Progressive Era Zeitgeist Anderson, Q. (1971). The Failure of the Fathers, chapter 1 in The Imperial Self, An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History. Alfred A. Knopf publisher, New York, pp 3-58.
Quentin Anderson, son of the playwright Maxwell Anderson, was a professor of English at Columbia University, teaching there from 1939 to 1981. He was a literary and cultural historian of American life. Anderson describes his thesis as “the American flight from culture, from the institutions and emotional dispositions of associated life, took on form in the work of Emerson, Whitman, and Henry James, and that it came to a culminating confrontation with what it claimed to supersede---the lives of men and women in society--- in the cosmic comedy of The Golden Bowl.” Validation is achieved within, not by the norms of the fathers or by history, which is the succession of generations. “There was no temple for God save within the self”, or “Secular Incarnation”. The book was written for a general, well educated, and tenacious, audience. A reviewer in the New York Times (April 3, 1971) said “…this dense, sententious, undeniably difficult book….may very well prove a turning point in our understanding of American culture.” (JB) Lawrence, K. (2005). Osmond’s Complaint: Gilbert Osmond’s Mother and the Cultural Context of James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The Henry James Review 26 (1): 52-67. Echoing Perry Miller, Kathleen Lawrence of Boston University makes the argument that Margaret Fuller is the model for Gilbert Osmond’s mother in The Portrait of a Lady. Margaret Fuller was an intellectual and personal force in transcendental circles in Boston. She counted among her friends Emerson, Channing and Clarke who edited her Memoirs. She wrote a number of books, including Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844). A passionate and idealistic romantic, Fuller traveled to Rome during the Risorgimento. There she married and had a son, but tragically died in the sinking of a ship off Fire Island, N.Y. on her return to the U.S. In Portrait Osmond’s mother is characterized as an “American Corinne”. Corinne relates to the character and title of Madame de Stael’s novel Corinne; or Italy depicting a woman of high romantic “…devotion to the spirit and intuition of the individual…”. Margaret Fuller had been termed “this new Corinne” by Emerson and “a Yankee Corinna” by Channing. Hence, as Lawrence puts it, “Short of actually naming Fuller, there could be no clearer way for James to allude to her than by using this epithet.” Lawrence locates three allusions to the American Corinne in Portrait, those by M. Merle, Countess Gemini, and by the Countess again. In the first Madame Merle speaking of Osmond says, “…one would suppose it had been by a more sensible woman than the American Corinne….”. The second allusion is by Countess Gemini, “…my mother was rather distinguished---she was called the American Corinne.” The third was again by the Countess. Osmond’s references were “more subtle”, but Lawrence comments that “Osmond’s entire character can be seen as a reaction to his mother’s political and aesthetic realism”. Lawrence considers that “…Isabel is a new Corinne”, that she was “Full of idealism that resembles that of Margaret Fuller….”. She sees Fuller’s influence throughout, “…an absent but ubiquitous character in Portrait….”. Lawrence concludes with, “In Isabel, James gives Margaret Fuller a chance to progress from Romanticism to Realism and, if not reform the world, at least to free herself from Osmond’s sentimental life.” I’m not sure that I like the construction of that final sentence but I am impressed by Lawrence’s arguments. (JB) Kaplan, Fred. The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Print.
Kaplan proposes that Twain wrote aspects of America into existence, changing our understanding of Americans through reading Twain’s writing. He claims that, Twain captured the American fascination with inventions and the interplay between greed and creativity, between commercialism and art, he embodied in his life and writings. Kaplan suggests that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court epitomizes American can-do capitalism, our love affair with technology, and the dangers of technology run amok [or perhaps unregulated] and its potential to destroy civilization. Kaplan appropriates perspective on Twain’s absence of religious faith, despite his observations that, in Connecticut Yankee, Twain aggressively condemned Europe’s feudal past and the clergy who controlled it. Kaplan entails that Twain took up against McKinley and Roosevelt’s transformation of the old American republic into an imperial power. The claims in Kaplan’s biography reinforce the impact of Twain’s writing as one of the early American protest writers.
Posted by Jeff Laude Twain, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. (1959). Ed. Charles Neider. First Harper Perennial ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1990. Print.
