1885

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“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” 

Ernest Hemingway

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William Least Heat Moon culled old newspapers from Chase County, Kansas, for stories to bring back life, good and bad, to the past. For example: 

January 15, 1885: 

A Dastardly Outrage 

This community was shocked last Monday morning by the report that C.C. Watson had attempted to commit a rape on a little girl, about 13 years old, the afternoon before. The scene of the outrage was the kitchen of Bauerle’s restaurant, where the girl works, and during the absence of Bauerle and wife.

 

Watson’s reputation is unsavory, but no one believed him so depraved as his fiendish attempt last Sunday afternoon stamps him.

 

The details of the outrage are simply horrible and unfit for publication, and, but for the timely arrival of a boy, about 15 years old, who was attracted to the room by the noise made by the girl in her efforts to protect herself, the lecherous brute would have accomplished his purpose.

 

Watson has a wife and three children, is about 30 years of age, and his beastly habits have placed him prominently before the public on more than one occasion. A couple of years ago he was convicted in the district court of an attempt to commit an abortion upon a young woman who lived in his family and with whom he had maintained a criminal intimacy. 

        … 

Expressions of indignation are loud and deep on every hand and it would require but a slight effort to induce Judge Lynch to administer summary justice, a mode of procedure it is hope will not be resorted to, as Watson has been arrested on complaint of his intended victim, and the law, even if inadequate to deal with such characters, should be allowed to take its course. 

Story in the Chase County newspaper, the Leader. 100/514-515

October 7-19: Friedrich Trump, grandfather of President Donald J. Trump, leaves Bavaria, in part to avoid mandatory military service, and travels to America. According to his grandson, on arrival he knew almost no English. 

All his life he spoke German primarily.

 

*

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, on which he first began work in 1876, is published in the United States. 

As Ernest Hemingway later explains, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

 

For the next hundred years, it seems the first half of Twain’s handwritten manuscript is lost irrevocably. Finally, in 1990, it turns up in an attic trunk. The second half had been sent to the Buffalo and Erie County Library in the 1880s. Fraser Gluck, a library benefactor, had  asked Twain for the manuscript from Life on the Mississippi. That was unavailable. So Twain offered Huck. 

Twain came to believe that the first half had been destroyed at the printer’s office; but he located it in 1887 and sent it to Gluck. His granddaughter found it in the fall of 1990 in an old trunk. 

At the time, it was estimated the find might be worth $1.5 million; the library claimed ownership; a court battle followed, and Barbara Testa, who found the manuscript, and her sister eventually reached an undisclosed settlement. The two halves were “reunited” in 1995.

 

Scholars were most excited to examine any differences in the original handwritten and published versions of the novel, not least because printers had been known to “correct” passages Twain had written in dialect. 

As the Associated Press explained, “Twain was infuriated by changes that were commonly made by printers in his time. On one occasion he said his publisher had written “that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, and I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.” 

In 2001, a new library edition of Huck was issued, complete with three new scenes and notes on the original pen drawings by E. W. Kemble that illustrated the first printing of the classic. Two, related to the slave Jim, indicated once again, how sympathetic the author was to the slave’s plight. Kemble’s drawing of Huck and Jim’s first encounter shows Jim on his one knee, hat in hand. The sketch is almost identical to a widely known graphic symbol of the campaign to end slavery. 

Another sketch in the book of Jim’s “coat of arms” - a slave figure toting a knapsack over one shoulder and running - is virtually the same as the image commonly used in newspaper notices about runaway slaves.

 

* 

Sculpture by Charles Ray: “Sarah Williams.” 

Huck dressed as a girl.

 

As explained by a New York Times art critic: 

“Sarah Williams,” a stainless steel sculpture also from 2021, is the show’s final work. It returns to Huck and Jim’s antebellum tale, to depict a scene of Jim helping Huck disguise himself as a woman so he can suss out who, at their latest stopover, might threaten their liberty. This time Huck seems incredibly tall, wearing a long gown whose folds fall like the flutes on a column; Jim, kneeling behind him, has been working on the hem. They are both playing roles: a white adolescent in drag and a Black man doing women’s work. And they both seem palpably sad. Huck’s head is bowed; Jim’s face is raised, subtly anguished. 

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Anyone who doubt’s where Twain’s heart lay should read Pudd’nhead Wilson, published in 1893, or Twain’s defense of “Chinamen,” who were victims of every kind of abuse out West, found in Roughing It, published in 1872. 

