To the Editor of the Literary World
December 1872 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: CtY-BR, UCCL 00836)

Dear Sir — The other charge ‸(see 4th column on this page)‸ is playful,2 but I’m not sure that the author of this “boy’s journal” hadn’t been reading page 637 of the “Innocents Abroad,” at some time or other. 3 But the truth is, a deliberate plagiarism is seldom made by any person who is not an ass; but unconscious & blameless plagiarisms are made by the best of people every day: Considering the fact that billions of people have been thinking & writing every day for 5 or 6,000 years, I wonder that any man of the present day ‸ ever ‸ [ dares to ] consider a thought original with himself.4

Very Truly Yrs

Mark Twain.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens wrote this letter to the editor of the Literary World: A Review of Current Literature in the margins of page 106 of the December 1872 issue. (The entire page is reproduced in Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles.) This Boston monthly was founded in 1870 and survived until 1904. Its editor and publisher from 1870 to 1877, Samuel R. Crocker, “used to have a literary connection with the book firm of Ticknor & Fields,” and had been the “Boston correspondent of several journals of other cities” (“Boston Correspondence,” Hartford Courant, 24 Feb 72, 1). He

had been trained as a lawyer; but he was widely read and had a flair for literary criticism, a studious habit, and tremendous industry. The World was his personal organ, but such were his versatility, breadth of interests, and voracity that it became a fairly well-rounded literary paper. ... [Crocker’s] reviews, though “friendly” as a rule, were apparently honest and fairly discriminating. The World was informative, conservative, and inclined to dullness.

Crocker’s health declined in 1876, and in the following year he became hopelessly insane; he died in a hospital in 1878. (Mott 1957, 454–56)

Crocker, who was not personally acquainted with Clemens, had written a negative review in April 1871 of Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, which Clemens had almost certainly read (Crocker 1871; see L4, 381 n. 1).

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2 Clemens meant to refer to the third (and last) column on the page, which included a “playful” note about plagiarism from “F. B. P.” (The item was circled in pencil, possibly not by Clemens.) “F. B. P.” compared Mark Twain’s account of mourning at the grave of Adam in chapter 53 of The Innocents Abroad with “an old French story” about a similar absurd lamentation over the untimely death of the poet Pindar. Crocker published Clemens’s rebuttal in the “Notes and Queries” column of the next issue, prefaced with the remark, “‘Mark Twain,’ Hartford, Conn., comments upon the humorous attempt of ‘F. B. P.,’ in our last issue, to convict him (M. T.) of plagiarism” (Crocker 1873).

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3 Clemens drew a box around the extract from a “boy’s journal,” in the first column of the Literary World page. The extract was quoted in a review of What Katy Did: A Story (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), the first of three “Katy” books by Sarah Chauncy Woolsey (1835–1905), who, under the pseudonym “Susan Coolidge,” wrote a number of popular children’s books. Crocker praised the book for its “exquisite naturalness, its fidelity to average child-life,” and the “pleasant humor” of passages like the journal (Crocker 1872). Clemens points out the similarity of Woolsey’s concept to his own (fictional) boyhood journal, included in chapter 59 of The Innocents Abroad.

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4 In December 1879 Clemens returned to his concept of “unconscious plagiarism” (“we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves”) in a graceful speech honoring Oliver Wendell Holmes (SLC 1879).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (CtY-BR). Clemens wrote his letter in the margins of page 106 of the 1 December 1872 issue of the Literary World: A Review of Current Literature. The page is reproduced, at 68 percent of actual size, in Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles.

Previous publication: L5, 232–233.

Provenance:The MS was formerly laid in a first edition copy of The Innocents Abroad (American Publishing Company, 1869) owned by Owen F. Aldis (1852–1925), who donated his collection of American literature to CtY in 1911 (Cannon, 180).

Emendations and textual notes:

dares to • darest to [false start]