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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

"The Relation of Mark Twain's Adventures
of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to
Contemporary Juvenile Literature.”

presented by

William Douglas Potter

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ll. A. degree ill—W

can; 711, &,5,_/;

Major professor

Date—966mm
I

 

THE RELATION OF MARK TWAIN'S

ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER AND HUCKLEBERRY FINN

 

TO CONTEMPORARY JUVENILE LITERATURE

by

William Douglas Potter

ufi'fihfu' 59:;

A THESIS
Submitted to the Graduate School of Michigan
State College of Agriculture and Applied
Science in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English

1943

THESYS

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Chapter I The Effect of Mark Twain's Life and.
Environment on The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberrprinn.......l

 

 

I. Clemens‘ Life.................;.1
II. The Influence of the Frontier
on Mark Twain................lO
Chapter II The State of Juvenile Literature
in the 1870's.....................,..
I. General Conditions.............15
II. The Work of Horatio Alger, Jr..26
III. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's
Story of a Bad Boy........-..36
Chapter III Mark Twain's Juvenile Literature.........
1.. Estimates of Mark Twain........51
II.. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer...59‘
III. Huckleberry Finn...............75
IV. The Character of Huckleberry

FinnOOOOOOOO000......0000-000-000082

Chapter Iv CONCIUSionooooooooocoooooooooooo-o--ooo-o-o-o-o-90

Bibliographyooo..o....................................92

CHAPTERI.
THE EFFECT OF MARK TWAIN'S LIFE AND ENVIRONMENT
ON THE ADVENTURES or TOM SAWYER AND HUCKLEBERRY FINN

I Clemens' Life

It is not the purpose of this introductory biography
to give a complete and detailed biography of Samuel
Clemens. Rather, a selection will be made of those events
in the life of Clemens that laid the foundation for his
spirit of independence and his reaction against the
conventionalized Juvenile hero.

Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on
November 30, 1835. His father, John Marshall Clemens,
was a lawyer by training, but was making a none too
prosperous living as a merchant. Samuel was the fifth
child. Shortly after Samuel's birth the family moved
to Hannibal, Missouri. There, on the banks of the
Mississippi, young Samuel spent his early years.

In 1847 his father died and young Clemens was left
to shift for himself. He immediately quit. school
and worked in his brother's printing office. From 1853
until 1857 he lived a wanderer's life, working first
in a New York printing office setting type. In 1857,
however, this period.of wandering came to a halt when
he fell under the tutelage of Horace Bixby, Mississippi

steamboat pilot. Under Bixby and in the piloting years

after until the opening of the Civil war which closed
the Mississippi, Clemens became personally and
familiarly acquainted with all of the types of
characters found in fiction. Clemens stated later in
his Autobiography that this brief schooling on the
river would have required forty years of shore
employment.

Next, he worked as private secretary to his brother
in Nevada. A year of fortune hunting followed in the
silver mines of the Humboldt and Esmeralda regions. This
year is described in Roughing It. As editor of the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise Clemens assumed
the pen name of "Mark Twain", the Mississippi leadsman's
call for two fathoms of water. Samuel Clemens will be
referred to as "Mark Twain“ in this paper as it was
his favorite appellation, the name by which he signed
his writings and the name by which he is most widely
known .

By now Mark Twain had turned to reporting. Happy
circumstance had given him the opportunity to travel
as far as the Sandwich Islands. He returned and began
to lecture about his travels and, of course, to write
about them. This was what Mark Twain had been born for..

His whole education had been pointed towards it..

There was no variety of pungent sarcasm with
which his head had not been filled; no rich
lingo of profanity that he had not at his
tongue's end; no hyperbole of sage-brush
exaggeration that was not his..When he wrote
he had sense enough to turn on the whole
accumulation.

Here was a man who was to make American literature
really national for the first time. He was the first
literary man of any distinction to be born west of the
Mississippi, a river which was the boundary between that
part of America which was known and that part which was
unknown. Since his early youth and young manhood were
spent along this river it is important to consider the
influence which the Mississippi exerted in his life..

It was the path of adventure, the gateway
to the world. The river with its islands, its
great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous steam-
boats that were like fairyland, its stately
current.swinging to the seal He would sit by
it for hours and dream. He would venture outs
on it in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when
he was barely strong enough to lift an oar out
of the water. He learned to know all its moods
and phases. He felt its kinship. In some occult way
he may have known it as his prototype.

DeVoto's description is even more picturesqueu

All of the life that swarmed westward was
borne by the packets...commerce, the factory
system and the machine age...traders, drovers,
farmers, homesteaders, tinmen, miners, masons,
shipwfidghts, actors, minstrels, mesmerists,
phrenologists, bear leaders, circus men, gamblers,
prostitutes, and prophets. All the world, quite

 

l J.E. Chamberlain,."The Self Revelation of Mark
Twain,“ Boston Evening Transcript (October 18,.
1924), pie.

2 Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography, p.50.

all of it, paused while roustabouts hustled
bales and cases down the gangplank to a coon-
Jine song, and while Sam Clemens gaped,.
seeing strange clothes and hearing stranger
tongues.

It is not surprising, then, that his The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn should be built
about the Mississippi. From the accounts of his
biographers and information within reach it would
probably be safe to say that-a continuation of Tom
Sawyer would have resulted in an autobiography of Mark
Twain..Twain himself points out the autobiographical
element contained in the two books:-

Most of the adventures recorded in this

book really occurred; one or two were experiences

of my own, the rest those of boys who were

schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from
life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an
individual---he is a combination of the
characteristics of three boys whom I knew,

and therefore belongs to the composite order'

of architecture. '

The odd superstitiqfi touched upon were

all prevalent among children and slaves in

the West at the period of this story-~that is

to say,.thirty or forty years ago.....

The Tom Sawyer days began about 1844, and Mark
Twain's youth.was filled with a series of terrifying
experiences. He saw an old man shot down on a street
of Hanniballand carried into a house. There young

Clemens watched in fascination as the victim expired

 

3 Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain's America, p. 50.
4 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p. 286.

with a huge family Bible crushing his chest. He
witnessed the death of a young immigrant stabbed with
a bowie-knife. He saw a widow shoot a drunken tough who
had shouted to the world that he was going in and rape
her daughter.5 These and other experiences less
gory possibly, but vivid, would be siftedand used in
his writings.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Hucklebergy Finn
are the most significant when they are examined in this
light, that is, asautobiography. Wagenknecht tells that in
a letter to a Mrs. Fairbanks, in 1868, Mark Twain expressed
the belief that the whole capital of a novelist is a slow
accumulation of "unconscious observation-~absorption."6
Aunt Polly is Clemens' mother. Judge Thatcher is his
father; Sid, his brother; Cousin Mary, his sister Pamela;
Nigger Jim, a slave called “Uncle Dan'l" owned by Clemens'
Uncle John Quarles; Huckleberry Finn, Tom Blankenship;

and Huck's dad was young Blankenship's father, who was

the town drunkard.7

 

Albert Bigelow Paine, MarkggwainL_A Biography, p.49.
Edward Wagenknecht, Mark TwainI The Man and His Work, p.107.

7 Ibid.

In regard to "InJun Joe" Mark Twain has this to
say in his Autobioggaphytr

"Injun Joe," the half-breed, got lost
in there (the cave) once, and would have starved
to death if the bats had run short. But there
was no chance of that; there were myriads
of them. He told me all his story. In the
book called Tom Sawyer I starved him entirely
to death in the cave, but that was in the‘
interest of art; it never happened.."Genera1"
Gaines, who was our first town drunkard before
Jimmy Finn got the place, was lost in there
for the space of a week, and finally pushed
his hankerchief out of a hole in a hilltop
near Saverton, several miles down the river'
from the cave‘s mouth, and somebody saw it
and dug him out. There is nothing the matter
with his statistics except the handkerchief. I
knew him for years and he hadn't any. But
it could have been his nose..That would
attract,attention.

The autobiographical incident of the Bible award
is told by Laura Hawkins, the "Becky" Thatcher of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in an interview with

the Rev. Henry M. Wharton:

”Sam was always up to some mischief,"
said Mrs. Frazer to me. "We attended Sunday
school together and they had a system of rewards
for saying verses after committing them to '
memory. A blue ticket was given for ten verses,
a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten
red, and a Bible for ten yellow tickets. If
you will count up, you will see it makes a
Bible for ten thousand verses. Same came up
one Sunday with his ten yellow tickets, and
everybody knew he hadn't said a verse, but had
Just got them by trading with the boys. But
he received his Bible w th all the serious air
of a diligent student.

__¥

__fiw

8 Harper & Brothers, The Family_Mark Twain, p.107.

9 Rev. Henry M. Wharton, "The Boyhood Home of Mark
Twain," The Century Magazine, vo1.42(1902), p.675.

Young Sam did not fare too well with Mrs. Horr,
his first teacher. Like any normal boy he set out to
find Just how close to the border line he could go
with her-~he got too close and was sent out for a
switch. “Everything looked too big and competent.
Even the smallest switch had a wiry, discouraging look."10
He returned with a shaving which he hoped would satisfy
Mrs. Horr's requirements. It didn't. She sent out
another boy who had no personal interest in the matter,
except a sadistic one. After the awful scene Clemens
was determined to quit school, become a pirate, or
an Indian and scalp people like Mrs..Horr.].'1
All of Mark Twain‘s youthful escapades were not
so innocent. Paine tells that young Clemens and Tom
Blankenship finally found "borrowing" boats too tire-
some. Deciding to own a boat, they gave a "borrowed"
one a coat of red paint over-its green and hid it for
a season.-
They borrowed‘the paint also, and the
brush, though they carefully returned these
the same evening about nightfall so the painter
could have them Monday morning..Tom Blankenship
rigged up a sail for the new craft, and Sam
Clemens named it "Cecilia“, after which
they didn't need to borrow boats any more,.
though the owner of it did; and he sometimes
used to observe as he saw it pass that, if it

had been any other color but red, he would have
sworn it his. 12

10 Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, A BiOgraphy, p.38
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.,p.56.