Halleck, writing in 1911 also notes, “For the same reason he paid all the expenses of a negro through an eastern college.”  The small “n” was then typically used. In fact, Halleck sums up Twain, calling him, “Mark Twain, philosopher, reformer of the type of Cervantes, and romantic historian… (363-364)

 

*

 

Twain would later say that Huck was modeled on his friend from childhood, Tom Blankenship. “In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was,” Twain  wrote in Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition. “He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.” 

Twain first set to work on the story in 1876, and quickly finished 400 pages, but told a friend he liked his story, “only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn.” 

He took a steamboat ride down the Mississippi in 1882 and may have been prompted to return to his work. 

“I have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn’t name the number of days,” Twain wrote to a friend in August 1883. “I shouldn’t believe it myself, and of course couldn’t expect you to.” The book was published in 1884, in England. 

Twain grew up in a slave state. An uncle owned twenty slaves. “I vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained to one another, once,” he said, “and lying in a group on the pavement, awaiting shipment to the Southern slave market. Those were the saddest faces I have ever seen.” If Twain ever accepted slavery as normal, his attitudes must have changed. He married into an abolitionist family. His father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad and helped Frederick Douglass escape from slavery.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Nuts, I may be quoting part of this, as in the above paragraph, without attribution. Heck with it. I’m too busy to go back and check all the websites I consulted right now. Besides, I’m only putting this out for teachers’ use.

I’m all but certain the next paragraphs are direct quotes: 

The moral climax of the novel is when Huck debates whether to send Jim’s owner a letter detailing Jim’s whereabouts. Finally, Huck says, “All right, then, I'll go to hell,” and tears the letter up.

 

Huckleberry Finn was first banned in Concord, Massachusetts in 1885 (“trash and suitable only for the slums”) and continues to be one of the most-challenged books. 

 

The n-word appears 200 times. 

Definitely quoting: “In 1905, the Brooklyn Public Library removed Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer from the shelves because, as a librarian wrote to Twain, Huck is “a deceitful boy who said ‘sweat’ when he should have said ‘perspiration.’” 

It turns out disaster was narrowly averted with the first printing. Quoting again: 

Twain, who ran his own printing press, hired 23-year-old E. W. Kemble to illustrate the first edition of Huckleberry Finn. Right as the book went to press, someone—it was never discovered who—added a penis to the illustration of Uncle Silas. The engraving shows Uncle Silas talking to Huck and Aunt Sally while a crude penis bulges from his pants.

 

According to Twain’s business manager Charles Webster, 250 books were sent out before the mistake was caught. They were recalled and publication was postponed for a reprint. If the full run had been sent out, Webster said, Twain’s “credit for decency and morality would have been destroyed.”

Finn never did like school much.

 

*      

It’s always interesting when people find historical treasures, be it the wreck of the Atocha, the Spanish treasure ship, or the lucky find made by Michael Sparks, in a Nashville, Tennessee thrift shop. In 2007, he unrolled an old document, and took a liking to a copy of the Declaration of Independence. 

How much? 

The clerk said $2.48. 

Sparks made the buy, took his copy home, did a little online sleuthing, and found he had one of 200 “original” copies of the Declaration of Independence, commissioned by John Quincy Adams in 1820. 

Estimated value at auction: $250,000. 

(It sold soon after for $477,650.)

 

In 1989, an even better discovery was made. At a flea market in Pennsylvania, a shopper saw an ornate old picture frame he liked and paid $4. When he took it home and removed  the picture, he found an old copy of the Declaration of Independence, folded into the size of an envelope. The frame proved unsalvageable and he had to throw it away, meaning he was out $4. He kept the document, however, as something of “a curiosity.” It was fortunate that he did, for his copy turned out to be one from the original “Dunlap” run, 200 copies printed hastily on the evening of July 4, 1776, and sent to all parts of the Thirteen Colonies for public reading. 

One, for example, is said to have been sent to George Washington, to be read to the troops during the winter at Valley Forge. Another, now in the possession of the National Park Service and housed in Philadelphia is believed to have been read to the people of that city by Colonel John Nixon, sheriff, on July 8, 1776.

 

Having been covered up by a picture for decades (perhaps), meant the flea market Declaration was an “unspeakably fresh copy,” according to experts at Sotheby’s. It was instantly one of only three known copies in private hands. 

Only 24 were known to exist. 

Estimated value in 1991: between $800,000 and $1,000,000. 

(Sold at auction: $2.42 million.)