To the Editor of the Hartford Courant
13 April 1874 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: NNPM, UCCL 01077)

About My Banquet.

To the Editor of the Courant: 1

I find the following in the Hartford Courant:

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“The New York Evening Post of Wednesday [says : “M ‸Mark Twain has received & paid the bill for a‸ ‸complimentary‸ supper given him by his friends in Hartford.” ] This is an error. Mr. Twain has no had no ‸ neither received nor paid for any ‸ ‸had no complimentary dinner or [supper. ] given him. Where do such absurd reports originate?”‸ 2

You have stated it correctly. I have never been complimented with a dinner or a supper, & so I wondered how that item got its start. I beliveve I have solved the problem. A banquet was lately given in an author’s honor, in America, & it was said in jest that he paid the bill himself. The jest found its way into print, with the slight amendment of naming me as the victim instead of the other man.3 That complicates the joke, & doubles the humor of it. This is well enough. Life would be dreary without jokes; jokes must have victims; so I may as well be the victim this [time. Where ] I was born they always hang a man who can’t take a joke.

Yours Truly

Mark Twain

Hartford, Apl. 134

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The newspaper’s editor in chief was Connecticut Congressman Joseph R. Hawley. Charles Dudley Warner, the associate editor, was in charge at this time, while the Forty-third Congress was in session and Hawley was in Washington (L3, 97 n. 5).

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2 Clemens paraphrased the Courant item, published on 10 April (see 9 Apr 74 to Stillson, n. 1).

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3 Wilkie Collins. See the next letter.

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4 The Courant published this letter on 14 April (“Mark Twain’s Banquet,” 2). On 15 April the New York Evening Post responded:

Mark Twain, who has had his joke on almost everybody from Adam to the Shah of Persia, is now obliged to confess in print that he has been made the subject of one himself. In other words, the story which we copied from a New England paper about Mark’s having to pay the bill for a complimentary dinner offered him on his return from Europe was concocted on April 1st, and was as innocent of reality as it was of malice. (“Personal,” 2)

The Post was mistaken in dating the rumor to 1 April. It had been in circulation since at least early March (10 Apr 74 to Redpath, n. 3) and it continued to spread through the system of “exchanges.” On 17 April, for example, the Dubuque Herald published an item identical to the Post’s (“Miscellaneous,” 3).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Heineman Collection, MAH 211B, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City (NNPM).

Previous publication: L6, 105–106; “Mark Twain’s Banquet,” Hartford Courant, 14 Apr 74, 2; “Letter from Mark Twain,” Boston Globe, 16 Apr 74, 7.

Provenance:Dannie N. Heineman (1872–1962), who served for forty years as director of the Belgian Public Utilities Management Company, purchased the MS in Copenhagen in 1936. After his death it was placed on deposit at the Morgan Library. Three years after Mrs. Heineman’s death in 1974, the Heineman Foundation donated the MS to the library (Dickinson, 157).

Emendations and textual notes:

says : .... “ • [SLC first wrote ‘says “M’ (the ‘M’ is only partly formed, and doubtful); then he canceled the open quotes and the ‘M’ and rewrote the quotes on the line below, with a paragraph indent (shown here, by necessity, at the end of the extract); then he canceled those quotes as well, inserted a colon after ‘says’, and, finally, after the inserted colon, wrote the rest of the paragraph]

supper. • [deletion implied]

time. Where • time.|Where