had “already reached a circulation of twenty thousand copies,” meaning that so many subscriptions had been taken (none had yet been filled). On 13 February, Clemens gritted his teeth for Mrs. Fairbanks: “I killed a man this morning. He asked me when my book was coming out.” A copy was deposited in the Library of Congress on 19 February, and publication was formally announced on 29 February.235

These final weeks of delay were probably a mistake, or at least unnecessary—the result of Bliss’s failure to fully understand the British copyright law. The transatlantic arrangements for Roughing It had probably been worked out with Routledge as far back as July 1871, and Clemens’s (and Bliss’s) working relationship with Routledge was of even longer standing. In 1870, Bliss had cooperated with Routledge in publishing “the only authorized and unabridged edition” in the United States of Wood’s Uncivilized Races, which Routledge had first issued in London in 1868–70. And Routledge had begun to court Clemens as early as 1868, hoping eventually to be named his “only authorized London publishers.” The Routledge edition of Roughing It was to be the first result of that courtship, and it was soon followed by a series of Routledge “authorized” editions, all published in 1872, which included both A Curious Dream; and Other Sketches and Mark Twain’s Sketches, as well as a revised edition of The Innocents Abroad. Roughing It would prove reasonably profitable for Routledge, but its importance to Clemens, who accepted a flat fee of only £37 ($185) for it, was chiefly as an answer to the English “piracy” of his books by John Camden Hotten.236

Collation shows that the Routledge edition of Roughing It, which appeared in two volumes, was typeset from proofs (or printed signatures) of the American edition (state Aa). The proofs were sent to London in at least two batches: the first in December 1871, and the last in January 1872. No effort was made to include the illustrations (although these were certainly present in the American proofs), and the Routledge text omitted the dedication to Calvin Higbie, as well as the three appendixes—further evidence that Clemens agreed to add the appendixes in January, too late even for the final batch of proofs. Since the dedication had appeared as early as November, in the first prospectus (Pra), Routledge may have omitted [begin page 877] it because the proofs lacked some of the front matter, or because it would have made the first volume asymmetrical with the second. Collation establishes that Clemens did not alter the text, or provide any new material for the English edition—both things that he did soon do for the Routledge edition of Innocents, which he prepared in June and July 1872. Apart from the missing dedication and appendixes, there are fewer than forty variant substantives in the Routledge text—none of them authorial. Even the substitution of “d——d” for “bloody” (at 334.17) must be attributed to the English proofreader, since he was more likely than Clemens to know that “bloody” was more offensive than “damned,” at least to a British reader. Although Clemens certainly gave his blessing to the English edition, its text is wholly derivative.

Chapters 1–45 appeared in volume 1, which was titled Roughing It, and chapters 46–79 appeared in volume 2, titled The Innocents at Home, perhaps at Bliss’s or Clemens’s suggestion. Volume 2 also included Routledge’s text of the Burlesque Autobiography (tacked on at the end), presumably to help equalize the size of the two volumes—a sign that Routledge did not omit the appendixes, but instead set from proofs that did not contain them, and that he determined the size of volume 1 before knowing the total length of the work. Six thousand copies of the first volume were bound on 6 February. It appeared in the London Athenaeum’s “List of New Books” on 10 February, and a copy was deposited in the British Museum on 15 February. The second volume was announced in the Athenaeum’s “List of New Books” on 17 February, but its first 6,000 copies were not bound until 28 February. Bliss seems to have held back on announcing publication of the American edition until both volumes had been published in London, although he probably would have been safe as early as 10 February, when the first volume issued.237

As soon as publication in Hartford was formally declared, Orion abruptly accused Bliss of fraud in manufacturing the American edition, and was promptly fired (or resigned) for his trouble. Clemens surely understood why, under the circumstances, Bliss could no longer trust Orion, even as he knew that Orion had long nursed a resentment of Bliss’s condescension toward him. He therefore did not intervene to save his brother’s job, writing him on 7 March, in part:

[begin page 878] I cannot let you think that I overlook or underestimate the brotherly goodness & kindness of your motive in your assault upon Bliss. I would have you feel & know that I fully appreciate that, & value it. The fact that I contemn the act as being indefensible, does not in the least blind me to the virtue of the motive underlying it, or leave me unthankful for it. . . . There is no profit in remembering unpleasant things. Remember only that it has wrought one good: It has set you free from a humiliating servitude; a thing to be devoutly thankful for, God knows.

Being now free of all annoyance or regret in this matter, I hasten to say so.238

Clemens was indeed thankful for Orion’s warning. Five days later, on 12 March, he met with Bliss to try to resolve the questions that had been raised by Orion’s “indefensible” attack. And shortly before (or shortly after) that meeting with Bliss, he consulted Hartford lawyer Charles E. Perkins. Clemens recalled in 1875:

I came to the conclusion that an assertion of Bliss’s which had induced me to submit to a lower royalty than I had at first demanded, was an untruth. I was going to law about it; but after my lawyer (an old personal friend & the best lawyer in Hartford) had heard me through, he remarked that Bliss’s assertion being only verbal & not a part of a written understanding, my case was weak—so he advised me to leave the law alone——& charged me $250 for it.239

A partial, and indirect, record of Clemens’s 12 March conversation with Bliss is preserved in a letter he drafted to Bliss on 20 March—a document he carefully preserved, sending a fair copy to Bliss. This draft shows that Orion’s charges led Clemens to suspect Bliss of overstating his manufacturing costs, which in turn led to the suspicion that “half profits” were not, as Bliss had maintained in July 1870, equal to a 7.5 percent royalty. Written just three weeks after Roughing It was published in the United States, and just one day after Clemens’s second child, Susy, was born, this remarkable document shows Clemens adopting his lawyer’s advice and maneuvering to get “half profits” written into his contract:

The more I think over our last Tuesday’s talk about my copyright or royalty, the better I am satisfied. But I was troubled a good deal, when I went there, for I had worried myself pretty well into the impression that I was getting a smaller ratio of this book’s profits than I had the spirit of our contract had authorized me to promised myself; indeed, I was so nearly convinced of it that if I had not known you so well, or if you had not been so patient & good tempered with my wool-gatherings & perplexities, & taken the pains to show me by facts & figures & arguments that my present royalty gives me fully half & possibly even more than half the net profits of the book, I would probably have come to the settled conviction that such was not the case, & then I should have been about as dissatisfied. a man as could be found in the country. I think few men could have convinced me that I am getting full half the profits, in the state of mind I then was, but you have done it, & I am glad of it, for after our long & pleasant intercourse, & the confidence that has existed between us, I am glad you convinced me, for I would have been sorry indeed to have come away from your house feeling that I had put such entire trust & confidence in you & the company to finally lose by it. And I am glad that you convinced me by good solid arguments & figures instead of mere plausible generalities, for [begin page 879] that was just & business-like, & a conviction grounded in that way is satisfying & permanent. So But everything is plain & open, now. I knew I was entitled to half the profits, & you will not blame me for coming frankly forward & consulting you when I felt a little unsure about it. And after thinking it over, I feel that, the result being the same, you will not mind readily assent to the altering the of our contract in such a way that it shall express that I am to receive half the profits. I am sorry the idea occurs to me so late, but that, of course, is of no real consequence. Any friend of mine can represent me in the matter. Twichell Charley Warner will do as well as another. Let Twichell attend to it. However, I suppose he has his hands about full; & perhaps he isn’t much experienced in this sort of thing. Then let Charles Perkins do it. Contracts are in his line at any rate. It is too complicated for anybody but a lawyer to handle, anyhow; I could not even conduct it myself. I will write him. ask him to do it. 240

For his part, Bliss could hardly regard the result of any revision as “the same,” and he evidently declined to amend or replace the original contract, probably soon after receiving this letter. Despite his lawyer’s earlier advice, Clemens decided to sue. He recalled in 1880 that eventually “Bliss went into the accounts & details & satisfied Perkins & his expert that 7½ per cent did represent half profits up to a sale of 50,000, & that after that the publisher had a mere trifling advantage of the author. So we dropped the matter.”241 The precise timing of these events remains unclear, but it seems likely that Perkins and his (unidentified) expert interviewed Bliss sometime in late May, and that Clemens was persuaded to give up the suit by the end of June or, at the latest, by mid-July.242

Orion’s charges against Bliss are not known to survive in their original, presumably written, form, but their general import is clear. As mentioned earlier, Bliss had used probably more than fifty borrowed engravings in Roughing It—that is, engravings originally made for other books, but reused (at substantial savings) in this one. Since this common practice could hardly have been a secret, Orion probably accused Bliss not of borrowing illustrations, but of overstating their cost. Yet Orion must have pointed to other abuses as well. On 15 May, Clemens urged him to “Ask Chas. Perkins if he wants you to give him points in my lawsuit. But give none otherwise.”243 On 17 May, Orion replied: “I didn’t know you had commenced a law suit. My plan did not contemplate a law suit by you. I suppose it is a suit for damages. I did not think there was any chance for enough to be made that way to justify such a proceeding.” Orion’s plan was to force Bliss to sue Clemens, to prevent his publishing with someone else.

[begin page 880] In the meantime, while waiting for him to assume the role of plaintiff, which is a difficult position, because the plaintiff has every thing to prove, you prepa keep an eye on the paper manufacturer, on Hinckley, book keeper at Bliss’s, on the book binders, and on the foremen of the press and book rooms of the Churchman, so that in case of sickness, or prospect of removal from the state, you may get an order from the chancellor to have their testimony taken for preservation on the ground of a probable law-suit. Imagine the effect of such an order on Bliss when he finds Hinckley subpoenaed to testify as to borrowed engravings, the amount of paper received from the paper mill for the publis Roughing It; the testimony of the paper man as to its quality; of the Churchman pressman as to the country newspaper style of printing the cuts &c., of the binder as to the quality of the binding, and how many he bound so. Bliss can see then that there is only needed to be added the testimony of some prominent engravers, book binders, and book publishers in the trade, at Boston and New York, to overwhelm with devastating ruin the subscription business and the American Publishing Company in particular—besides inevitably beating them in the suit if there should be a if they should sue your case would be one of the “causes celebre.” It would be seized upon with keen relish by newspapers favorable to the trade, and no the testimony published. All this Bliss must foresee as soon as when he sees the course indicated as soon as an excuse offers to “perpetuate the evidence” of—say Hinckley. This indirect quiet threat would be so terrible that he would never bring a suit against you if you simply went quietly along and wrote your next book and which you have contracted with him to publish, and put it into the hands of somebody else to publish, just as if you had never made any contract at all with Bliss to publish it.

These remarks suggest that Orion had accused Bliss of misrepresenting the cost not only of the illustrations (“borrowed engravings”), but of the paper and binding as well. Orion’s point was that his brother could hardly recover significant damages for the way Roughing It had been manufactured, but that “the fraud you can prove concerning the printing of Roughing It” could be used to free him from his multiple contracts with Bliss by frightening the publisher with the prospect of seeing subscription-book manufacturing standards held up to ridicule by “newspapers favorable to the trade,” which is to say, publishers who sold their books in bookstores, rather than by subscription.244

Whether or not Bliss really cheated Clemens remains an unanswered question.245 It is clear, however, that Orion’s charges inadvertently provided [begin page 881] Clemens with yet another reason to fear what newspaper critics would say about Roughing It. He did not believe that he was receiving “half profits,” even when he dropped the lawsuit in June or July, but he was convinced that Roughing It had been printed on substandard paper and with badly executed engravings. It is important to recognize that his complaint was principally with the crude way the illustrations had been engraved, electroplated, and printed—and only incidentally, if at all, with the quality of the drawings themselves. Eventually he recognized that these drawbacks were to some extent inherent in subscription publishing. Two years later, after True Williams had contributed drawings to his next book (The Gilded Age), Clemens told Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “There is one discomfort which I fear a man must put up with when he publishes by subscription, & that is wretched paper & vile engravings.”246

Although Clemens was less concerned about the quality of the actual drawings, he was ambitious to improve them as well. In December 1872, he wrote Thomas Nast: “I do hope my publishers can make it pay you to illustrate my English book. Then I should have good pictures. They’ve got to improve on ‘Roughing It.’ ”247 But Nast never did illustrate a book by Mark Twain—at least in part because of the high cost of his services. In [begin page 882] 1905, Clemens put the blame for this parsimony entirely on Bliss, who “always had an eye for the pennies”:

He did not waste any on the illustrations. He had a very good artist—Williams—who had never taken a lesson in drawing. Everything he did was original. The publisher hired the cheapest wood-engraver he could find, and in my early books you can see a trace of that. You can see that if Williams had had a chance he would have made some very good pictures.248

Williams continued to help illustrate Mark Twain’s books, up through A Tramp Abroad (1880).

8. Reviews

It was presumably with Orion’s accusations fresh in his mind that Clemens told David Gray he was afraid Roughing It “would be considered pretty poor stuff,” and that therefore he “had better not let the press get a chance at it.”249 But did Clemens actually withhold review copies, as this remark implies? To answer this question, more than sixty American, English, and Hawaiian newspapers and magazines were searched for periods ranging from six to twelve months (as available) in 1872–73.250 The search showed that while extracts from the text of Roughing It were frequently published,251 the total number of reviews, even very brief ones, was only fourteen. Reviews that Clemens or Bliss might have solicited soon after publication are certainly few: ten of those found can be safely excluded from this category, either because they were published in England and reviewed the Routledge edition, or because they appeared well after Clemens [begin page 883] had changed his mind, and was actively trying to solicit reviews. On the whole, the reviews that did appear failed to confirm his worst fears, but they contained enough negative comment to suggest that his fears might have been more fully realized if he had not restricted review copies.

In March 1880, Clemens said that David Gray, Charles Dudley Warner, and William Dean Howells were the only men he could “trust to say the good thing if it could be honestly said” about his books, or, if it could not, to “be & remain charitably silent.”252 His trust in their discretion may well have begun with the publication of Roughing It. Clemens knew that Gray had reviewed The Innocents Abroad favorably, and intelligently, on 19 March 1870, and it seems inconceivable that he did not send him a copy of Roughing It in March 1872. But a search of the files of the Buffalo Courier shows that Gray did not review the book. On 9 March, in fact, he had this to say about Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada:

If Mr. Bret Harte has most successfully wrought up the artistic material which the wild nature and humanity of California afford, Mr. King has as surely, with equal success, and with scarcely less literary art, portrayed for us the face of Californian nature. . . . His book takes a position immeasurably above the journals of travel with which western explorers have fatigued the public mind, and it will awaken a fresh and poetic interest in the hackneyed subject of the west.253

The closest Gray came to publishing his opinion of Roughing It was to print half a dozen extracts from it (including parts of chapters 26, 30, 44, 51, 59, and 67), which he introduced as follows:

Mark Twain, according to the autobiographical sketch in his recently published book, “Roughing It,” left the Atlantic coast in 1865—he spent a short time as a government underling—and he himself says he would have made a good pickpocket if he had remained long in the service of Uncle Samuel. He pined for change, and here is his own account of how it came and what adventures it led him into.254

The inference must be that Gray was obliged by his real opinion of Roughing It to “be & remain charitably silent.”255

On 18 March (a week after his meeting with Bliss) Clemens wrote to Howells, thanking him for an autographed copy of Their Wedding Journey: “I would like to send you a copy of my book, but I can’t get a copy myself, yet, because 30,000 people who have bought & paid for it have to have preference over the author. But how is that for 2 months’ sale? But [begin page 884] I’m going to send you one when I get a chance.”256 Howells’s copy was almost certainly among the twenty-three “½ moroccos” that Clemens ordered sent to “friends of mine” in his 20 March letter to Bliss. In the final paragraph of that troubled letter, he professed to be

at last easy & comfortable about the new book. I have sufficient testimony, derived through many people’s statements to my friends, to about satisfy me that the general verdict gives “Roughing It” the preference over “Innocents Abroad.” This is rather gratifying than otherwise. The reason given is, that they like a book about America because they understand it better. It is pleasant to believe this, because it isn’t a great deal of trouble to write books about one’s own country. Miss Anna Dickinson says the book is unprecedentedly popular—a strong term, but I believe that was it . . . . (Request added to send 23½ moroccos to friends of mine named.)257

This statement may well be part of Clemens’s strategy in dealing with Bliss, so just how “easy & comfortable” Clemens actually was at this time is in doubt. The passage does suggest, however, that he was relying chiefly on the word of friends, not on book reviews. It is also not known just how Clemens learned of Anna Dickinson’s opinion, but since she was a friend of the Langdons’, her words may have come by private letter to his wife or mother-in-law. Yet Dickinson’s real feelings, less than a year later, were quite different from those she had expressed to the Langdons (and Clemenses). On 14 March 1873 she wrote her mother:

Just think that John Hay’s beautiful “Castilian Days” never paid him but $350,—that Charlie Warner made, all told, from his jolly “Summer in a Garden” less than $1000,—that Whittier for years scarcely earned enough to keep him in bread & butter, & that this man’s stuff, “Innocents Abroad” & “Roughing It,” have paid him not short of $200,000.—

’Tis enough to disgust one with one’s kind.258

Because of Clemens’s cautious strategy with review copies, opinions like Dickinson’s were only rarely expressed in print. On 6 March 1872, however, the Manchester (England) Guardian reviewed the Routledge edition, taking a more critical tack than has been found in any American review:

The main portion of “Roughing It” is an account of the author’s experiences among the silver miners in Nevada, and very rough both the experiences and the miners seem to have been, though of course a certain allowance must be made for exaggeration. The life and people are much the same as those that form the subject of Bret Harte’s tales; but whereas he has shown a poetical and imaginative spirit, has represented inner life and character, and shown how the tender flower of sentiment or emotion may be found to spring among the rude and unlovely surroundings of a diggers’ camp, our author i.e., Mark Twain has contented himself with dwelling on the outside of things and simply describing manners and customs. . . . Mark Twain, too, often falls into the slang of transatlantic journalism, and displays also [begin page 885] its characteristic inability to distinguish between the picturesque and the grotesque.259

And on 6 April, a reviewer in the London Examiner expressed similar, albeit slightly more tolerant, views. Mark Twain’s

humour is not of a very delicate or profound order, but he enjoys it so keenly himself that it is impossible to resist the contagion. This humour is, moreover, evidently the natural outgrowth of the unsettled, adventurous, wild life he has led. . . . It is the humour of strong, daring, adventurous spirits, animated by wild, irregular passions, which may unfit them for settled life, but are among the very qualities required for semi-civilised regions, such as those that form the scene of Mr Clemens’s book.260

Whether or not Clemens saw either of these reviews is not known, but is almost irrelevant: although British, they represent precisely the kind of reaction Clemens had predicted to David Gray (“pretty poor stuff”).