Later, both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would
be willing to compromise with honesty. It is worth
noting that Mark Twain never allowed either Tom or
Huck to steal, but they dig‘borrow any article that
happened to fit into their proJects of the moment;.

We went down the hill and found Joe
Harper and Ben ROgers, and two or three more
of the boys, hid in the old tanyard. So
we unhitched a skiff and pulled down the
river two miles and a half, to the big
scar on the hillside and went.ashore. 13

v On one of their pirate escapades they have
stolen a ham. In this one instance their consciences
will not allow them to sidestep the moral issue::

They tried to argue by reminding
conscience that they had purloined sweet-
meats and apples scores of times; but
conscience was not to be appeased by such
thin plausibilities; it seemed to them, in
the end, that there was no getting around the
stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was
only "hooking", while taking bacon and
hams and such valuables was plain simple
stealing and there was a command against
that in the Bible..So they inwardly
resolved that so long as they remained in
the business, their piracies should not
again be sullied with the crime of stealing..
Then conscience granted a truce, and these
curiously inconsiitent pirates fell peace-
fully to sleep. 1

The line of reasoning here sounds curiously like
Caliban's. Huck Finn‘s philosophy when it came to
Conscience was as follows:

Itzdon‘t make no difference whether you
do right or wrong, a person’s conscience
ain't got no sense, and Just goes for him
anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know

 

13 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.348.
14 Ibid.

no more than a person's conscience does

I would pison him. It takes up more room,
than all the rest of a person's insides and
yet ain't no good nohow. Tom Sawyer, he says
the same:

_h

15 Harper a Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.606.

10

II The Influence of the Frontier on Mark Twain

There is a tendency to forget how thoroughly
American Mark Twain was and think of him only as a-
humorist. He was also a Westerners His whole early lit!
erary training was obtained in the boom camps of Nevada
and California during a period in which the West was
utterly independent of the East and where the public
“demanded their intellectual fare dressed with the
hottest; strongest condiments." 1 Primitive and
elemental though Mark Twain's work might be when
compared to the literature of EurOpe and the East, Mark
Twain knew men and he wrote with no allegiance to false
standards.2 He represents the West as it was in the
1860‘s and his themes and forms were a logical develop-
ment of that period and locale.

For the future in America he is the

author of Roughing It, The Gilded Age, Life On

The Mississippi, The Man Who Corrupted Had-

leyburg, Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Adventures of

Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberpy

Finn..But these books exist as satire and

realism to which the frontier humorist attained

They are the humor of the frontier in its

grandest incandescence, realizing its fullest

scepe and expressing its qualities on the
level of genius. In them an American civilization

 

_—

1 George T. Ferris, "Mark Twain," Appleton's Journal,
Vol. 112 (1874), p.18.

2 R.E. Phillips, "Mark Twain: More Than Humorist,"
The Book Buyer, Vol. 22 (1901), p. 199.

 

11

sums up its experience; they are the climax
of a literary tradition. But from the laughter
of anonymous frontier story tellers to the
figure of Huckleberry Finn a clearly traced
line exists, and Huckleberry Finn could

have been arrived at along no other path..3

If Europe's institutions were unable to stand the
test of Mark Twain's fearless analysis it was because
its culture for the first time was being examined by a
man who had learned to Judge things, not by appearances
or by traditions, but by intrinsic worth. If things
were sham this hard-headed westerner was disgusted..
He would not exclaim over a thing simply because the
whole world had "gushed" over it. 4

Mark Twain was the first man to look

upon the catacombs as a Joke..Turner's

"Slave Ship“ reminded him of a tortois

shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes

as he looked at the ship floundering about in

that fierge conflagration of reds and
yellows.

Mark Twain might have his limitations, but he was
unawed. In his testing of Europe's past and present
he was unfamiliar with the conventional approach..He
plunged into the Job “an unawed Philistine with no
background, but at any rate his opinions were formed

after he had seen things and not before." 5

Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain's America, p. 241.

Fred Lewis Pattee, American Literature Since 1870, p. 56.

R.E. Phillips,."Mark Twain: More Than Humorist,n
The Book Buyer, V01. 22 (1901), p.200.
William Lyon Phelps, Essays 0n Books, p. 221.

O\ in #' U!

12

In later life this independence of spirit spilled
over into his personal life. As his huge shock of red
hair turned white he wore clothes which matched
“Appearing in Washington drawing rooms in evening
clothes the colour of snow." 7 Phelps remarks that
Mark Twain's hatred of convention, both literary and
social resulted in books "which were so original that.
although received with rapture, they were too strange
for classification, which is the curse of criticism...
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were stories about
boys that had all the queer shock of truth." 8

Woven into this fierce spirit of independence is
Mark Twain's great capacity for indignation, about
which, Phelps has this to say:

Indignation was a fundamental quality

in his whole intellectual attitude. His

philosophy of democracy was largely inspired

by this emotion; and his uncompromising

pessimism was built on it. Such a book as

The Mysterious Stranger sprang directly from

it. The chronic folly of mankind infuriated*

him; and he hated also the Idea of God,

as it appeared in orthodox religious thought;:

for if God were really responsible for

such a world as Mark believed this to be,

He ought to be treated like any other'
capricious and cold hearted tyrant. 9

7 William Lyon Phelps, "The American Humorist,"
Some Makers of American Literature, p. 165.

8 Ibid.,p. 169.
Ibid.. ,p. 186

13

An example of how frontier anecdotes have a habit
of blending into Mark Twain's autobiographical tales
is the story about the coon skin. Sam and Huck desired
money, but had only one skin, the value of which was
ten cents. So they sold it over and over again at
Selms' store, stealing it out of an open window after '
each sale. Although the data of the story sound
legitimate, the story had been told about the frontier
before Samuel Clemens' birth, had been told about
every sharp dealing personage figuring in frontier
humor and folklore. DeVbto found what is believed to be
the earliest reference to David Crockett in the anonymous
Sketches and Eccentricities (1855). 10

If Mark Twain was outspoken in his criticism of
the sacred European institutions, conventions and
traditions, he was even more independent in his
personal indulgences. In his Autobiography is this
delightful statement which clearly shows his
individualism:

It seems a pity that the world should

throw away so many good things merely because

they are unwholesome. I doubt if God has

given us any refreshments which, taken in

moderation, are unwholesome, except microbes..

Yet there are people who strictly deprive

themselves of each and every eatable,
drinkable, and smokable which has in any

10 Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain's America, p.79.

way acquired a shady reputation. They pay
this price for health. And health is all
they get for it. How strange it is!

It is like paying out your whoie fortune
for a cow that has gone dry..1

—_

11 S.L. Clemens, Mark Twain's Autobiography, p.99.

14

15

CHAPTER II
THE STATE OF JUVENILE LITERATURE IN THE 1870's

I General Conditions

By 1874 the state of Juvenile literature had
become so deplorable that an official communication was
prepared by the Ladies' Commission on Sunday-school
Becks at the request of the editors of the Unitarian

 

Review . This body of ladies had been organized nine
years previously to select, for recommendation to
Sunday schools and to families, suitable books for the
young. The group was such a solemn body that the
editors' note concerning them published at this time
is worthy of quotation::

We desire to call especial attention to
this article as an official communication‘
prepared,at our request, by the Ladies‘
Commission on Sunday school books. Only those
among our.readers who are unfamiliar with
the activities of the Unitarian denomination
will need to be informed that the ladies are
of the highest literary and religious culture.
During all these years they have devoted them-
selves, with the most painstaking assiduity
to the work, of which they have realized
more and more the importance as they have
learned to know more completely with what a
mass of unprofitable or pernicious reading

16

our generation is being flooded..By their wise
Judgment and taste and fairness they have won
the confidence of other denominations as well
as of our own; and we anticipate as the result
of their labors, when these shall have become
more generally known, not only a service to
those who may avail themselves of their
catalogues in the purchase of books, but an
influence on publishers and authors in the
production of this class of literature. If one
public sentiment shall be fairly aroused to
the importance of the right sort of reading-
for the young--and to the poisoning nature of
much that is now most widely circulated, the
makers of books will be compelled to conform
to a higher moral and religious and literary
standard.

Surveying the "mass of unprofitable" reading the

young people were being flooded with, the Ladies'

Commission on Sunday school books found that contemp-

orary literature for the young was incompetent in style..

Authors, they pointed out, had fitted people out with a

name, a few remarkable features apiece, and put them.

into vehement actions which lacked sequence. Choleric

old gentlemen become mild as lambs..Shrewish old

maids advise children to marry..

In the middle of the story they will be
worked upon by motives to which, according
to all previous showing, they should have
been insensible...Nobody would believe, without
examining scores of such productions annually,
what use is made of stereotyped figures
and stereotyped experiences. With each book
of this class we are haunted by the idea
that we must have read it before. It is
a pity that so many persons have tried to
make a books.

Editor's Note, "Literature for the Young,"
The Unitarian Review, Vol. 1 (1874), p.554.

Ibid., p.356.

17.

