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Who really said it

Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!

Not Oscar Wilde — an anonymous Victorian newspaper joke Anonymous Unsigned newspaper filler · earliest known printing 25 April 1850
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

No letter, cable or telegram from Oscar Wilde containing a single question mark has ever been produced. The one-character exchange is a nameless comic filler that ran in British papers from April 1850; Victor Hugo’s name was attached to it in 1892, and Wilde’s name does not appear on it in any source earlier than 2013.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!” Not Oscar Wilde. The one-character "?"/"!" exchange is an anonymous newspaper joke, first printed in The Nottinghamshire Guardian on 25 April 1850 — with a cipher "0" as the reply, not an exclamation mark. Victor Hugo's name was attached to it in 1892, in William S. Walsh's Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities; Oscar Wilde's name does not appear on it before 2013. — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “But the shortest correspondence ever known took place between Victor Hugo and his publisher, just after the publication of "Les Misérables." The poet, impatient to learn of the success of the book, sent off a letter which contained only the following: ? and he received the following entirely satisfactory answer: !”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Oscar Wilde. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of simplicity, success and creativity. Theme: "Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the anecdote actually comes from

Text quoted below
Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities
Compiler & date
William S. Walsh — 1892, J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia; p. 600 per Quote Investigator
Earliest known printing of the joke
The Nottinghamshire Guardian, 25 April 1850 — unsigned, nobody named, and the reply is a cipher “0” for “None”
Where Wilde enters
2013 — the earliest Wilde version known to Quote Investigator

But the shortest correspondence ever known took place between Victor Hugo and his publisher, just after the publication of “Les Misérables.” The poet, impatient to learn of the success of the book, sent off a letter which contained only the following:

?

and he received the following entirely satisfactory answer:

! The 1892 Hugo version

Walsh’s is the earliest known printing to attach a real writer’s name to the joke, and the earliest to give the reply as an exclamation mark. Quote Investigator notes the thirty-year delay after Les Misérables and treats the Hugo version as doubtful. In the 1850 newspaper item and in Saunders’ Pastime Papers of 1885 the correspondents are anonymous and the answer is a cipher, “0,” meaning “None.”

Scanned book
Read Walsh's Handy-Book at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!

The paper trail

  • Quote Investigator traces the joke to an unsigned “Varieties” filler in The Nottinghamshire Guardian of 25 April 1850, in which no one is named and the reply is a cipher, and follows it through English and American papers into the 1850s. Quote Investigator ↗
  • Frederick Saunders’ Pastime Papers was still telling it with no names in 1885: on page 37, in the chapter “Letters and Letter-Writing,” the query “?” means “Is there any news?” and the answer is “a cipher (o) — None.” Pastime Papers, R. Bentley & Son, 1885 ↗
  • Victor Hugo enters in Walsh’s Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities. The passage is readable in full in the Internet Archive’s scan, a J. B. Lippincott printing dated 1893; Quote Investigator cites the 1892 edition, page 600. Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities ↗
  • Wikipedia files the whole story under apocrypha, noting the sender is “variously identified as Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde,” and cites Quote Investigator as its only source. Telegram style ↗

No rights status is asserted for this line, because there is no work to attach one to. The Victorian texts the anecdote descends from are all long out of copyright — the 1850 newspaper filler, Saunders’ Pastime Papers (1885) and Walsh’s Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892), which the Internet Archive marks as not in copyright. But the sentence as it circulates, “Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!”, is not a period wording at all: it is the headline Quote Investigator gave its own 2014 article about the story, so no pre-1931 work contains it.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Three names, none of them the author

The exchange has been in print for well over a century and a half, and it has picked up a different celebrity at almost every stop. Each new name arrives later than the last, and none arrives with a document.