Twain reflects about his writing, and his family and the people and places of his youth, and life experiences such as, his steamboat pilot career, his resignation from his brief tenure in the Confederacy, and the changes in America in the aftermath of the Civil War. Twain recollects that the source for Huckleberry Finn’s character was Tom Blankenship, the son of the local town drunkard, Jimmy Finn. Twain says that he sketched Tom exactly as he was – ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but, Tom had a good heart, and Tom’s liberties were totally unrestricted. Tom was in Twain’s eyes, the only truly independent person or boy in the community. Tom was tranquil and truly happy within his freedom and independence from society’s boundaries. Twain recalls all of the boys envying Tom’s freedom, and enjoying Tom's society, though it was forbidden by their parents. Twain also notes that his father took in Jimmy Finn, and tried to civilize or reform him.
Posted by Jeff Laude |
On this page, you'll find resources that provide insights into some of the general concerns and sentiments of the Progressive Era as well as "deep background" for the kinds of pronouncements or assumptions that turn-of-the-century authors tended to make about what it meant to be an American. |
Vanderbilt, Kermit. The Achievement of William Dean Howells. Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1968.
Print.
Engeman, T.S. (2001). Religion and Politics the American Way: The Exemplary William Dean Howells. Rev. Politics 63(1): 107-127.
At the time of writing this essay Engeman was an Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola University in Chicago, a Jesuit based school. He argues that “Howells was singular among American writers in criticizing capitalist individualism, Social Darwinism and scientific positivism from the perspective of Christian and belief and practice.” The Founders of the nation believed, and in which Howells apparently concurred, according to Engeman, that with multiple religious sects none would dominate, preventing a tyranny of a majority and protecting democracy. The end sought was “a religious society in a liberal polity.” That was challenged by national corporations, scientific positivism, Social Darwinism and the positivist movement. Engemen asserts that “While William Dean Howells supported the progressive demand for greater equality he rejected their hostility to religious faith and morality and that he”…envisioned a liberal Christian welfare state.” Howells’ novels, according to Engeman: analyzed the conversion of Puritanism into liberal Protestantism; examined Christian communitarianism; described utopian concepts of an ideal society, and demonstrated the dangers of charismatic spiritualistic religions. While the points are well argued and clearly written, this reader was made uncomfortable by the implication that Howells was a practicing Christian. We learned from E.H. Cady’s Introduction to the 1984 Penguin edition of A Modern Instance that “Howells was a believing and professed agnostic at the moment of writing A Modern Instance. It’s not necessarily inconsistent to argue that a society needs a Christian basis while not personally professing that religion. I do wish though that Engeman had addressed that apparent incongruity. (JB)
At the time of writing this essay Engeman was an Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola University in Chicago, a Jesuit based school. He argues that “Howells was singular among American writers in criticizing capitalist individualism, Social Darwinism and scientific positivism from the perspective of Christian and belief and practice.” The Founders of the nation believed, and in which Howells apparently concurred, according to Engeman, that with multiple religious sects none would dominate, preventing a tyranny of a majority and protecting democracy. The end sought was “a religious society in a liberal polity.” That was challenged by national corporations, scientific positivism, Social Darwinism and the positivist movement. Engemen asserts that “While William Dean Howells supported the progressive demand for greater equality he rejected their hostility to religious faith and morality and that he”…envisioned a liberal Christian welfare state.” Howells’ novels, according to Engeman: analyzed the conversion of Puritanism into liberal Protestantism; examined Christian communitarianism; described utopian concepts of an ideal society, and demonstrated the dangers of charismatic spiritualistic religions. While the points are well argued and clearly written, this reader was made uncomfortable by the implication that Howells was a practicing Christian. We learned from E.H. Cady’s Introduction to the 1984 Penguin edition of A Modern Instance that “Howells was a believing and professed agnostic at the moment of writing A Modern Instance. It’s not necessarily inconsistent to argue that a society needs a Christian basis while not personally professing that religion. I do wish though that Engeman had addressed that apparent incongruity. (JB)
Marx, L. (1953). Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn. American Scholar 22(4): 423-440, 1953.
In an essay glittering with insights, only a few of which can be touched on here, Leo Marx contends that there is a moral falling off at the end, the final ten chapters, of Huckleberry Finn. Further, he argues that the critics T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling have failed in the role of critic in their analyses, to be “alert to lapses of moral vision”. Marx, known best for his writings on technology and culture, eg, The Machine in the Garden(1988) and the co-edited Does Technology Drive History? (1994), was an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota at the time of publishing this essay.
