Quote Investigator finds the line surfacing in unrelated American sources through 1909 — a Pennsylvania newspaper in March, a novel, an Arizona paper, a Vermont coal advertisement, a Kansas paper about baseball — and unattributed in every one. Its verdict is that the saying is anonymous. Dickens does have a claim on the idea, but through a different sentence: in Nicholas Nickleby Mr Mantalini says, “My life is one demd horrid grind!”
“Life Is Just One Damn Thing After Another” Anonymous — first documented in the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, 5 March 1909. Not Charles Dickens, who wrote a different line: "My life is one demd horrid grind!" (Nicholas Nickleby, ch. 64).
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Charles Dickens. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
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Provenance
The source
Earliest known printing
Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader (Pennsylvania), 5 March 1909, p. 6, col. 5 — unattributed
The Dickens ancestor
Nicholas Nickleby
Ancestor published
Serialised March 1838 – September 1839; in volume form 1839 (Chapman & Hall). The line is in chapter 64.
Verdict
Anonymous. Attributed at various times to Mark Twain, Elbert Hubbard and Frank Ward O’Malley — none of them documented as the originator
‘So I am, my life and soul!’ replied the man’s voice. ‘I am always turning. I am perpetually turning, like a demd old horse in a demnition mill. My life is one demd horrid grind!’
ch. 64
This is not the quotation on this page. It is Mr Mantalini in Nicholas Nickleby, chapter 64, turning a mangle in a cellar — the nearest thing Dickens wrote, and almost certainly why his name became attached to a saying that first appeared thirty-nine years after his death. We read it in the Project Gutenberg text rather than taking it on report.
Quote Investigator ↗ concludes: “the saying emerged in print in multiple places in 1909… The earliest newspaper appearances in March 1909 printed the words without attribution. Based on current information QI would label the saying anonymous.”
The 1909 cluster is the argument. Quote Investigator dates the earliest instance to the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader of 5 March 1909 — “Life (A new definition.) One damn thing after another” — then the Daily Arizona Silver Belt on 14 March, a St. Albans coal advertisement on 19 May with “darn” for “damn”, and The Topeka Daily Capital on 12 August applying it to baseball. Lilian Bell’s novel The Concentrations of Bee puts it on a wall as a motto already in circulation.
We checked the Dickens end ourselves. The full text of Nicholas Nickleby at Project Gutenberg ↗ contains Mantalini’s “My life is one demd horrid grind!” in chapter 64, and contains no instance of the saying on this page. Quote Investigator likewise treats the Mantalini line as a thematic forerunner, not as the quotation.
The famous names arrived later and did not stick. Quote Investigator records H. L. Mencken attributing it to Mark Twain in The American Language in 1919 and calls that ascription unsubstantive; newspaper obituaries crediting Frank Ward O’Malley after his death in 1932; and Mencken revising himself in 1942 to link it to O’Malley and Elbert Hubbard. Hubbard had printed it in The Philistine in December 1909 — without attribution ↗.
✓Public domain
Every documented appearance of the saying is from 1909, and the Dickens passage quoted above was published in 1839 — both comfortably before 1931, the point at which United States copyright can still reach a published work. Nicholas Nickleby is freely readable in full at Project Gutenberg.
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
Often misattributed
This is a saying with four claimants and no owner. Each name was attached decades after the words were already in print, and the Dickens credit is the only one with an innocent explanation.
✕
The credit on this pageCharles Dickens Not Dickens
Dickens died in 1870; the earliest printing Quote Investigator can find is from March 1909 ↗. The saying appears nowhere in Nicholas Nickleby, whose full text we searched at Project Gutenberg.
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What Dickens did writeMr Mantalini, Nicholas Nickleby ch. 64 Ancestor
“I am perpetually turning, like a demd old horse in a demnition mill. My life is one demd horrid grind!” — a different sentence, spoken by a character, verifiable in the Gutenberg text ↗. Same complaint, same softened oath, thirty-nine years earlier.
✕
The 1919 creditMark Twain Not Twain
H. L. Mencken attributed it to Twain in The American Language in 1919. Quote Investigator ↗ calls the ascription “not substantive”, and Mencken himself moved away from it by 1942.
✕
The 1932 creditFrank Ward O’Malley Posthumous
The credit appears in newspaper notices only after O’Malley died in 1932, twenty-three years after the saying was already in print, per Quote Investigator ↗.
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The Hubbard creditElbert Hubbard Early user
Hubbard printed it in his journal The Philistine in December 1909 without attribution — nine months after the earliest instance. Wikiquote ↗ still lists it under his name, sourced only to a 1911 attribution in Items of Interest.
✓Nobody knows who said it. It was loose in American newspapers by March 1909 and every famous name on it was added afterwards.
Context
Why it mattered
The saying spread in 1909 the way a good joke does — sideways, through papers that had no connection to each other, applied to whatever the writer was tired of. Within five months it had been used to define life, to sell coal, and to describe a baseball season.
That is also why it has no author. A line that useful gets picked up faster than it gets credited, and by the time anyone thought to ask where it came from, the answer was already gone. The famous names attached later are not evidence; they are what a saying accumulates once it is worth owning.
A line that useful gets picked up faster than it gets credited.
Read the full story
The Dickens connection is the interesting one, because it is nearly right. Mantalini is a preening sponge who has ended the novel turning a mangle in a cellar for a washerwoman, and his complaint is a joke at his expense: he is describing honest work as though it were martyrdom. Dickens is mocking the sentiment the modern saying expresses sincerely.
The line also has a well-known sibling — “history is just one damn thing after another” — which follows the same pattern of drifting between famous claimants. Neither the historical version nor this one has ever been pinned to a first author.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Charles Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby in his mid-twenties, in monthly instalments that began in March 1838 — while Oliver Twist, serialised in Bentley’s Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839, was still running. He is one of the most quoted writers in English and therefore one of the most misquoted: lines with a Victorian cadence and no obvious owner drift toward him. This is one of them — though in this case he did write something close enough to explain the mistake, and put it in the mouth of a scoundrel turning a mangle.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The earliest source (Chicago)
“Life (A new definition.) One damn thing after another.” Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, 5 March 1909, p. 6, col. 5, unattributed. Cited in “Quote Origin: Life Is Just One Damn Thing After Another,” Quote Investigator, 2 September 2015. For the Dickens forerunner see Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (London: Chapman & Hall, 1839), ch. 64.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Life Is Just One Damn Thing After Another’?” Last verified 3 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/life-is-just-one-damn-thing-after-another/