Another common fault was the mixed character of
books. Books appealing to very young readers had their
characters put into “hot beds to ripen for marriage."
Still other books they found to be mixed all the way‘
through "so that, alternately, the older classes growl,
'How babyish,’ and the little ones cry, 'We can't
understand thatl'" 3

The Commission found books in which children were
being taught "conceit and self-assertion, with contempt‘
for age and experience and a total disbelief thatu
anybody knows more than they do.” 4 In books of this
type elders were portrayed as stupid and silly until
taught and reformed by "young wiseacres, who combine
the sagacity of sages with the unruffled goodness
of seraphs." 5

The Ladies' Commission on Sunday school Books
found sensationalism to be the most serious fault of all.

In the story books of a generation ago,

if a naughty child pushed another child till it

tumbled down, the consequences were torn

clothes, or a bump, a natural amount of

crying or wrath, and a reasonable punishment;;

but nowadays if a six year old urchin pushes

a four year old, the precocious victim must,

needs “hit its head against a sharp stone,"

and "the angel face" grow deathly pale," while

a "dark red stream trickles slowly over the

golden tresses." Then follows a brain fever at

least, and the poor baby who pushed waits

through days of agonized suspense, to learn
if he is a murderers...-

 

"Literature for the Young,” Unitarian Review, Voll(l874),
p. 356 ‘

U14? U,

Ibid.
Ibid.

18

We ask ourselves snmetimes if there are
authors who consider it desirable to familiarize
the mind with images of blood of crime, of
ghastliness, as early as possible. Are they
afraid the little inhabitants of the kingdom
of heaven will linger there too long, that they
hasten to pull them out into the glare of
earthly passions....And love, the holiest
of human powers, they profane by making out
of it that silly offspring of artificial society
which deserves no name but its vulgar one of
flirtation. They will not allow children to
love one another without saying that they are
in love, and the old fashioned "play fellow"
becomes the "beau".

From October, 1873, to May, 1874, the Ladies'
Commission on Sunday-school Books read and approved
eighty-two books out of 343“ Their Supplement is not.
available. The principal reasons for their rejections
were incompetency as to style, ignorance of human life
and character, general inJudiciousness, and sensationalism..

They also discovered “will" used for "shall".

The plaint of the Ladies' Commission on Sunday-
school Books was followed in 1879 by an article in '
The National QuarterlyReview attacking the papers in
New York City, twenty-five of which were classed as
"sensational, or flashy." 7' The article, pointing out‘
that the condition existed throughout the United States,
singled out New York City as particularly offensive.
The stories featured by the newspapers of this city
were designed to appeal to young readers. The titles
of these stories are indicative of their character::

'Qgshing Dolores, or Chincapin Dick on the Border ;;

 

6 ”Literature for the Young," Unitarian Review, Vol. 1 (1874),
p. 356.

7 "Pernicious Juvenile Literature," The National Quartegly
Review;(Ju1y, 1879), p. 136.

19

Spider and Stump, the Plagues of the Village ; Number

Six, or the Young Fireman of Carbondale.

The article continues, giving a summary of one

of the stories:

A small steamer lying amid other vessels in
a harbor on the Pacific coast, blows up and
sinks. A canoe, with a young girl in it, was
approaching the steamer Just before the fatal
moment. An elderly man who was on the steamer
utters a cry as he sinks, which is responded
to by the occupant of the canoe. When she
reaches the place, she at once dives where the
man had disappeared. The hero of the story had,
in the meanwhile, started in a boat from
another vessel, and in a minute or two comes
to the spot. He dives, of course, to rescue
the girl, and finds, when he reaches the
bottom, that the girl has been grasped by
the man and they are both about to perish. The
hero wrenches the man's grasp from the girl,
catches at a "long rope" which the unfortunate
man had "dangling from his waist” (when you
are blown up on a steamer, always attach a
long rope to your waist; it may be your sal-
vation£) and fastens it to his arm....Then, the man,
Who proves to be the girl's father, is pulled up;-
a physician from a leOp-of-war(everything is
convenient in these storiesi) is at once at hand,
and the half-dgowned persons are speedily
resuscitated.

This is not all. It is only the beginning,

for the story is to be continued in the next issue..

In commenting, The National Quarterlngevi w gives

a sharp picture of the highly flavored serials:

—¥

8

Probabilities are scouted, possibilities

.are recklessly lost sight of, the laws of

nature are set aside with the utmost abandon..
The adventures must be thrilling at any cost;:
the young adventurer must be a hero.

Any interest that attaches to them,
however; comes solely from their staple
characteristic---their narrative of adventures.

"Pernicious Juvenile Literature," The National Quarterly

Review, (July, 1879), p. 136.

20

It would be an abuse of language to speak
of their literary style. The dialogue is of
the baldest sort. There is no picturesque
description to elevate the literary taste
of the reader. There is no real portrayal
of character. There is no sweet, pure
sentiment. There is nothing but the

recital of thrilling exciting, blood-
curdling adventure after adventure. But of
that there is abundance.

Sports and sportsmen of the professional variety
are attacked by the article:

In several of these papers some space is
given to extended accounts of croquet matches,
base-ball games, rowing contests, and the
like, together with sketches of ball-players
and other sporting young men. We are told
how a young man, for example, became a member
of a professional nine, the amount of

- salary he receives, and various other pleasant
particulars. The effect of such reading is
to put before a boy's mind pastimes, innocent
enough in themselves, in the light of a
business for life, and a business too,
possessing all the attractions of sport.

If this is business, however, the ordinary
occupations of sober and laborious men soon
come to be regarded as distasteful in the
extreme. 10

The article then traces the "evil results that must
come from an acquaintance with this literature." 11
The ability of a generation nourished on this literature
to appreciate "delicate flavor“ is destroyed by "high

seasoning." It is given false values and "unworthy views

 

9 "Pernicious Juvenile Literature," The National Quarterly
Review, (July, 1879). p. 156.

10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.

21

of.life." Life, according to these stories is a time

for selfegratification. Where the moral rule of life

is to "work doggedly and persistently" for a living,

the heroes of these stories take any position and do

a good Job with no training or experience behind them.12
Fortunately, the article continues, a great deal

is being done to combat this situation by the religious

publishing societies, as well as private houses, in

sending out wholesome reading. Although much of this

may be "goodish" it is better to be "goodish" than

dirty.

Possibly the work of the Ladies' Commission on
Sunday-school Books is bearing fruit, for the article
epines:

If we are capable of Judging, moreover,
there is of late a decided improvement in these
publications. The periodicals and the books
of our Sabbath-school libraries, in point of
view of literary style, of common-sense, of
manliness in piety, are better than they used
to be. We are glad to feel assured that in
the religious Juvenile literature that
circulates so widely through our Sabbath-schools,
there is much that antidotes pernicious
publications. 1

This is highly important, the article points out,
for the completed product of pernicious literature is

not a pleasant one to have in society:

¥

12 “Pernicious Juvenile Literature," op. cit., p.149.
13 Ibid.

22

Brought forth as the result of these
publications is a foul-mouthed bully, a cheat,
a thief, a desperado, a libertine. Instead
of a clean-minded, high-toned, honorable young
man, not afraid of work, and knowing that
whatever is of value in this world is gained
by work, a young man of courage in which the
moral element is greater than the physical,

a young man respecting the law and other

men's rights, a young man worthy of the love of
a good woman, we should have one, who, when the
fictitious gloss, the stage-tinsel, the mock-
heroic glamour had been rubbed off, would

be found preferring to live by his wits,

rather than his lbor;:rotten at heart, and
hence foul in speech; aslikely as not, a
betrayer of ignocence; a pest and a plague

in society. 1

As an antidote the article recommended a library
and reading room to any community trying to gamp out
the effects of pernicious reading. The books should
be wisely selected in order to "counteract, rather
than increase the evil." 15 In reference to fiction the
free library of Germantown, Pennsylvania, was mentioned.
Germantown had excluded all fiction and reported
"excellent results in interesting even youth in more
substantial literature."16 Literature, even good lit-
erature, was an evil if too much of it were read:'

The superintendent of the Hartford

Library Association recently reported that

the accounts of that institution show that

one boy had taken out 102 story books in

six months, and one girl 112 novels in the
same time! 17

 

l4 "Pernicious Juvenile Literature," op.cit., p.150.

15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.

23

Not all of the Juvenile literature was being
attacked, however. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a
Bad Boy, 1869, had been thoroughly approved. Horatio
Alger, who had moved to New York in 1866 to seek his
fortune in writing for boys, had already published
his first piece in l865---"Squire Pitman's Peaches."
During the same year he had published in Student and
Schoolmate "Deacon Baxter's Cow," which had received
great praise from the editor:

Your style is admirably suited to the

taste of our young readers. I am exceedingly

delighted with the result of your first story

for us. It strikes the right chord and will be
received with enthusiasm. Of that I am certain.

Apparently you are blessed with an unusual know-

ledge of the boy Mind. Chapter VIII of Ragged

Dick (submitted at the same time) is an

inspired episode. The boys sound natural

and nothing is of greater importance than
thiSo 18

The "naturalness" of Horatio Alger will be examined

later.
Of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer~ the

New;§ork Evening Postiobserved that the first half of
the book was 'fairly entitled to rank with Mr..A1drich's
Story of a Bad Boy.’ The second half, however, was very
poor and the ng§.issued a grave warning: 'Certainly it
will be in the last degree unsafe to put the book into
the hands of imitayative youth.‘ 19 This view was shared

by almost every other American Journal.