Up until the final episode, Marx maintains that Huckleberry Finn is an idyllic seeking after freedom. On the raft Huck and Jim have “…freedom from society and its imperatives”, free of the social constraints found along the river’s edge. Those constraints are of a social-political nature, in contrast to the freedom of individual ethics on the raft. The social, or public, constraints are essentially those of Christianity’s original sin, whereas the ethics of the raft are secular, in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Marx quotes the novel in characterizing the raft’s ethics “What you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and to feel right and kind towards the others.” It sought “Harmony among men”. In contrast, in the final episode the Phelpses keep Jim locked up in a small hut, with its window boarded, while enjoying “their comfortable Sunday-dinner conviviality”. Marx draws the parallel with German citizens who were thought to have ”…tried to maintain a similarly gemutlich way of life within virtual earshot of Buchenwald.”
Marx maintains that Clemens was unable to adequately resolve the tension between the raft’s morality and that of the shore, that “the quest [could not] succeed”. Twain was unable to escape what Santayana had characterized as the Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911), the old mentality inherited from Europe. He particularly focuses on Miss Watson’s freeing of Jim in her will, that she had been ready to sell him to slave traders in New Orleans, breaking up his family. Marx characterizes the final episode as the “preposterous monkey business attendant on Jim’s ‘rescue’”. Although it is in line with Twain’s western American humor, it is over the top (my summary of Marx), “tedious”, and its “…slapstick tone jars with the underlying seriousness of the voyage.” Only the final sentence, in which Huck vows “to light out for the territory” and escape Aunt Sally’s civilizing of him, squares with the rest of the novel.
Lionel Trilling maintained that while the ending fell off it had “a certain formal aptness.” However, Marx’s ire is focused on T.S. Eliot, that savant of western civilization. Eliot endorsed the ending, that it had symmetry, structural unity, in bringing Huck once again under the influence of Tom Sawyer. But in Marx’s words, “…such structural unity is imposed on the novel, and therefore is meretricious.” In contrast, a unified work ought to have “coherence of meaning” and “clear development of theme”. In a telling comment on the times, Marx argued that the critics’ focus on form was “not unlikely” linked to the tendency to “…shy away from painful answers to complex questions of political morality.” It is of note that Marx’s essay was published in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism. Marx, sympathetic to Twain’s dilemma, concludes, “For Huck Finn’s besetting problem, the disparity between his best impulses and the behavior the community attempted to impose on him, is surely ours as it was Twain’s.” (JB)
In an essay glittering with insights, only a few of which can be touched on here, Leo Marx contends that there is a moral falling off at the end, the final ten chapters, of Huckleberry Finn. Further, he argues that the critics T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling have failed in the role of critic in their analyses, to be “alert to lapses of moral vision”. Marx, known best for his writings on technology and culture, eg, The Machine in the Garden(1988) and the co-edited Does Technology Drive History? (1994), was an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota at the time of publishing this essay.
Up until the final episode, Marx maintains that Huckleberry Finn is an idyllic seeking after freedom. On the raft Huck and Jim have “…freedom from society and its imperatives”, free of the social constraints found along the river’s edge. Those constraints are of a social-political nature, in contrast to the freedom of individual ethics on the raft. The social, or public, constraints are essentially those of Christianity’s original sin, whereas the ethics of the raft are secular, in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Marx quotes the novel in characterizing the raft’s ethics “What you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and to feel right and kind towards the others.” It sought “Harmony among men”. In contrast, in the final episode the Phelpses keep Jim locked up in a small hut, with its window boarded, while enjoying “their comfortable Sunday-dinner conviviality”. Marx draws the parallel with German citizens who were thought to have ”…tried to maintain a similarly gemutlich way of life within virtual earshot of Buchenwald.”
Marx maintains that Clemens was unable to adequately resolve the tension between the raft’s morality and that of the shore, that “the quest [could not] succeed”. Twain was unable to escape what Santayana had characterized as the Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911), the old mentality inherited from Europe. He particularly focuses on Miss Watson’s freeing of Jim in her will, that she had been ready to sell him to slave traders in New Orleans, breaking up his family. Marx characterizes the final episode as the “preposterous monkey business attendant on Jim’s ‘rescue’”. Although it is in line with Twain’s western American humor, it is over the top (my summary of Marx), “tedious”, and its “…slapstick tone jars with the underlying seriousness of the voyage.” Only the final sentence, in which Huck vows “to light out for the territory” and escape Aunt Sally’s civilizing of him, squares with the rest of the novel.