Oscar Wilde No support

The earliest Wilde telling Quote Investigator could find is dated 2013 — a business-communication handbook, more than a century after the story was already in print under other names, and with no letter, cable or publisher named. QI’s verdict on it is blunt: it “has no substantive support.” Quote Investigator ↗

Victor Hugo Late and doubtful

Hugo’s name first appears in Walsh’s 1892 Handy-Book, thirty years after Les Misérables, and the 1981 Guinness Book of World Records repeated it as a record, naming the publisher as Hurst and Blackett. That was the London house that issued the first British translation in October 1862 — not A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Cie of Brussels, who actually published the novel on 31 March 1862. Les Misérables ↗

An unnamed correspondent, then an American merchant The original

In the earliest versions nobody famous is involved at all: an anonymous pair in 1850, and by September 1854 “an American merchant in want of news and his London agent” — and the reply is a cipher, not an exclamation mark. Quote Investigator ↗

Nobody sent it. Quote Investigator concludes that all of these tales of brief correspondence were fictional, published simply to amuse readers — and every famous name on the story arrived decades after the joke was already in circulation. Quote Investigator ↗

Context

A joke that keeps recasting itself

The appeal is structural. Two marks of punctuation carry a whole conversation — anxiety and triumph, author and publisher — and the reader supplies everything in between. That is why the story survives: it is not really an anecdote about anyone, it is a party trick about how little language you need, and it works exactly as well with any famous name dropped into it.

Which is also why it keeps drifting. In 1850 the correspondents are nobody. By 1854 they are an American merchant and his London agent. By 1892 the sender is Victor Hugo. By 1981 the Guinness Book of World Records is printing it as a record, with a date and a publisher attached. By 2013 the sender is Oscar Wilde. Nothing about the exchange changed; only the celebrity did.

Nobody sent it. The joke arrived first and collected its famous names afterwards.

How the punchline flipped from “0” to “!”

The original gag is bleaker and funnier than the version people repeat. In the 1850 newspaper item, and still in Frederick Saunders’ Pastime Papers in 1885, the query “?” means “Is there any news?” and the answer is a cipher — a zero — meaning “None.” It is a joke about silence.

The exclamation mark arrives with the Victor Hugo telling in 1892, and it changes the whole point: the reply is now enthusiasm rather than emptiness, which is what makes it usable as a flattering story about a bestseller. A September 1854 American printing had already swapped the marks the other way round, opening with “!” and answering “0.” The characters were never fixed, which is a fair sign nobody was transcribing a real document.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Simplicity Success Creativity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: fourteen dated citations from 1850 to 2013, and the conclusion that the whole family of stories was fictional.
Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiositiesarchive.org

Free scan of Walsh's compendium, the earliest known printing to name Victor Hugo; the passage sits between a Voltaire anecdote and a short letter to the Times.
Saunders, Pastime Papers (1885)archive.org

Free scan showing the pre-Hugo form on page 37: no names at all, and the reply is a cipher meaning 'None'.
Telegram styleen.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia records the anecdote as apocryphal and notes the sender is 'variously identified as Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde', citing Quote Investigator.
Les Misérablesen.wikipedia.org

The novel's actual publication facts — Brussels, 31 March 1862, A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Cie — against which the Guinness telling can be checked.
Oscar Wildeen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's Wilde page, where the anecdote appears in no section at all — not sourced, not disputed, not misattributed.

Not the author — the compiler

The man who handed the story to Victor Hugo

William S. Walsh

1854–1919 · American editor and compiler of literary curiosities

William Shepard Walsh was an American editor and anthologist whose Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (J. B. Lippincott, 1892) gathered hundreds of literary oddities, hoaxes and coincidences into a single alphabetical compendium. He did not invent the “?”/“!” joke — it was already in print four years before he was born — but his book is the earliest known printing that pins it on a real writer, and every later telling descends from that page, including the Guinness Book’s and, eventually, Oscar Wilde’s.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

William S. Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892), 600 — the earliest known printing to name Victor Hugo. The joke itself is older and anonymous: the earliest printing known to Quote Investigator is “Varieties,” The Nottinghamshire Guardian (Nottinghamshire, England), 25 April 1850, p. 4, where nobody is named and the reply is a cipher, “0.” No source connects the exchange to Oscar Wilde before 2013.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/briefest-correspondence-question-mark-exclamation-mark/

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