 

18 Hubert R. Mayes, Alger, A Biography Without a Hero, p.45.

19 Allan Nevins, The Evening Post, A Centupy_9f
Journalism, p.L417,

24

With the publication in 1876 of The Adventures

 

of Tom Sawyer' libraries rushed to protect the children
from the evils of the book..Huckleberry was deceitful.
He lied. He itohed and scratched. Tom said "sweat"
instead of "perspiration." ~
Upon learning that the book had been banned by
a Brooklyn library, Clemens dispatched this letter:
Dear Sir:-

I am greatly troubled by what
you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer for adults exclusively,
and it always distrespes me when I find that
boys and girls have been allowed access to
them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth
can never again be washed clean;;I know this
by my own experience, and to this day I cherish
an unappeasable bitterness against the
unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not
only permitted, but compelled me to read an
unexpurgated Bible through before I was fifteen
years old. None can do that and ever draw a
clean sweet breath again this side of the
grave. Ask that young lady--she will tell you
800

Most honestly do I wish I could
say a softening word or two in defense of Huck's
character, since you wish it, but really in
my opinion it is no better than God's (in the'
Ahab chapter and ninety-seven others) and
those of Solomon, David, Satan and the rest
of the sacred brotherhood.

If there is an unexpurgated Bible
in the Children's department won't you please
help that young woman remove Huck and Tom
from the questionable companionship?

Sincerely yours, 20
(signed) S.L. Clemens

 

20- Asa Don Dickinson, “Huckleberry Finn is Fifty
Years Old---Yes;:But is He Respectable?" flilggn
Bulletin for Librarians (November, 1935).

25

Asa Don Dickinson, the librarian, had written to
Mark Twain informing him of the board's decision and
requesting him to make a statement as to his views.
Although Dickinson favored retention of the book, he
was powerless against the wrath of the ladies on the
board.

Reporters somehow got wind that something was
afoot at the library. They stormed Dickinson for a
story. Had Mark Twain actually written a letter in
defense of his book? If so, who had it? When would it
be released for publication. Dickinson handed the letter
to the board without comment, for comments or threats

were unnecessary. They read; the book was reinstated.

26

II The Work of Horatio Alger, Jr.

The story of Horatio Alger, Jr., who wrote stories
about boys who were on their own and making their way
in the big city, is the story of a boy whose own boy-
hood was protected and regimented in the extreme..
Born in Revere, Massachusetts, in 1832, Horatio was
guided from childhood towards the ministry by his
father, Horatio Alger, Sr., a Unitarian minister.

His course of study was so strict and his play-
mates and playtime so scarce that at the age of eight
he could discuss the Revolutionary War causes, compute.
fractions in his head, paraphrase his father's sermons,
and had become such a little prig that his
acquaintances called him "Holy Horatio." Although
he left home to go away to school at the age of
fourteen and learned the Joysof mischief, his primness
remained even after he entered Harvard.

At nineteen, he fell in love with a Cambridge girl,
Patience Stires, and wanted to marry her. His father‘s-
indignation at the mention of such a thing made him
give her up and continue on in his preparation for-
the church. Even then his preparation for the ministry
was a reluctant one. Horatio wanted to write. He

planned to write a great novel, a book that would

27

perpetuate his name. He sketched out plans for the
novel continually. Even in Paris while attending a
theological school, and, incidentally, having an affair
with one Elise Monselet, he tried to write, but failed.
By 1866, he had broken away from his theological studies
forever, had taken up lodgings at the Newsboys‘ Lodging
House, in New York City, and was launched on a career~
of writing that would result in an avalanche of
20,000,000 cOpies of rags-to-riches books. His work
showed industry, certainly, but one cannot very well
label it as the product of genius.

It has been taken for granted that Alger wrote
for boys because of the income he received. Herbert
R. Mayes points cat that this was not true:-

Alger wrote books for boys because he
could not write books for men. The implication
is not that the author of juvenile fiction
is inferior, but that Alger was. Besides,
boys interested him. He liked to be in their
company. The greatest love in his life was
his love for a Chinese boy, Wing, though-
Patience Stires was first to cross his path
and her influence, therefore, was greater..
He did not write down to boys. He never had
to for he never was above them. While waiting
for a masterpiece it was necessary for him
to be occupied. DOggedly, ofttimes with
disgust, he did his stories, cultivating his
muse, eternally hoping.

 

1 Hubert R. Mayes, Alger, A Biography Without a Hero, p.38.

28

Year after year Horatio Alger ground away on his
books. He dreamed of becoming a man of letters; he always
failed, for his mind was too naive, unimaginative, and
bewildered by the world in which he was living.

A short discussion of Alger's method of writing a
story is found in Munsey's Magazine, 1892. The article
shows great respect for Mr. Alger's work,.and a
comparison is being made here between Alger's style
and the method of writing a story employed by William
Taylor Adams, author of the Boat Club Series, Great
Western Series, Armygand Navy Series, and Yacht Club
Series.

His stories are quite unlike Mr. Adams'
both in handling and conception. Mr. Alger
has not the faculty of working up the strong
situations that are so congenial to Mr. Adams.
Their methods of treatment are entirely different.
Mr. Adams maps out his plot in detail, draws
a chart of the situations and then proceeds
to write out his story on a typewriter, which
he operates at great speed.

Mr. Alger chooses an incident for opening
a story and at once begins work upon it without
regard to further chapters. In writing the
first few thousand words he becomes acquainted
with his characters, and gradually sees
combinations and adventures ahead, making the
ones an integral part of the others. Thus, he
builds from day to day. While his books lack
the involved plots of Mr. Adams' they have the
charm and genuine humor that make them share
the other's popularity.

29

But in one respect, and that the essential

one, the books of these two authors are the

same. They are alike founded on the theory of

containing an abundance of healthful adventure.

In this regard Alger is a follower of Mr. Adams,

than whom he could have had no better model.

He once remarked to the writer that his

publisher advised him, when he first began

writing Juvenile stories, to study the easy

straight forward style of Mr. Adams. "I did,"

said he, "and with the best results. An academic

style is not the popular style with boys.9 2

The tone of dignity in this review is almost startling.
Today, although his books are not banned, they have
simply disappeared. The mention of his name in public
libraries results in amused and tolerant smiles that shade
into faint irritation.

It is true that Horatio Alger commenced his stories
with an incident. It is also true and very obvious that‘
Alger never knew Just where the story would lead, but
there was never any doubt in his or in his reader's mind
as to how the story would end. There could be only one
ending---"Reading an Alger story was like watching a
foot ball game in which you knew all the players and
the home team made all the touchdowns."3 One was not
deterred by subtleties of character from distinguishing
the character of each person in the story. Our hero had
“a frank, manly expression, and a preposessing (sic) face,"
and was without fail, "well-knit and vigorous."

Mortgage holders were usually Deacons or Squires and

 

2 "Horatio Alger's Method of Writing a Story," Munsey's
MHEBZ1HG, V01. 8 (1892), p.590

3 "Horatio Alger,“ Reader‘s Digest, (Nov.,1938), p.37.

30

"had the reputation of living very penuriously." Their .
wives never had new bonnets. They spoke "maliciously“,
"dryly", or "coldly".

As Mayes points out, Alger was the hero of every
book he wrote, and he wrote 119 books.

Local color; it is true, he secured at.

first hand---saw his characters and lived

among them. It is true, too, that he describes

in his tales the actual lives of some of the

boys he met---up to a certain point. The boys

are in his stories up to the point where

they graduate from boot blacks and baggage

smashers into quite noble creatures. At the

place of transition Horatio steps in, usurps

the hero role, and when the last chapter arrives,

achieves the proper degree of fame and

fortune. Thus did his sxbconscious control the

destiny of his fiction.

Only once did Horatio Alger overcome his lack of
confidence in himself and plunge into city affairs. This
was occasioned by his interest in and pity for young
Italian immigrant boys who were kept in virtual slavery
by Italian "padrones", who lived on their earnings and
thrashed them for not earning more. Alger exposed this
system in Phil the Fiddler , and conducted a campaign
of public protest. He had a great deal to do in ending
the system although he was often beaten himself by the
padrones. Mayes refers to this book as "a sorfi of minor-

key Uncle Tom's Cabin."

 

4 Hubert R. Mayes, Alger, A Biography Without a Hero, p.49.

31

Whatever Opinion one may form of the "rags-to-riches"
books one cannot overlook the fact that over 20,000,000 .
copies were sold and had a profound influence on
the lives and ambitions of an entire American generation..
And, paradoxically enough, the heroes were the product
of a man who was an easy mark for sharpers and
imposters.

Mayes does a concise Job of summing up Alger's
place in the American scene:

Alger was mid-Victorianism in America,

part and parcel of a Sunday-school era, swathed

in sentiment, zealous in his preachments.

Though he failed to grasp the significance of

his position he was in truth the leader of

the moral forces of his day. His stories

were called masterful, the churches lauded

them, and the magazines in which they

appeared prospered by their aid. Staid men

recommended them to their children. In

Juvenile literature he loomed as a Moses and

his texts were reverenced as commandments.5

To allow "our reader" an opportunity to renew
his acquaintance with Horatio Alger's work, the
finale of Bob Burton is "presented", "This writer
hastens to assure" the "gentle reader" that he found
the book "most thrilling as the Jacket prophesied.

The conclusion of the novel gives an Opportunity to
study Alger's dialogue which, "our reader" will recall,

was famous for its "naturalness".

 

5f Hubert R. Mayes, op.cit., p.49.

32

There was another arrival at Burton's
Ranch the next day. Sam Wolverton came in.
charge of his new found relative, Robert Granger
(our hero's young friend). They took a
carriage, and reached the ranch without
attracting the attention of Aaron Wolverton.

Mrs. Burton welcomed her visitors,
and expressed great pleasure at the discovery
that Sam‘s fortunes were likely to be improved.
Mr. Granger proposed to make a call upon the
faithless guardian, but was saved the
necessity, as Mr. Wolverton called early in
the afternoon of the same day. He was in a
hurry to show his power, and foreclose the
mortgage. It was arranged that Sam and Mr.
Granger should remain out of sight at first.