Lionel Trilling maintained that while the ending fell off it had “a certain formal aptness.” However, Marx’s ire is focused on T.S. Eliot, that savant of western civilization. Eliot endorsed the ending, that it had symmetry, structural unity, in bringing Huck once again under the influence of Tom Sawyer. But in Marx’s words, “…such structural unity is imposed on the novel, and therefore is meretricious.” In contrast, a unified work ought to have “coherence of meaning” and “clear development of theme”. In a telling comment on the times, Marx argued that the critics’ focus on form was “not unlikely” linked to the tendency to “…shy away from painful answers to complex questions of political morality.” It is of note that Marx’s essay was published in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism. Marx, sympathetic to Twain’s dilemma, concludes, “For Huck Finn’s besetting problem, the disparity between his best impulses and the behavior the community attempted to impose on him, is surely ours as it was Twain’s.” (JB)
Santayana, George. The genteel tradition in American philosophy. University of California Press, 1911.
Santayana was an American-Spanish philosopher and man of letters. While the citation given for this essay is the book of the same title, the thoughts were first presented as a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley in August 1911. Importantly in the present context is that Santayana belonged to the pragmatist school of philosophy, of which William James was a leader. As such, observation had to be vigilant, not resting on fixed systems, to “keep quick the edge of life.”
Santayana maintained that the American “genteel tradition” was European in origin and based in Calvinism and transcendentalism. He described Calvinism as having a “fierce pleasure in the existence of misery” founded on the existence of sin and its punishment. Transcendentalism, born in Germany and in America, was a point of view Santayana characterized as “systematic subjectivism”. He thought it best as a method, not as a system of knowledge, and in ways as exemplified by Emerson “truly American.” He described the seeking of truth as a “distinguished passion” and credited “men of science, the naturalists, the historians…” as engaged in that search. He described Walt Whitman as the “…one American writer who has left the genteel tradition entirely behind” but criticized him as having a “lazy desultory apprehension…..” Santayana then described William James as “…representing the genuine, the long silent American mind…” James saw intelligence as having “its roots and its issue in the context of events…” not as abstractions, creeds and theories.
Thus it appears that Calvinism and transcendentalism, which comprised the genteel tradition, were not favored by the “American atmosphere”, that they “ceased to be inwardly understood”. They were challenged on the one side by “the bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude naturalism” (read Walt Whitman here I suspect) and by impassioned empiricism….not to be harnessed by the logic of any school” (read here William James and pragmatism). All told it is an interesting analysis of the components of American thought at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries. (JB)
Santayana was an American-Spanish philosopher and man of letters. While the citation given for this essay is the book of the same title, the thoughts were first presented as a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley in August 1911. Importantly in the present context is that Santayana belonged to the pragmatist school of philosophy, of which William James was a leader. As such, observation had to be vigilant, not resting on fixed systems, to “keep quick the edge of life.”
Santayana maintained that the American “genteel tradition” was European in origin and based in Calvinism and transcendentalism. He described Calvinism as having a “fierce pleasure in the existence of misery” founded on the existence of sin and its punishment. Transcendentalism, born in Germany and in America, was a point of view Santayana characterized as “systematic subjectivism”. He thought it best as a method, not as a system of knowledge, and in ways as exemplified by Emerson “truly American.” He described the seeking of truth as a “distinguished passion” and credited “men of science, the naturalists, the historians…” as engaged in that search. He described Walt Whitman as the “…one American writer who has left the genteel tradition entirely behind” but criticized him as having a “lazy desultory apprehension…..” Santayana then described William James as “…representing the genuine, the long silent American mind…” James saw intelligence as having “its roots and its issue in the context of events…” not as abstractions, creeds and theories.
Thus it appears that Calvinism and transcendentalism, which comprised the genteel tradition, were not favored by the “American atmosphere”, that they “ceased to be inwardly understood”. They were challenged on the one side by “the bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude naturalism” (read Walt Whitman here I suspect) and by impassioned empiricism….not to be harnessed by the logic of any school” (read here William James and pragmatism). All told it is an interesting analysis of the components of American thought at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries. (JB)
Smiley, Jane (1996). Say It Ain’t So, Huck. Second thoughts on Mark Twain’s “Masterpiece”. The Century Magazine, Jan 1996: 61-67.
Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, used the occasion of a broken leg to catch up on her reading, and started by re-reading Huckleberry Finn. She was stunned, “that this is even a serious novel”. She recounts the canonization of the book as occurring in the “Propaganda Era”, 1948-1955, when such luminaries as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, T.S. Eliot and Joseph Wood Krutch pronounced it great. [Hemingway, famously had written that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huck Finn” (The Green Hills of Africa, 1935).]
