Mark Twain to Helen Keller: Everything is Plagiarism

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Mark Twain to Helen Keller: Everything is Plagiarism

Years ago, after looking through old journals, I was horrified to discover that some of my thinking about myself had not changed in decades.

I challenged myself to have at least one original thought a day. Then I bumped it up to two, then three, and on I went.

But were these “new” thoughts really new and truly original?

Is there any such thing as originality? Isn’t everything just a copy of a copy of a copy, another iteration of what came before it?

Mark Twain certainly thought so, and it’s what he tried to impart to Helen Keller ten years into their friendship and a decade after an accusation that would change the lives of her inner circle.

In the fall of 1891, eleven-year-old Helen Keller wrote a short story called "The Frost King" as a birthday gift for Michael Anagnos, the Director of Perkins School for the Blind.

The story was about how King Frost and his fairies were the creators of the changing of fall leaves.

Anagnos, highly impressed by the story, published it in the Perkins alumni newsletter.

This triggered a cascade of events resulting in an accusation of plagiarism against Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan of fraud. Worse was the resulting “trial” over the story that gained national attention.

The relationship between Keller, Sullivan, and Anagnos ended, and Helen Keller left the school as a student.

(Keller would later reestablish her connection with the school.)

A group of eight experts questioned the twelve-year-old girl regarding the sources of her inspiration. Was the resemblance between Keller's "The Frost King" and Margaret Canby's "Frost Fairies" coincidental?

Each “expert” passionately argued for or against Keller's culpability.

Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, came to her aid. They developed a friendship, and ten years after the initial accusations, he wrote her a letter addressing the incident, encouraging her to never stop writing.

I’ve omitted all content in his letter unrelated to the plagiarism claim.

“Dear Helen:

….

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce!

As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul–let us go farther and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances in plagiarism.

For substantially, all ideas are secondhand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten thousand men–but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his.

But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his but there were others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing–and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.

He added his little mite–that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest.

But nothing can do that.

Then why don't we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as well as the story itself? It can hardly happen–to the extent of fifty words–except in the case of a child; its memory tablet is not lumbered with impressions, and the natural language can have graving room there and preserve the language a year or two, but a grown person's memory tablet is a palimpsest, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase.

It must be a very rare thing that a whole page gets so sharply printed on a man's mind, by a single reading, that it will stay long enough to turn up some time or other to be mistaken by him for his own.

No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and how imagined to be our own, but that is about the most we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes's poems, in the Sandwich Islands.

A year and a half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my "Innocents Abroad" with. Ten years afterward I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass–no, not he; he was not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your "Plagiarism Court," and so when I said, "I know now where I stole it, but who did you steal it from,"he said, "I don't remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anyone who had!"

To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with their ignorant rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn't sleep for blaspheming about it last night. Why, their whole histories, their whole lives, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid rock of plagiarism, and they didn't know it and never suspected it.

A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they've caught filching a chop! Oh, dam--

But you finish it, dear, I am running short of vocabulary today.

Every lovingly your friend (sic)

Mark”

Read “The Frost King” by Helen Keller in Mentor Magazine, starting on page 14…

Read the story she’s accused of plagiarizing:

Have you heard this story before? If so, let me know in the comments, and share any stories like this you’d like me to cover.

Until next week, I remain…

Amanda

About me: I am an author and a mental health advocate. I’ve published 13 books, most recently Little Panic: Dispatches From An Anxious Life. I sit on the advisory board of Bring Change to Mind and live in Brooklyn with my dog, Busy.