Robert answered the knock at the door.

"Is your mother at home?" asked Wolverton.

"Yes, sir; will you walk in?”

"I believe I will."

He entered the sitting-room, and Mrs.
Burton soon made her appearance.

"I see your son has returned, widder,"
remarked the agent.

"Yes; it seems pleas ant to have him back.
I missed him greatly."

"Humph' I s 'pose so. It' s a pity he
went at all."

"I don' t know that."

"Why, it stands to reason," said Wolverton
impatiently. "He went on a fool' s e; rand."

‘"What makes you say that?"

. "He might have known a boy like him couldn' t
succeed in such an enterprise. If he had taken
up with my offer, he would have been all
right."

"He said you offer d him much less than
the market price for wheat."

"And so he started off to do better, and lost
his whole cargo,“ sneeréd Wolverton, smiling
unpleasantly.

Mrs. Burton was silent.

"I came to tell you that I should require
not only the interest, but a payment of half
the mortgage, according to the conditions. It
is due next Saturday."

33

"Won't you wait, under the circumstances,
M . Wolverton?"

"No, I will not."

"Do you think that is kind?" asked Mrs.
Burton. ,

"Kindness is kindness, and business is
business, Mrs. Burton. Still, I am willing to
spare you on one condition."

"What is that?"

"That you become Mrs. Wolverton."

Mrs. Burton made a gesture of repulsion.

"That is entirely out of the question," she
said.

"Then, I shall show no mercy."

Mrs. Burton went to the door and called,
"Robert."

Bob entered.

"Mr. Wolverton demands his interest and
the payment of half the mortgage, according
to the terms."

“It is not due yet."

"It will be, next Saturday," said the agent
triumphantly. "And I won't listen to any
palaver or any entreaties to put off the
payment. As you have made your bed you can lie
upon it."

"What do you propose to do if we don't
pay? II

"Foreclose the mortgage," exclaimed the
agent, bringing down his fist upon the table
before him.

"In that case, I think, mother, we will
pay," said Bob, quite calmly.

"You can'tpay!"

"That is where you are mistaken, Mr.

. Wolverton. I will not only pay you what you
ask, but I am ready to take up the whole
mortgage."

"Is the boy crazy?" eJaculated Wolverton.

"Not that I am aware of," answered BOb,
smiling.

"You haven't got the money."

"Mistaken again."

"When did you get it?" gasped Wolverton.
"Wasn't your cargo stolen?"

"Yes, by emissaries of yours," was Bob‘s
unexpected reply, "but I recovered it, and
sold the grain for two dollars and a quarter
a bushel.‘

"You recovered it?“ said Wolverton, turning

pale.

34

"Yes; and the men who stole it are now
in Jail. I have a letter from one of them,
declaring that he was employed by you."

"It's a 116:" hastily exclaimed the agent;
but he looked frightened..

"I have reason to believe it is true..

Mr. Wolverton, your base conspiracy failed."

"I guess I'll go," said Wolverton, rising.
He wanted time to think.

"Not Just yet. Here are two persons
wo wish to see you," and, to Wolverton's
surprise, Sam and Robert Granger entered the
room.

"You didn't expect to see me, Aaron
Wolverton," said Captain Granger; "I have come
here with your nephew to demand restitution
of the property which you have appropriated
to your own use, giving him to understand
that he was living on charity."

Wolverton looked like a man in a state
of collapse. He didn't care to deny what he
knew Captain Granger would have no difficulty
in proving. He glared at Sam as if he would
like to have him in his power for a short time.

"Are you coming back with me?" he asked.

“I will answer for him," said Captain
Granger. "Sam is of an age when the law
authorizes him to select his own guardian..

I have accepted the trust, and I demand the
transfer of his property to me.?

If there had been any chance of success,
Wolverton would have contested the matter,
as it was, he interposed all the obstacles
in his power. Finally, Sam got his own,
however, much to Wolverton's disappointment.....

Five years have passed. The mortgage
on Burton's Ranch has long since been paid,.
and Bob is making a handsome profit every
year for his mother and himself. Clip is
still with the family, and, though he cannot
be called a model of industry, his loyalty
is true to the Burtons, and he hates Wolverton
as much as it is in his nature to hate any-
body. Wolverton is getting worse in tempers
as he grows older, and his ill-gotten gains

35

do not bring him happiness. The sight of
Bob's prosperity is gall and wormwood to
him; but for this Bob cares little../Sam is
employed in a store under his new guardian's
charge, but every summer he comes to Burton's
Ranch and stays a month, where he and Bob;
have fine times. Mrs. Burton is happy

in her prosperity, and is thankful to God
for having given her so good a son..Bob

has made more than one trip down the river,.
but none so eVentful as the one described

in this story.

6 Horatio Alger; Bob Burton (pages are not numbered).

36

III Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy

The Story of a Bad Boy , which according to Thomas
Bailey Aldrich's own statement is autobiographical, was
written as the result of an original notion of
"describing an ordinarily healthy and natural boy's
ear lier life and ending the story with his boyhood" 1
according to the Critic in a brief review of the story
in 1881. Since then, the Critic continues, this method
has been imitated, "notably by two of our most popular
authors." 2 There is no reason to doubt that one of
these authors must have been Mark Twain.

The stories of boys written by Mark Twain and
Aldrich lend themselves readily to comparisons as so
many of the incidents of the books are similar. An
attempt to poiht out some of these will be made, for
it is my opinion that Mark Twain, out of personal
pride, deliberately introduced some of his scenes in
order that an involuntary comparison of the books
would result. By his own admission Mark Twain did noti

regard Aldrich's prose too highly; the many

__B*

1 George Parsons Lathrop, "Thomas Bailey Aldrich,"
The Critic, Vol. 1 (April, 1881),p. 97. -

2 Ibid.

37.

similarities between The Story of a Bad Boy and
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are too studied to be
accidental. .

Aldrich in his very first paragraph of The Story

of a Bad Bgy_makes certain that the reader will learn

 

that he (Aldrich) is not really a bad boy:: "This is
the story of a bad boy. Well,.not such a very bad boy,
but a pretty bad boy; and I ought to know, for I am,.
or rather I was, that boy myself." 3 Here the difference
between Mark Twain and Thomas Bailey Aldrich is
obvious. Though Mark Twain might wander off in asides
occasionally, he never took the spice out of his
stories by introductory postscripts. To know that Jack
Harris, stalwart friend of young Aldrich, has been
killed in the Civil War; to learn that "Pepper" Whit-
comb is a Judge, "sedate and wise with spectacles
balanced on the bridge of that remarkable nose which,
in former days, was so plentifully sprinkled with
freckles," makes it certam that no reader will lose
himself completely in the story.

Aldrich's use of the term "bad" is worth examining..
Aldrich was not wicked; he was not evil; he was not
hurtful. Possibly the term at that time meant simply

mischievous, for during the recounting of an incident

 

3 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy, p.9.

38

in which one of the boys put a firecracker under Mr.
Grimshaw's desk we have the boy instantly "regretting
his badness and after school confessing the whole
thing to Mr. Grimshaw, who heaped coals of fire upon
the nameless boy's head by giving him five cents for
the fourth of July. If Mr. Grimshaw had caned this
unknown youth the punishment would not have been half
so severe." A

What kind of boys are these who confess to
teachers; what kind of boys are these who are even
unable to slide down a rope properly?

I had neglected to knot the rope; the

result was, that, the moment I swung clear

of the pediment, I descended like a flash of

lightning, and.warmed both my hands smartly.

The rope, moreover, was four or five feet too

short; so I got a fall that would have

proved serious had I not tumbled into the

middle of one of the big rose-bushes growing

on either side of the steps.

Aldrich's use of the first person was unfortunate.
This method forces the author either to assume an undue
modesty in recounting his story, or leaves him open to
the lack, or the accusation of the lack of it. In
The Story of a Bad Boy the method serves constantly to
remind the reader that the boy is not a boy, but a man

and that the man is simply stirring his memories around

‘4M Thomas Bailey Aldrich, op. cit.,p.76.
5 Ibid.,po67o

39

and coming out with incidents of his youth. Thomas
continually intrudes upon the boy Tom. He speaks of
developing his muscles: "I developed my muscles until
my little body was as tough as a hickory knot.” Boys
never refer to their "little bodies? but simply say,
”I got muscles." In my Judgment Themes Bailey Aldrich
failed to capture the spirit of Youth, and the use:of:
of the first person style contributed to that failure.
Aldrich was simply presenting a sentimental picture
of youth through the eyes of an amused and slightly
tolerant adult; the result was not Boy.

Constant reference to “the reader" serves to
detract from the force of the story:

But I have been gossipping too long,--

and yet not too long if I have impressed upon

the reader an idea of what a rusty, delightful

old town it was to which I had come to spend

the next three or four years of my

boyhood. 5

Coupled with remarks such as, “You may be sure,
gentle reader," the effect is unfortunate. Possibly
this "gentle reader" was not only ungentle, but grumpy,
and too partial to Huck and Tom Sawyer to have any

sympathy for Tom Bailey. Certainly, passages such as

the following are not found in The Adventuresfiof Tom

Sawyer :

 

6 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Op. cit., p.39.

