To Samuel S. Cox
8 February 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: Craven and CU-MARK, UCCL 01190)

Hartford Feb. 8.

My Dear Cox:

If you want to present & [bitterly ] oppose this petition, you can contend that forty-two years is already longer than any ‸one‸ author’s books in a million lives. 1

Don’t you see? If copyright were perpetual, about three authors in a century would benefit by it—that is, their heirs would; but in order to get the advantage of those three, a contemptible statute is left upon the law books.

Love to you! Goodbye.

Ever Yrs

Mark.

[enclosure:]

[PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT].

To the Honorable the Senate & House of Representatives in Congress assembled:

Whereas, The Constitution guarantees equal rights to all, backed by the Declaration of Independence; and

Whereas, under our laws, the right of property in real estate is perpetual; and

Whereas, under our laws, the right of property in the literary result of a citizen’s intellectual labor is restricted to forty-two years; and

Whereas, Forty-two years seems an exceedingly just & righteous term, & a sufficiently long one for the retention of property:

Therefore, Your petitioner, having the good of his country solely at heart, humbly prays that “equal rights” & fair & equal treatment may be meted out to all citizens, by the restriction of rights in all property, real estate included, to the beneficent term of forty-two years. Then shall all men bless your honorable body & be happy. And for this will your petitioner ever pray.

Mark Twain

A paragraph not added to the petition:

The charming absurdity of restricting property-rights in books to forty-two years sticks prominently out in the fact that hardly any man’s books ever live forty-two years, or even the half of it; & so, for the sake of getting a shabby advantage of the heirs of about one Scott or Burns or Milton in a hundred years, the law makers ‸of the “Great” Republic‸ are content to leave that pitiable ‸poor‸ little pilfering edict upon the statute books. It is like an emperor laying in wait to rob a phenix’s nest, & waiting the necessary century to get the chance.2

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens’s effort to stop the pirated Gilded Age play evidently inspired him to compose the enclosed ironic appeal. The existing copyright law, as amended in 1831 and reaffirmed in 1870, limited the total term of a copyright to forty-two years: “twenty-eight years from the time of recording the title” of a work, renewable “within six months before the expiration of the first term” for a “further term of fourteen years” (Solberg, 32, 37, 47; before 1831 the total term had been only twenty-eight years). Cox had introduced a bill concerning international copyright in Congress in December 1871, but it failed to pass (L5, 257 n. 4).

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2 The text of the petition transcribed here is from a manuscript in the Mark Twain Papers. The version that Clemens sent to Cox, which has not been found, may not have included the final “paragraph not added.” A member of the House of Representatives, presumably Cox, gave a copy of the petition to the New York Mail. The text in the Mail has not been recovered, but the Hartford Courant reprinted it on 8 March 1875 (“‘Mark Twain’ on Copyright,” 2). That version—dated “Hartford, Feb. 8. 1875.”—is virtually identical to the present text, but lacks the final paragraph. Later in the year Clemens included the petition, with the “paragraph not added,” in Sketches, New and Old (SLC 1875, 179).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS facsimile is copy-text for the letter. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned in 1976 by Mrs. Robin Craven, who provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers. MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), is copy-text for the enclosure.

Previous publication: L6, 376–377; SLC 1875, 179, enclosure only; Lindsey, 252, brief excerpt.

Provenance:For the enclosure, see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

bitterly • bitt bitterly [corrected miswriting]

PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT • [‘Petition Concerning Copyright’ underscored three times]