5 May 1868 • San Francisco, Calif. (Typed transcript made for Albert Bigelow Paine and
handwritten transcript made by Dana S. Ayer:
CU-MARK and WU-MU, UCCL 02731)
The Alta people, after some hesitation, have given me permission to use my printed letters, & have ceased to think of publishing them themselves in book form. I am steadily at work, & shall start east with the completed manuscriptⒶemendation about the middle of June.1explanatory note
IⒶemendation lectured here on the trip the other night—over sixteen hundred dollars in gold in the house—every seat taken & paid for before night.
Clemens’s intention was probably to depart on the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s Golden City, scheduled for Saturday, 13 June. The company routinely dispatched its steamers for the Isthmus of Panama (and hence for New York) on the sixth, fourteenth, twenty-second, and thirtieth of each month, except when the date fell on a Sunday, which occasioned departure one day earlier or later (“Ocean Steamers,” San Francisco Alta California, 4 June 1868, 4).
All variants among the source texts are reported here. Readings identified by the siglum ‘MTP’ are editorial emendations that draw from or fully replace the source readings when none of those is deemed an accurate representation of the original manuscript.
References
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Madison Memorial Union Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- 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
- Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 3 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. [Volume numbers in citations are to this edition; page numbers are the same in all editions.] 1912
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2: 1867–1868. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Richard Bucci, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1990
None. The text is based on three transcripts, each of which derives independently from the original holograph letter, which has not been found. Tr1 and Tr2 are almost textually identical, but like other duplicate typescripts prepared for Paine, were probably both made with the original manuscript accessible to the typist: when they agree, they strongly confirm each other.
Transcripts published in MTB and MTL both derive from Tr1 or Tr2, so their (very slight) variants are derivative and not recorded here.
MTB, 1:363, partial publication; MTL, 1:152–53; L2, 215–16.
See Paine Transcripts and Brownell Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.