It is likely, but not certain, that Clemens also sent a copy of Roughing It to the Hartford Courant, edited by his friend Charles Dudley Warner—soon to become co-author of The Gilded Age. The Courant’s review appeared on 18 March, the same day Clemens wrote to Howells, and is remarkable less for its deliberate praise than for an undercurrent of alarm, which emerges as a kind of defensiveness about the book. Warner began by reassuring the reader of Mark Twain’s moral purpose, and the genuine clarity of his style:

Behind the mask of the story-teller is the satirist, whose head is always clear, who is not imposed on by shams, who hates all pretension, and who uses his humor, which is often extravagant, to make pretension and false dignity ridiculous.

It is not mere accident that everybody likes to read this author’s stories and sketches; it is not mere accident that they are interesting reading. His style is singularly lucid, unambiguous and strong. Its simplicity is good art. The reader may not be conscious that there is any art about it, but there is art in its very perspicuity. There is no circumlocution, or any attempt at fine writing, but there is a use of vigorous English, and often a quaint use of it that gives the effect of humor in the soberest narration.

Warner then took up one of the more troublesome issues, the proper uses of “slang”:

The author also means to be true to his art in another respect, and that is to report the odd characters he meets and the people of the new countries he describes, exactly as they were, slang and all. There is much slang in the book, but it is the argot that was current in the mining regions, and the description of the life there would be entirely imperfect if it had been left out.

And he included a defense of the book which, except for its final note, chimed very close to Clemens’s own professed feelings about it:

Roughing It is a volume of nearly 600 pages, of queer stories, funny dialogues, strange, comical and dangerous adventures, and it is a book of humor first of all; but we are inclined to think that, on the whole, it contains the best picture of frontier [begin page 886] mining life that has been written. The episode of the silver mining in Nevada has certainly never been so graphically described. It is an experience that can, we trust, never be repeated on this continent. In these pages we are made to see distinctly a society that never had any parallel. It would be unpleasant to read about it, if the author did not constantly relieve the dreadful picture with strokes of humor.261

Similarly defensive, though briefer, was a notice on 25 March in the Cincinnati Gazette, which observed that Mark Twain’s adventures were “related with a liveliness, and, we must add, with more than occasional imaginativeness peculiar to himself. One may not always approve the taste of what is said, yet he can rarely record his dissent without a smile. The many illustrations are not the least amusing feature of the book, which is published by subscription exclusively.”262

These conservative views did not go wholly unanswered. On 11 April, the New York Independent remarked that among Roughing It’s

most entertaining chapters are those which describe the author’s visit to the Hawaiian Islands. . . . We only wish that Mr. Clemens had made fewer alterations than he has made in those rollicking, often ludicrous descriptions, the “Sacramento Union” letters here reprinted. . . . The sketches of Western life are equally amusing. We may remark, too, that his fun is not dependent upon bad spelling or bad grammar. He writes good English, and we can commend the book to all who enjoy the wild Western drollery of which Mark Twain is the ablest living master. As a remarkably full repository of Western slang this work has a literary interest which will give it a permanent value to the student of Americanisms.263

By the time this notice appeared, Clemens had evidently begun to regret his cautious policy toward reviews. On 19 April he asked Frank Bliss to send a copy of the book to William C. Smythe, “a splendid old friend of mine,” who had written him requesting a chance to review it: “He is city editor of the principal Pittsburg paper—a city where I drew the largest audience ever assembled in Pittsburg to hear a lecture. Send him a book. I want a big sale in Pittsburg.” Smythe’s review (if any) has not been found, but Clemens’s letter shows that his own attitude toward reviews had changed.264

The next day, 20 April, Clemens wrote to James Redpath in Boston, weeping a few crocodile tears about the press’s neglect of his book:

Could you jam this item into the Advertiser? I hate to see our fine success wholly uncelebrated:

Mark Twain’s new book, “Roughing It” has sold 43,000 copies in two months & a half. Only 17,000 copies of “The Innocents Abroad were sold in the first two months & a half months.

[begin page 887] I ordered a copy to be sent to you a couple of weeks ago. If it has been delayed, let me know.265

No such item has been found in the Boston Advertiser, but on 1 May, a generous review did appear in the Boston Evening Transcript:

Though abounding in facts, and brimful of new and interesting information, the work belongs, not to the literature of knowledge, but to the literature of nonsense, and will be read not so much for its wisdom as for its wit. It will be safer, as well as more agreeable, to quote its jokes than its statistics. There is, however, a serious side to Mark Twain’s genius, and in “Roughing It” it has something like justice done to it. Some of the descriptions of mountains, lakes, rivers, and other marvels and wonders of nature are graphic, eloquent and almost poetical. . . . The silver mining fever in Nevada, and numerous other scenes, incidents and adventures are described with delightful freshness and vigor. The worthies of the “flush times” of Nevada are so admirably depicted that one is almost induced to call Mark Twain a comic Plutarch.

Dick Baker’s story of his cat, and Jim Blaine’s story of his grandfather’s old ram, will satisfy and delight the lovers of Mark Twain’s peculiar humor. But Scotty Brigg’s Visit to the Minister is perhaps the best thing in the book, if not the best thing of its kind that Mark has yet done. The whole chapter on Scotty is rich in humor—the sweetest and tenderest humor in all Twain’s writings.266

Redpath’s reply to Clemens has not been found. He presumably told him what, if anything, he had accomplished with the Boston press, and may also have said something about the book itself. On 15 May Clemens replied in his turn: “Thank you with all my heart. I want to send a copy to the Boston literary correspondent of the N.Y. Tribune—Louise Chandler Moulton, isn’t it? I will have it sent to you. Will you give it to her with my compliments?”267 Redpath presumably did as requested, for on 10 June, Moulton noticed the book in her regular letter from Boston to the New York Tribune:

For pure fun, I know of nothing which has been published this year to compare with “Roughing It,” by Mark Twain (Samuel S. Clemens), a New-England, though not a Boston, issue. It is a large and handsome book, full of the funniest possible illustrations. . . . It is funny everywhere; perhaps it is funniest of all when he sojourns in Salt Lake City, and learns to understand the Mormons through the revelations of their Gentile neighbors. . . . With a parting aphorism, which was one fruit of the writer’s experience in “Roughing It,” I will leave the book. An Irishman fell from a third story window with a hod of bricks, and had his life saved by falling upon Uncle Lem, an old gentleman who was leaning against the scaffolding. “Uncle Lem’s dog was there,” says the narrator. “Why did n’t the Irishman fall on the dog? Becuz the dog would a seen him a coming, and stood from under. That’s the reason the dog warn’t appointed. A dog can’t be depended on to carry out a special providence.”268

Shortly before Moulton’s letter appeared, probably sometime between 25 and 30 May, Howells published his review (yet another voice from Boston) in the Atlantic Monthly:

[begin page 888] We can fancy the reader of Mr. Clemens’s book finding at the end of it (and its six hundred pages of fun are none too many) that, while he has been merely enjoying himself, as he supposes, he has been surreptitiously acquiring a better idea of the flush times in Nevada, and of the adventurous life generally of the recent West, than he could possibly have got elsewhere. The grotesque exaggeration and broad irony with which the life is described are conjecturably the truest colors that could have been used, for all existence there must have looked like an extravagant joke, the humor of which was only deepened by its nether-side of tragedy. The plan of the book is very simple indeed, for it is merely the personal history of Mr. Clemens during a certain number of years, in which he crossed the Plains in the overland stage to Carson City, to be private secretary to the Secretary of Nevada. . . .

A thousand anecdotes, relevant and irrelevant, embroider the work; excursions and digressions of all kinds are the very woof of it, as it were; everything far-fetched or near at hand is interwoven, and yet the complex is a sort of “harmony of colors” which is not less than triumphant. The stage-drivers and desperadoes of the Plains; the Mormons and their city; the capital of Nevada, and its government and people; the mines and miners; the social, speculative, and financial life of Virginia City; the climate and characteristics of San Francisco; the amusing and startling traits of Sandwich Island civilization,—appear in kaleidoscopic succession. Probably an encyclopædia could not be constructed from the book; the work of a human being, it is not unbrokenly nor infallibly funny; nor is it to be always praised for all the literary virtues; but it is singularly entertaining, and its humor is always amiable, manly, and generous.269

This last sentence shows that even Howells could not avoid mentioning the book’s occasional lack of “all the literary virtues.” It is worth recalling that John Hay had identified Howells himself as a promising member of the “Western school.” And Clemens therefore acknowledged this praise, as Howells recalled in 1910, in a way that “stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here.”270

Clemens’s response to Howells is also worth comparing with what he said just three weeks later to Louise Chandler Moulton, writing her on 18 June:

I am content, now that the book has been praised in the Tribune—& so I thank you with all that honest glow of gratitude that comes into a mother’s eyes when a stranger praises her child. Indeed, it is my sore spot that my publisher, in a frenzy of economy, has sent not a copy of my book to any newspaper to be reviewed, but is only always going to do it—so I seem to be publishing a book that attracts not the slightest mention. It is small consolation to me when he says, “Where is the use of it?—the book is 4 months & one week old, we are printing the 75th thousand, & are still behind the orders.” If I say, “If you had had the book noticed in all the papers [begin page 889] you would be now printing the 150th thousand, maybe,” the wisdom falls upon a sodden mind that refuses to be enlightened.271

These remarks were disingenuous in more than one way, especially since Clemens had probably not yet dropped his lawsuit against Bliss. It is clear that the responsibility for not sending copies “to any newspaper to be reviewed,” at least until April, belonged squarely to Clemens, not to Bliss.

Given the controversial nature of the West as a literary subject, Clemens could reasonably expect to be treated kindly by western journals, but no evidence has been found that he sent copies to them. The book seems to have reached western journals at about the same time copies were being delivered to agents in the West, which implies that Clemens did not do what he had previously done for Innocents, order it sent to the Overland Monthly so that Bret Harte could review it before anyone else. In late May an unidentified critic reviewed Roughing It in that journal with understandable enthusiasm:

As Irving stands, without dispute, at the head of American classic humorists, so the precedence in the unclassical school must be conceded to Mark Twain. About him there is nothing classic, bookish, or conventional, any more than there is about a buffalo or a grizzly. His genius is characterized by the breadth, and ruggedness, and audacity of the West; and, wherever he was born, or wherever he may abide, the Great West claims him as her intellectual offspring. Artemus Ward, Doesticks, and Orpheus C. Kerr, who have been the favorite purveyors of mirth for the Eastern people, were timid navigators, who hugged the shore of plausibility, and would have trembled at the thought of launching out into the mid-ocean of wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration, as Mark Twain does, in such episodes as Bemis’ buffalo adventure, and “Riding the Avalanche.” . . .

It would be a great misapprehension, however, to conceive of Roughing It as merely a book of grotesque humor and rollicking fun. It abounds in fresh descriptions of natural scenery, some of which, especially in the overland stage-ride, are remarkably graphic and vigorous. . . .

Of the three hundred wood-cuts that illustrate the volume we can say nothing complimentary, from an artistic point of view. But some of them are spirited, and many of them suggestive. Crude as they are in design, and coarse in execution, they have afforded us much amusement; and the majority of readers would, we are sure, regret to dispense with them.272

On 28 April, Clemens’s old San Francisco employer, the Morning Call, published a long, rambling notice that was basically positive:

No writer ever made so much out of so little, and that much of such excellent quality. Notwithstanding his palpable exaggeration in certain parts when describing incidents, [begin page 890] there is much more of truth to be found, and a better idea of situations (in the theatrical sense) conveyed, than can be obtained from the most sober-sided narrative of the events of which he tells.273

Western reviewers were certainly not all so kind. On 18 May, a critic for another old employer, the Sacramento Union, reviewed the book with some asperity, sharply drawing attention to its “padding”:

Mark Twain is one of those geniuses that occasionally appear to make books that will sell, and, per consequence, make money, while others who write to benefit the world obtain but a poor reward for their labors. There is a good deal of stuff in this book, and a great deal too that is amusing. Had it been half its size, and the contents sifted, the book would have answered every purpose except, perhaps, to sell. . . . Sam Clemens tells good stories, but he is under high pressure as a book-making celebrity, and necessarily shoves off some yarns that under other circumstances might not find a place in his pages, and with less reputation as a humorist would not be excused by the reading public. There is always enough of fun in Clemens to make his books salable, and some stories are good enough to palliate the appearance of half a dozen others not as good.274

Sales were, in fact, excellent. On 21 March Clemens had chided Bliss for getting “caught in a close place with a short edition.” And by the end of May the American Publisher announced, “The book is having an unparalleled sale. About 50,000 copies in a little over three months. . . . We have been unable to fill orders at sight, for this book; 10,000 copies are ordered ahead now.” In mid-June Clemens again boasted to Howells of “62,000 copies of Roughing It sold & delivered in 4 months.”275 The bindery records of the American Publishing Company corroborate these impressive figures. It is clear that Bliss was indeed unable to meet the demand for copies: his general agents for Chicago reported on 24 March that they were “away behind in filling their orders,” and that their “five hundred agents, throughout the North and Southwest,” were “taking from five to ten orders each, daily.” By 31 March the bindery had produced 23,695 copies, and it was apparently unable to meet all back orders until sometime in June: by the end of that month it had shipped a total of 67,395 copies.276

But sales declined sharply and unexpectedly in July, when only 2,645 copies were bound, less than a quarter of the number bound the previous month. The total for July through December was only 7,773, a mere one- [begin page 891] eighth of the number for the first half of the year. Total sales for the year were thus 75,168, with 90 percent occurring in the first six months. If the rate of sale for January through June had continued for the rest of the year, Clemens’s prediction in September 1870 that he would sell 90,000 copies during the first year would have been easily met, even exceeded.277

To someone with Clemens’s high expectations, the sales of Roughing It were ultimately disappointing. A total of only 7,831 copies of the American edition were sold in 1873, followed by 5,132 in 1874. In comparison, fewer copies of Innocents—only 67,680—were sold during its first year, but its sales did not decline so precipitously: during the second year of publication, a total of 21,822 copies were sold. On 4 March 1873 Clemens remarked to Bliss that Roughing It was now selling “less than twice as many in a quarter as Innocents, a book which is getting gray with age.”278 But he was willing to take at least part of the blame:

I believe I have learned, now, that if one don’t secure publicity & notoriety for a book the instant it is issued, no amount of hard work & faithful advertising can accomplish it later on. When we look at what Roughing It sold in the first 3 & 6 [begin page 892] months, we naturally argue that it would have sold full 3 times as many if it had gotten the prompt & early journalistic boost & notoriety that the Innocents had.279

Perhaps in response to this decline, Clemens engineered one more review in the New York Tribune. On 12 January 1873 he wrote to John Hay:

Bliss is going to send “Roughing It” to the Tribune today, so he says. If you ever do any book reviews for the paper, I wish you & Reid would arrive at an amicable arrangement whereby you can have an hour or two to write a review of that book in, for you understand it & a week’s holiday afterward to rest up in—for you know the people in it & the spirit of it better than an eastern man would. I shall hope so, at any rate. That is I mean I hope you’ll write it—that is what I am trying to mean.

Don’t answer this letter—for I know how a man hates a man that’s made him write a letter.280

But Whitelaw Reid did not assign Hay to review it, much to Clemens’s annoyance. The reviewer was instead George Ripley, “the profound old stick who has done all the Tribune reviews for the last 90 years. The idea of setting such an oyster as that to prating about Humor!”281 Ripley’s comments were hardly unfavorable, concluding that Roughing It “may be regarded as one of the most racy specimens of Mark Twain’s savory pleasantries, and their effect is aggravated by the pictorial illustrations which swarm on every page, many of which are no less comical than the letterpress.”282 But they certainly did not exhibit the sort of sympathetic understanding Clemens expected (and had earlier received) from John Hay. Just one year before, Hay had reviewed the Roughing It lecture in the Tribune, describing Mark Twain as “a true humorist, endowed with that indefinable power to make men laugh which is worth, in current funds, more than the highest genius or the greatest learning.”283

9. Sales

Sales of the English edition of Roughing It followed the same pattern as the American, but on a smaller scale. In 1872 Routledge printed 18,000 copies of each volume, and followed in 1873 with another 8,000 of each. From 1872 through 1899, Routledge sold a total of 63,750 copies of volume 1, and 68,000 copies of volume 2. In 1882, Routledge also issued a new, one-volume illustrated edition, printing 4,000 copies that year. The plates and unsold sheets of this edition were sold in 1885 to Chatto and Windus, who printed an additional 5,000 copies before 1900.284 Routledge was well satisfied with the sales of the original two-volume edition: in [begin page 893] 1892, when Chatto and Windus offered £100 for the “stereos & copy-rights” of Roughing It, The Gilded Age, and Mark Twain’s Sketches, Edmund Routledge responded, “You can have as I offered before the two 2/. vols of Twain for £60, but Roughing it we don’t wish to sell at all.”285

Although Clemens did not alter the text of any edition after the first American, he did sanction republication by Routledge, and later by Chatto and Windus, in England, as well as by Bernhard Tauchnitz in Germany, and (indirectly, through Routledge) by George Robertson in Australia. Clemens also sanctioned, but did not revise, later editions in the United States, both by the American Publishing Company and by Harper and Brothers. Despite Routledge’s English copyright, however, John Camden Hotten reprinted several extracts from the text, without Routledge’s or Clemens’s permission. And beginning in 1880, Belford and Company in Toronto (later Rose-Belford Publishing, and later still, Rose Publishing Company) reprinted the whole text of Roughing It, lacking only chapters 22, 36, 45, 49, 52, 71, 72, and 77, again without Routledge’s or Clemens’s approval.

