Mark Twain was falsely accused of plagiarism, not for the last time during his career, in the spring of 1870. Such a charge, leveled in the wake of his literary success with The Innocents Abroad, would have been serious had it been true. Three humorous sketches about the death by spanking of a boy with nitroglycerin-soaked trousers, one of them by Mark Twain, circulated in the American periodical press in 1869–1870. This convergence of comic anecdotes soon devolved into a snarl of misunderstandings.The original, unsigned sketch appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for 4 November 1869: An old lady residing in the lower part of the city recently had occasion to spank her little boy for some youthful indiscretion. He had been playing about the wharves, and in his juvenile perambulations had sat on a leaky can of nitro-glycerine, the consequences of which was that the first smack the old lady administered caused a fearful explosion, which sent them flying in different directions and broke all the glass in the room. Both are recovering from the injuries they sustained.1This item was copied across the country over the next six weeks in dozens of newspapers, including the Washington, D.C. National Intelligencer (November 24), Vicksburg Herald (December 4), Buffalo Express (December 7), Buffalo Commercial (December 8), Portland, Me., Press (December 14), Richmond Dispatch (December 15), St. Joseph Gazette (December 17), and Leavenworth Times (December 18).As an editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and a prolific humor writer under the pseudonym “John Quill,” Charles Heber Clark embellished the item in “The Fate of Joe M'Ginnis: A Warning to Mothers,” printed in the December 22 issue of his paper. Like the boy in the original sketch, Joe soaks his pants in a puddle of nitro-glycerine and is spanked by his mother, whereupon he “was blown through the winder and the door, and the fire-place, in little bits and chunks about the size of a marvel” and Mrs. M'Ginnis “went a pitchin’ through the ceilin’ and the garret about ten thousand miles, along with chairs and stove-pipe and pans and tom cats and soup tureens” and “she never come down again.” The story concludes with a satirical admonition to parents to examine their children's “trousers with chemical tests” before “inflicting punishment” lest they perish “without a chance to get off any last words.”2 “Joe M'Ginnis” was also widely reprinted regionally in such newspapers as the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette (25 December 1869); Washington, Pa., Reporter (12 January 1870); San Francisco Golden City (23 January 1970); Ravenna, Oh., Democratic Press (3 February 1870); Charlestown Virginia Free Press (14 March 1870); and Wheeling Register (18 March 1870).Mark Twain published a third iteration of the anecdote—based on the original unsigned sketch, not on Clark's version—at the end of his “Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” in Galaxy for May 1870. As in his “Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Did Not Come to Grief” (1865), Twain parodied sentimental conventions governing the fates of characters, whether naughty or nice. “Somehow, nothing ever went right” with Jacob Blivens, the ironic hero of “Good Little Boy.” “Nothing ever turned out with him the way it turned out with the good little boys in the books. . . . Nothing ever came out according to the authorities with him.” After sitting on a leaking nitroglycerine can, he is spanked “and in an instant that good little boy shot out through the roof and soared away towards the sun. . . . Although the bulk of him came down all right in a tree-top in an adjoining county, the rest of him was apportioned around among four townships, and so they had to hold five inquests on him to find out whether he was dead or not, and how it occurred.” Twain appended a note to this conclusion: “This catastrophe is borrowed (without the unknown but most ingenious owner's permission) from a stray newspaper item.”3Falsely believing that his work had been plagiarized, Clark was incensed. He editorialized in his column in the Philadelphia Bulletin that the Galaxy had hired “an ordinary comic man—a newspaper wit, end-man, or scrap-gatherer . . . to edit one of its departments.” He was even more blunt in commenting on the exploding boy story: By the by, as he terminates his wildest story with a catastrophe confessedly borrowed, we may properly help him to the authorship of the fancy he appropriates. The citizens of Philadelphia remember well enough, what Mr. Twain, in his journey to the sanctum in New York, has dropped the knowledge of, that his boy exploded with nitro-glvcerine was an invention of “John Quill” of the Philadelphia Bulletin.4Clark also wrote to Twain, enclosing a clipping of “The Fate of Joe M'Ginnis,” asserting he was the “ingenious owner” of the catastrophe, and implicitly accusing the author of “Story of a Bad Little Boy” of literary larceny.5 In response, Twain launched a counter-attack against the “literary sneak thief” Quill in the next issue of the Galaxy. Twain outlined his strategy in a letter dated April 26 to his friend Frank Fuller: “Without mentioning his name, I have salted him down in my MSS. for June as ‘A Literary ‘Old Offender’ in Court with