40

With the old school formula I commence
these sketches of my boyhood. My name is
Tom Bailey, what is yours, gentle reader?
I take for granted it is neither Wiggins
nor Spriggins, and that we shall get on .
famously together, and be capital friends
for ever....It is with no ungentle hand that
I summon back for a moment that Past which
has closed upon them and upon me. How
pleasantly they live again in my memory!
Happy magical Past, in whose fairy
atmosphere even Conway, mine ancient foe,
stands forth transfigured with a sort of
dreamy glory encircling his bright red hair..7

The claim has been continually set forth that
Aldrich was unable to recapture the intensity and color
that is Youth. He admits it here:

Let each reader take his lead pencil
and remorselessly correct the orthography,
the capitalization, and the punctuation of
the essay. I shall not feel hurt at seeing
my treatise cut all to pieces; though I
think highly of the production, not on account
of its literary excellence, which I
candidlyadmit is not overpowering, but
because it was written years and years ago
about Gypsy, by a little fellow who, when
I strive to recall him, appears to me like
a reduced ghost of my present self.

This passage comes as one of the asides which are
so frequent in the story. While Aldrich does not admit
that he has difficulty in recalling his youth in all
of its vigor, he never lets the reader forget that he

is now Tom Aldrich, the Man, sitting in the parlor

 

7 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, op. cit., p.126.

8 Ibid.,p.226.

41

and telling a story about a little boy of long ago:

When a young boy gets to be an old boy,
when the hair is growing rather thin on the
top of the old boy's head, and he has been
tamed sufficiently to take a sort of
chastened pleasure in allowing the baby to
play with his watch-seals,--when, I say, an
old boy has reached this stage in the Journey
of life, he is sometimes apt to indulge in
sportive remarks concerning his first love.

Now, though I bless my stars that it
wasn't in my power to marry Miss Nelly, I
am not going to deny my boyish regard for her

«nor laughiat it. As long as it lasted it
was a very sincere and unselfish love, and
remained so, rendering me proportionately
wretched. I say as long as it lasted, for
one's first love doesn't last forever.

I am, reader, however, to laugh at the
amusing figure I out after I had really ceased
to have any deep feeling in the matter. It
was then I took gt into my head to be a
Blighted Being.

The kicking of the negro boy was a strange touch
by Aldrich in The Story of a Bad Boy. Upon learning that-
he was to go North to his grandfather's home to be
educated he "instantly kicked over the little negro boy
who happened to be standing by me at the moment, and,
stamping violently on the floor of the piazza, declared
that I would not be taken away to live among a lot of
Yankees. 10

Although Huck Finn played a practical Joke on
Nigger Jim, he was instantly overcome with remorse and
shame and apologized. I have been unable to discover

any reference or incident in Mark Twain's books in which

a negro is the obJect of a petulant display of temper.

 

9 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, op.cit., p.220.

10 Ibid.,p.57.

42

This passage of Aldrich's is interesting because it
is so out of harmony with the rest of his book.

Aldrich's characters, like Alger's, are
distinguished by "tags". The villain is a "sallow boy
with bright red hair“ who slinks around with "scowls
of defiance". His friends speak in a "clear voice",
and if we meet a "handsome, frank looking lad" we
are safe in assuming that young Tom Bailey will find
him "true". Their emotions are exaggerated; their
delight is "unspeakable" at finding a turtle with
Harry Blake's initials carved on it. 11 '

Tom Bailey's fondness for prayer forms another
basis for comparison of young Bailey and Tom Sawyer.
Here, Tom Bailey includes his pony, Gypsy, in his
evening prayer:

I should fail if I tried to tell you

how dear the pony was to me..Even hard

unloving men become attached to the horses

they take care of; so I, who was neither

unloving nor hard, grew to love every glossy

hair of the pretty little creature that
depended on me for her soft straw bed and

her daily modicum of oats. In my prayer at

night I never forgot to mention Gypsy with

the rest of her family,--generally setting
forth her claims first. 1

‘1

11 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, op.cit., p.57.
12 Ibid., p.124.

43

It will be recalled that Tom Sawyer prayed only
when coaxed and wheedled by his sister, but young Tom
Bailey not only prayed for his horse, which both Tom
Sawyer and Huck Finn would probably have accepted, but
prayed for the rest of his family too:

There always seems to be either a slightly
sentimental slushiness to Aldrich's choice of adJectives,
or an exaggerated simplicity of emotion which writers
seem prone to use when attempting to recapture the
intensity of youth. This is one fault which Clemens
avoided; for he was still Tom Sawyer at heart when he
wrote the book. He could still enJoy a fight and the
fighting positions of the participants which Aldrich called
absurd.

In fact, Aldrich continually avoided description of
action. In the fight scene with young Conway who has been
picking on Tom through the first few chapters is another
example of this tendency to shy away from active
description in favor of a more leisurely and passive
narration. The boys are face to face in what Mr. Aldrich
terms an ”absurd position.“ He continues:

Look at us as long as you may; for this

is all that you shall see of the combat.

According to my thinking, the hospital

teaches a better lesson than the battlefield.

I will tell you about my black eye, and my

swollen lip, if you will, but not a word of
the fight.

44

You will get no description of it
from me simply because I think it would
prove very poor reading, and not because
I consider my revolt against Conway's
tyranny unJustifiable. 1

In the following passage Tom Sawyer had met and
was testing a new boy. As yet, the method of testing
was in the verbal stage. There remained lines to be
drawn in the dust with sticks, chips to be placed on
shoulders and final exasperation before the blows would
occur. This was recorded faithfully by Mark Twain. It

will be noted that this ceremony has changed little

with the ensuing years.

An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said,
"What's your name?"
"'Tisn't any of your business, maybe."
"Well, I 'low I'll make it my business."
"Well, why don't you?"
"If you say much, I will."
"Much--much--much. There, now."
"Oh, you think you're mighty smart,
don't you? I could lick you with one hand tied
behind me, if I wanted to." 1

The attitudes of the two authors are strikingly
different towards "playing hockey". Aldrich speaks of
the "purchase" of a boat. Tom Sawyer obtained his in
another manner; After the purchase young Tom Bailey
ran into difficulty over getting enough time Off from.

school to go on a cruise:

___

13 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, op.cit., p.111.
14 Harper and Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.290.

45

We planned to go on an excursion to
Sandpeep Island,the last of the islands
in the harbor. We proposed to start early
in the morning, and return with the tide in
the moonlight. Our only difficulty was to
obtain a whole day's exemption from
school, the customary half-day holiday not
being long enough for our picnic. Somehow we
couldn't work it; but fortune arranged
it for us. I may say here, that, what-
ever else I did, I never played truant,
"hookey", we called it, in my life. 1

Here again The Adventures of Tom Sawygr follows

 

closely in the similarity of the incidents, although

the handling is far different. Tom Bailey planned a

"picnic" and an "excursion.“ Tom Sawyer and his crew

start off to be pirates:

"Who goes there?"

"Tom Sawyer, The Black Avenger of the
Spanish mains. Name your names."

"Huck Finn, The Red-Handed; and Joe
Harper, The Terror of the Seas.?

“ 'Tis well Give the countersign!"

"Blood." 5

Tom Bailey was initiated into the Centipede Club.

In his narrative of a cannoney which is dear to the

heart Of every boy Aldrich "tells" , but does not "show."

‘

Finally, I was led up a steep plank
to what appeared to me an incalculable height.
Here I stood breathless while the by-laws
were read aloud. A more extraordinary code
of laws never came from the brain of man..
The penalties attached to the abject
being who should reveal any of the secrets
of the society were enough to make the
blood run cold. 17

15 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, op.cit., p.47.

15 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.343.

17 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, op.cit., p.100.

46

When The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appeared it
contained a similar oath sworn by the members of Tom's
robber band. The penalties are much more specific.
Unlike Aldrich, who was careful to omit anything that:
might offend watchful parents, or warp the sensitive
minds of the children, Mark Twain did not leave this
important part of the.ceremogfiy to the imagination:

So Tom got out a sheet of paper that
he had wrote the oath on, and read it. It
swore every boy to stick to the band, and
never tell any of the secrets; and if any-
body done anything to any boy in the band,
whichever boy was ordered to kill that
person and his family must do it, and he
mustn't eat and mustn't sleep 'till he
had killed them and hacked a cross in their
breasts, which was the sign of the band.
And nobody that didn't belong to the band
could use that mark and if he did he must
be sued; and if he done it again he must
be killed. And if anybody that belonged to
the band told the secrets, he must have his
throat cut, and then have his carcass
burnt up and the ashes scattered all around,
and his name blotted Off the list with
blood and never mentioned again by the gang,
but have a curse put on it and be forgot
forever. 1

Here,again, is the tendency of Aldrich to generalize
and.avoid getting right down into the details of his
story, contrasting strongly with the delight and gusto
Iflark Twain found in the fondness of the Juvenile mind
Ifor details. The.Aldrich of Portsmouth simply could not:

Ianbend. The conventional had too strong a hold on him.

¥

:18 Harper &3Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.447.

47

David Masters writing in The Chautauquan in 1897
discusses the art of Mark Twain from this standpoint.
While he admits that Mark Twain was certainly not a
master of literary technique, he asserts that Mark
Twain was above all of his contemporaries in the art
- of strOng description and the ability to "present a
jpicture that glows with a certain light that brings in
'bold relief every point that the writer wants the reader
'to see." 19 Mark Twain was preeminent in the ability

to write plainly and understandingly:

With no artificial cultivation, his
genius took its own bent, and proved strong
enough to tower into a sturdy tree, in a
soil where the more delicately nurtured plant,
first prOpagated in the city hot-house would

have died.
With the writer of weak individuality

and small self-confidence there is an
inevitable tendency to imitate the style of
some great writer of the past, and this
inclination soon disposes of its victim.

Twain, with his early poverty and uninviting
environments, had but little opportunity to
study the works of the standard writers and was
thus saved from the endeavor to imitate

them, had he been so disposed.

Aldrich, however, was more delicately nurtured.
Iiis reaction to the death of Binny Wallace is in the
?literary vein which so distressed the Ladies'

(Jommission on Sunday-school Books. It was the

¥

3L9 David Masters, "Mark Twain's Place in Literature,"
The Chautauquan, V01. 25 (1897). P.6l2.

