per Fanny C. Hesse
7 November 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: ViU, UCCL 01502)
It is aⒶemendation right down generous offer you make & if the books didn’t cost much I accept with pleasure. ButⒶemendation if they were expensive it would not be fair to let you payⒶemendation the whole cost of a blunder which was not yours but a subordinate’s—in which case let us divide the expense, & shake hands across the bloody chasm.1explanatory note
It was not about the Tom Sawyer act2explanatory note with me that I was inquiring, for that is all correct. I was simply anxious to know if Conway had paid himself his royalty or if you had paid it to him. The main thing was I wanted him to get it. I did not care anything about the details, I only wanted to know that he got it.
Have received your checks for 5.qs. and £7.10.0. Thanks, they are satisfactory, especially the latter. The larger a check is, the more I like it; & the more I honor & glorify the sender, & the more it stirs me up to high literary achievement in that man’s behoof.
Clemens answered the following letter, which Chatto had written in response to an earlier one of his that is now lost (CU-MARK):
Bentley had complied with Clemens’s request to forward the proofsheets of “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion” to Chatto, who published all four installments in Belgravia at the same time they appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (see 15 Sept 1877 to Bentley; SLC 1877–78).
References
- University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
- 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
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Previously Unpublished Letters. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 8 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion.” Atlantic Monthly 40 (October–December 1877): 443–47, 586–92, 718–24; Atlantic Monthly 41 (January 1878): 12–19 1877–78
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, ViU.
MicroPUL, reel 1.
Deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.