Smiley's major concern is that Twain failed to “…reconcile the felt memory of boyhood with the cruel implications of the social system within which that boyhood was lived.” She maintains that ”…neither Huck nor Twain takes Jim’s desire for freedom at all seriously…”. In contrast, Harriet Beecher Stowe, later to be Twain’s neighbor at Nook Farm in Hartford, a New Englander and active in the abolitionist movement, had no such conflict in writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Smiley’s analysis, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is far superior to Huck in its discussion of race, its effect on families, individuals and society. Smiley emphasizes the strength of Stowe’s characterization and yet understands the ways that slavery was embedded in the American economic system, north and south.
Like others, such as Leo Marx, and Hemingway himself, Smiley denounces the ending of Huck as weak. In noting the canonization of a narrow range of white male authors Smiley laments the loss to “…our culture and ourselves” of how various social groups which may not be able “to escape to the wilderness are to get along in society…”. She concludes with the ethical argument that “great” literature must “…help us face up to our responsibilities…”. It’s pretty clear that Smiley believes that Uncle Tom’s Cabin meets that criterion, but that Huck does not. (JB)
Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, used the occasion of a broken leg to catch up on her reading, and started by re-reading Huckleberry Finn. She was stunned, “that this is even a serious novel”. She recounts the canonization of the book as occurring in the “Propaganda Era”, 1948-1955, when such luminaries as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, T.S. Eliot and Joseph Wood Krutch pronounced it great. [Hemingway, famously had written that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huck Finn” (The Green Hills of Africa, 1935).]
Smiley's major concern is that Twain failed to “…reconcile the felt memory of boyhood with the cruel implications of the social system within which that boyhood was lived.” She maintains that ”…neither Huck nor Twain takes Jim’s desire for freedom at all seriously…”. In contrast, Harriet Beecher Stowe, later to be Twain’s neighbor at Nook Farm in Hartford, a New Englander and active in the abolitionist movement, had no such conflict in writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Smiley’s analysis, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is far superior to Huck in its discussion of race, its effect on families, individuals and society. Smiley emphasizes the strength of Stowe’s characterization and yet understands the ways that slavery was embedded in the American economic system, north and south.
Like others, such as Leo Marx, and Hemingway himself, Smiley denounces the ending of Huck as weak. In noting the canonization of a narrow range of white male authors Smiley laments the loss to “…our culture and ourselves” of how various social groups which may not be able “to escape to the wilderness are to get along in society…”. She concludes with the ethical argument that “great” literature must “…help us face up to our responsibilities…”. It’s pretty clear that Smiley believes that Uncle Tom’s Cabin meets that criterion, but that Huck does not. (JB)
Williams, J.D. (1964). Revision and Intention in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee. American Literature 36 (3): 288-297.
James D. Williams, of Fairleigh Dickinson University, examines the contention that Twain’s intention for Yankee changed during the writing from a simple contrast to a satire of present English laws, customs and shams. Williams acknowledges that Twain “had long believed that the society of the “Middle Ages” was not simply quaint but radically evil and falsely glamorized.” In Chapter eight Twain launched “…a tirade on reverence, nobility and the Catholic Church.” Further “…Knights are presented as credulous liars, insensitive to suffering, brainless, verbose, and dirty.“ In the last section of the essay Williams summarizes, “The notebook entries, the manuscript, and the published novel do not support the thesis that A Connecticut Yankee began simply as a humorous contrast and then---because of a conscious change in intention---became at a specific point an ‘inverted satire’.” By “inverted” he may be referring to implied criticism of “…injustices both of Victoria’s England and of Mark Twain’s America.” That’s not entirely clear to this reader, but, in any event, Williams isn’t buying it. He concludes that Yankee survives as an “ordinary fantasy”, if shrewdly done, in which a dreamer can reduce a hostile world to impotence. (JB)
James D. Williams, of Fairleigh Dickinson University, examines the contention that Twain’s intention for Yankee changed during the writing from a simple contrast to a satire of present English laws, customs and shams. Williams acknowledges that Twain “had long believed that the society of the “Middle Ages” was not simply quaint but radically evil and falsely glamorized.” In Chapter eight Twain launched “…a tirade on reverence, nobility and the Catholic Church.” Further “…Knights are presented as credulous liars, insensitive to suffering, brainless, verbose, and dirty.“ In the last section of the essay Williams summarizes, “The notebook entries, the manuscript, and the published novel do not support the thesis that A Connecticut Yankee began simply as a humorous contrast and then---because of a conscious change in intention---became at a specific point an ‘inverted satire’.” By “inverted” he may be referring to implied criticism of “…injustices both of Victoria’s England and of Mark Twain’s America.” That’s not entirely clear to this reader, but, in any event, Williams isn’t buying it. He concludes that Yankee survives as an “ordinary fantasy”, if shrewdly done, in which a dreamer can reduce a hostile world to impotence. (JB)
David, Beverly R. (1976). The Unexpurgated A Connecticut Yankee: Mark Twain and His Illustrator, Daniel Carter Beard. Prospects 1: 99-117.