20 Ibid.

48

customary reaction to sadness found in the books of
the days.

The excitement over, I was in a folorn
state, physically and mentally. Captain
Nutter put me to bed between hot blankets,
and sent Kitty Collins for the doctor. I
was wandering in my mind, and fancied
myself still on Sandpeep Island: now we were
building our brick-stove to cook the
chowder, and, in my delirium, I laughed
aloud and shouted to my comrades; now the
sky darkened, and the squall struck the
island; now I gave orders to Wallace how
to manage the boat, and now I cried because
the rain was pouring in on me through the
holes in the tent. Towards evening a
high fever set in and it was many days
before my grandfather deemed it prudent
to tell me that the Dolphin had been found
floating keel upwards, four miles southeast
of Mackerel Reef.

Poor little Binny Wallace! How strange
it seemed when I went to school again, to
see the empty seat in the fifth row! How
gloomy the playground was, lacking the
sunshine of his gentle sensitive face!

One day a folded sheet slipped from my
algebra; it was the last note he ever
wrote me. I couldn't read it for the tears.

What a pang shot across my heart the
afternoon it was whispered through the
town that a body had been washedashore at
Grave Point,--the place where we bathed.

We bathed there no more! How well I remember the
funeral, and what a piteous sight it was
afterwards to see his familiar name on

a small headstonE in the Old South

Burying Ground! 1

_~

21 ffhomas Bailey Aldrich, op.cit., p.164.

49

Mark Twain's own opinion of Thomas Bailey Aldrich
as a writer was not high. They were personal friends
and saw much of each other, but Mark Twain's respect
for Aldrich did not include, to any great extent, an
admiration for his writings. Possibly this negative
attitude was influenced to a great part by Mark Twain's
dislike for Aldrich's wife. He wrote his opinion of
.Aldrich in "The Memorial to Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Aldrich" in Mark Twain in Eruption, edited in 1940
‘by Bernard DeVoto. This material was given a marginal
:note in pencil by Albert E. Paine which read: "Not -
'to be used for seventy-five years from 1908," but has
since been published with consent. The material is so
pungent that the entire passage is quoted::

Last Monday (July 3, 1908) Albert Bigelow
Paine personally conducted me to Boston, and
next day to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to assist
at the dedication of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Memorial Museum.

As text and basis I will here introduce
a few simple statistics. The late T.B.A. was
born in his grandfather's house in the little
town of Portsmouth, N.H., seventy-two or seventy-
three years ago. His widow has lately bought
that home and stocked it with odds and ends
that once belonged to the child Tom Aldrich,
and to the schoolboy Tom Aldrich, and to the
old poet Tom Aldrich, and turned the place
into a memorial museum in honor of Aldrich
and for the preservation of his fame. She has
instituted an Aldrich Memorial Museum Corp-
oration under the laws of the State of New
Hampshire, and has turned the museum over to
this corporation which is acting for the city
of Portsmouth, the ultimate heir of the
benefaction, and she has injected the mayor

50

of Portsmouth and other important people

into that corporation to act as advertisement
and directors. A strange and vanity-devoured,
detestable woman: I do not believe I could
ever learn to like her except on a raft at
sea with no other provisions in sight.

The Justification for an Aldrich
Memorial Museum for pilgrims to visit
and hallow with their homage may exist, but
to me it seems doubtful. Aldrich was never
widely known; his books never attained to a
wide circulation; his prose was diffuse,
self-conscious, and barren of distinction in
the matter of style; his fame as a writer Of
prose is not considerable; his fame as a writer
of verse is also very limited, but such as it
is it is a matter to be proud of. It is based
not upon his output of poetry as a whole
but upon half a dozen small poems which are
not surpassed in our.language for exquisite
grace and b uty and finish....When it came to
making fun f a folly, a silliness, a windy
pretense, a wild absurdity; Aldrich, the
brilliant; Aldrich, the sarcastic; Aldrich,
the ironical; Aldrich, the merciless was a
master. It was the greatest pity in the
world that he could not be at that memorial
function in the Opera House at Portsmouth to
make fun of it. Nobody could lash it and
blight it and blister it and scarify it as he
could.

However, I am overlooking one important
detail: he could do all this, and would do it
with enthusiasm, if it were somebody else's
foolish memorial, but it would not occur to him
to make fun of it if the function was in his
own honor, for hehad very nearly as extensive
appreciation of himself and his gifts as had
the late Edmund Clarence Stedman, who
believed that the sun merely rose to admire
his poetry....Aldrich was a good fellow; but
vain?--bunched together they were as vain as
I am myself, which is saying all that can be
said under that head without being extravagant..22

 

 

22 Mark Twain, "The Memorial to Thomas Bailey Aldrich,"
Mark Twain in Eruption, p.294.

CHAPTER III
MARK TWAIN'S JUVENILE LITERATURE

I Estimates of Mark Twain

William Lyon Phelps was able at the time of his
book, Essays on Modern Novelists, 1910, to remember-
when Mark Twain was regarded merely as a humorist.
‘Very few were of the opinion that he actually belonged
in literature. A "complete, uniform edition of his
M would perhaps have been received with something
of the mockery that greeted Ben Jonson's folio in
1616.“ 1 Professor Richardson's American Literature,i
'which is still a standard work, appeared originally
in 1886. Phelps remarks that Mark Twain received but
'two references in the index, while Mr. Cable received
‘ten. One of the two references follows as quoted from

Professor Richardson by Phelps:

But there is a class of writers, authors
ranking below Irving or Lowell, and lacking
the higher artistic or moral purpose of the
greater humorists, who amuse a generation and
then pass from sight. Every period demands a
new manner of Jest after the current fashion
.... The reigning favorites of the day are
Frank Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, the
various newspaper Jokers, and "Mark Twain“.
But these writers must make hay while the sun
shines.... Twenty years hence .

¥

1- William Lyon Phelps, Essays on Modern Novelists, p.100.

52

unless they chance to enshrine their wit in

some higher literary achievement, their

unknown successors will be the privileged

comedians of the republic. Humour alone never

gives its masters a place in literature; it

must coexist with literary qualities, and

must usually be Joined with such pathos as one finds

in Lamb and Holmes.2

This was after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn had been read by thousands..Mark Twain
was excluded from the department of fiction entirely.

Possibly the lack of any standard of excellence,
that is, of a uniform excellence influenced Richardson..
Mark Twain's creative energy was never completely under
control. Wagenknecht remarks that "Tom Sawyer is both
an idyll of remembered childhood experiences and a dime
novel. Huckleberry Finn starts uncertainly, achieves
magnificence in the great days on the river, the feud,
the killing of Beggs, and kindred episodes, then dies
slowly in the tiresome, long-drawn-out account of the
rescue of Nigger Jim...Structure was his Waterloo."3

Phillips adds to this by stating what is clear to
aanyone who reads the two books, that Mark Twain cared

:practically not at all for effective construction.

{There is no climax in either of the two books. They

—¥

22 William Lyon Phelps, op.cit., p. 100.
33 Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain,_Ths Man and His Work, p.61.

53

might have continued indefinitely. They end when the
book ends.

One thing is sure: Mark Twain cared only for the
past. His tendency to wite in the past, to return into
a world that he knew and understood was so strong
that it cannot be overlooked..Hicks advances a theory
as to the cause of this tendency to write in the past:

It was a world Mark Twain knew and
understood and in which he had once had a
recognized place. When he returned to that
world, he escaped from the strain of
conventional society, from the fear of
treachery, from the everlasting demand for
money. So strong was the temptation that
it could have been resisted only if he had
mastered for literary purposes, the complex life
of industrial America as he had mastered
life on the Mississippi. If he had under-
stood, if he had been at home in, the world of
his own social interests, his own invest-
ments, his own ambitions, he might have
written about it. The frontier humorist
and Balist might have become a great social
novelist....

Hicks does not intend, by pointing out the
possibilities in Mark Twain, to disparage the work that
he did. He continues by bringing out the point that
it was only by developing as a realist that Mark
Twain could develop at all; the alternative was

stagnation. "In minor ways Mark Twain made progress,

 

4 R.E. Phillips, "Mark Twain, More Than Humorist,"
The Book Buyer, Vol.22(l90l), p.197.

5 Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition, p.46.

54

but he never transcended the limitations of his
tradition. He was forced to rely on the humorous
elements. He was, and knew he was, merely an
entertainer." 6 Mark Twain made no attempt to come
to grips with the world in which he was living. "Life
was so much simpler in the Missouri of the forties and
fifties, and in a way so much finer. If there was
poverty, no one realized it. If there was a caste
system, there was no bitter competition on a pecuniary
level...there was beauty in the woods and on the river." 7
Van Wyck Brooks‘ "psychological" approach to Mark
Twain precipitated the most exciting furor. Mr. Brooks
advanced the theory that Mark Twain had been stifled
by his early life in Missouri. He had discovered that
Mark Twain had been delicate as a boy and high strung .
“Therefore: God had fashioned him to be one of the
most profound artists that the world had ever known,
a combination of American Dostoievsky and American

Rabelais.“ 8 These biographers held that Mark Twain's

life in the country about Hannibal, "his adventures

 

6 Granville Hicks, op.cit., p.46.
7 Ibid.

8 James Oscar Campbell,"Twain Versus Clemens," l9§6
Essay Annual, p.154.

55,

as a wandering compositor; the perils of existence
during the early gold-rush days in Nevada, when
gambling, drinking and murder flourished; his Journey
to Europe on the same boat with Henry Ward Beecher
and Austin Burlingame, and his career as a husband
of a proper conventional woman---all these experiences
were futile and uncongenial modes of living." 9

The "psychological" approach to Mark Twain held
that he had been "forced" into the career of a
humorist. They insisted that his audiences were the
motivating source and not the inner spirit of his

humor.

