January 29 Sunday – Joe Goodman wrote from Fresno, Calif. to Sam offering his opinion on P&P.

…I am going to say something that will not be agreeable, I presume, but which is spoken with the same warm regard I have always entertained for you and your writings. “The Prince and the Pauper” is the first of your works in which I have ever been disappointed. Aside from the clear-cut English and an occasional bit of elegant description or quiet humor, there is no evidences of your handiwork in the volume. It might have been written by anybody else—by a far less masterly hand, in fact. You went entirely out of your sphere. The laboriousness is apparent everywhere by which you endeavor to harmonize irreconcilable improbabilities, to manage the obsolete customs and parlance of the times, and to wrestle generally with a condition of things to which you feel yourself alien and unsuited. And after all you don’t succeed. The impression of a skillfully wrought-out improbability is still uppermost when the volume is closed; we feel that all the pomp and pauperism has been a masquerade, and not the genuine article, and we are conscious of not having heard the real language of the age and personages, but a stilted imitation that never did and never will have existence outside of a book. You develop no character through any subjective trait. Your princes and paupers, your lords and rogues all express sentiments in common through a common diction. But I am getting more sweeping in my remarks than I intended. Perhaps I should not have indulged in criticism at all, but I have such a high opinion of your abilities that I can’t bear to see them misdirected or exerted at a disadvantage. After all, it is only my own obscure judgment, and I have learned to distrust that mightily. I have seen no newspaper notices of the work. The only other opinion of it I have heard was one directly opposed to mine. Sam Davis, now of the Salt Lake Tribune, wrote me that he was charmed with the story, thought it by far the finest thing you ever did, and that it had exalted you to the highest niche in his estimation.

…

Who designed the mechanical and artistic features of the book? They are superb [MTP].

Orion Clemens wrote a long letter on various topics to Sam, clipping enclosed from Keokuk Gate City about Rev. Dr. Craig. “Many thanks for your dispatch. It made me as easy as an old shoe” [MTP].