In this article Beverly R. David, who also wrote on Twain and his Illustrator for Huck, discusses the complementary relationship between Twain’s text and D.C. Beard’s illustrations. Beard did a number of drawings using familiar public figures like Sarah Bernhardt the actress and Jay Gould the financier, who was shown as the slave driver. Beard’s drawings “flaunted populist ideology”, treated the church with irreverence, and ridiculed industrialists. Beard himself noted that he had “grievously offended powerful parties unknown”. The result was that he was boycotted by advertisers for about a decade. However Beard continued to collaborate with Twain on other books and they became good friends. Later editions of Yankee contained many fewer of Beard’s drawings, such that years later Beard quipped about having illustrated the “unexpurgated” Yankee. The drawings, “carefully worked out allegorical drawings”, ended up as “celebrated museum pieces rather than book illustrations.” The facsimile title page of the 1889 Catto and Windus first edition, reproduced in our Penguin edition, noted that there were 220 illustrations by Dan. Beard. In contrast, our edition contains only 46 Beard illustrations. A loss. (JB)
In this article Beverly R. David, who also wrote on Twain and his Illustrator for Huck, discusses the complementary relationship between Twain’s text and D.C. Beard’s illustrations. Beard did a number of drawings using familiar public figures like Sarah Bernhardt the actress and Jay Gould the financier, who was shown as the slave driver. Beard’s drawings “flaunted populist ideology”, treated the church with irreverence, and ridiculed industrialists. Beard himself noted that he had “grievously offended powerful parties unknown”. The result was that he was boycotted by advertisers for about a decade. However Beard continued to collaborate with Twain on other books and they became good friends. Later editions of Yankee contained many fewer of Beard’s drawings, such that years later Beard quipped about having illustrated the “unexpurgated” Yankee. The drawings, “carefully worked out allegorical drawings”, ended up as “celebrated museum pieces rather than book illustrations.” The facsimile title page of the 1889 Catto and Windus first edition, reproduced in our Penguin edition, noted that there were 220 illustrations by Dan. Beard. In contrast, our edition contains only 46 Beard illustrations. A loss. (JB)
Williams, J.D. (1965). The Use of History in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee. PMLA 80 (1): 102-110.
In this contribution by J.D. Williams to Twain scholarship, see his 1964 article above, the influence of several historians on the writing of Yankee is examined. Who better than historians to provide zeitgeist? Williams asserts that Twain’s “historical reading was wide but eclectic” and that he made no attempt at a “thorough or scholarly historical preparation”. W.H. Lecky was a favorite, his History of European Morals served to provide specific materials such as the story of the holy fountain, and also moral fuel. He wrote that “…the greatest tragedies of history evoke no vivid images in our minds and it is only by a great effort of genius that an historian can galvanize them into life.” To that end, Twain sought realization to evoke compassion. Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century also provided specific materials such as the young woman who shoplifted after being reduced to starvation and was executed. Among numerous other historians who influenced Yankee were Saint Simon, Taine, and Carlyle on corrupt nobility, preoccupation with rank, suppression of common people and the French Revolution. Twain is quoted as saying that Saint Simon “had transformed him into a sans-culotte”. A piece in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869 by Edward Jarvis provided data and a method for calculating real wages which Twain used in the chapter “Sixth-century Political Economy”. Twain took aim at slavery and a book by Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States, provided many incidents that were adapted to Yankee. In the large picture of the thrust of the book, Williams comments that there was a shift in Yankee “from farce to a bitter humor and indignation…”, that history had become “a source of material for moral indignation…”. Williams’ identification of the historical writings Twain used in Yankee was impressive, as was the range of historical writings themselves that served as a foundation for Twain’s novel. (JB)
In this contribution by J.D. Williams to Twain scholarship, see his 1964 article above, the influence of several historians on the writing of Yankee is examined. Who better than historians to provide zeitgeist? Williams asserts that Twain’s “historical reading was wide but eclectic” and that he made no attempt at a “thorough or scholarly historical preparation”. W.H. Lecky was a favorite, his History of European Morals served to provide specific materials such as the story of the holy fountain, and also moral fuel. He wrote that “…the greatest tragedies of history evoke no vivid images in our minds and it is only by a great effort of genius that an historian can galvanize them into life.” To that end, Twain sought realization to evoke compassion. Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century also provided specific materials such as the young woman who shoplifted after being reduced to starvation and was executed. Among numerous other historians who influenced Yankee were Saint Simon, Taine, and Carlyle on corrupt nobility, preoccupation with rank, suppression of common people and the French Revolution. Twain is quoted as saying that Saint Simon “had transformed him into a sans-culotte”. A piece in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869 by Edward Jarvis provided data and a method for calculating real wages which Twain used in the chapter “Sixth-century Political Economy”. Twain took aim at slavery and a book by Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States, provided many incidents that were adapted to Yankee. In the large picture of the thrust of the book, Williams comments that there was a shift in Yankee “from farce to a bitter humor and indignation…”, that history had become “a source of material for moral indignation…”. Williams’ identification of the historical writings Twain used in Yankee was impressive, as was the range of historical writings themselves that served as a foundation for Twain’s novel. (JB)
Hoben, J.B. (1946). Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee: A Genetic Study. American Literature 18: 197-210 + 211-218.
