“I am in the throes of a new book, of which after a few months’ full pondering over I cannot even fix up the name, so that you see I haven’t made much progress.”
“The enclosed bulky packet--which I need not say is entirely open to you if you care to read it--I want you to negotiate with M’Glashan for ‘The Dublin University Magazine’; the ground of the treaty being that I am to write a serial story, of which this is the opening chapter,* [? instalments] of a length varying from 16 to 18 pp. in the Magazine, the copyright of which I am to retain,--the whole to be concluded in twelve or twenty contributions, as we may see best, and for which I ask £20 per sheet, but if obliged will take 16 guineas--terms he offered me before. My plan is a story which, embracing the great changes in the present century, would bring my hero _en scène_ in the recent convulsions of the world--in the years ‘48 and ‘49.”
“As to his [M’Glashan’s] codicil. He knows me by this time well enough to be aware that if he but gives me the wind of a word, I am always ready to pull up short; and if the story should not be found to tell with his readers, I’ll make a short yarn of it willingly. Only I beg that I may not be asked to spoil a catastrophe by any abruptness, but get fair notice to shorten sail....
“With ‘Tiernay’ I may be able to work along in these hard times, when, besides my confoundedly wasteful habits, education--or what affects to be education--for the brats runs away with every sixpence I can make.
“I have said nothing about [using] my name in the M’Glashan compact, because as he does not in the Magazine append other names, he will not of course do so with mine. But in any other way I have no desire to blink the authorship, intending, as I do, to make the story as interesting as I am able.
“In another six weeks we shall be in the mountains,--in our old delightful quarters at the Bagni di Lucca,--where cheapness and glorious scenery are happy associates.
“I have not heard more of the notices of my book in ‘The Dublin University Magazine,’ and now that a new contribution of mine will appear there, it would be too late, and look too like a puff, to print a critique on me in the same sheet with myself. Tell M’Glashan that however anxious [? I may be] for a review, I’d rather forgo it now than incur such a malapropos.