August 16 Tuesday – In Belmont, Mass., Howells wrote to Sam:

Your Ashfield audience will be the farmer-folks of the region, quiet and dull on top, but full of grit and fun; they’re fond of speaking, and rather cultivated, but not spoiled. They know you, like a book, and you can trust all your points to them. Their life is one of deadly solitude and suffocating frugality; but they are smart. They will stand lots of human nature from you [MTHL 1: 365].

August 16–22 Monday – Sam wrote from Elmira to Benjamin H. Ticknor, on proof-reading minutiae for P&P. He wanted the printers to follow the copy strictly, in preparing proofs, because he was having to focus too much on punctuation and capitalization which they’d changed. Like many writers, Sam revised with an eye to specifics:

“What I want to read proof for is for literary lapses & infelicities (those I’ll mark every time; so, in these chapters where I have had to turn my whole attention to restoring my punctuation, I do not consider that I have legitimately read proof at all” [MTP].