Hotten had written to Clemens in February 1872, shortly before Roughing It was published: “Will you oblige by mailing to me on receipt of this some of the proofs—a few chapters. You may depend upon my dealing honourably with you & I will place to your credit whatever is fair & equitable.”286 But Clemens had long since agreed to sell the English rights to Routledge, precisely in order to foil Hotten, who had reprinted both of his earlier books, the Jumping Frog and The Innocents Abroad, in England, and had also issued various collections and anthologies of American humor, much of it Mark Twain’s. In 1870 Hotten had published The Piccadilly Annual of Entertaining Literature, which included five Mark Twain sketches from the Galaxy; and in 1871 he had issued two smaller volumes, Eye Openers and Screamers, containing several more sketches from the Galaxy and a few from the Express, the Chicago Republican, and the San Francisco Alta California.287

Hotten was made more cautious by the Routledge copyright on Roughing It, but in August 1872 he issued yet another collection of humor, Practical Jokes with Artemus Ward, Including the Story of the Man Who Fought Cats, which included fourteen Mark Twain sketches taken from the Express, the Galaxy, and other newspapers, as well as three extracts from the English edition of Roughing It. Whether or not Hotten thought Routledge’s copyright was valid, he was apparently confident that these [begin page 894] Roughing It anecdotes would not be detected. He supplied the titles “Editorial Skits,” “Sending Them Through,” and “The Union—Right or Wrong?” And he edited the texts rather more heavily than those from other sources that were clearly not protected by copyright.288

In March 1873 Hotten published The Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (HWa), reprinting virtually everything by Mark Twain which he had included in the earlier books. In London during the fall of 1872, Clemens had told Hotten of his willingness to revise and correct this volume before it appeared. Hotten welcomed the offer, but Clemens left for home before he could follow through on it. HWa included eight sketches corresponding to passages in Roughing It. Two of them were the anecdotes that Hotten had previously extracted from Roughing It (“Editorial Skits” was excluded). Also reprinted was the Practical Jokes text of “Mark Twain’s Remarkable Stranger,” derived from the April 1871 Galaxy, which Clemens had independently used as the basis for chapter 77. Hotten’s 1870 Jumping Frog provided two extracts from the 1866 Sacramento Union which Clemens had independently incorporated into Roughing It from Union clippings: “Honoured as a Curiosity in Honolulu” and “The Steed Oahu.” Hotten also reprinted “Mark in Mormonland” from Roughing It, “A Nabob’s Visit to New York” from the American Publisher of January 1872, and “Baker’s Cat” from his own Screamers, which had in turn come from the Buffalo Express of 18 December 1869.289

When Hotten died only a few months after HWa issued, his assistant, Andrew Chatto, took over the business in partnership with W. E. Windus. Chatto was eager to follow up on Clemens’s 1872 offer to revise HWa, and so wrote to him again when he was in London: “I am sincerely anxious to establish more cordial relations as between Author & Publisher, than have hitherto existed, between you and our firm, and I beg to submit to you a set of the sheets of a volume of your writings, in order that you may (as I understand you expressed a desire to do) correct certain portions of the contents.”290

An agreement was reached, and Clemens set to work revising a set of HWa folded and gathered sheets, which became the basis for a new edition, HWb, issued in April 1874. Collation of HWa with HWb shows that the original HWa plates were altered to incorporate Clemens’s corrections and, in some cases, his deletion of entire sketches. Some of the texts—such as those from the Union and the Express—had undergone a parallel [begin page 895] evolution: they had been subjected to Hotten’s cutting and editing, while Clemens had independently supplied his own revisions of the same sketches for Roughing It. Thus when he came to revise Hotten’s texts, he was annoyed and sometimes puzzled, since their history was not clear to him.291 Clemens’s demonstrable changes to these eight sketches for HWb, however, were not revisions of Roughing It but of independent sketches, and therefore have not been adopted in the present text.292

The second English edition of Roughing It and The Innocents at Home (illustrated by F. A. Fraser; Routledge, 1882) was set from the first English edition, but contained the appendixes of the first American edition, and the revision of “thirteenth” to “sixteenth” (136n.6) introduced in the fifth state of the first American edition (Ae, 1874). Chatto and Windus reissued the second Routledge edition in 1885, 1889, and 1897. Clemens made no revisions in any of these reimpressions.

Bernhard Tauchnitz of Leipzig, Germany, published a Continental edition of Roughing It in 1880–81, which was based on the 1872 Routledge edition. In September 1880 he sent Clemens 300 gold marks (about $75) as a voluntary payment for his use of the text. Clemens responded on 7 October, expressing his “distinguished appreciation of a publisher who puts moral rights above legal ones, to his own disadvantage.” He also evidently explained that the Routledge version of the book comprised two volumes, of which Tauchnitz had published only one. Tauchnitz promptly replied: “As to ‘Roughing it’ you are quite right. I have published in my edition only the Tale which bears this title in the ‘Routledge edition.’ In consequence of your kind explanation I will now publish in a further separate volume ‘The Innocents at Home,’ and beg to offer you, as for ‘Roughing it,’ Three Hundred Mark Gold for this volume.”293 Clemens provided no revisions for either volume in this edition.

From 1899 until 1903 the American Publishing Company issued several impressions of a two-volume edition of Roughing It (A2), typeset from the last state of the first American edition (Ag, 1892). Later impressions of A2 (e.g., the “Japan” and “DeLuxe”) incorporate corrections suggested by the company’s proofreader, Forrest Morgan, who compared a copy of the “Royal edition” (an early impression of A2) with the first edition. Although in at least one instance a query from Morgan was referred to Clemens, he offered no revisions of his own. The American Publishing Company [begin page 896] retained the copyright on Roughing It until 1903, when it sold the plates of A2 to Harper and Brothers. Harper continued to issue impressions of A2 from these plates until about 1914, when it published a new, more compact two-volume edition. Numerous impressions of this last typesetting appeared with the Harper imprint over several decades.294

No royalty statements (at least none itemized by title) are known to survive for the years 1880–98, although there were lump-sum payments for the years 1890–91 on the seven Mark Twain titles for which the American Publishing Company owned the rights.295 On 31 December 1896 the company signed a new contract for these books, whereby it agreed to pay a royalty to Olivia Clemens of 12.5 percent of the cover price, or one-half of the net profits—whichever was greater—on the seven titles and on the forth-coming Following the Equator. Between January 1899 and June 1903, extant royalty statements (covering all but six months of that period) show 2,280 copies of Roughing It sold, representing payments of at least $997.296 For the years 1903–7, the records of Harper and Brothers show that Mark Twain’s three most popular books were The Innocents Abroad (46,125 copies), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (40,962 copies), and Roughing It (40,334 copies).297

The Text

The printer’s copy used by the American typesetters and illustrators is not known to survive, but the conjectural reconstruction of that copy in Figures 1 and 2 (pages 814–15), together with the history of composition and production just described, affords a reasonably clear idea of it. To recapitulate, three pages of manuscript draft for Roughing It do survive, and are reproduced in facsimile above: they contain passages revised so completely that Clemens simply replaced them in the printer’s copy.298 The page numbered 423 is typical of the many chapters that were entirely in [begin page 897] Clemens’s holograph—those listed in Figures 1–2 as having no “clipping” words: they consisted of leaves inscribed on a single side, in purple ink, with the usual cancellations, interlineations, and insertions. The page numbered 968 is typical of the chapters that included “clipping” words: the printer’s copy for them was partly holograph, and partly in printed form. Such printings were either passages cut from the Book of Mormon or Catharine V. Waite’s Mormon Prophet,299 or clippings from the New York Times, the Buffalo Express, the Galaxy, the Sacramento Union, the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (and possibly even from proofs of the Weekly Occidental, also of Virginia City), which Clemens mounted on the same-sized paper that he used for holograph sections. Draft page 968, which contains a clipping from the Express, shows that such clippings could be revised both on the newsprint itself and in the margins. Among the sketches Clemens prepared in 1870–71 were two additional Express articles: “A Ghost Story” and “Adventures in Hayti” (CU-MARK). The draft page and these sketches, totaling sixteen pages, demonstrate that Clemens attended chiefly to changes in his own diction, while revising or correcting the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation much less often. On the draft page he changed “can’t” to the more formal “cannot”; he altered “letter” to “chapter” (for obvious reasons); and he substituted “shifted” for the slangy “swapped.” He also changed “newspaper article” to “little sketch” (in pencil, on the clipping itself), and then to “brief sketch” (in ink, in the margin). In “A Ghost Story” he changed “a tiny” to “an,” “What” to “Now what,” “in” to “under,” and “infamous” to “mean.” He also corrected a typographical error (“of” to “off”) and changed “foot print” to “footprint,” so that it would be spelled consistently as one word throughout the sketch, as was the analogous “footstep.” In “Adventures in Hayti” he deleted some extreme phrasing, like “carrying their bleeding hearts outside their shirt-bosoms.” He also deleted “just” and “soulless,” corrected “dollars” to “dollar,” “volcanos” to “volcano,” and “I” to “It,” but passed over several other errors: “what what” (dittography), “halucination,” and “decripit.” Collation of the first edition of Roughing It against the original printings of articles reused in it shows that Clemens made many similar changes (and some similar oversights) in them, presumably on the printer’s copy, but possibly also in proof.

There were some likely exceptions to these two basic kinds of copy. In some cases, Clemens’s revisions were so extensive that he must have copied out the passage, as he decided to do with the first uncanceled sentence in the clipping on draft page 968, preserving his change from [begin page 898] “swapped” to “shifted,” but making further deletions and revisions as well. Judging from collation, and other evidence, the quotations in chapters 10 and 11 from Dimsdale’s Vigilantes of Montana were probably copied out, rather than supplied in torn pages from the book, which may have been loaned, rather than given, to Clemens by Hezekiah Hosmer. In addition, some small part of Clemens’s manuscript in the first seven chapters may have been replaced before typesetting began with the “20 or 30 pages” of corrections that he sent to his publisher on or about 10 April 1871. Although these corrections were in Clemens’s hand, some of them must have been inscribed on pages from the amanuensis security copy of his first 168 pages (up through the pony-express passage). It also seems likely that, when it was decided to put the material removed from chapters 13 and (then) 15 into appendixes, the typesetters availed themselves of the early proofs for those chapters, rather than digging out and setting from Clemens’s printer’s copy. Finally, the table of contents and list of illustrations were not drafted by Clemens, but by Bliss or his associates (Orion or Frank Bliss are both likely candidates), and therefore copy for them was also not in Clemens’s hand.

It is clear that Clemens did not write or revise all of the chapters in sequence. Nor were they all typeset in sequence—in fact, they were probably not set by the same compositors throughout. It will be recalled that in October 1871, Clemens was forced to rewrite parts of chapter 18, combining newly written material with what had been preserved in proof, or possibly in manuscript. Chapters 58–75, 77, and 79 were clearly set in type well after the earlier chapters, probably by different typesetters, but at least by those who had not been instructed (among other things) to ignore Clemens’s habitual end-line dashes. In addition to the revisions Clemens submitted by mail in April 1871, he revised virtually all of the copy during August 1871 (“I cut & slash & lick & trim & revamp it”), when he also read and drastically revised parts of the first fifteen (possibly twenty-five) chapters in proof, removing two chapters (conjecturally, one about Overland City and one about the Mountain Meadows massacre), as well as sharply reducing the length of a third (chapter 13); he also added new material (Eckert and the cat) and redivided chapters 7–9. Even so, the continuing problem of the book’s overall length forestalled his wish to “scratch out half of the chapters of the Overland narrative.”300 It is likely, but not demonstrable, that Clemens read and revised proof for most of the book, occasionally adding footnotes (chapters 14 and 52), deleting anecdotes or episodes like “Waking Up the Weary Passenger” (chapter 48), adding two specific references to the illustrations (chapters 44 and 54),301 and writing or adding several additional chapters (conjecturally 36, 49, 52, 53, and 75), as well as the appendixes, long after he thought the book was complete.

[begin page 899] Orion (and both Blisses) saw preliminary sketches for the illustrations, but no evidence has been found that Clemens himself did. He nevertheless saw a high percentage of the illustrations in proofs of the prospectus and of the book itself, and therefore had a chance to reject any that he did not approve. And although he was disappointed in the technical execution of at least some of the wood engravings, no edition of Roughing It can claim to fulfill his intentions without including them. There can be no doubt that, even before beginning to write, he expected his book to be “well & profusely illustrated” with “snappy pictures—especially pictures worked in with the letter-press.”302 They are therefore reproduced photographically from the first edition, occasionally reduced or enlarged slightly to accommodate the present page design.

Each chapter of the text has its own peculiar history of authorial revision and printing-house transmission, but the chapters with clippings of Clemens’s own work were the most complex. In those cases, only the original newspaper (or magazine) typesetter worked exclusively from Clemens’s holograph. The book typesetters set partly from his holograph, and partly from printed copy already one remove from holograph, despite Clemens’s efforts to revise and correct it. This circumstance complicated the task of the book typesetters and proofreaders, insofar as their goal was to maintain uniformity in punctuation, spelling (especially of compound words), and capitalization, as well as in various nontextual matters, such as whether to retain certain manuscript abbreviations, how to set extract quotations, what typographical treatment to give titles and foreign words, and whether or not to spell out numbers.

In the absence of the manuscript printer’s copy for Roughing It, the first American edition, which was set directly from that copy, would ordinarily be chosen as copy-text throughout. Indeed, for the present edition, the first edition (A) is copy-text for all parts of the text that reprint no earlier text (or at least none that is now available).303 But wherever Clemens reprinted a text of his own, the earlier printing was chosen as copy-text, since it is the text nearest to the author’s original holograph and is therefore the most likely to preserve his punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and paragraphing. And wherever Clemens quoted from a text by another writer, that text too was chosen as copy-text, to ensure that any errors in transmission would be removed, on the assumption that Clemens intended to quote accurately.304 These several copy-texts were then emended [begin page 900] to incorporate all changes, whether to substantives or accidentals, which Clemens is thought to have made on the printer’s copy (or on the proofs) of the first American edition.

This procedure is somewhat more cumbersome than relying exclusively on the first edition as copy-text, but it has several advantages. It increases the likelihood that the author’s spelling and punctuation will be preserved throughout, while it forces the editor to recapitulate the process of revision and correction which Clemens himself performed on the clippings. And since the apparatus must record the editor’s decisions about which differences between the copy-texts and the first edition are authorial and which are not, the list of emendations provides as full a record as we are ever likely to have of the author’s revisions on his printer’s copy and proofs.

But while the choice of first printings as copy-texts has these positive results, it does not automatically yield a text that is free of errors. We know from Clemens’s statements over a long period of time that he always welcomed the correction of mistakes in his texts. In 1881, for example, he told the publisher of The Prince and the Pauper: “For corrections turning my ‘sprang’ into ‘sprung’ I am thankful; also for corrections of my grammar, for grammar is a science that was always too many for yours truly.” And in 1897 he made it clear that while the printer’s proofreader was not to concern himself with punctuation, he was expected to correct misspelling, “which is in his degraded line.”305 Since errors are, by definition, not intended, the following have been emended, whether they occur in authorial or in quoted copy-texts: (a) typographical errors such as “carrried” and “welome”; (b) missing or incorrect quotation marks (single where double are needed, and vice versa); (c) misspelled words (that is, spellings not sanctioned by any known authority since 1800, such as “logarythm”); (d) misspelled proper names of real people, places, things, and institutions such as “Holliday,” “Fort Kearney,” and “Roscicrucian”; (e) subject-verb disagreement (except in quoted speech), as in “statement were”; (f) “end-line dashes,” which were never intended as punctuation; and (g) manifestly defective punctuation (at 183.18, 233.12, 304.31, 406.32, 430.15, 431.5, 487.18, and 523.9).

The largest potential for error in the copy-texts, however, lies in their inconsistent punctuation, spelling (particularly of compound words), and capitalization. In the first edition, the punctuation of parenthetical phrases, for example, follows no particular pattern: sometimes a comma [begin page 901] precedes the opening parenthesis, sometimes the closing one, and sometimes both. Collation reveals that the typesetters occasionally “corrected” the punctuation of the earlier printings, while in others they followed their copy exactly. The first edition also contains dozens of words spelled in more than one way, largely because it followed spellings in the earlier newspaper and magazine typesettings. The book typesetters attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to spell words consistently, often succeeding within a chapter while overlooking variants in more distant chapters. While uniformity in spelling was clearly a goal, there was evidently no clear house style—at least none which was known by all the compositors, and which would have allowed them to resolve all such inconsistencies. It is clear, for example, from a detailed survey of holograph letters written between 1853 and 1870, as well as of numerous literary manuscripts from the same period, that Clemens spelled “summer” and “winter” without initial capitals. In some twenty occurrences of each of these words in manuscript, none was capitalized, including the two which appear on draft page 423 (where they are part of a sentence that Clemens canceled). And yet in both the Buffalo Express and Sacramento Union printings of Clemens’s work, these words were consistently rendered with capitals, no doubt because the typesetters followed their own house style. In setting passages from holograph, the book compositors adopted Clemens’s invariable lowercase form. But when setting passages based on Express and Union clippings, they followed the capitalized spellings in their copy, and even supplied capitals nearby, in an attempt to achieve uniformity. The result is that both authorial and nonauthorial spellings of these words occur almost randomly in the first edition, not because Clemens ever intended to spell them both with and without initial capitals, but because the typesetters tried and failed to create a uniform texture of spelling, defeated by printer’s copy that contained a bewildering mixture of spellings.

We know quite a lot about Clemens’s attitude toward compositorially or editorially imposed consistency in punctuation. His strong view, often and vigorously expressed, was that punctuation was his province and his alone, and that the compositor or proofreader ought simply to “have no opinion whatever regarding the punctuation, that he was simply to make himself into a machine and follow the copy.”306 In August 1876, while seeing Tom Sawyer into print, Clemens explicitly turned down an offer from Bliss to make the punctuation “uniform . . . here & hereafter.” The narrow question was whether the single word “No” (in dialog) should always be followed by a period, or always by an exclamation point. Clemens [begin page 902] replied on the proof for page 75 (chapter 7): “No, not uniform; follow copy; sometimes it is a quiet negative, & sometimes an exclamatorily vigorous one. The copy isn’t always the way I want it, though. The thing takes a different look in print from what I thought it would.” To which Bliss replied: “Of course! alter wherever it dont look right. We will follow copy & make your alterations afterwards.” Clemens responded: “Very well, what better way is there, than that? Do I give you one-fiftieth the trouble that Richardson did?” To which Bliss in turn replied, “Richardson made more trouble over every page than you do in a whole book. Your model Ms is my standard to gauge others by, & must not be much better & cant be really.”307 This exchange shows that Clemens did not tolerate compositorial regularizing of his punctuation; that despite his care with preparing printer’s copy, he did sometimes change his mind about punctuation when he saw it in type; and that in his own eyes and in Bliss’s, his printer’s copy manuscript was typically a model of clarity and accuracy.

Variant patterns of punctuation which were not deemed erroneous before the twentieth century, and which may be intentional, have therefore not been emended. Clemens’s occasional use of a comma before an opening or closing parenthesis, or just before the sentence verb, or in combination with a dash, are all well documented in holograph manuscripts. Their occurrence in the printed copy-texts does not necessarily reflect the author’s inscription, but it might. Variants of this kind either do not require uniformity (as Clemens firmly told Bliss in 1876), or cannot be made uniform without significant risk of obscuring the writer’s intention.

