Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To the Public
18 or 19 May 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(Hartford Courant, 20 May 75, UCCL 11895)

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TWO HUNDRED [&] FIVE DOLLARS REWARD—At the great base ball match on Tuesday, while I was engaged in hurrahing, a small boy walked off with an English-made brown silk UMBRELLA belonging to me, [&] forgot to bring it back. I will pay $5 for the return of that umbrella in good condition to my house on Farmington avenue. I do not want the boy (in an active state) but will pay two hundred dollars for his remains.1

[Samuel L. Clemens].

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Twichell pasted a clipping of this notice in his journal, commenting:

On the 18th I attended a grand Baseball match between the “Hartfords” and the “Bostons” with M. T. who lost his umbrella down through the seats and had the discomfort of presently finding that it had been carried off by somebody who crept under the seats to get it. The next day this advertisement appeared in “the Courant.” (Twichell, 1:102)

In fact, the notice appeared in the Hartford Courant on 20 May (“New Advertisements,” 3). The New York World reprinted it on 21 May (“Mark Twain Loses an Umbrella,” 4), and then on 28 May remarked that

it might prove no joke for the boy should it meet the eye of some simple-minded ruffian without a sense of humor. Indeed, by a strict construction of law, when a gentleman, over his own signature, publicly offers a large pecuniary inducement for the commission of murder, the jest might be very unpleasantly turned against its author. (“News Splinters,” 5)

Seaver paraphrased Clemens’s notice in his “Personal” column in Harper’s Bazar for 19 June (Seaver 1875; see William Seaver’s Squibs about Clemens), and it was still drawing comment on 4 August. On that date the Courant reported: “That absurd story set afloat by some wag to the effect that the dead body of a boy was left at the house of Mark Twain, after his advertisement in The Courant about a lost umbrella, is taking a serious turn in some of the papers” (“Brief Mention,” 2).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

“New Advertisements,” Hartford Courant, 20 May 75, 3. Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Newspaper and Microcopy Division, University of California, Berkeley (CU-NEWS).

glyph Previous publication: L6, 481–482; “Mark Twain Loses an Umbrella,” New York World, 21 May 75, 4.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

& • AND

& • and

Samuel L. Clemens • SAMUEL L. CLEMENS