J.B. Hoben, of Colgate University, undertook a study of the genesis of Yankee from a study of the Mark Twain papers, particularly the notebooks. Published in 1946, it was to be partially superseded by H.G. Baetzhold’s work published in 1961 based on new evidence.[1] However certain broad points merit recognition. In notebook 18, Twain credits G.W. Cable with giving him a copy of Malory’s Morte d’ Arthur to read. On the same notebook page he wrote that he dreamed of “…being a knight errant, in the Middle Ages.” Hence it has been accepted that this was the genesis of Yankee. Originally Yankee was intended to be a contrast, not a “satire peculiarly” according to a letter from Twain to Mrs A.W. Fairbanks, who Hoben refers to as “Twain’s “literary godmother”. However that changed dramatically, as did his attitude toward the English, to what Boden characterized as “raging Anglophobia in 1888 and 1889.” It was fueled most particularly by Matthew Arnold’s criticism of “American philistinism and cultural mediocrity”. Much of Boden’s essay is devoted to documenting the feud that Twain undertook to defend American culture, particularly its newspapers, against Arnold’s derogatory opinions. Boden has done a convincing job of showing the genesis of Yankee and of its biting satire.
1. Baetzhold, H.G. (1961). The Course of Composition of A Connecticut Yankee: A Reinterpretation. American Literature 33 (2): 195-214.(JB)
J.B. Hoben, of Colgate University, undertook a study of the genesis of Yankee from a study of the Mark Twain papers, particularly the notebooks. Published in 1946, it was to be partially superseded by H.G. Baetzhold’s work published in 1961 based on new evidence.[1] However certain broad points merit recognition. In notebook 18, Twain credits G.W. Cable with giving him a copy of Malory’s Morte d’ Arthur to read. On the same notebook page he wrote that he dreamed of “…being a knight errant, in the Middle Ages.” Hence it has been accepted that this was the genesis of Yankee. Originally Yankee was intended to be a contrast, not a “satire peculiarly” according to a letter from Twain to Mrs A.W. Fairbanks, who Hoben refers to as “Twain’s “literary godmother”. However that changed dramatically, as did his attitude toward the English, to what Boden characterized as “raging Anglophobia in 1888 and 1889.” It was fueled most particularly by Matthew Arnold’s criticism of “American philistinism and cultural mediocrity”. Much of Boden’s essay is devoted to documenting the feud that Twain undertook to defend American culture, particularly its newspapers, against Arnold’s derogatory opinions. Boden has done a convincing job of showing the genesis of Yankee and of its biting satire.
1. Baetzhold, H.G. (1961). The Course of Composition of A Connecticut Yankee: A Reinterpretation. American Literature 33 (2): 195-214.(JB)
Baetzhold, H.G. (1961). The Course of Composition of A Connecticut Yankee: A Reinterpretation. American Literature 33 (2): 195-214.