Clemens’s attitude about the limits of compositorial responsibility, however, did not extend to misspelled, or inconsistently spelled, words. For instance, in April 1869, while proofreading The Innocents Abroad, he wrote Bliss:

I wish you would have my revises revised again & look over them yourself & see that my marks have been corrected. A proof-reader who persists in making two words (& sometimes even compound words) of “anywhere” and “everything;” & who spells villainy “villiany” & liquefies “liquifies” &c, &c, is not three removes from an idiot— infernally unreliable—& so I don’t like to trust your man. He never yet has acceded to a request of mine made in the margin, in the matter of spelling & punctuation, as I know of. He shows spite—don’t trust him, but revise my revises yourself. I have long ago given up trying to get him to spell those first-mentioned words properly. He is an idiot—& like all idiots, is self-conceited. 308

This letter makes clear that two years before he proofread Roughing It, Clemens thought there was one and only one way to “properly” spell “anywhere” and “everything,” even though it must be conceded that he occasionally wrote them with what looks for all the world like a space between the two halves of the compound. He was chastising the proofreader [begin page 903] not simply for misspelling the words, nor just for failing to correct them, but also for spelling them in more than one way (“& sometimes even compound words”).

The printing-house goal of uniformity in spelling can be traced at least as far back as 1808, to an essay by Joseph Nightingale in Caleb Stower’s Printer’s Grammar; or, Introduction to the Art of Printing, which included a paragraph subsequently reprinted in dozens of printer’s manuals.309 It appeared, for instance, in a manual Clemens himself is likely to have used as a printer’s apprentice—Thomas F. Adams’s Typographia; or, The Printer’s Instructor (first published in 1845):

We should always preserve a strict uniformity in the use of capitals, in orthography, and punctuation. Nothing can be more vexatious to an author, than to see the words honour, favour, &c. spelt with, and without the u. This is a discrepancy which correctors ought studiously to avoid. The above observations equally apply to the capitaling of noun-substantives, &c. in one place, and the omission of them in another. However the opinions of authors may differ in these respects, still the system of spelling, &c. must not be varied in the same work: but whatever authority is selected should be strictly adhered to.310

By the time Clemens wrote Roughing It, the demand for uniformity, both from readers and from the typesetters themselves, had significantly increased. Writing in 1901, Theodore Low De Vinne noted pointedly that

during the last fifty years there has been no marked improvement in the average writer’s preparation of copy for the printer, but there have been steadily increasing exactions from book-buyers. The printing that passed a tolerant inspection in 1850 does not pass now. The reader insists on more attention to uniformity in mechanical details.311

To emend the copy-texts of a published work by Mark Twain so that in its spelling, and in nontextual questions of typography, the text is as authorial [begin page 904] as possible, as well as uniform in spellings for which the author had no distinct or discoverable preference (except the tacit one that uniformity be preserved in print), is therefore not to “modernize” the work but to restore part of its authenticity.312 The lack of uniformity in the first edition cannot by itself show that uniformity was not a goal, both of the author and of the typesetters. There is no reason to suppose that Clemens intended his spelling to be pointlessly varied. It is no more likely that he would intentionally spell words in more than one way—without some reason for doing so—than it is that he would willingly allow misspellings in the text (always excepting the representation of speech, especially dialect). Clemens agreed with what his friend Joseph T. Goodman said to him in 1881, when he questioned Clemens’s habitual (and no doubt unintentional) misspelling of “champagne” as “champaign”:

Where do you find the authority for it? In that funny description in the “Tramp” of the scene between Neddy and his bride at the dinner table, it occurs three or four times, I think, and looks rather awkward to me, as the passage is a somewhat sarcastic and critical one, and a fellow should be mighty correct himself when scoring others.313

Apart from the correction of error, emendation of the copy-text accidentals was carried out with three priorities in mind. The first was to restore authorial spellings wherever possible, not just in resolving ambiguous end-line hyphenation, and to record each change as an emendation.314 Taking that step alone brings the text very close to uniformity in spelling throughout. The second priority was to achieve uniformity in spelling the relatively few words for which the author’s preference is either unknown or nonexistent. And the third was to complete the task begun by the book [begin page 905] typesetters, emending typographical or nontextual variants that they tried, but failed, to make consistent.315

In the absence of the printer’s copy and the proofs for Roughing It, authorial preference in spelling must be determined from independent, or collateral, evidence.316 Such evidence was gathered by a computer-assisted search of holograph manuscript letters for 1867–70 and a reading search of manuscript letters for 1853–66 and 1871–72, plus the following literary manuscripts (as well as miscellaneous later manuscripts as needed): “Sarrozay Letter from ‘the Unreliable’ ” (1864); “The Mysterious Chinaman” (1864–65); “Angel’s Camp Constable” (1865); “The Brummel-Arabella Play Fragment” (1865, 1870–71); “The Only Reliable Account of the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865); “Burlesque ‘Il Trovatore’ ” (1866); “How, for Instance?” (1866); Sandwich Islands lecture notes (1866–67); “Interview with Gen. Grant” (1867); “A New Cabinet ‘Regulator’ ” (1867); “A Plea for Old Jokes” (1867); an unpublished letter to the San Francisco Alta California (1867); “Mr. Brown, the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate” (1867–68); draft of “The American Vandal Abroad” lecture (1868); “Assaying in Nevada” (1868); “Boy’s Manuscript” (1868); “Colloquy between a Slum Child and a Moral Mentor” (1868); “The Frozen Truth” (1868); “The Legend of Rev. Dr Stone” (1868); “Remarkable Sagacity of a Cat” (1868); “I Rise to a Question of Privilege” (1868); manuscript fragments C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L, M (1868), discarded from The Innocents Abroad (NPV A7, A11, A20, A22, A24, A25, A26, A27); “L’Homme Qui Rit” (1869); “Remarkable Idiot” (1869); “Scenery,” draft of the “Curiosities of California” lecture (1869); untitled burlesque letter from Lord Byron to Mark Twain (1869); “Chinese Labor &c” (1870); “Housekeeping No. 1” and “Housekeeping No. 2” (1870); “Interviewing the Interviewer” (1870); “A Protest” (1870); “The Reception at the President’s” (1870); “The Tennessee Land” (1870); “A Wail” (1870); draft of the Artemus Ward lecture (1871); notes for the “Roughing It” lecture (1871–72); “An Appeal from One That Is Persecuted” (1872); “The ‘Blind Letter’ Department, London P.O.” (1873); “Foster’s Case” (1873); play fragment, a dramatization of the “Arkansaw Incident” (1873?); “Samuel Langhorne Clemens” (1873); “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It” (1874); “The Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup” [begin page 906] (1875); the partial manuscripts of The Gilded Age (1874) and A Tramp Abroad (1880); and the complete manuscripts of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); The Prince and the Pauper (1882); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885); and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). For each word or word pair (like “a while”) spelled in more than one way in the Roughing It copy-texts, a context-sensitive examination was made of every occurrence found in these manuscripts, determining whether or not the manuscript usage was reliably comparable to the usage in Roughing It. More weight was given to manuscripts written before 1885, and especially to those written in the period 1869–71. A count was made of all collected usages, and the results were judged to belong to one of three levels of evidence. It should be noted that a number of the adopted spellings are not more, but less, modern than the spellings probably imposed by the typesetters.

Level 1. At least ten occurrences of a word or word pair were found in holograph manuscript, all spelled alike.

Level 2. At least four occurrences were found in holograph manuscript, and at least three-fourths of them were spelled alike—that is, one form predominated over the other (or others) in a ratio of 3 to 1.

Level 3. Three or fewer occurrences were found in holograph manuscript—or more were found, but no single form predominated in a ratio of 3 to 1.

Level 1 evidence was deemed strong enough to justify emending invariant spellings of two words in the copy-texts: the noun “envelope” to “envelop” (twice), and “Saviour” to “Savior” (once). Four spellings that predominated in the copy-texts were confirmed by level 1 evidence: “anybody,” “anyhow,” “whisky,” and “winter.”

Level 2 evidence was deemed strong enough to establish clear authorial preference, and was used to overturn copy-text predominance, even when the predominant form was found to occur occasionally in manuscript. Thus for eight words the predominant spelling in the copy-texts was ignored, and the author’s preference uniformly adopted: “a while,” “backwards,” “cañon,” “County,” “offense,” “pretense,” “river,” and “Sanitary.” In one case, “barkeeper,” the spelling found three out of four times in manuscript was adopted even though it never occurred in the copy-texts, which had either “bar keeper” or “bar-keeper.” For ten words in which no form predominated in the copy-texts, level 2 evidence established a preferred spelling: for example, “enterprise,” “half past,” “mould,” and “practice.” In twenty-seven cases a spelling that predominated in the copy-texts was confirmed by level 2 evidence: for example, “afterward,” “by and by,” “cannot,” “centre,” “ecstasy,” “King,” and “worshipped.”

Level 3 evidence was regarded as significant, but less conclusive about the author’s preference than levels 1 or 2. When variant spellings fell into this category, the spelling predominant in the copy-texts was adopted, provided that it was also found at least once in manuscript. This pattern [begin page 907] occurred in sixty-two cases: for example, “boulder,” “height,” “Islands,” “lawsuit,” “sage-brush,” “shoveled,” “skurrying,” and “tattooed.” In six cases no manuscript usage was found that confirmed the predominant copy-text spelling, and so the manuscript form that was found (if only once) was adopted: “brim full,” “enclosure,” “log house,” “pocket-mining,” “station,” and “wild-cat” (n.). When the copy-text variants occurred in equal numbers, any manuscript usage found was relied on to resolve the variation: level 3 evidence established the preferred spelling in twenty-six such cases: for example, “caulk,” “foot-notes,” “Garden of Eden,” “per cent,” and “St. Joe.” In one case, “shotgun,” the spelling found in manuscript was adopted even though it never occurred in the copy-texts, which had either “shot gun” or “shot-gun.”

For forty-three variant spellings in the copy-texts, no exact manuscript evidence at all was found. When one spelling predominated in the copy-texts (as happened in twenty-seven cases), it was necessarily adopted. When no single spelling predominated (sixteen cases), holograph spelling of similar words was considered, as well as the preferred form in Webster’s 1870 Unabridged Dictionary.

Resolution case by case (“spring,” “summer,” and “winter,” all individually considered) rather than by category (the seasons) was attempted for most spelling variants, partly because that method was most likely to recover genuine authorial practice, but also because the result turned out to be categorically consistent as well. In a few cases, however, the categorical method was effective both in recovering Clemens’s practice and in maintaining overall uniformity where the manuscript and copy-text evidence was otherwise scarce.317 Emendation to retrieve authorial spelling and achieve uniformity was applied in the following spelling categories by using the same criteria as case-by-case emendation, except that both copy-text and holograph occurrences were counted in groups. (a) The spelling “county” was emended to “County” when it was part of a name, as in “Carson County.” (b) “River” and “Station” were emended to “river” and “station” when part of a name, as in “Green river station.” (c) The hyphen between “a” and a participle was emended to a space, as in “a hunting” rather than “a-hunting.” (d) Word space between the numerator and denominator of fractions was emended to a hyphen: “two-thirds” rather than “two thirds.” (e) Two-em dashes to show interrupted speech were [begin page 908] emended to one-em dashes: “and—” rather than “and——.” (f) The possessive of “Jarves” (a proper name ending in “s”) was emended with an additional “s”: “Jarves’s” rather than “Jarves’.” (g) Compound modifiers that included numbers but no hyphen, or only one hyphen, were emended: “ten-cent piece” rather than “ten cent piece,” and “three-thousand-foot precipice” rather than “three-thousand foot precipice.” (h) All references to “the Lake” (Mono or Tahoe) were emended to “the lake.” (i) All spelled-out forms of “Captain,” “Colonel,” “General,” “Governor” (as parts of names), and “United States” (as an adjective) were emended to their abbreviated forms: “Capt.,” “Col.,” “Gen.,” “Gov.,” and “U.S.” (j) All closing quotation marks preceding other punctuation were emended to follow it instead. (k) Parentheses to signal interpolations or asides were emended to square brackets: “[falling inflection]” rather than “(falling inflection).”

Variant spellings that denote a difference in meaning were not emended. The distinctions between “Heaven” and “heaven,” “Overland” and “overland,” “Plains” and “plains,” and “Nature” and “nature” are difficult to articulate, but nevertheless real. Likewise variable are Clemens’s neologisms or slang set off, or not, by quotation marks (“flush times,” “square meal,” and “feet”) in virtually identical contexts.

Despite Clemens’s jealous control of his punctuation, there certainly were aspects of typesetting that he willingly if tacitly ceded to the printing house. In other words, Clemens’s practice in manuscript is not invariably a sound guide to his intention for a literary work—the ampersand, for example, which he used throughout his manuscripts, always expecting it to be expanded to “and.” In the use of numbers versus figures, or in the treatment of long quotations, Clemens accepted the participation of the printshop in devising and applying a uniform standard. A comparison of the first-edition text with the author’s manuscript usage, as well as with the several copy-texts, provided a good deal of information about what kind of styling, textual and nontextual, the book typesetters applied. For example, they usually (but not invariably) spelled out numbers, even though the newspaper compositors (and Clemens himself, at least with informal manuscripts like letters) used numerals for convenience and speed. In spelling out numbers the book compositors may well have had the warrant of Clemens’s holograph manuscript chapters: draft page 968 spells out both “six thousand” and “twelve thousand dollars.” But whether or not Clemens’s manuscript was consistent in this matter, the book compositors tried to be (albeit with imperfect success), deliberately printing numerals only for hours of the day followed by “a.m.” or “p.m.” Collation reveals that they achieved nearly consistent results in all categories except for dollars. They tended to leave the dollar figures they encountered in printed texts, such as the Buffalo Express (where newspaper style made figures conventional), perhaps because a clipping gave the impression of greater finish, having already been styled by the previous compositors. Emendation (always recorded) was therefore undertaken to complete the [begin page 909] pattern begun by the book compositors in spelling out numbers—including dollars, except in two instances where numerals were deemed acceptable (both discussed in textual notes).318

Similarly, the book compositors set all extended quotations in smaller type, sometimes enclosing them in quotation marks, sometimes not. In a few places they set double quotation marks within an extract already enclosed in quotation marks, which suggests that they added the surrounding double quotes without attending to the internal ones. Examination of Clemens’s practice in marking quoted material in his literary manuscripts of the 1870s and 1880s reveals that all three possible treatments occur with seemingly equal frequency: quotation marks with, and without, a request for small type, and small type alone. It is also clear that the compositors did not always follow their copy, but instead adopted a house style—with varying degrees of consistency. When the author wrote a specific directive in the manuscript, such as “Put this in small type,” they usually followed it, but sometimes they removed quotation marks, and sometimes supplied them. While early-nineteenth-century printer’s manuals make no mention of how to treat extracts, the later ones explicitly advise compositors not to use quotation marks when using small type; from this we can infer that redundancy was becoming less acceptable.319 This edition perfects the apparent intention of the book compositors by following their prevailing pattern: quotation marks enclosing extracts in small type were removed by emendation.

Several additional minor points of typographical style required emendation for uniformity. The book compositors were nearly, but not entirely, consistent in styling names of ships in roman type and names of newspapers in italic. Three emendations in these two categories were made to achieve uniformity. The compositors also failed to achieve a consistent treatment of foreign words, and in this instance the evidence does not point to a categorical solution. Three foreign words were invariably set in italic type: “riata,” “tapidaros” (a misspelling, emended to “tapaderas”), and “awa.” Numerous other foreign words occurred only in roman type: “cañon” and “poi,” for example. Five words and one abbreviation appeared in both italic and roman type: “adobes,” “hula-hula,” “i. e.,” “kahilis,” “tabu,” and “taro.” No distinct pattern of normalizing was discernible in the evidence of collation. The italicized words appeared in material set from the author’s holograph as well as from clippings from the Sacramento Union; in some cases the italic form was changed to roman, in others [begin page 910] the reverse was true. The fact that some italic forms also represent a word used as a word (“adobes, the Spanish call them”; “Tabu . . . means prohibition”) added a complication. It seems probable that the first-edition typesetting reflects Clemens’s own inconsistency, overlaid by incomplete compositorial attempts, at one or more stages, to extend his sporadic markings for italics to all like instances. A word occurring in a single invariant form was deemed likely to reflect at least some authorial impulse to render it in that form; all invariant forms were therefore left unemended. Furthermore, it seems likely that any word occurring in both roman and italic forms reflected some authorial impulse, albeit sporadic, to render it in italics; all variant forms were therefore consistently italicized.

Italic punctuation following italic words (an accepted convention in American typesetting since at least the early nineteenth century) was adopted in the first edition in all but three instances, which have been emended here. Footnotes in the first edition were typeset with a paragraph indention except for two instances, in which the notes were centered: both have been emended here. Mark Twain’s initials at the end of a footnote were emended to delete brackets in one instance.

The front matter in the first edition (the List of Illustrations and the Contents), the illustration captions, and the headlines (running heads) on each page were all undoubtedly supplied by Elisha or Frank Bliss, perhaps with Orion’s assistance. All usages in these sections, being nonauthorial, were excluded from the first-edition tally of spelling variants and the like, but they were emended for uniformity according to the same policy as the rest of the text. Whenever the titles in the List of Illustrations, the wording of subjects in the Contents list, and the illustration captions themselves correspond to wording in the text, emendation was applied to make them accord exactly, and the quoted phrases were enclosed in quotation marks. Whenever the title of an illustration, as given in the List of the first edition, differed from the wording of the caption, the caption was deemed more accurate, and the title in the List emended to match it.320 The running heads, which cannot be adapted to the paging of the present edition, have been silently omitted. In addition, the following alterations were carried out without being individually reported in Emendations of the [begin page 911] Copy-Text and Rejected Substantives. (a) All publication information no longer applicable to the present edition (such as “issued by subscription only” and “AMERICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY. . . . 1872”) was removed from the title page. (b) The seven full-page illustrations were printed in the first edition as separate plates, which were not included in the pagination. For these seven illustrations the reading in the List—“(Full Page,) (Face Page)”—was altered to read merely “(Full Page),” followed by the appropriate page number in this edition. (c) All first-edition front matter was styled in accordance with the design of this edition: periods were removed from the title page, and illustration titles on the List and the subjects in Contents were altered so that nouns, adjectives, and adverbs begin with initial capital letters, prepositions and conjunctions with lowercase letters. (d) Arabic chapter numbers, with no punctuation, were substituted for roman numerals followed by periods, and the opening of each chapter and appendix was styled in capitals and small capitals and set flush left with no paragraph indent.

H.E.S.

Editorial Notes
1 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 4 Sept 70, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 39.

2 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 30 Apr 71, NPV, in MTBus, 119; SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 27 Nov 71, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 166; SLC to David Gray, Sr., 10 June 80, NHyF.

3 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 4 Mar 73, ViU, in MTLP, 74.

4 

SLC to William Dean Howells, 25–30? May 72, L5, forthcoming. Howells’s review appeared in the June Atlantic Monthly, available in western New York by 24 May (“Recent Literature,” 29 [June 72]: 754–55; “New Periodicals,” Buffalo Courier, 25 May 72, 2).

5 

Reviews are discussed in section 8 below.

