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To
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
22 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: MH-H, UCCL
00560)
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Buffalo, Jan. 22.
Dear Sir:
Please do not publish the note I sent you the other day
about “Hy. Slocum’s” plagiarism entitled
“Three Aces”—it is not important enough for
such a long paragraph.1 Webb writes me that he has put in a paragraph about it,
too—& I have requested him to suppress it.2 If you would simply state, without any fuss in a line & a half under “Literary
Notes” that you mistook one “Hy.
Slocum” (no, it was one “Carl
Byng,” I perceive) “Carl Byng” for Mark
Twain, & that the form it was the former who wrote the
plagiarism entitled “Three Aces,” I think that would do a
fair justice without any unseemly display. But it is hard
to be accused of plagiarism—a crime I never have committed in my
life.
Ys Truly
Mark Twain.
I have just crossed Mr. Carl Byng & Mr. Hy.
Slocum both off my the
“Express’s” list of contributors (for their
[
own good
own good
]—for everything they write is straightway saddled onto me.)3
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1
Aldrich replied on 25 January: “It is too late for you to
attempt to prevent me doing you justice! About 42000 copies of your
note, with my apology nobly appended, are now printed, and we hope to
have the rest of the edition off the press by to-morrow night. In the
next No. of E. S. I will withdraw my apology, if you say so!”
(
CU-MARK).
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2
This exchange of letters with Webb has not been found. None of
Webb’s final “Things”
columns—in
Every Saturday for 28
January, 4 February, and 11 February—mentioned the
matter.
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3
Sketches by Carl Byng appeared irregularly in the Buffalo
Express between 12 November 1870 and 28
January 1871. A statistical comparison of the Byng texts with known
texts by Mark Twain has suggested that Clemens did not write the
Byng pieces, and that they may have been the work of
Clemens’s partner, Josephus N. Larned (
Gillette 1984, 2–3,
13–16). Larned may also have written the sketches by Hy
Slocum that had appeared in the
Express
between 31 March 1868 and 8 October 1870. For all known articles by
Byng and Slocum, see References (
Byng 1870a–f,
1871a–b;
Slocum 1868a–d,
1869a–p,
1870a–t;
McCullough 1969,
1971,
1972).
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Source text(s):
MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (
MH-H).
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Previous publication:
L4, 305–306; Greenslet, 95–96; MTL, 1:181–82, without the postscript.
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Provenance:
deposited at MH-H in 1942 and donated in 1949 by Talbot Aldrich.
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Emendations and textual notes:
own good
own good
•
[wavy
underscore over straight]