Ever your affectionate
T.
Carlyle
All love from both of us to the Mother and Boy. My Wife is better than usual; rejoices in the promise of summer now at last visible after a spring like Greenland. Scarcity, discontent, fast ripening towards desperation, extends far and wide among our working people. God help them! In man as yet is small help. There will be work yet, before that account is liquidated; a generation or two of work! Miss Martineau is gone to Switzerland, after emitting Deerwood [sic], a Novel.* How do you like it? people ask. To which there are serious answers returnable, but few so good as none. Ah me! Lady Bulwer too has written a Novel, in satire of her Husband. I saw the Husband not long since; one of the wretchedest Phantasms, it seemed to me, I had yet fallen in with,—many, many, as they are here.
The L100 Sterling Bill came, in due time, in perfect order; and will be payable one of these days. I forget dates; but had well calculated that before the 19th of March this piece of news and my gratitude for it had reached you.
-------- * Deerbrook --------
XXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle
Boston, 20 April, 1839
My Dear Friend,—Learning here in town that letters may go today to the “Great Western,” I seize the hour to communicate a bookseller’s message. I told Brown, of C.C. Little & Co., that you think of stereotyping the History. He says that he can make it profitable to himself and to you to use your plates here in this manner (which he desires may be kept secret here, and I suppose with you also). You are to get your plates made and proved, then you are to send them out here to him, having first insured them in London, and he is to pay you a price for every copy he prints from them. As soon as he has printed a supply for our market,—and we want, he says, five hundred copies now,—he will send them back to you. I told him I thought he had better fix the price per copy to be paid by him, and I would send it to you as his offer. He is willing to do so, but not today. It was only this morning I informed him of your plan.