6 

Prefatory, page xxiv; chapter 4, page 26; SLC to Orion Clemens, 11 and 13 Mar 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 58.

7 

SLC to Alfred Arthur Reade, 14 Mar 82, Alfred Arthur Reade, ed., Study and Stimulants; or, The Use of Intoxicants and Narcotics in Relation to Intellectual Life (Manchester, England: Abel Heywood and Son, 1883), 122.

8 

Hirst, 317; SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 6 and 7 Jan 70, CSmH, in MTMF, 114; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 22 Jan 70, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 30.

9 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 17 Mar 71, NN-B, published in part in MTLP, 60–61.

10 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 15 May 71, ViU, in MTL, 1:187: “I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work, now (a thing I have not experienced for months) that I can’t bear to lose a single moment of the inspiration.”

11 

AD, 30 Aug 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 196.

12 

The principal studies of Roughing It’s composition, structure, and themes are: Martin B. Fried, “The Composition, Sources, and Popularity of Mark Twain’s Roughing It” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1951); Henry Nash Smith, introduction to Roughing It (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), xi–xxii; Franklin R. Rogers, The Pattern for Mark Twain’s Roughing It: Letters from Nevada by Samuel and Orion Clemens, 1861–1862 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961); Henry Nash Smith, chapter 3, “Transformation of a Tenderfoot,” in Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 52–70; Hamlin Hill, chapter 2, “The People’s Author,” in Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1964), 21–68; Roughing It, edited by Franklin R. Rogers and Paul Baender, The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972); Hamlin Hill, introduction to Roughing It (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 7–24; Harold J. Kolb, Jr., “Mark Twain and the Myth of the West,” in The Mythologizing of Mark Twain, edited by Sara deSaussure Davis and Philip D. Beidler (University: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 119–35; and Jeffrey Steinbrink, chapters 8, 9, and 10—“Writing Roughing It,” “Lighting Out,” and “Coming of Age in Elmira”—in Getting to Be Mark Twain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 131–87. Steinbrink’s chapters are the most successful effort to date to give a detailed account of the course of composition.

13 

The average number of words Clemens put on a manuscript page was set at 84, partly because it yielded the most satisfactory overall result, and partly because it is the actual average found in the longest comparable manuscript available in Clemens’s hand: a chapter written for, but omitted from, The Innocents Abroad, probably in June 1868. Known as “Fragment M” (A27, NPV), this particular manuscript has 43 leaves (torn half-sheets) measuring 4 ⅞ by 7 ⅞ inches, with 22 ruled lines—a paper stock very nearly identical to the stock used in three discarded pages from the Roughing It manuscript, which have survived in the Mark Twain Papers (CU-MARK), and which measure 4 ⅞ by 7 ¾ inches, also with 22 ruled lines. By actual count, the pages of Fragment M average 84.7 words of uncanceled text (pages with few, or no, cancellations hold as many as 100 words each). For a discussion of how revised clippings were counted, see page 817 below.

14 

The best way to judge the accuracy of the calculated page numbers is to see how well they correspond with the independent evidence found in Clemens’s letters, and on two of the three extant manuscript pages. The correspondence is unlikely to be exact, but the occasional discrepancies are small and not cumulative, and therefore do not invalidate the overall reconstruction, which may be compared to a preliminary map that represents some areas with less certainty than others.

15 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr.: 11 Mar 70, NN-B; 5 May 70, typescript at WU; 22 Jan 70, CU-MARK, in MTMF, 118; 20 May 70, courtesy of Robert Daley, in MTLP, 35; SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 8 July 70, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 154.

16 

SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 29 May 70, CSmH, in MTMF, 131.

17 

MTB, 1:420; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 9 June 70, CtHMTH.

18 

SLC to Orion and Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, 28 Sept 64, L1, 315.

19 

SLC to Jane Lampton Clemens and family, 26 Mar 70, NPV, in MTBus, 112.

20 

Maintaining the scrapbooks was a chore that fell largely to Orion and Mollie, although Clemens performed it himself on at least one occasion (see ET&S1, 502). The main cache of scrapbooks probably stayed with Orion and Mollie when they returned to St. Louis in September 1866, and therefore had to be retrieved from them when Clemens wanted it in 1870. Sometime in 1907 or 1908, Paine asked Clemens what had become of these “files,” and was told that he had “burned” them. When Paine reported this statement to Joseph T. Goodman, Goodman replied on 13 March 1908:

I would accept as final your assertion that those “Enterprise” files were destroyed if it rested on any authority but Mark’s. He never had physical energy enough to burn anything—unless perhaps his fingers. . . . He may at sometime have thrown a scrap of paper in the fire, and afterwards, not finding the “Enterprise” files when he wanted them, fancied that he had burned them; but I’ll bet, he never did. (Twainian 15 [Jan–Feb 1956]: 1)

Goodman was right, of course: some portion of the files did indeed survive—in the estate of Anita Moffett (1891–1952), Pamela Clemens Moffett’s granddaughter—and were eventually purchased by the Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley.

21 

Memoirs of Samuel Chalmers Thompson, typescript in CU-MARK, 96. In July 1871 the scrapbooks became useful in a third way—when Clemens began, in chapter 63, to use clippings of his 1866 Sandwich Islands letters to the Sacramento Union.

22 

Harte published “Heathen Chinee” in the September 1870 Overland Monthly. Hay published “Little-Breeches” in the 19 November 1870 daily New York Tribune, and “Jim Bludso (of the Prairie Belle)” in the 5 January 1871 daily Tribune; both poems were collected in Pike County Ballads in 1871.

23 

“The Western School,” New York Tribune, 27 Dec 70, 4; reprinted as “The Western Literati. Who They Are—What They Have Done. Their Future,” Buffalo Express, 29 Dec 70, 1. The article is unsigned.

24 

SLC to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 27 Jan 71, MH-H SLC to Charles Henry Webb, 26 Nov 70, ViU.

25 

“New Books,” Buffalo Express, 14 Jan 71, 2. The review is unsigned.

26 

See, for example, “Letter from ‘Mark Twain.’ [No. 14.],” San Francisco Alta California, 26 May 67, 1 (Jim Townsend’s tunnel, in chapter 35 of Roughing It); “Mark Twain’s Letters from Washington. Number II.,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 7 Jan 68, PH in CtY-BR (Boggs and the school report, in chapter 43); “Letter from Mark Twain,” Chicago Republican, 31 May 68, 2 (wildcat mines, in chapter 44); “Remarkable Sagacity of a Cat,” an unpublished manuscript probably written in June 1868, NPV (Dick Baker’s cat, in chapter 61); and The Innocents Abroad, chapter 27 (the trip to Humboldt, in chapter 27).

27 

SLC to Edward P. Hingston, 15 Jan 67, L2, 8; SLC to Frank Fuller, 12 May 68, L2, 216.

28 

SLC to James Redpath, 10 May 69, L3, 215–16.

29 

SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 5 July 69, L3, 281; “Scenery,” manuscript of eleven pages, CU-MARK, published in ET&S4.

30 

The sixth letter was devoted to the “fluctuations of fortune in the mines” (chapter 46); the first letter described Mono Lake, or the “strange Dead Sea of California” (chapter 38). Letters 3–5 were also reused in Roughing It—in chapters 37, 56, 57, 60, and 61 (see the Description of Texts). Although Clemens ultimately wrote only eight letters in this series, he implied in January that he expected it to be some fifty letters long—long enough, in other words, to form the basis for a book (SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 22 Jan 70, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 29). His decision to turn his lecture manuscript into articles also explains why, in the fall of 1869, he suddenly reverted to his Sandwich Islands lecture, even though “Curiosities of California” had been announced.

31 

MTB, 1:420; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 4 July 70, courtesy of Robert Daley, in MTLP, 36.

32 

“Letter from Washington,” signed “D.,” written 6 July, Sacramento Union, 19 July 70, 1.

33 

Cyril Clemens Collection, CtHMTH, in Mark Twain Quarterly 6 (Summer/ Fall 1944): 5.

34 

AD, 23 May 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 151–53.

35 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 15 July 70, CU-MARK, in MTL, 1:174–75. Orion was then working as the “Night Editor” of the St. Louis Missouri Democrat.

36 

SLC to Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett, 27 July 70, NPV, in MTBus, 117.

37 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 2 Aug 70, OC, in MTLP, 37.

38 

Elmira Advertiser: “City and Neighborhood,” 8 Aug 70, 4; “Jervis Langdon’s Will,” 13 Aug 70, 4; “The Late Jervis Langdon,” 22 Aug 70, 4. Clemens was one of the executors of Jervis Langdon’s will.

39 

Buffalo Express, 25 Aug 70, 2. Clemens’s clipping of this unsigned editorial is in CU-MARK; Paine attributed it to him in 1912 (MTB, 1:400–401).

40 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 2 Sept 70, L4, forthcoming.

41 

Page 40. Orion’s journal has not been found, but access to its text is made possible by a letter Orion wrote to his wife on 8 and 9 September 1861, into which he evidently copied most of it. See supplement A, item 1 (pages 769–74).

42 

SLC to Pamela A. Moffett, 31 Aug 70, NPV, in MTL, 1:176.

43 

Olivia L. Clemens and SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 2 Sept 70, CSmH, in MTMF, 137.

44 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 4 Sept 70, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 39.

45 

“City and Neighborhood,” Elmira Advertiser, 7 Sept 70, 4.

46 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 9 Sept 70, NPV, in MTL, 1:177.

47 

According to Orion’s journal, this breakfast took place on the morning of the ninth day of the trip. Clemens eventually described it in chapter 10, even though that placed it on the eighth day; his narrative did not reach the ninth day until the beginning of chapter 12. Supplement A, item 2 (pages 775–77), provides a chart comparing Orion’s journal with the Roughing It narrative.

48 

“Around the World. Letter Number 7,” Buffalo Express, 22 Jan 70, 2.

49 

SLC to Hezekiah L. Hosmer, 15 Sept 70, MtHi.

50 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 21? Sept 70,CCC. Bliss’s paper appeared for the first and only time as the Author’s Sketch Book in late October. Redesigned and renamed The American Publisher, it reappeared in early March 1871, evidently the issue to which Clemens promised to contribute (see SLC to Orion Clemens, 4 Mar 71, NPV, in MTL, 1:186).

51 

See SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 15 May 71, ViU, in MTL, 1:187–88, and SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 10 Aug 71, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 159.

52 

SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 17 June 68, L2, 222, 230 n. 4; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 29 Apr 69, L3, 199.

53 

The calculated numbers in these charts are rounded off to the nearest whole number, except the numbers of clipping pages, which are rounded to the nearest tenth, to avoid the cumulative error caused when each is multiplied by four. In this case, for example, the clipping contained 417 words, or 1.2 clipping pages (417/336). The clipping was thus equivalent to 4.8 manuscript pages (1.2 × 4), rounded off to 5. Two sketches that Clemens prepared for reprinting no later than January 1871 consist almost entirely of pasted-up clippings and contain roughly 310 to 340 words on each page (see “Adventures in Hayti” and “A Ghost Story,” in CU-MARK, sample pages reproduced in ET&S1, 580–83). In Figures 1–2, the number of words judged to be in clipping form or in holograph was determined by the amount of revision. Any passage in which collation showed heavy revision was counted as “holograph” rather than “clipping” words, on the assumption that marking a clipping was impractical.

54 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 22 Dec 70, CtY-BR, ViU, and courtesy of Todd M. Axelrod†.

55 

See ET&S1, 574–84. That is, 180 + (4 × 25) = 280, and 1800-280=1520.

56 

Portions of Leonowens’s story were serialized in the Atlantic Monthly for April, May, June, and August 1870, but the complete version, including the passages alluded to in chapter 7 of Roughing It (see the explanatory note at 48.6–7), was not issued as a book until early December (New York Times, 10 Dec 70, 2; “New Publications,” New York Tribune, 27 Dec 70, 6).

57 

This phrase survives at the end of chapter 6 (page 40), but the expectations it sets up are not gratified in chapter 7, which says only, “For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City as if we had never seen a town before” (page 41). The rationale for this conjecture is set forth more fully in the discussion below.

58 

“Local Matters,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 7 Oct 70, 3. This local item does not appear to derive from any published source. It must therefore come from a letter to Joseph T. Goodman, or to any of Clemens’s other colleagues on the Enterprise, such as William Wright (Dan De Quille).

59 

SLC to Alfred Arthur Reade, 14 Mar 82, Alfred Arthur Reade, 121–22.

60 

SLC to Joseph H. Twichell, 19 Dec 70, CtY-BR, in MTL, 1:179.

61 

“Sad News to Friends,” Elmira Advertiser, 30 Sept 70, 4; SLC to James Redpath, 4 Oct 70, MH-H; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr.: 13 Oct 70, MB, in MTLP, 40; 31 Oct 70, courtesy of Maurice F. Neville Rare Books†.

62 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 13 Oct 70, MB, in MTLP, 40; SLC to Mary Mason Fair-banks, 13 Oct 70, CSmH, in MTMF, 138–39.

63 

SLC to Francis P. Church, 18 Oct 70, Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1865–1885, 2d printing (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957 [1st printing, 1938]), facing 255; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 26 Oct 70, courtesy of Todd M. Axelrod†.

64 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 29 Oct 70, courtesy of Robert Daley†.

65 

Alan Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1980), 1:224, 2:577, 783. Clemens also mentioned, and may have received and read, a copy of Charles De Wolf Brownell’s The Indian Races of North and South America, published by the American Publishing Company in 1865, but if so, its influence has not been detected in Roughing It. Wood’s and Evans’s books were prominently advertised and extracted in the Author’s Sketch Book 1 (Nov 70): 2–4, which was clearly Clemens’s source for the news that Bliss had published them. What alerted him to the two earlier books is not known. See the explanatory notes at 97.9, 103.34–36, and 126.12–127.3.

66 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 31 Oct 70, courtesy of Maurice F. Neville Rare Books†.

67 

Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 2 Nov 70, CU-MARK; SLC to Orion Clemens, 5 Nov 70, NPV and CU-MARK.

68 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 11 Nov 70, CU-MARK; SLC to Orion Clemens, 4 Apr 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 62.

69 

SLC to Joseph H. and Harmony C. Twichell, 12 Nov 70, CtY-BR, in MTL, 1:178; Mary Mason Fairbanks to SLC, 8 Nov 70, CU-MARK; SLC to Olivia Lewis Langdon, 19 Nov 70, CtHMTH; SLC to Charles Henry Webb, 26 Nov 70, ViU and MoSW.

70 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 28 Nov 70, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 43. It is a measure of how far his mind really was from Roughing It that he was obliged in both the draft and the copy to insert the phrase, “spring of ’72.”

71 

AD, 30 Aug 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 196–97; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective, edited by John C. Gerber, Paul Baender, and Terry Firkins, The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980), 9–11. The editors point out that no such “break” occurs at page 400, although one does at page 500. In any case, the only two-year hiatus in composition occurred between 1872 and 1874. At this point in the composition of Roughing It, Clemens had written some 180 pages.

72 

SLC to Warren Luther Brigham, 1 Dec 70, MBAt.

73 

Sheldon and Company telegram and letter to SLC, 9 Dec 70, CU-MARK. For a detailed account of this project, see ET&S1, 561–71.

74 

SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 17 Dec 70, CSmH, in MTMF, 142; SLC to Joseph H. Twichell, 19 Dec 70, CtY-BR, in MTL, 1:179.

75 

Clemens could have seen Mullen’s comic illustrations in books by Jeems Pipes (Stephen C. Massett), Miles O’Reilly (Charles G. Halpine), and Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne)—all issued by New York publisher George W. Carleton.

76 

ET&S1, 545 n. 43; “The Famous Sanitary Flour Sack,” New York Tribune, 13 Dec 70, 5. Clemens dated his letter “Albemarle, Dec. 11, 1870.”

77 

John M. Hay to SLC, 16 Dec 74, CU-MARK; see MTA, 2:118, 133.

78 

“John Hay and the Ballads,” MS in RPB-JH, written 3 October 1905, published in Harper’s Weekly 49 (21 Oct 1905): 1530. Clemens recounted his first meeting with Greeley more than once, often with slight variations: see MTB, 1:472, and “Miscellany,” MTE, 347–48. In the “Miscellany,” his conversation with Greeley went as follows:

“Well, what in hell do you want!”

“I was looking for a gentlem——”

“Don’t keep them in stock—clear out!”

I could have made a very neat retort but didn’t, for I was flurried and didn’t think of it till I was downstairs.

Clemens could have encountered Greeley on or shortly after 12 December, for Greeley was reported in the city by the evening of 11 December (“Personal,” New York Evening Express, 12 Dec 70, 4).

79 

“Four page ALs, signed ‘Clemens’ with the postscript signed ‘Mark’ to ‘Friend Bliss’ (his Hartford publisher Elisha Bliss), Dec. 13, [1870]. The letter discusses a scheme of Clemens’ to write about the diamond rush in South Africa” (Bromer, lot 10). Bliss had checked into the Tremont House in New York City by the morning of 14 December (“Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 14 Dec 70, 3).

80 

Whitelaw Reid to SLC, 15 Dec 70 and 3 Jan 71, DLC.

81 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 17 Dec 70, NN-B; Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 20 Dec 70, CU-MARK.

82 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 20 Dec 70, courtesy of Christie, Manson and Woods International†.

83 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 22 Dec 70, CtY-BR, ViU, and courtesy of Todd M. Axelrod†. Talmage, a Brooklyn minister, had recently published Crumbs Swept Up. Edward F. Mullen was probably undergoing treatment at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, run by the Sisters of Charity.

84 

Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 28 Dec 70, CU-MARK.

85 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 3 Jan 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 53.

86 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 4 and 5 Jan 71, CU-MARK and AAA, lot 244.

87 

See ET&S1, 574–84.

88 

SLC to James Redpath, 10 May 69, L3, 215–16. See, for example, the following comment in a book review in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for February 1870 (40:462): “The Mormons, the Yosemite Valley, the Big Trees, the Pacific Railroad, and the Chinese Question are themes so old now, and so elaborately discussed in newspaper and periodical, that it is not strange that Dr. John Todd, in his Sunset Land (Lee and Shepard), has failed to invest them with any remarkable degree of interest.” The same work was reviewed in the November 1870 Galaxy (10:714): “It is not an easy task in the year 1870 to tell us much that is new concerning California, or, as our author fancifully calls it, ‘The Sunset Land.’ ”

89 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 26 Oct 70, courtesy of Todd M. Axelrod†; SLC to John Henry Riley, 3 Mar 71, NN-B.

90 

“The Western School,” New York Tribune, 27 Dec 70, 4.

