Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this volume.  He had a superstition that Howells’s verdicts were echoed by the lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that meant to any book the difference between success and failure.  Howells’s review of Sketches may be offered as a case in point.  It was highly commendatory, much more so than the notice of the ‘Innocents’ had been, or even that of ‘Roughing It’, also more extensive than the latter.  Yet after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the strength of the author’s reputation, the book made a comparatively poor showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors.

We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an unattractive, incoherent volume.  The pictures were absurdly bad, the sketches were of unequal merit.  Many of them are amusing, some of them delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral.  If we except “The Jumping Frog,” and possibly “A True Story” (and the latter was altogether out of place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its contents will escape oblivion.  The greater number of the sketches, as Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have been allowed to die.

Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain.  He particularly called attention to “A True Story,” which the reviewers, at the time of its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy people.  Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume, and of its “perfect fidelity to the tragic fact.”  He urged the reader to turn to it again, and to read it as a “simple dramatic report of reality,” such as had been equaled by no other American writer.

It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating against literary ownership by statute of limitation.  He did this in the form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership limited to a “beneficent term of forty-two years.”  Generally this was regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain’s jokes it was founded on reason and justice.

The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led him to still further flights.  He began a determined crusade for international copyright laws.  It was a transcendental beginning, but it contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion.  In this first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to pirate the books of any foreign author.  He wrote to Howells, urging him to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this petition.