13 May 1873 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: PBL, UCCL 00915)
There was no use for “about 600 pages” in the contract, & the putting them there was foolish surplusage. I want Bliss to take them out. That will leave it that we contract to furnish to him the MS of a book called the Gilded Age—& that is entirely sufficient. There never was n Ⓐemendationany sense in sticking in that stupid reference to the number of pages. Don’t you If you suggest the aut Ⓐemendationalteration while the MS. is still in your hands there won’t be any trouble or anything disagreeable.1explanatory note
The baby was sick & kept us up all awake seven-tenths of the night—seems better today. Livy rusty—I too.
Ys in haste (of packing up)
‸begin insertion spanCare Geo. Routledge & Sons
Publishers—
The Broadway,
Ludgate Hill
London, E. C.‸end insertion span
Never mind Lackland. In his prosperity—then in his adversity—& finally in his lunatic death in a house of d by the side of the corpse of his only friend—he is perhaps better suited to the stage than a book.2explanatory note
The contract remained unchanged (Contract for the American Publishing Company Gilded Age click to open link). Clemens’s sensitivity on this minor point probably owes something to his frustration in 1871, when he had difficulty producing enough manuscript to make Roughing It six hundred pages long ( RI 1993 , 872–73).
Major Lackland figures in chapter 10 of The Gilded Age, where he is reported to have died “wholly alone and friendless,” leaving “certain memoranda” that show Laura is not the natural child of Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins (SLC 1873–74, 100–101). Since Lackland does not die “by the side of the corpse of his only friend,” it seems likely that Warner declined the advice in the present letter and revised the chapter to resolve whatever problem he had identified, eliminating in the process this melodramatic detail. Warner would have made his changes on the manuscript itself, or possibly on the proofs (see Hill 1965, 142). None of the proofs, and only five pages of manuscript, are known to survive from chapter 10 (the changes would have been on pages 258–63, and the first surviving page is 264).
References
- Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5: 1872–1873. Edited by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1997
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Roughing It. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Edgar Marquess Branch, Lin Salamo, and Robert Pack Browning. The Works of Mark Twain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. This edition supersedes the one published in 1972. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1993
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day. Charles Dudley Warner, coauthor. Hartford: American Publishing Company. [Early copies bound with 1873 title page, later ones with 1874 title page: see BAL,2:3357.] [bib00143] 1873–74
- Hill, Hamlin. “Toward a Critical Text of The Gilded Age.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 59 (Second Quarter): 142–49. 1965
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the Robert B. Honeyman Collection, Linderman Library, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (PBL).
L5 , 365–366.
The Honeyman Collection was donated to PBL in March 1957.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.