91 

John M. Hay to SLC, 9 Jan 71, CU-MARK. Clemens had suggested that Jim Bludso be made a pilot, rather than an engineer. He noted on Hay’s letter, “Col. John Hay with poem ‘Jim Bludso.’ ” The Buffalo Express (7 Jan 71, 2) attributed the poem to “Col. John Hay, in the N. Y. Tribune,” conclusive evidence that Clemens so ordered it.

92 

John M. Hay to SLC, 14 Jan 71, CU-MARK. Clemens’s offer is inferred from Hay’s letter. Hay referred to George Wilkes’s Spirit of the Times, and to the London Spectator, which reprinted “Little-Breeches” in its 31 December 1870 issue, calling it “almost as good as the Bigelow Papers” (“Poetry,” 1580).

93 

Consider the first stanza of “Little-Breeches. [A Pike County View of Special Providence]”:

I don’t go much on religion,
I never ain’t had no show;
But I’ve a middlin’ tight grip, Sir,
On the handful o’ things I know.
I don’t pan out on the prophets
And free-will, and that sort of thing—
But I b’lieve in God and the angels,
Ever sence one night last Spring.
94 

The accusation came in the 7 January 1871 issue: “Mark Twain’s versified story of the ‘Three Aces’ seems to be a feeble echo of Bret Harte. The ‘Truthful James’ vein is one that can be worked successfully only by the owner of the ‘claim’ ” (“Literary Items,” Every Saturday, 2:19). Charges of plagiarism were a kind of code for charges of vulgarity.

95 

“Harte Disease,” Pittsburgh Gazette, 16 May 71, 4, reprinting the Philadelphia Bulletin of unknown date.

96 

John M. Hay to William Dean Howells, 29 Dec 70, in William Roscoe Thayer, ed., The Life and Letters of John Hay, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), 1:357–58.

97 

Although Hay declined to join forces with Clemens in Buffalo, he soon agreed to become a regular contributor to Bliss’s American Publisher, the first issue of which published “The Sphinx of the Tuilleries. [Written in Paris, August, 1867]” and also reprinted “Jim Bludso.”

98 

SLC to Charles Henry Webb, 14 Jan 71, MoSW.

99 

Orion Clemens to SLC, 25 Jan 71, CU-MARK; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 24 Jan 71, courtesy of Todd M. Axelrod, in MTLP, 54. Orion’s phrase survives only in this subsequent letter from Clemens to Bliss. Orion presumably sent his now missing letter on or about 11 January.

100 

Orion Clemens to SLC, 25 Jan 71, CU-MARK.

101 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 24 Jan 71, courtesy of Todd M. Axelrod, in MTLP, 54.

102 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 27 Jan 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 54–55.

103 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., or Francis E. Bliss, 31 Jan 71, CU-MARK. Francis was Elisha’s son.

104 

“Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 1 Feb 71, 3. If Bliss stayed overnight in New York, no record of it has been found.

105 

“Personal,” New York Tribune, 3 Feb 71, 5.

106 

Susan L. Crane to SLC, 6 Feb 71, CSmH.

107 

“Our Fashionable Society,” Washington (D.C.) National Republican, 9 Feb 71, 1; “Washington Letter” from Donn Piatt to the Cincinnati Commercial, 11 Feb 71, 2; Francis P. Church to SLC, 10 Feb 71, CU-MARK.

108 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 15 Feb 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 55–56.

109 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 22 Feb 71, CU-MARK; SLC to Whitelaw Reid, 22 Feb 71, DLC.

110 

According to an authoritatively informed reporter in the Washington (D.C.) National Republican, Clemens “was induced to sell his interest in the Buffalo Express solely on account of the health of his wife, who, we are sorry to hear, is extremely delicate. These steps were taken by him on the advice of his physicians” (2 May 71, 2).

111 

SLC to John Henry Riley, 3 Mar 71, NN-B.

112 

Orion must have sent Clemens the first (April) issue of the Publisher at about the same time he returned the “Liars” sketch—i.e., probably in early March. The issue printed an apology for the absence of a Mark Twain sketch, explaining that it was “in consequence of very dangerous illness” in Clemens’s family, and promising a contribution in the “next number” (“Editorial Notes,” American Publisher, Apr 71, 4). Bliss later told Clemens that “your brother wrote & inserted” the statement “on strength of your telegram” (Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 15 Mar 71, CU-MARK).

113 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 4 Mar 71, NPV, in MTL, 1:185–86.

114 

Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 7 Mar 71, transcription in an unidentified hand, Ct-HMTH. In part because Bliss’s handwriting is extremely difficult to read, three substantive corrections are supplied within square brackets: “artists” for “article”; “are to” for an apparent omission, whether Bliss’s or the transcriber’s; and “must” for “will.”

115 

Henry Nash Smith (1962) noted that both the “tenderfoot” and the “old-timer” were “present in the narrative from the start,” a device by which Clemens produced an “implied judgment upon the tenderfoot’s innocence and a corresponding claim for the superior maturity and sophistication of the old-timer” (53). Getting the two personae properly adjusted to one another might, however, be expected to take some revision. On the other hand, a more recent speculation suggests that “the character in need of alteration was itself a piece of fiction, a creature Clemens conjured . . . to keep Orion and Bliss at bay while he made his way back to the longneglected manuscript” (Steinbrink, 159).

116 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 9 Mar 71, PBL.

117 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 10 Mar 71, NN-B.

118 

It is relevant that Clemens wrote “168” before sending the manuscript off to be copied, and “160” after it had gone, when he could not see how many pages it contained. The pony-express incident was also the final part of the manuscript for which Clemens ordered any security copy at all.

119 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 10 Mar 71, NN-B. Orion’s response is transcribed in supplement A, item 3 (pages 778–81).

120 

Orion Clemens to SLC, 8 Mar 71, CU-MARK.

121 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 11 and 13 Mar 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 56–58.

122 

See Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 15 Mar 71, CU-MARK.

123 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 17 Mar 71, NN-B, published in part in MTLP, 60–61.

124 

The editors of the 1972 edition implied that this discrepancy showed the episode had been moved from “in the area of Chapter 9” to its final position in chapter 7, but not when or why such a change was brought about (RI 1972, 18–19).

125 

“City and Neighborhood,” Elmira Advertiser, 7 Sept 70, 4.

126 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., and Orion Clemens, 20 Mar 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 61–62.

127 

These page references also make it more likely that Clemens sent out 168, rather than 160, pages to be copied. For if the pony-rider passage came at the end of only 160 pages, he would have placed its beginning at about page 150. Figure 1 indicates instead that the passage probably occupied pages 162–70, and therefore began as Clemens said it did, “along about the 160th to 170th page.”

128 

“However,” the word that begins the passage quoted in the letter, also appeared in the Publisher text, but was omitted when the passage became the start of chapter 8. If the passage had begun a chapter at this time, Clemens might simply have identified it for Bliss by its chapter number.

129 

It is clear, but less than obvious, that Clemens did send chapters 1–11 on or about 18 March, rather than only chapters 1–8, with chapters 9–11 following by the end of April, as might be inferred (Steinbrink, 180). On 30 April he told Orion: “I sent Bliss MSS yesterday, up to about 100 pages of MS” (30 Apr 71, NPV, in MTBus, 118). Three days later, on 3 May, he told Bliss: “I mailed you the 12th, 13th, 14th & 15th chapters yesterday, & before that I had sent you the previous 11 chapters. Let me know if they all arrived safely” (3 May 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 66). If one assumes that these two letters allude to separate mailings of 100 pages on 29 April and chapters 12–15 on 2 May, then those 100 pages must have consisted of chapters 9–11, which could hardly have been sent as early as 18 March. As Figure 1 shows, however, chapters 9–11 comprised only 88 pages—not a good approximation of Clemens’s figure. In fact, on 15 May, twelve days after telling Bliss he had sent chapters 12–15, Clemens chided him for not acknowledging them: “You do not mention having received my second batch of MS, sent a week or two ago—about 100 pages” (15 May 71, ViU, in MTL, 1:188). This statement suggests that the 100 pages and chapters 12–15 were not separate and distinct, but one and the same—Clemens’s “second batch,” sent on or about 29 April (as he told Orion) or 2 May (as he told Bliss). Figure 2 indicates that chapters 12 through 15 as originally submitted did in fact comprise some 100 pages of manuscript (259–358). Clemens’s first batch must therefore have comprised chapters 1–11.

130 

“The Travelers’ Inn,” Elmira Advertiser, 27 Mar 71, 3; “Mr. Joseph F. Goodman, editor of the Virginia City Enterprise, Nevada, is visiting friends in this city” (“City and Neighborhood,” Elmira Advertiser, 25 Mar 71, 4).

131 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 18 Apr 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 64. By 10 April, Clemens had dismantled his security copy even further, using it to send corrections to Bliss.

132 

“Jos. Goodman’s Memories of Humorist’s Early Days,” San Francisco Examiner, 22 Apr 1910, 3.

133 

MTB, 1:435–36.

134 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 4 Apr 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 62.

135 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 8 and 10 Apr 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 63.

136 

For example, compare Orion’s journal entries for 4 and 5 August (pages 771–72) with the passage on page 85.

137 

Pages 771, 778.

138 

See pages 81–82. Although unnumbered, the manuscript page would have been approximately page 278. It reads:

westward again. The incident had such a gentle air of romance about it that I was subdued into a vein of thoughtfulness; & as I sat lost to tracing its dreaming of the wanderings of the my leaf across the continent, & the vague possibility that many weeks to come she might take it out of the water as it drifted by the old city, & by the unerring instinct of love reveal its message to her love know instantly the tender words its tender freight it bore, the tears came into my eyes. However, when I reflected that I had forgotten to put a postage stamp on it, end of page.

139 

Pages 92–93, 98n, 549.

140 

Pra confirms that the desert chapter was at one time number 19, but does not explain how it became number 20, if only briefly. The manuscript represents the printer’s copy in a state well before Pra—one that might have included the same material with different chapter divisions, for example.

141 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 4 Apr 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 63.

142 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 8 and 10 Apr 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 63–64.

143 

Strictly speaking, the discrepancy could reflect the addition of a total of nine pages anywhere in the first 116 pages of manuscript. But chapter 6 is the earliest point in the text where it seems likely that material was added, rather than deleted.

144 

Page 779. In his September letter to Hosmer, however, Clemens had correctly identified Slade as a “section-agent” (SLC to Hezekiah L. Hosmer, 15 Sept 70, MtHi).

145 

“Home News,” New York Tribune, 13 Apr 71, 8; “Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 13 Apr 71, 3. Clemens was thus in New York on at least 12 and 13 April, but the nature of his errand is not known.

146 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 18 Apr 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 64–65.

147 

SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 18 Apr 71, CSmH, in MTMF, 151; “Personal,” Buffalo Courier, 20 Apr 71, 2: “ ‘Mark Twain’ was in the city yesterday, on his way to the present residence of his family in Elmira.”

148 

“H. G. as a Joker,” Buffalo Courier, 21 Apr 71, 1. This copy of Greeley’s book, which had been published about the middle of April, was still in Clemens’s possession when he died, although its significance went unappreciated by Paine, who sold it in the auction of 1911. The catalog for that sale gave the inscription as follows: “To Mark Twain, Esq., Ed. Buffalo Express who knows even less of my farming than does Horace Greeley. N. York” (Anderson Auction Company catalog, sale of 7–8 February 1911, lot 204). Clemens made at least one marginal notation in his copy: on pages 148–49 Greeley’s text reads: “If it were the law of the land that whoever allowed caterpillars to nest and breed in his fruit trees should pay a heavy fine for each nest, we should soon be comparatively clear of the scourges.” Clemens noted, “And the farmers too” (“Book Find Recalls Clemens’ Stay Here,” Buffalo Courier-Express, 3 Dec 1950, 24A).

149 

Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 22 Apr 71, CU-MARK.

150 

Steinbrink makes nearly the same point (178–79).

151 

SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 26 Apr 71, CSmH, in MTMF, 153.

152 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 30 Apr 71, NPV, in MTBus, 118–19.

153 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 3 May 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 66; see note 129 above.

154 

It is conjectured that chapter 36 was not written at this time, but inserted later—probably in August. The evidence for this conjecture, and for designating three additional chapters as late additions to the printer’s copy (see Figure 2), is discussed below (see pages 864–66). If Clemens was “up to page 750 of the MS.” on 30 April, and “half done” on 3 May, and if the first statement refers to “real” pages while the second refers to “equivalent” pages (as assumed here), then he finished chapters 35, 37, 38, 39, and 40 (roughly 80 pages) in only three days. That he did indeed shift his way of counting is suggested by his choice of words (unlike “page 750,” the words “half done” do not refer to actual pagination). If one assumes no shift occurred, then the number of chapters supposedly written in three days becomes truly implausible: 35 and 37–43 for real pages, 32–35 and 37–40 for equivalent pages.

155 

Horace Greeley to SLC, 7 May 71, CU-MARK; a facsimile of this letter is reproduced in supplement C, pages 794–95.

156 

Page 481. Greeley’s inscription to Clemens in What I Know of Farming, reported on 21 April by the Buffalo Courier, was soon reprinted in other newspapers: the Chicago Tribune (“Literature,” 7 May 71, 5) and the Pittsburgh Gazette (“Literature, Music and Art,” 15 May 71, 4) are the earliest examples found so far, but even the Courier story must have been known to Clemens. That he was not pleased by such attention may be inferred from Greeley’s denial that he had “publicly made” any “disparaging criticism” of Clemens.

157 

Paine was the first to assert that Greeley’s letter was “the model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley’s writing” in Roughing It (MTB, 1:438).

158 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 15 May 71, ViU, in MTL, 1:187–88.

159 

Chapter 49 (fatal affrays) was probably added in August or even later. Some bibliographical evidence suggests that the manuscript of chapter 48 was slightly longer than the chapter as printed: the description in the analytical Contents for the first edition included the phrase “Waking up the Weary Passenger” before the final “Satisfaction without Fighting.” Since chapter 48 makes no reference to waking up a weary passenger, it is likely that the description was not adjusted to reflect Clemens’s subsequent revision of the chapter itself.

160 

No issues of the Occidental are known to be extant. Clemens says in chapter 51 that the poem failed to appear in the Occidental because it “was on the ‘first side’ of the issue that was not completed” (page 347). This statement implies that the poem was typeset, and therefore available to Clemens in the form of proof.

161 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 15 May 71, ViU, in MTL, 1:188.

162 

Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 17 May 71, CU-MARK.

163 

The prospectus included text, illustrations, or both, from chapters as high as 51, but nothing from chapters 52 through 79, with two exceptions: chapters 76 and 78, which were clearly the “selected chapters.” See also note 187.

164 

Buffalo Courier, 31 May 71, 1.

165 

“I wrote them to know if it would pay me to go in over the Niagara river & get a British copyright, & you see what he says,” Clemens wrote Bliss on 3 March 1870, presumably referring to The Innocents Abroad (CU-MARK). A week later he implied that Bliss was supposed to inquire of Routledge about the next book: “Have you heard yet what the possibilities are in the matter of selling our book there?” (SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 11 Mar 70, NN-B).

166 

SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 10 Aug 71, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 159.

167 

Page 369; New York Tribune, 3 June 71, 1.

168 

SLC to Redpath and Fall, 10 June 71, NHi†.

169 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 21 June 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 66–67. The “short article” for the Galaxy was “About Barbers,” published in the August issue. The three articles sent to Bliss were “A New Beecher Church” and “A Brace of Brief Lectures on Science” (in two parts), which appeared in the July, September, and October 1871 issues of the American Publisher.

170 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 27 June 71 (2nd of 2) and 29 June 71, CU-MARK.

171 

For instance, the only illustration in chapter 16, “the miraculous compass” (page 110), was not in place when Pra was printed, so that when it was inserted for Prb and A, the text which followed it was forced further along, although not so far as to overrun the last page of the chapter.

172 

Sinclair Hamilton, Early American Book Illustrators and Wood Engravers, 1670–1870 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Library, 1958), 207.

173 

Williams’s signed illustrations appear in the present edition on (chapter:page) 2:6, 2:7, 4:23, 5:33, 6:36, 7:42, 7:48, 10:61, 10:62, 10:65, 10:68, 11:71, 12:82, 13:91, 14:97, 15:104, 15:105, 17:119, 21:139, 21:142, 23:155, 25:167, 25:172, 26:175, 29:190, 30:199, 31:201, 31:205, 31:206, 31:208, 33:218, 34:222, 35:230, 37:242, 45:296, 46:305, 55:382, 55:384, 58:397, 58:400 (two), 58:401, 58:402, 59:410, 61:419, 62:422, 62:427, 63:432, 63:435, 65:446, 76:521, 76:524, and 78:535 (two).

174 

Illustrations signed with “S.,” “R. S.,” or the monogram “S. R.” appear in the present edition on 42:273, 42:276, 44:289, 46:299, 50:332, 50:334, 51:341, 53:362, 53:364, 53:365, 53:366, 77:527, 79:539, and 79:541.

175 

See 38:248, 43:279, 67:458, and 67:463.

176 

Illustration electrotypes were advertised for sale, for example, in the Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular 1 (15 and 22 Feb 72): 148, 175. See also Hamlin Hill 1964, 58, 194 n. 110, and Beverly R. David, Mark Twain and His Illustrators: Volume I (1869–1875) (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Company, 1986), 132–48 (the latter contains several errors). Below are the thirty-three “borrowed” illustrations (listed by chapter:page in the present edition) whose source has been identified: 4:27 = Richardson, 607; 5:30 = Richardson, 295 (portion only); 9:56 = Richardson, 231; 12:83 = Richardson, 246; 13:92 = Green, frontispiece; 13:93 = Green, frontispiece; 14:98 = Green, facing 343; 17:121 = J. Henri Browne, 148; 19:126 = Richardson, 495 (portion only); 20:136 = J. Henri Browne, 322; 24:163 = Richardson, 203; 26:177 = Richardson, 511 (portion only); 30:198 = Richardson, 74; 31:210 = Knox, 239; 34:224 = Richardson, 83 (portion only, altered); 36:232 = J. Ross Browne 1869, 532; 36:234 = Richardson, 502; 36:235 = Richardson, 368; 37:239 = J. Ross Browne 1869, 289 (altered); 38:244 = J. Ross Browne 1869, 438 (altered); 43:281 = J. Ross Browne 1869, 408 (altered); 43:283 = Richardson, 372; 44:286 = J. Ross Browne 1869, 505 (portion only, altered and reversed; signed “R.B.”); 44:290 = J. Ross Browne 1869, 489 (portion only, altered; signed “R.B.”); 46:302 = Richardson, 279 (portion only, altered); 48:319 = J. Ross Browne 1869, 500 (altered; signed “R.B.”); 50:338 = Knox, 20 (also in Innocents, 64); 52:358 = Richardson, 377 (altered); 54:370 = Richardson, 436 (portion only); 54:375 = Knox, 337; 66:456 = Evans, 113; 67:465 = Richardson, 216; 77:531 = Richardson, 487 (altered).

