For the date of this letter, see note 4. The McIntyre Coal Company was a subsidiary of J. Langdon and Company, of which Charles Langdon was president ( L4 , 451–52 n. 1).

In 1855 James Ripley Osgood (1836–92) was a clerk in the Boston publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields. When William Ticknor died in 1864, Osgood became a junior partner; when Howard M. Ticknor retired in 1868, the firm became Fields, Osgood, and Company; and after James T. Fields retired in December 1870, the remaining partners (Osgood, John S. Clark, and Benjamin H. Ticknor) immediately reorganized as James R. Osgood and Company. They inherited a prestigious list of American and British authors, including Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Emerson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as Dickens and Tennyson. Osgood had significantly enhanced that list, adding many of Clemens’s friends: Bret Harte, John Hay, William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Clemens tried in February 1875 to give Osgood his sketchbook, only to be frustrated by his 1870 contract with Bliss. Osgood did not succeed in publishing a book by Mark Twain until 1877, with A True Story, and the Recent Carnival of Crime. Osgood and Company also published several very successful magazines: the Atlantic Monthly and Every Saturday, as well as the North American Review and Our Young Folks (“Copartnership Notice,” Every Saturday, n.s. 2 14 Jan 71: 2; Edgar, 341, 344; Austin, 38–39; ET&S1 , 619; see also 7 Jan 72 to Howells, n. 3click to open link).

Clemens was bound to publish his books exclusively with the American Publishing Company, both by his Roughing It contract and by two additional contracts signed on 6 and 29 December 1870. The first of these, for the South Africa diamond mine book, was about to be redrawn because of Riley’s fatal illness. The second, for a book of sketches, would not be fulfilled until 1875 (see the previous letter, n. 1; 11 June 72 to Sutro, n. 1click to open link; L4 , 565–68; ET&S1 , 435–36).

George Routledge and Sons had been courting Clemens since 1868, when they paid him generously (as he recalled thirty years later) for the right to publish “Cannibalism in the Cars” in the Broadway: A London Magazine, a short-lived journal they had founded—in part—to foster good relations with American writers. In April 1870 they published a new edition of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches, which included “Cannibalism in the Cars” as “a New Copyright Chapter,” probably with the author’s sanction (SLC 1868, 1870). Then in February 1872 they paid Clemens a token fee of £37 ($185) for the right to “simultane” Roughing It. They issued it in two volumes, fully protected by British copyright, thereby establishing themselves as his authorized English publishers. Almost immediately thereafter, probably in late February or early March, they suggested issuing a British edition of his sketches. This “portly volume,” as Clemens called it, became in fact two volumes: A Curious Dream; and Other Sketches, containing fifteen sketches that no one had yet reprinted in England, and Mark Twain’s Sketches, containing sixty-six sketches in all, including the fifteen in A Curious Dream. Except for “Cannibalism in the Cars,” none of these sketches was protected by British copyright. Even so, the Routledges paid Clemens another £37 for the two sketchbooks, which they soon received from their printer: 10,000 copies of A Curious Dream on 8 May, and 6,000 copies of Mark Twain’s Sketches on 10 May. Both volumes were in fact “Selected and Revised by the Author,” as their title pages claimed (SLC 1872 [MT01067], 1872 [MT01064]). Clemens was able to prepare the book quickly because he already had with him a substantial number of sketches that he had earlier prepared for Bliss (see 21 Mar 72 to Bliss, n. 1click to open link). He expanded the contents twofold by using copies of the Routledge 1870 Jumping Frog as well as two small collections of his sketches—Eye Openers and Screamers—which John Camden Hotten of London had published without his consent, in late 1871 (SLC 1871 [MT01020], 1871 [MT01018]). Clemens deleted some sketches that he did not write, and revised and corrected many others—generally toning down his language to suit his notion of a British audience. He probably wrote this letter to Osgood just before (or perhaps just after) the Routledges’ New York agent, Joseph Blamire, shipped the printer’s copy to London. The Routledges required three weeks to set a book in type and print it, as their contract for The Gilded Age specified. It is therefore likely that Clemens wrote the letter on Sunday, 31 March, and sent off his printer’s copy on that day or the next. Blamire could then have forwarded it on any of several ships that left New York on 3 April and reached England between 12 and 15 April, in time for books to be ready on 8 and 10 May. The possibility remains, however, that Clemens wrote the letter one week earlier, on 24 March, three days after telling Bliss he had “looked the new book through” ( RI 1993 , 876–77; L4 85 n. 2, 411 n. 6, 432 n. 2; ET&S1 , 550–53, 590 n. 129; Contract for the Routledge Gilded Age click to open link; “Shipping Intelligence,” New York Tribune, 15 Apr 72 and 16 Apr 72, 2).

From the last verse of Longfellow’s “Light of Stars,” collected in Voices of the Night (1839): “Oh, fear not in a world like this, / And thou shalt know erelong, / Know how sublime a thing it is / To suffer and be strong” (Longfellow 1902, 4).

Clemens’s Atlantic and Every Saturday acquaintances (see 7 Jan 72 to Howells, n. 3click to open link).