Suspicious Property in his Possession’—& declining to accept of his testimony.”6 He also discussed the case with his lecture manager James Redpath: “In next Galaxy I give Nasby's friend and mine from Philadelphia (John Quill, a literary thief) a ‘hyste’ [hoist].’”7 Ironically, neither Clark nor Twain depended on the other for the crux of his story. Instead, each independently gleaned the exploding boy event from a widely circulated newspaper source. As Twain explains in “A Literary ‘Old Offender,’” he discovered the plot device “drifting about the sea of journalism, in the shape of a simple statement of the catastrophe in a single sentence and attributed to a California paper.”8Clark had apparently been a thorn in Twain's side for some time, as the sobriquet “Old Offender” implies. “This person several of us know of our own personal knowledge to be a poor little purloiner of other men's ideas and handicraft,” Twain declared without mentioning his antagonist by name. A close examination of Clark's list of writings, Twain added, “will find in it two very good articles of mine.”9 According to Kruse, these two additional plagiarisms were “How William McGinley Suffered” (Philadelphia Bulletin, 26 November 1869), which covers the same territory as Twain's “Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man,” and perhaps “That Horse of Mine” (Philadelphia Bulletin, 4 December 1869) with its vague similarities to Twain's “The Steed Oahu.”10 More likely the second “very good article” Twain alleged Clark had stolen from him was “Sunday School Address,” which was printed in the Californian on 15 June 1867 under this editorial headnote: One of the invariable characteristics of genius, is its tendency to provoke imitation. The following, evidently found its inspiration in “Mark Twain's” “Bad Little Boy,” and would have in all probability never have been written, had its author not seen, appreciated, and admired its prototype.11The “Bad Little Boy” story in question was “The Christmas Fireside,” published in the Californian a year and a half previously and later collected in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867) under the title “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn't Come to Grief.” Clark “borrowed” shamelessly from Twain's sketch. For example:12The fate of “Sunday School Address” in the newspaper exchanges was nothing if not ironic. On the one hand, Clark was praised: “A sketch writer in the Californian delivers a Sunday School Address, which is better than anything Twain can do.”13 On the other hand, another thread of reprintings mistakenly attributed the sketch to Twain.14 The preface to Clark's first book, Out of the Hurly-Burly (1874), a compilation of previously published sketches set in a narrative frame and published under his pseudonym “Max Adeler,” begins by addressing this most common bane of the newspaper humorist: the tendency of exchange editors to excise a writer's byline and send orphaned tales into the viral network of reprintings where they were often misattributed: Several of the incidents . . . have already appeared in print and have been copied in various newspapers throughout the country. Sometimes they have been attributed to the author; but more frequently they have been given either without any name attached to them, or they have been credited to persons who probably never saw them. The best of the anecdotes have been imitated, but none of them, I believe, are [sic] imitations.15Had Twain read Out of the Hurly-Burly, not only might he have bristled at the insinuation in the preface, he would surely have recognized a much less subtle shot across the bow in the story of “the great Cooley inquest.” Tom Cooley of Vandyke, Delaware, an inventor who held over two hundred patents for elaborate but ultimately useless machines, concocts a compound more combustible than gunpowder.This material clearly mimics Twain's account of the distribution of the disjecta membra of Jacob Blivens over so many townships that it took five inquests to determine “whether he had died, and how it had occurred.” But Clark elaborates upon Twain's original text, devoting several paragraphs to the comical verdicts of the sixty-four different juries called by the coroner to determine Cooley's cause of death.As Kruse and others have noted, Out of the Hurly-Burly contains a new round of apparent borrowings from Twain sketches, along with several jibes alluding to Twain's reputation as an unreconstructed plagiarist. Fifteen years later, that charge would be renewed in a widely disseminated news dispatch, in which “Literary people in Philadelphia,” speaking on behalf of Clark, accused Mark Twain of stealing the entire plot and many of the episodes of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court from Clark's wildly unsuccessful novella “The Fortunate Island” (1881). In 1914, a year before his death, Clark appended to the last reprinting of “The Fortunate Island” he supervised through the press the following footnote: “It is necessary to say that this tale was first published in 1881 and antedates a story with a similar theme by a noted author.”17 These words express in a nutshell Clark's philosophy of literary borrowing: for those drinking from the common font of all possible ideas, imitation is inevitable.