177 

SLC to Orion and Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, 21 June 71, CU-MARK.

178 

American Publisher, July 71, 4.

179 

“Personal,” Buffalo Courier, 20 June 71, 1.

180 

Olivia L. Clemens and SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 27 June 71, MTMF, 154 n. 3.

181 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 2 July 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 67–68.

182 

Before 10 July, Clemens probably wrote as far as chapter 61 or 62. Like chapter 59, chapter 61 (Dick Baker and his cat, Tom Quartz) had just been rehearsed in the “third lecture,” as he explained to Mrs. Fairbanks on 29 June:

I call it “Reminiscences of some Un-Commonplace Characters I have Chanced to Meet.” It tells a personal memory or so of Artemus Ward; Riley Blucher, an eccentric, big-hearted newspaper man; the King of the Sandwich Islands; Dick Baker, California Miner, & his wonderful cat; Dr. Jackson & the Guides; the Emperor Norton, a pathetic San Francisco lunatic; Blucher & our Washington landlady, a story I told in the Galaxy; the a grand oriental absolute monarch, the Rajah of Borneo; the our interview with the Emperor of Russia, about as I told it before—didn’t alter it (a great deal) because it always “took” on the platform in that shape; & Blucher’s curious adventure with a beggar. . . .

Of course you can’t tell much about the lecture from this, but see what a splendid field it offers, & you know what a fascination there is in personal matters, & what a charm the narrative form carries with it. (SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 29 June 71, CSmH, in MTMF, 155–56)

183 

Orion Clemens to SLC, 4 July 71, CU-MARK.

184 

See pages 159, 160, 162.

185 

Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 7 July 71, CU-MARK. The first volume of Henry Ward Beecher’s two-volume Life of Jesus, the Christ would be published in September 1871 by another subscription house, J. B. Ford and Company of New York (“Literary,” Cleveland Leader, 20 Sept 71, 2).

186 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 10 July 71, OClRC.

187 

The prospectus also included the full-page engraving entitled “going into the mountains,” which appears in chapter 69 (page 479) but has no specific relation to its text. It was almost certainly prepared at the same time as the full-page illustration in chapter 76 entitled “a view in the iao valley” (page 521): it appears to be drawn by the same artist (Williams), and could illustrate chapter 76 just as well as it does chapter 69.

188 

SLC to Albert Francis Judd, 20 Dec 70, MS facsimile, CtY-BR.

189 

See L2, 3–4, 48, 49 n. 2. The four chapters set in or describing the Sandwich Islands but not based on Sacramento Union letters are 70 (Greeley’s letter), 75 (trip into Kilauea crater), 76 (Maui’s Iao Valley and Haleakala), and 77 (the liar Markiss).

190 

The official memorandum of this copyrighted title, dated 3 August 1871, is numbered 7222B (CtHMTH). Clemens’s original choice for a title was, however, made public—probably through the biographical data he supplied to the editors of the eighth edition of Men of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries, Containing Biographical Notices of Eminent Characters of Both Sexes (227), published by George Routledge and Sons in 1872. John Camden Hotten’s “Mark Twain: A Sketch of His Life,” published in Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1873) and dated 12 March 1873, said that Roughing It “was first announced under the title of ‘Flush Times in the Silver Mines, and Other Matters’ ” (xxxviin). The title copyrighted by Bliss (and very likely suggested by him) was retained for the second volume of the Routledge edition, and was even mistakenly used in a few advertisements and news items about the American edition of the book.

191 

“Home News,” New York Tribune, 4 Aug 71, 8; “Personal,” New York Evening Express, 5 Aug 71, 3.

192 

SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 10 Aug 71, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 159. This statement is the first and only time Clemens suggested that it would take 1500, rather than 1800, pages of manuscript to make a 600-page book. Apart from that error, his numbers are consistent with his earliest statement about his progress, especially if he regarded the “Overland trip” as comprising the first 180 pages of manuscript. For on 21 September 1870, having written 180 pages, he indicated he had “about 1500 more to write” (see page 812).

193 

Among the “Sandwich Islands notes” Clemens could have reviewed in the last three weeks of July was the following entry in one of his 1866 notebooks:

Brown attempts to entertain company (in accordance with advice received from me,) & is now & accompanied by gaping & stretching of the company tells interminable story—something like Dan’s old ram,)—& when abused for by me says it is just my style, & instances illegible gaping over my trip across plains in overland stage—says that when I got to Jules Julesburg Mrs. C. left, to Fort Laramie, Mrs. W. left; to Wind River Mountains & that remarkable circumstance of the Indians shooting Pony Express rider, Mr. G. left—Salt Lake City Mr. B left—Sacramento Mrs. L. left— (N&J1, 154)

194 

The discarded printer’s copy page numbered 423, originally inscribed as a chapter opening, contains a passage that is very similar in wording to the passage that begins the Scott’s Bluffs section (see page 52). This curious fact suggests that the page originally began chapter 9 before being set aside; then it was numbered 423 and used briefly in what became chapter 18; and finally it was discarded altogether. The deleted chapter number on the page could even have been inscribed first as a “9,” then altered to “19,” and finally to “20.”

195 

The Eckert episode was added in time to have an illustration prepared, however, and its caption, “a wonderful lie,” was included in the List of Illustrations for Pra.

196 

The addition of this chapter would have compensated, in the sequence of chapter numbers, for the loss of manuscript chapter 15.

197 

Figure 2 shows that if chapter 36 (comprising twenty-two pages of manuscript) had been part of the printer’s copy from the start, then chapter 46 would have begun on calculated page 975, rather than on 953, and thus could not have included discarded page 968.

198 

See ET&S1, 578. In 1972 the editors of Roughing It argued that “a Canadian piracy possibly issued in July 1872” was “probably set from proofs” of the first American edition, smuggled to Toronto “in December 1871” before the book was in its final form, and that because this piracy “lacks the appendixes and eight chapters of the first edition (22, 36, 45, 49, 52, 71, 72, and 77),” it is possible to infer that “Mark Twain deleted several chapters between the phases of the prospectus and the piracy, only to restore or replace them before publication of the first American edition” (RI 1972, 18–20). If this Canadian edition were set from proofs, its missing chapters might well correspond to the chapters that Clemens added in August 1871 or later that fall. It is tempting evidence because, on independent grounds, we conjecture that chapters 36, 49, 52, 53, and 75 (the first three of which are absent from the Canadian piracy) were late additions. But significant problems arise with this Canadian evidence. (a) Collation shows that the Canadian edition was not set from proofs, but from a late state of the first American edition (Af), the earliest known example of which appeared in 1877. (b) The specific copy of the Canadian edition which was thought to have been published in July 1872 quotes a review of A Tramp Abroad which appeared in the London Athenaeum for 24 April 1880. (c) The typesetting in that copy is a reimpression of the type used in another Canadian edition issued by Belford and Company, also in 1880 (see the Description of Texts, 616). So the “significant variants” of the Canadian edition do not derive “from a form of the text prior to that of the first American edition,” and therefore cannot help to identify any authorial revision of the text (RI 1972, 636 n. 2).

199 

SLC to Horace Greeley, 17 Aug 71, NN.

200 

For Goodman’s advice, see the explanatory note at 136n.1–2.

201 

SLC to Adolph Sutro, 19 Aug 71, JIm. The other “matter” that Clemens had “principally & very particularly” in mind remains unidentified.

202 

“Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 22 Aug 71, 3; SLC to Adolph Sutro: 24 Aug 71 and 25 Aug 71, NhD; 29 Aug 71, NvHi. Olivia Clemens, accompanied by her sister-in-law, Ida C. Langdon, and one of her cousins (not otherwise identified) were in New York by 26 August, which may explain why Clemens himself is not listed at any New York hotel during this interval: he presumably joined Olivia in her room (“Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 26 Aug 71, 3).

203 

SLC to Mortimer D. Leggett, 6 Oct 71, DNA; SLC to Orion Clemens, 31 Aug 71, CU-MARK; “Brief Mention,” Hartford Courant, 2 Sept 71, 2.

204 

Page 360n. Sutro later thanked Clemens, probably in a letter written on 30 June 1872, for the “favorable publicity given the tunnel” (Robert E. Stewart and Mary Frances Stewart, Adolph Sutro: A Biography [Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1962], 105). The present location of Sutro’s letter and its full contents are not known. Its date has been established by a letter that Clemens wrote to Sutro on 11 June 1872, which was docketed “Ans June 30/72” (ODaU).

205 

Page 180; “Political. Republican Victory in Montana. Wm. H. Claggett Elected Delegate to Congress,” New York Tribune, 9 Aug 71, 4.

206 

“Personal,” Washington (D.C.) National Republican, 8 Sept 71, 2. The document Clemens filed for the patent is dated 9 September 1871. Orion Clemens to Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, 14 Sept 71, CU-MARK, indicates that Clemens had gone to Elmira the previous afternoon.

207 

SLC to James Redpath, 15 Sept 71, NN-B.

208 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 17 Sept 71, CU-MARK.

209 

“Mark Twain Takes Out a Patent—Why He Did It,” Washington (D.C.) National Republican, 21 Sept 71, 2. The reference to the New York World’s comments on Greeley has not been explained.

210 

SLC to James Redpath, 22 Sept 71, courtesy of Todd M. Axelrod†.

211 

Orion Clemens to Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, 3 Oct 71, CU-MARK. Mollie was in Elmira, taking the “water cure.”

212 

SLC to James Redpath, 9 Oct 71, CtHMTH.

213 

In 1882, Clemens recalled that he had left the choice of a title up to the publisher:

I never write a title until I finish a book, and then I frequently don’t know what to call it. I usually write out anywhere from a half dozen to two dozen and a half titles, and the publisher casts his experienced eye over them and guides me largely in the selection. That’s what I did in the case of “Roughing It,” and, in fact, it has always been my practice. (“An ‘Innocent’ Interviewed. Mark Twain Pays a Visit to St. Louis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12 May 82, 2, in Budd, 37–39)

214 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 19 Oct 71, courtesy of Robert Daley, in MTLP, 68.

215 

Compare MTLP, 68 n. 1, and RI 1972, 18.

216 

Chapter 18 was the last chapter listed with a page number in the Contents for Pra. One more page of contents was included (listing chapters 19–27), but page numbers for its chapters had not been assigned.

217 

See pages 122, 124–25, 772.

218 

SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 31 Oct 71, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 162; “Mark Twain’s Lecture,” Hartford Courant, 9 Nov 71, 2; Olivia L. Clemens to Robert M. Howland, 20 Nov 71, CU-MARK; APC, [73].

219 

SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 27 Nov 71, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 166.

220 

Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 6 Dec 71, CU-MARK. Bliss placed some of the blame for delay on the “electrotypers”—that is, those responsible for producing electrotypes of the woodcuts, which they mounted on wood blocks and gradually “shaved down” to make precisely type high. Although he did not mention it, Bliss also copyrighted Roughing It in the name of the American Publishing Company (number 11568) on the same day he wrote Clemens, 6 December (Eugene R. Lehr of the Copyright Office, DLC, to Michael B. Frank, 29 Nov 1982, CU-MARK).

221 

“The confinement of such dashes to the portion of Roughing It after p. 378 426 in the first edition therefore rather suggests that the author corrected no proof for it, an implication supported by the chronology of his movements and the printing in late 1871 (see MTLP, p. 68)” (RI 1972, 628). The dash following terminal punctuation at the right margin in Clemens’s manuscript is now recognized as a device for justifying short lines. But the device was often misinterpreted even by Clemens’s typesetters, who set both the period and the dash, even though the dash is meaningless except in the original lineation of his manuscript.

222 

It remains possible that Clemens’s printer’s copy originally called for a revenging “portrait” of Stewart, as well as something to represent a typical Chinese laundry bill. But on balance, his references to these illustrations seem much more like afterthoughts supplied in proof—responses to what Bliss had supplied.

223 

Even though Clemens made this last change some thirty pages before the first end-line dash, the “chronology of his movements” during December cannot establish that he failed to read proof for chapters 58 and beyond. He had planned from the outset to read proof while on lecture tour, and the changes to chapters 44 and 54 must have been made in December during that tour.

224 

The phrase occurs under “A New Book by a Well Known Author,” in the publisher’s announcement following the sample pages.

225 

It is inconceivable that Bliss added these materials without consulting Clemens, who must therefore have been in touch with the publisher about his book even while on lecture tour—whether or not he managed to read proof for all the later chapters.

226 

“Literary Notes,” Buffalo Courier, 30 Nov 71, 1.

227 

SLC to James Redpath and George L. Fall, 8 Dec 71, ODaU, in MTL, 1:193.

228 

“A New Lecture by Mark Twain,” Buffalo Courier, 9 Dec 71, 2.

229 

SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 10 Dec 71, CSmH, in MTMF, 157.

230 

Bliss also continued with his plan to advertise the book in the American Publisher. The pony-express passage had already appeared in May 1871. The first of seven additional excerpts, “My First Lecture” (from chapter 78), appeared in December, followed by “A Nabob’s Visit to New York” (from chapter 46) in January 1872, and “Dollinger the Aged Pilot Man” (from chapter 51) the next month, coupled with a brief extract about Brigham Young’s wives (from chapter 15). The March issue reprinted most of chapter 57. “Horace Greeley’s Ride” (from chapter 20) appeared in April, and then, in June, “Mark Twain on the Mormons” (from chapter 15), which included the Mormon passage published in February. According to an introductory comment in the Publisher, “My First Lecture” was typeset from “advance sheets” of the book, “now in press.” Collation indicates that the printer’s copy for this passage and for the next three could have been proofs of A, or a copy of Prb. (All were included in Pra and Prb.) The last three extracts, published in March, April, and June, were set from the book itself. Thus, aside from the one about the pony express, all derived from A, contained no authorial revision, and have no textual authority.

231 

“ ‘To Book Agents,’ ” Syracuse Standard, 4 Jan 72, 2; also in Elmira Gazette, 11 Jan 72, 4: both advertisements include the code “dec11,” indicating that they were first printed on that day. The same advertisement also appeared in the Buffalo Courier, 14 Dec 71, 4, the New York Independent 24 (4 Jan 72): 8, and no doubt in numerous other newspapers as well.

232 

“Wanted—Agents,” Cincinnati Gazette, 19 Dec 71, 2. Since the book eventually contained more than 300 (not just 250) illustrations, this notice may signal how far along Bliss was in mid-December: the first-edition List of Illustrations indicates that illustration number 250 was on page 470, in chapter 65.

233 

“Mark Twain at Steinway Hall,” New York Tribune, 25 Jan 72, 5.

234 

SLC to James Redpath, 26 Jan 72, American Art Association catalog, sale of 24–25 Nov 1924, lot 98.

235 

APC, [74]; Weekly Trade Circular 1 (8 Feb 72): 101, and 1 (29 Feb 72): 180; “Brief Mention,” Hartford Courant, 8 Feb 72, 2; SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 13 Feb 72, CSmH, in MTMF, 160; BAL 3337.

236 

ET&S1, 555, 590; Routledge Ledger Book 4:576–77, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

237 

Routledge Ledger Book 4:576–77, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London; Athenaeum: 10 Feb 72, 177; 17 Feb 72, 210. The copy in the British Museum (call number 12331.bb.21) is stamped with the date of deposit, “15 FE 72” (PH in CU-MARK). In early March, Routledge also issued a single-volume edition, which was simply the pages of the two volumes bound together (BAL 3336). No copy of the second volume was deposited with the British Museum, probably because Routledge was satisfied that the first volume alone was sufficient: “If only a portion of a work be first published in this country, or within the scope of the British Copyright Act, it will be protected” (Walter Arthur Copinger, The Law of Copyright, in Works of Literature and Art [London: Stevens and Haynes, 1870], 64).

238 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 7 Mar 72, CU-MARK.

239 

SLC to Charles Henry Webb, 8 Apr 75, NBuU-PO.

240 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 20 Mar 72, CU-MARK, published in part in MTLP, 70–71.

241 

SLC to Orion Clemens, 24 Oct 80, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 125–26.

242 

Following 21 March 1872 there is a hiatus in the correspondence between Bliss and Clemens, presumably caused by the threatened lawsuit. The first known communication between them after that date was written by Clemens on 20 July.

243 

SLC to Orion and Mollie Clemens, 15 May 72, CU-MARK.

244 

Orion Clemens to SLC, 17 May 72, CU-MARK. After Bliss’s death in 1880, Clemens examined the financial records of the American Publishing Company and wrote his brother:

The aspect of the balance-sheet is enlightening. It reveals the fact, through my present contract, (which is for half the profits on the book above actual cost of paper, printing & binding,) that if Perkins had listened to my urgings & sued the company for ½ profits on “Roughing It,” at the time you ciphered on cost of Innocents, Bliss would have backed down & would not have allowed the case to go into court. I felt sure of that, at the time, but Perkins was loath to go for a man with no better weapon to use than a “scare.” (SLC to Orion Clemens, 24 Oct 80, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 125–26)

245 

In 1906, Clemens was still convinced that Bliss had foresworn himself in July 1870:

It took me nine or ten years to find out that that was a false oath, and that 7 ½ per cent did not represent one-fourth of the profits. But in the meantime I had published several books with Bliss on 7½ and 10 per cent. royalties, and of course had been handsomely swindled on all of them. . . . In 1872 Bliss had made out to me that 7½ per cent. royalty, some trifle over twenty cents a copy, represented one-half of the profits, whereas at that earlier day it hardly represented a sixth of the profits. (AD, 23 May 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 151–55)

Hamlin Hill has pointed out that in November 1870, several months after the contract for Roughing It had been signed, Bliss offered the following calculation in a discussion about the Riley diamond-mine book: the manufacture of a subscription book with a cover price of $3.50, “without any copyright, cost of Plates, or any other expenses,” cost about $1.00; when sold to agents at a 50 percent discount, each copy realized a profit of about $.75. Thus Clemens should have known that a 7.5 percent royalty ($.26) represented only about one-third of the profit (Hamlin Hill, “Mark Twain’s Quarrels with Elisha Bliss,” American Literature 33 [Jan 1962]: 454; Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 30 Nov 70, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 44 n. 2). But Bliss’s exclusion of “any other expenses” makes his calculation difficult to interpret, and certainly left him room to maneuver in any dispute. Hill calculated that on A Tramp Abroad Clemens’s half profits equaled just over $.51, or a fraction under 15 percent of the cover price (Hamlin Hill 1964, 156–57; chapter 4 discusses Clemens’s contracts with Bliss). In the absence of records for the costs of manufacture—defined in the company’s 1896 contract as plates, paper, printing, binding, and insurance—it is impossible to make an accurate accounting of the profits realized by the American Publishing Company on Mark Twain’s books, and in all likelihood the question of whether Bliss swindled Clemens must remain unanswered (contract dated 31 Dec 96, CU-MARK, in HHR, 685; see also MTB, 1:420–21).