As noted in the summary of Hoben (1946), Baetzhold of Butler University has re-examined old sources and examined then newly available sources to re-chart the course of composition of Yankee and to identify an important source. He takes issue with the thesis that Yankee was set aside for two years between November 1886 and the summer of 1888, arguing that sixteen chapters were written in the summer of 1887. More to the point from our perspective of the zeitgeist in which Yankee was written, he presents data to support the claim that the writings of George F. Kennan played a vital role in Twain’s revulsion at slavery. Kennan was distantly related to his namesake who was later to be ambassador to the USSR and the architect of the policy of cold war containment of the USSR. The earlier G.F. Kennan wrote of atrocities in Russia and Siberia. The essays were published in the Century magazine from 1887 through 1891. In addition, Twain had heard Kennan lecture at the Lowell Institute in Boston. The pieces were so devastating that in his preface to Yankee, Twain wrote of “…the twin civilizations of hell and Russia.” Like Hoben, he cites the letter to Mrs. A.W. Fairbanks as indicating that at first the book was to present a “contrast”. However the combination of his fury at Arnold and other English critics, his readings in French, English, and European history, shock at Kennan’s revelations on Russian atrocities, and examples of barbaric treatment of American slaves by Charles Bell (Slavery in the United States) transformed Yankee into a “bitter satire”. (JB)
As noted in the summary of Hoben (1946), Baetzhold of Butler University has re-examined old sources and examined then newly available sources to re-chart the course of composition of Yankee and to identify an important source. He takes issue with the thesis that Yankee was set aside for two years between November 1886 and the summer of 1888, arguing that sixteen chapters were written in the summer of 1887. More to the point from our perspective of the zeitgeist in which Yankee was written, he presents data to support the claim that the writings of George F. Kennan played a vital role in Twain’s revulsion at slavery. Kennan was distantly related to his namesake who was later to be ambassador to the USSR and the architect of the policy of cold war containment of the USSR. The earlier G.F. Kennan wrote of atrocities in Russia and Siberia. The essays were published in the Century magazine from 1887 through 1891. In addition, Twain had heard Kennan lecture at the Lowell Institute in Boston. The pieces were so devastating that in his preface to Yankee, Twain wrote of “…the twin civilizations of hell and Russia.” Like Hoben, he cites the letter to Mrs. A.W. Fairbanks as indicating that at first the book was to present a “contrast”. However the combination of his fury at Arnold and other English critics, his readings in French, English, and European history, shock at Kennan’s revelations on Russian atrocities, and examples of barbaric treatment of American slaves by Charles Bell (Slavery in the United States) transformed Yankee into a “bitter satire”. (JB)
Leisy, E.E. (1952). Book review of Wecter, D., Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, in Modern Language Quarterly 13 (1): 108-109.
A letter to Mrs. A.W. Fairbanks was referred to by both Hoben and Baetzhold as describing Yankee to be a "contrast". Hoben identified Mrs. Fairbanks as Twain’s ‘literary godmother”. Who was she and what was their relationship? Leisy’s review of Wecter’s book on their correspondence answers those questions. Early in his career, while still a newspaperman, Twain met Mrs. Fairbanks, of the Cleveland Herald, on a trip to Europe and Palestine. That trip was to lay the basis for Twain’s Innocents Abroad. The friendship, in which she offered advice on his writing and concern for his “spiritual welfare”, blossomed into a lifelong correspondence. On his part, in a hundred letters, Twain revealed intimate details of his life as well as his writing. There is no suggestion of a romantic involvement in the review. Mrs. Fairbanks “urged him to be a humorist, not a clown”. Leisy complements the "epistolary art" and Wecter’s editorial role in linking the letters with documentation. Used copies of the book remain available at around $6 while its price at publication in 1949 was $5. Hence it would appear, perhaps unjustly, that the book has not become a collector’s item. (JB)
A letter to Mrs. A.W. Fairbanks was referred to by both Hoben and Baetzhold as describing Yankee to be a "contrast". Hoben identified Mrs. Fairbanks as Twain’s ‘literary godmother”. Who was she and what was their relationship? Leisy’s review of Wecter’s book on their correspondence answers those questions. Early in his career, while still a newspaperman, Twain met Mrs. Fairbanks, of the Cleveland Herald, on a trip to Europe and Palestine. That trip was to lay the basis for Twain’s Innocents Abroad. The friendship, in which she offered advice on his writing and concern for his “spiritual welfare”, blossomed into a lifelong correspondence. On his part, in a hundred letters, Twain revealed intimate details of his life as well as his writing. There is no suggestion of a romantic involvement in the review. Mrs. Fairbanks “urged him to be a humorist, not a clown”. Leisy complements the "epistolary art" and Wecter’s editorial role in linking the letters with documentation. Used copies of the book remain available at around $6 while its price at publication in 1949 was $5. Hence it would appear, perhaps unjustly, that the book has not become a collector’s item. (JB)