Bancroftiana, Number 118 Spring 2001: Home at Last—Four Manuscript Chapters of Mark Twain's <span class="italic">A Tramp Abroad</span> Come to Bancroft

Home at Last—Four Manuscript Chapters of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad Come to Bancroft

Using the Flora Lamson Hewlett Fund, and with the thoughtful assistance of Peter B. Howard as well as the generosity of Mark Twain collector Waring Jones, Bancroft has just succeeded in purchasing four complete chapters of Mark Twain's manuscript for A Tramp Abroad: chapters 2, 21, 44, and 49. These manuscripts join two chapters (4 and 43) earlier given to the Mark Twain Papers, as well as uncounted pages written for but "crowded out" of that book, which have been part of Mark Twain's papers ever since he published it in 1880. All of this manuscript will ultimately form the indispensable basis for a scholarly edition of Mark Twain's second most popular travel book (after The Innocents Abroad).

Mark Twain never gave away or sold the manuscript for A Tramp Abroad— something he did do for the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn, and the manuscripts for books like Connecticut Yankee and Life on the Mississippi. Why then were these chapters for Tramp not already among his papers?

Simply because Mark Twain did not value his manuscript enough to retrieve it from the typesetters after the proofs had been read and the book issued. We know that he also left the manuscript for The Gilded Age in the hands of Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company in Hartford. Dozens of pages from Gilded Age were, with Mark Twain's consent, inserted in the first volumes of the De Luxe autograph edition of his writings (1899), which was limited to fewer than 1,000 sets. And a few pages of Tramp Abroad were likewise used in other collected editions, or sold as souvenirs after his death in 1910.

But sometime after the American Publishing Company was dissolved about 1914, hundreds of Mark Twain's letters to Elisha Bliss and to his son Frank, as well as the bulk of the manuscript for Tramp Abroad and what remained of Gilded Age, were privately sold to collectors and manuscript dealers, probably by Dana S. Ayer in Worcester, Massachusetts, acting for members of the Bliss family.

Three of the newly acquired chapters were among several dozen that were handsomely bound in red or blue "straight-grain morocco, by Bradstreet," each supplied with a specially printed title page. These three bear the bookplate of William Harris Arnold, who was probably the first collector to own them. His collection was sold in 1924. Auction records show that Arnold had owned 16 of the 56 chapters and appendixes.

From Chapter 2, the start of "Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn."

The same chapters also contain the bookplate of Jerome Kern, who likely bought them in 1924 and who famously sold his entire collection just a few years later, in January 1929 (these particular manuscripts are not listed in the official Anderson Galleries auction catalogue). Alas for Kern he invested the proceeds from that sale in the New York stock market. The chapters themselves must have passed through the hands of still other collectors not yet identified, but sometime before 1975 they ended up in the hands of Waring Jones of Wayzata, Minnesota, who only recently put them up for sale.

The fourth chapter (chapter 49) has been traced back as far as the library of Dr. James B. Clemens (no relation to Samuel), and we know it was sold in January 1945. It passed at one point into the hands of Arthur Wilmer-Lissauer, whose bookplate appears in the clam-shell case containing the unbound pages, but it doubtless also belonged to other collectors from time to time until it was recently offered to Bancroft.

Before this recent purchase, only 33 of the 56 chapters and appendixes that made up the printer's copy for A Tramp Abroad had found their way into institutional collections. Three chapters appear to have been broken up and their pages sold piecemeal, and the remaining 20 chapters were either known or presumed to be in private hands (collectors or dealers). For that reason, single chapters of Tramp have long since ceased to appear with any frequency in the market.

Bancroft's purchase increased the number of chapters in safe harbor to 37, and decreased those in private hands to 16. This is certainly the first time in recent history that four chapters have changed hands at once. Only three libraries own more than a single chapter of the Tramp manuscript: the Honnold Library in the Claremont Colleges (with 10 chapters), the University of Virginia Library (with 7 chapters), and now The Bancroft Library (with 6 chapters).

We recognize that often were it not for collectors willing to invest their money in such manuscripts, they might long ago have been discarded, or been broken up and sold page by page as souvenirs, or perhaps destroyed in some even more final way. But there is a crucial step in this rescue process that is sometimes overlooked. So long as preservation is left up to private collectors, scholarly access to the documents is limited or nonexistent, for while some collectors are generous about providing access or photocopies, others are not. The kind of access editors and scholars need—access to the originals, not just to photocopies—becomes possible only when collectors either open their holdings to such use, or transfer ownership to public libraries. In this case, we see the excellent stewardship given the manuscripts, over many years, by several private collectors. But ultimately, through the generous efforts of one such collector and a far-sighted antiquarian bookseller, they have been returned to Mark Twain's own papers, where they are permanently accessible to present and future scholars.

—Robert H. Hirst
General Editor, Mark Twain Project