July 24 Sunday – Sam wrote from Branford, Conn. to the Australian public, a letter which was printed in the Adelaide Observer on Oct. 15. After discussing that someone had been “scattered all over Australia pretending to be him,” Sam informed Australians that he’d never been in any part of the country and that he suspected the man to be “a pretty shabby sort of rascal.” He closed with:

Today’s mail brings a letter…from an old English friend of ours, dated “Government House, Sydney, May 29,” in which the writer is shocked to hear of my “sudden death.” Now, that suggests that that aforementioned imposter has even gone the length of dying for me. This generosity disarms me. He has done a thing for me which I wouldn’t even have done for myself. If he will stay dead now I will call the account square, and drop the grudge I bear him.

Note: The letter was later published in the Springfield Republican and the New York Times (Dec. 8) as AUTHORITATIVE CONTRADICTION [Fatout, MT Speaks 129].

Sam also wrote to Reginald Cholmondeley who wrote on May 29 while visiting Sydney, Australia, to inform him that the imposter there, who’d been posing as Mark Twain for years, had died.

It is odd that a letter containing the news of my own death should give me pleasure & a lively sense of relief—yet these were the effects produced by this one: pleasure in the recognition of the fact that I still possess a friendship which I so greatly value, & a sense of relief in the conviction that a fraud who has been passing under my name during some years in New South Wales & neighboring regions is at last disposed of & out of the way…I was beginning to get tired of him & his performances [MTP].

Sam also replied to Joseph G. Hickman who wrote on Jan. 20 (not extant) informing Sam of the “Florida Literary Association,” in his Missouri birthplace. Sam lost his letter and must have recalled it, for he sent a donation of $25 and ordered a copy of each of his past books for the group. He also inserted a page of a weekly New York journal, Good Literature, which he claimed was “devoted to advertising some astonishingly cheap books” [MTP]. Note: this letter was printed in the Monroe County (Missouri) Appeal on Aug. 12. See Hickman’s earlier letter of Jan. 20, 1878.

Sam also wrote to Charles Eliot Norton agreeing to come, probably to another event for the arts and sciences that he’d declined a year before, what now was a regular mid-summer Academy Dinner in Ashfield, Mass. “Any date between now & the 10th September will suit me” [MTP]. Note: Norton was the founder of The Nation and Prof. of poetry at Harvard.

Sam also wrote to Percy Frederick Sinnett, enclosing a card (“A Word of Explanation”) for him to print with a denial that he’d ever been in Australia. Sam also enclosed Cholmondeley’s May 29 letter [MTP].

“If he [the imposter] will only stay dead, now, I will call the account square, & drop the grudge I bear him.”