December 9 Saturday – Moncure Conway wrote to Sam offering followup in the Belford piracy matter for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Belford was doubtful Sam’s copyright was valid in Canada, but Chatto would continue the fight. Legal remedies open to Sam and Chatto would only led to a Pyrrhic victory, since penalties for violation of the 1875 Canadian copyright act were small, and the damage done to U.S.
December 8 Friday – The release date for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [Camfield, bibliog.]. Hirst gives this as the date “the earliest copies of the first edition came from the bindery” [“A Note on the Text” Oxford edition, 1996]. Only 23,638 copies were sold the first year, and less than 29,000 by the end of 1879, providing only half the income of The Gilded Age [Emerson 95].
December 6 Wednesday – Christian Bernard Tauchnitz wrote from Leipzig, Germany to Sam.
My dear Sir, / In consequence of your kind letter of Sept 14 I have added your “Tom Sawyer” to my series. It filled one of my little volumes. I have printed it from the London edition, in adding the dedication you wished.
December 5 Tuesday – Sam was back in Hartford. He dictated a letter through Fanny C.
December 4 Monday – In Cambridge, Mass., Howells wrote to Sam, enclosing a letter from Belford Brothers to Howells Nov. 29. The Belfords wanted the right to publish Sam’s future contributions to the Atlantic. “We would be willing to pay liberally for the right to publish them in the magazine, although the law allows us to pirate them.” “What answer?” Howells asked [MTHL 1: 166]. (See Dec. 5 for Sam’s answer.)
In 1859 Broadway near Madison Square saw the opening of two magnificent new hotels. Amos R. Eno opened his Fifth Avenue Hotel, which engulfed the block front from 23rd Street to 24th, on August 23, 1859. But his was not the first. By January that year another white marble had opened, the St. James.
December 3 Sunday – Sam wrote from the St. James Hotel in New York to Livy. James R. Osgood visited Sam at his hotel around noon. Mrs. T. B. Aldrich had also called and he would soon return her call. He wrote that he’d “used no whisky or other liquor to sleep on [but] was utterly tired out.” NYC temperatures ranged from 35-24 degrees F. with no precipitation [NOAA.gov].
December 2 Saturday – In the evening Sam dined with “those leddy-hets till 12, then went to bed” [MTLE 1: 149]. Note: The “leddy-hets” (Clara Clemens’ pronunciation of “leatherheads”) are unidentified.
NYC temperatures ranged from 24-15 degrees F. with no precipitation [NOAA.gov].
Chelsea is a city in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States, directly across the Mystic River from the city of Boston. As of the 2020 census, Chelsea had a population of 40,787. With a total area of just 2.46 square miles, Chelsea is the smallest city in Massachusetts in terms of total area. It is the second most densely populated city in Massachusetts, behind Somerville, and is the city with the second-highest percentage of Latino residents in Massachusetts, behind Lawrence.
Cambridge (/ˈkeɪmbrɪdʒ/[4] KAYM-brij) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States.