246 

SLC to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 24 Mar 74, MH-H, in MTLP, 81.

247 

SLC to Thomas Nast, 17 Dec 72, in Albert Bigelow Paine, Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1904), 263. The date of the letter has been supplied, in part, from the auction catalog of a Nast sale, which prints a slightly different version of the letter text (Merwin-Clayton Sales Company catalog, sale of 2–3 Apr 1906, lot 244).

248 

See SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 4 Mar 73, ViU, in MTLP, 75; “Joan of Arc. Address at the Dinner of the Society of Illustrators, Given at the Aldine Association Club, December 22, 1905,” in MTS, 271.

249 

SLC to David Gray, Sr., 10 June 80, NHyF.

250 

No reviews of Roughing It were found in the following newspapers. California: San Diego Bulletin; San Francisco Alta California, Chronicle, Evening Bulletin, Evening Post, Examiner, News Letter and California Advertiser; Stockton Independent; Colorado: Denver Rocky Mountain News; Illinois: Chicago Republican and Tribune; Louisiana: New Orleans Times Picayune; Massachusetts: Boston Advertiser; Springfield Republican; Montana Territory: Helena Rocky Mountain Gazette; Virginia City Montanian; Nevada: Carson City State Register; Austin Reese River Reveille; Gold Hill Evening News; Virginia City Evening Chronicle and Territorial Enterprise; New Jersey: Newark Advertiser; New York: Albany Argus and Evening Journal; Buffalo Express (reprinted Moulton’s Tribune review) and Courier; Elmira Advertiser and Gazette; New York Evening Post, Evening Express, Herald, Sun, Times, and World; Syracuse Standard; Ohio: Cincinnati Gazette; Cleveland Herald and Leader; Toledo Blade; Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and Inquirer; Pittsburgh Commercial and Gazette; Utah: Salt Lake City Deseret Evening News and Tribune; Washington (D.C.): Chronicle and Evening Star; magazines: Athenaeum and Spectator (London); Golden Era; Nation; Harper’s Monthly.

251 

The three most frequently reprinted extracts were “A Nevada Funeral” (from chapter 47), “Mark Twain as Editor-in-Chief” (from chapter 55), and “Nevada Nabobs” (from chapter 46).

252 

SLC to William Dean Howells, 24 Mar 80, MH-H, in MTHL, 1:294.

253 

“New Publications,” Buffalo Courier, 9 Mar 72, 4.

254 

“Roughing It. Mark Twain’s Experience among the Silver Mines & Miners of Nevada,” Buffalo Courier, 27 Apr 72, 4.

255 

Gray also expressed disapproval of his friend John Hay’s Pike County Ballads:

In fact we cannot but think that the vein of truly American material he has struck is destined to develop something much more admirable than the Pike County Ballads. If Mr. Hay will turn the vigor, the true perception and creative power he has displayed in these to the representation of the higher and more beautiful phases of American life, preserving always the like juices and flavors of the soil, it will no more be said that we lack a distinctively national literature. (“New Publications,” Buffalo Courier, 1 July 71, 4)

256 

SLC to William Dean Howells, 18 Mar 72, MH-H, in MTHL, 1:10.

257 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 20 Mar 72, CU-MARK, published in part in MTLP, 70–71.

258 

Anna Dickinson to Mary E. Dickinson, 14 Mar 73, Anna Dickinson Papers, DLC.

259 

“Literature: Uncivilised America,” Manchester (England) Guardian, 6 Mar 72, 7.

260 

“Life in the Western States,” London Examiner, 6 Apr 72,361–62.

261 

“ ‘Roughing It.’ Mark Twain’s New Book,” Hartford Courant, 18 Mar 72, 1.

262 

“New Periodicals,” Cincinnati Gazette, 25 Mar 72,1.

263 

“Some Travels,” Independent 24 (11 Apr 72): 6.

264 

SLC to Francis E. Bliss, 19 Apr 72, transcript at WU. A brief note in Clemens’s hand, apparently written in February 1872, places Smythe at that time with the “Commercial, Pittsburg” (Notebook 13A, [15], CU-MARK). In 1869, however, he was with the Pittsburgh Dispatch (L3, 378). A search of the Commercial’s files yielded no review, and the files of the Dispatch for 1872 could not be located.

265 

SLC to James Redpath, 20 Apr 72, ViU.

266 

“Mark Twain’s New Book,” Boston Evening Transcript, 1 May 72,3.

267 

SLC to James Redpath, 15 May 72, MB.

268 

“Boston. Literary Notes,” New York Tribune, 10 June 72, 6.

269 

“Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 29 (June 72): 754–55.

270 

My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), 3. Paine reported in 1912 that Clemens had said, “When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white” (MTB, 1:390n). It was pointed out in 1960 that both Howells and Paine mistakenly recalled it as a remark about Howells’s review of The Innocents Abroad, rather than Roughing It (MTHL, 1:6–7).

271 

SLC to Louise Chandler Moulton, 18 June 72, DLC. Clemens’s statement here that Roughing It was published on 11 February (“4 months & one week old”) may refer to the English edition.

272 

“Current Literature,” Overland Monthly 8 (June 72): 580–81. This review was not written by Bret Harte, who had been living in New York since February 1871, and would soon visit Clemens in Hartford on 13 June 1872, shortly after this review was published. It does seem likely, however, that Clemens read the review in Hartford, shortly after the magazine arrived in June.

273 

“ ‘Mark Twain.’ Biographical Sketch of the Great Humorist. Carefully Compiled from Imaginary Notes by B. B. Toby,” San Francisco Morning Call, 28 Apr 72, 1.

274 

“New Publications,” Sacramento Union, 18 May 72, 8. Two additional reviews were found which are not quoted here: “A New Book,” Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 30 Mar 72, Supplement, no page; and “ ‘Roughing It,’ ” Marysville (Calif.) Appeal, 13 June 72, 3.

275 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 21 Mar 72, CtY-BR, in MTLP, 73; “Mark Twain on the Mormons,” American Publisher, June 72, 8; SLC to William Dean Howells, 15 June 72, NN-B, in MTHL, 1:12.

276 

“ ‘Roughing It,’ ” Chicago Tribune, 24 Mar 72, 4; APC, [109].

277 

APC, [109]; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 4 Sept 70, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 39. Previous assertions that the book sold only 65,376 copies in the first year apparently resulted from misreadings of the ledger, the largest error being for May: during that month 16,905 copies were bound, not 6,905 (compare RI 1972, 22, and Hamlin Hill 1964, 63).

278 

The bindery records corroborate this statement: in the quarter ending on 1 March 1873, 3,684 copies of Roughing It were sold, whereas the sales of Innocents totaled 2,045. Two years later, in March 1875, Clemens correctly calculated that his earnings on Roughing It and the venerable Innocents had become roughly even: “I get 5 per cent on Innocents Abroad & it has paid me $25,000 or $30,000. I get 7½ per cent on Roughing It. It has sold something over 100,000 copies, & consequently has paid me about the same aggregate that Innocents has” (SLC to William Wright, 24 Mar 75, CU-BANC). Cumulative sales for the eight years following each book’s publication totaled 119,870 copies of Innocents (July 1869–June 1877) and 96,183 of Roughing It (January 1872–December 1879). During these same periods, it may be estimated that Clemens earned $21,876 on Innocents Abroad and $26,330 on Roughing It. Thus the higher royalty on Roughing It compensated somewhat for its lower sales. Sales and royalty figures for the period 1869–79 for Innocents Abroad and Roughing It are based on the bindery records compiled by the American Publishing Company, on the surviving quarterly royalty statements, and on related evidence in correspondence and in Clemens’s notebook (APC, [106–9]; statements dated 1 May 72, 5 Aug 72, 1 May 73, 1 Jan 76, 1 Apr 76, 1 July 76, 9 Nov 76, 24 Jan 77, 7 May 77, [1] Oct 77, and 23 Jan 78 [Scrapbook 10:24, 28, 29, 31, 75, 76a, 81, 84, CU-MARK; Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 5 Aug 72, CU-MARK; Francis E. Bliss to SLC: 1 May 72, CtHMTH; 1 May 73, CU-MARK]; SLC to Charles H. Webb, 8 Apr 75, NBuU-PO; N&J2, 428). Both The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It ranged in price from $3.50, for a cloth binding, to $5.00, for a half-morocco binding; a full-morocco binding was also available, but rarely purchased, at $8.00. Prices were perhaps 10 percent higher on the West Coast (see advertisements in the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 16 Mar 72, 2, and HF, 845), but this may not have affected Clemens’s royalties.

279 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 4 Mar 73, ViU, in MTLP, 74.

280 

SLC to John M. Hay, 12 Jan 73, OClWHi.

281 

SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 2 Feb 73, CU-MARK.

282 

“New Publications,” New York Tribune, 31 Jan 73, 6. Ripley (1802–80), the literary critic for the Tribune from 1849 until his death, was also an ordained minister and a founding member of the Brook Farm Community near Boston (1841).

283 

“Mark Twain at Steinway Hall,” New York Tribune, 25 Jan 72, 5.

284 

Routledge Ledger Book 4:576–77, 5:145, 183, 6:680–81, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

285 

George Routledge and Sons to Chatto and Windus, 27 Feb 92, and Edmund Routledge to Chatto and Windus, 2 Mar 92, University of Reading, Reading, England.

286 

John Camden Hotten to SLC, 3 Feb 72, Chatto and Windus Letter Book 6:18, Chatto and Windus, London. Clemens never responded to this letter; it is possible that since he was on lecture tour at the time, he failed to receive it.

287 

ET&S1, 554, 586.

288 

Athenaeum, 6 June 68, 799; ET&S1, 550, 589. An 1868 court case, Routledge v. Low, had resulted in a divided judicial interpretation of existing copyright law, leaving some uncertainty about whether an author needed to reside in some part of the British Empire at the time of publication in order to make his Imperial copyright indisputably secure.

289 

For details, including the chains of transmission for the eight pieces in HWa, see the Description of Texts.

290 

Andrew Chatto to SLC, 25 Nov 73, Chatto and Windus Letter Book 6:707.

291 

The revised HWa sheets are preserved in the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library (NN). See ET&S1, 599–607, for a detailed publication history of HWa and HWb, and the Description of Texts for further details about the revisions Clemens inscribed.

292 

For further details about the revisions Clemens inscribed on HWa, see the Description of Texts.

293 

SLC to Bernhard Tauchnitz, 7 Oct 80, incomplete text in Curt Otto, Der Verlag Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1837–1912 (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1912), 125; Bernhard Tauchnitz to SLC, 9 Dec 80, CU-MARK.

294 

Contract dated 23 Oct 1903, CU-MARK, in HHR, 700–708. For details see the Description of Texts and the textual note at 416.4.

295 

The titles are The Innocents Abroad; Roughing It; Sketches, New and Old; The Gilded Age; A Tramp Abroad; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; and Pudd’n-head Wilson. Only five statements of payments, totaling $2718, survive; the period covered by each statement is not indicated (Francis E. Bliss to SLC, 4 Jan 90, 1 July 90, 10 Jan 91, 3 Apr 91, and 9 Jan 92, all in CU-MARK).

296 

Contract dated 31 Dec 96, CU-MARK, in HHR, 682–87. At this time, sales of single volumes of the old editions represented only a portion of Clemens’s income; considerably more income was generated from sales of volumes in the uniform edition and other fine limited editions. Only two of the extant statements for 1899–1903 itemize sales of the uniform editions by title: these statements suggest that sales of such volumes of Roughing It were twice that of single volumes. Overall, the income from volumes in uniform editions was at least three times that from single volumes (Francis E. Bliss to SLC, 7 Feb 1900 and 12 Oct 1900; Francis E. Bliss to Olivia L. Clemens, 21 Jan 1902 and 29 July 1903, all in CU-MARK).

297 

“Volumes of Mark Twain Sold from Nov 1–1903 to Oct. 31–1907,” CU-MARK.

298 

See pages 816, 843, and 845; compare the text on pages 81–82, 122, and 303–4.

299 

It was possible for Clemens to cut out the passages from these books, rather than use loose pages (as he later did in the printer’s copy for Tom Sawyer), because the sections he quoted were not printed on two sides of a sheet—except for about seventy words from The Mormon Prophet, which he could easily have copied out by hand.

300 

SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 10 Aug 71, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 159; SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 15 May 71, ViU, in MTL, 1:187–88.

301 

See pages 288 and 370.

302 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr.: 3 May 71, CU-MARK, in MTLP, 66; 15 May 71, ViU, in MTL, 1:188.

303 

The pony-express passage in chapter 8 is an exception. It was typeset for publication in the American Publisher from Clemens’s manuscript, or from the amanuensis security copy of the manuscript, and that printing therefore derives independently from the manuscript: see the textual note at 50.1–52.7.

304 

For quotations, the printing Clemens is most likely to have used—either by transcribing it or by literally inserting it in the copy—was designated copy-text. In a few cases, the edition or impression he used cannot be certainly identified, so the edition or impression closest to it was designated copy-text. Similarly, some things that Clemens published first in the Enterprise are not now available in that printing, and the only choice is to rely on the text of the first edition. The choice in each case is explained in the Textual Notes.

305 

SLC to James R. Osgood, 15–23 Aug 81, Caroline Ticknor, Glimpses of Authors (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Riverside Press, 1922), 139–40; SLC to Chatto and Windus, 25 July 97, ViU.

306 

Frederick J. Hall, for Charles L. Webster and Company, to SLC, 19 Aug 89, CU-MARK. Hall paraphrased Clemens’s instructions to him, but Clemens repeated them in his reply: “You are perfectly right. The proof-reader must follow my punctuation absolutely. I will not allow even the slightest departure from it” (SLC to Frederick J. Hall, 20 Aug 89, ViU, in MTLP, 255).

307 

Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, and SLC to Bliss, postmarked 7 Aug 76, CU-MARK, in TS, 510–11.

308 

SLC to Elisha Bliss, Jr., 20 Apr 69, L3, 197.

309 

Cited in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, edited by Bernard L. Stein, with an Introduction by Henry Nash Smith, The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979), which reads in part: “By the middle of the century, the principle was firmly established that to spell, hyphenate, or capitalize a word in different ways within the same manuscript was an error, however correct each individual usage might be” (617 n. 92). Stein’s edition of Connecticut Yankee imposed “consistency in spelling, compounding, and capitalization” on the text “so long as the author’s inconsistency appears to be unintentional and without purpose” (617).

310 

Thomas F. Adams, Typographia; or, The Printer’s Instructor: A Brief Sketch of the Origin, Rise, and Progress of the Typographic Art, with Practical Directions for Conducting Every Department in an Office, Hints to Authors, Publishers, &c. (Philadelphia: L. Johnson and Co., 1857 [copyright 1845]), 191.

311 

Theodore Low De Vinne, Correct Composition: A Treatise on Spelling, Abbreviations, the Compounding and Division of Words, the Proper Use of Figures and Numerals, Italic and Capital Letters, Notes, etc. with Observations on Punctuation and Proof-Reading (New York: Century Company, 1901), viii–x. De Vinne noted, “In making the last revision of this treatise, the writer has doubts as to the propriety of assuming to be its author, for the work done is as much the compilation and rearrangement of notes made by other men as it is the outcome of the writer’s own long practice of printing” (x).

312 

Compare G. Thomas Tanselle, “Problems and Accomplishments in the Editing of the Novel,” Studies in the Novel 7 (Fall 1975): “A regularized text can no longer be thought of in most instances as an unmodernized text” (342). See also Hershel Parker, “Regularizing Accidentals: The Latest Form of Infidelity,” Proof 3 (1973):

Undoubtedly printers of the early and middle nineteenth century were more consistent in their spelling and punctuation than their predecessors, but they sometimes followed copy when it was highly inconsistent and often were inconsistent themselves. Despite the greater accuracy of some nineteenth-century compositors than that of others, no one has yet shown that any major publisher then had a systematically imposed house style, although there were gestures toward one, as in the decision of the Harpers to follow Webster’s still-controversial orthography. Nothing indicates that there was a mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of the modern-day Bryn Mawr graduate who slavishly checks manuscript usages against Webster’s Second or Third while encubicled at a New York publishing office. (8–9)

313 

Joseph T. Goodman to SLC, 24 Oct 81, CU-MARK. Goodman’s reference was to A Tramp Abroad, chapter 31.

314 

Ambiguous forms in the copy-texts (compounds hyphenated at the end of a line) were resolved as emendations by adopting the spelling that the manuscript survey (described below) established as the author’s clear preference. Compounds ambiguously divided in the edited text are listed separately on pages 1020–21 to enable accurate quotation. Compounds ambiguously divided in the record of emendations appear with a double hyphen when the hyphenated form is intended.

315 

Such emendation was carried out only on authorial copy-texts, not on material being quoted. Clemens’s quotation of his own work in the Territorial Enterprise was treated like other quoted texts.

316 

Fredson Bowers, “Regularization and Normalization in Modern Critical Texts,” Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 79–102. Bowers holds that “the only documentary evidence that can be trusted for emendation back to authorial forms is variation in the print, one form of which should be compositorial but the other the reading of the printer’s copy. It is then a separate problem requiring collateral evidence to establish whether either form is or is not authorial” (84).

317 

For instance, the copy-texts have both “River” and “river” used with a proper name: “Green River” (once); “Missouri River” (once); “Humboldt river” (twice); “Reese River” (twice) and “Reese river” (once); “Carson River” (once) and “Carson river” (once). The manuscript search established that Clemens’s overwhelming preference was for “river,” which he wrote in thirteen out of fourteen instances recovered. The likelihood is therefore great that most, if not all, spellings of “River” in the copy-texts were imposed by the compositors, and all “River” variants could therefore be emended to “river,” restoring authorial spelling and uniformity at one stroke.

318 

Dollar figures were spelled out in accordance with the practice followed by the compositors elsewhere in the book—that is, “twenty to forty dollars” for “$20 to $40,” and “a hundred” for “100.”

319 

See De Vinne, 214, and Wesley Washington Pasko, American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (New York: Howard Lockwood and Co., 1894; reprint edition, Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1967), 482–83.

320 

The first-edition captions in general accorded with the text more closely and had fewer errors: see, for example, the title for illustration number 93, which in the first edition read “Fight” instead of “Fire.” It is probable that after the List was prepared from the captions, some of the latter were revised; these revisions were then inadvertently not incorporated into the List. Three tailpieces and one other illustration were inadvertently omitted from the List in the first edition (at xxvb.16, xxvib.44, xxviia.42, and xxviiib.2); they were added in this edition, and all subsequent numbers in the List silently adjusted upward. One caption evidently not included in the first edition because the page was already full was supplied from the List (see page 395).