His restlessness, his superficial
materialism and its attendant pessimism,
his interest in strange philosophical and
religious cults...all these characteristics
of the man so say these biographers, were
the product of a tragic maladjustment in
his personality. With their assumptions of
boundless potentialities in the man, they
could not admit that these intellectual
blemishes were an expression of precisely
those limitations in personality and in
culture which produced his positive and
distinctive literary qualities....Did the
world in which he was born stifle in him a
potential Dostoievsky, or did it fashion
and liberate Mark Twain's native powers
until he became the perfect expression of
the culture of western Aaerica? The second
view is the sound one.

 

9 James Oscar Campbell, op.cit., p.154.

10 Ibid.

56

Raised in the swirl of characters that found
refuge in the world of the great river at the edge of
civilization, Mark Twain could have but small use for
the accepted characters in fiction of juveniles. For
Mark Twain was the real and eternal boy, a boy with
a lot more freedom than that given boys today, but
the lOgic and motives of boys have not changed;
conditions have changed, but the "show off" motive,
for example, is as strong today as it was in Mark
Twain's time. It is because he understood and
captured the basic motives of boys in Tom Sawyer and
Huck Finn that his humor is as effective now as it
was then.

When giving his audiences to Mr. Albert Bigelow
Paine in 1906 Mr. Clemens told Paine a dramatic story
of his apprenticeship to the printer, Mr. Ament.

His mother led him into the room containing the open
coffin of his father and there, with Clemens'
conscience beset by past misdeeds, made him promise to
reform. According to the story told by Clemens the
scene made such an impression on him that he was
attacked by somnambulism for several nights in

succession after that. Although it is, as DeVoto

57

points out, the only incident in Samuel Clemens'
memory which "endows Jane Clemens with dramatic
technique", and although the coffin and dreadful
oath strongly suggest the imagination of Tom Sawyer,
Van Wyck Brooks uses this instance to form a theory
concerning Clemens' entire life, according to which
his genius was destroyed in his twelfth year. 11
Four years after recounting this incident of
the coffin Mark Twain referred to the turning point
of his life as the acquiring of measles. "Everyone
believed I would die, but on the fourteenth day a
change came for the worse and they were disappointed."
Upon his recovery, he continued, his mother having
grown tired of trying to keep him out of mischief,
took him out of school and put him "into more
masterful hands". He became a printer and "began
to add one link after another to the chain which
was to lead me into the literary profession.” 12
The two stories, but four years apart, are

another reason for DeVoto's skepticism of Brooks'

views. It is not hard to se that DeVoto puts little

 

11 Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain's America, p.83.

12 Ibid., p.85.

58

faith in Van Wyck Brooks' theory. DeVoto objects to
it on the grounds that Brooks bases the theory on

this one scene.

In Mr. Brooks' hands the scene tells
the whole story. It creates Mark Twain and
damns him. By promising to be a better boy
young Sam has thrown away his birthright as
an artist (undetectable in anything available
to biOgraphy). John Marshall Clemens, dying,
has molded in the shape of respectability
a boy who might have been the greatest of
American writers. Jane Clemens, the goddess
Nemesis in linsey-woolsey, seals on him the
mark of the mother imag2, and creates the
retribution of self-betrayal for this
acceptance of false values, thus strangling
genius in its twelfth year. 1

 

13 Bernard DeVoto, op.cit., p.82.

59

II The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

An attempt has already been made to show the
similarities between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and The Story of a Bad Bgy . The moment one attempts
to analyze the character of Tom Sawyer one is faced
with a most difficult task. For the qualities that
made Tom Sawyer what he is were evolved from the
themes and feelings that meant most to Mark Twain
as a literary artist. The society in which Tom moved,
his freedom and security in the life on the river,
as well as the darker fear and insecurity caused by
his superstitions and dread terror were Mark Twain's
fullest expression of the spirit that is Boy.

The Dictionary of American Biography states that
Mark Twain would have been surprised if anybody at
the time had called his turning to boyhood
reminiscences "an evidence that he had been intimidated
by his conservative friends and had for that reason
shirked his obligations to be drastic." 1 It speaks of
his "immense delight in life in general, an
omnivorous relish for all phases of comedy, a tender-

ness too quick to be invariably well judged, and an

 

1 Dictionary of American Bioggaphy, IV, p.195.

6O

eager disposition to please his hearers and readers
as well as he pleased himself with the exercise of
this robust art...Comic energy was his nature, rather
than his purpose or his weapon.
Mark Twain himself was at times doubtful about
the value of the "Huck" Finn and Tom Sawyer books.
Wagenknecht quotes from a letter written by Mark Twain
to Joel Chandler Harris, in November, 1885, thanking
him "for the good word about Huck, that abused child
of mine who has had so much mud thrown at him. Some-
how I can't help believing in him, and it's a great
refreshment to my faith to have a man back me up who
has been where such boys live, and knows what he is
talking about.“ 3 It is not surprising that Mark
Twain was unable to sense the full merit of the two
books. He was too close to them to judge their value.
Later, in 1887, he said of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
"Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose form

to give it a worldly air." 4

 

2 The Dictionary of American Biography, IV, p.195.
3 Edward Wagenknecht, op.cit., p.66.
4 Ibid.

61

Throughout the book one is impressed by the
shrewdness of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain discusses this
trait in connection with the fence painting incident, but
the comments he makes at this time apply throughout
the book:

In order to make a man or boy covet

a thing it is only necessary to make the

thing difficult to attain. If he had been

a great and wise philosopher, like the

writer of this book, he would now have

comprehended that Work consists of what-

ever a body is obliged to do, and that

Play consists of whatever a body is not

obliged to do.... There are wealthy gentlemen

in England who drive four-horse passenger

coaches twenty or thirty miles on a

daily line, in the summer, because the

privilege costs them considerable money,

but if they were offered wages for the

service, that would turn it into work

and then they would resign. 5

Mention has already been made concerning Thomas
Bailey Aldrich's inability to lie in school. He
confessed his sins, received a small coin from the
smiling teacher and rushed away, tears of shame in
his eyes, to buy some firecrackers. School to Tom
Aldrich, while not a place of joy, was, nevertheless,
not a place for mischief either. He respected his
teacher and did not dream of playing "hookey".

Horatio Alger's heroes were of the same mold.
They were "A" students who could not have skipped if
such a thoughthad ever entered their minds; they

either acted as janitors after school hours, or were

 

5 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.296.

62

hard at work in a dingy store making money for their
widowed mothers.
Tom Sawyer, however ----- Tom Sawyer:

The harder Tom tried to fasten his mind

on his book the more his ideas wandered.
So at last, with,a sigh and a yawn, he
gave it up. It;Weemed to him the noon recess
would never come. The air was utterly dead.
There was not a breath stirring. It was
the sleepiest of sleepy days..The drowsing
murmur of the five and twenty studying
scholars soothed the soul like the spell
that is in the murmur of bees. Away off in
the flaming sunshine Cardiff Hill lifted its
soft green sides through a shimmering veil

of heat, tinted with the purple of distance;
a few birds floated on lazy wing high in the
air; no other living thing was visible but
some cows and they were asleep. Tom‘s heart
ached to he free, or else to have something
of interest to do to pass the dreary time.
His hand wandered into his pocket and his
face lit up with a glow of gratitude that
was prayer, though he did not know it.
Then, furtively, the percussion-cap box
came out. He released the tick and put him
on the long flat desk. The creature probably
glowed with a gratitude that amounted to
prayer, too, at this moment, but it was
premature; for when he started thankfully
to move off, Tom turned him aside w th a pin
and made him take a new direction.

In taking the whipping which was rightfully
deserved by Becky Thatcher, Tom reasoned in an
interesting manner. Tom Bailey would have denied
it truthfully. Horatio Alger's young gentlemen
would have denied it, but taken the licking like a

man without the least quivering of lips. Tom Sawyer

 

6 Harper & Brothers, op.cit., p.318.

 

53

however, "took his whipping and went back to his seat
not at all broken-hearted, for he thought it was
possible that he had unknowingly upset the ink on the
spelling book himself, in some Skylarking bout---he
had denied it for form's sake and because it was
custom, and had stuck to the denial from principle." 7
Such was the code of Tom Sawyer. The code of Tom
Sawyer did not stop at the limits of the school grounds.
It extended out into all of his associations. It
permeated his adventures and formeda basis for mutual
trust and honor among all his friends. True, his .
guarantee might not be measured in dollars, but how
many treasures of that age can?

It is significant that when Tom, afflicted with
homesickness, left his fellow pirates on the island
he left sufficient security. In fact, they were
treasures---a lump of chalk stolen from school, a
ball made of India-rubber, three rusty fish hooks,
and a marble known as a "sure'nough crystal". These
he reclaimed in spectacular fashion, stepping out
from the shadows at the last moment. Had Tom left

with ut this security he would have been in disgrace.

 

7 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.318.

64

Had he not returned for them the boys would have been
free to return to civilization with Jeers and with
their pockets full of riches.

For sheer joy of living and expression of animal
spirit there is nothing in either Aldrich's or Alger's
work that can compare with Mark Twain's scene on the
sand bar. In fact, ther= is nothing in The Story of a
Bad Boy or in the Alger books dealing with nudity.
The claim is not being set forth here that the sand
bar scene, presently to be quoted, was a deliberate
attempt by Mark Twain to outdo the other two authors.
It is simply another sample of Mark Twain's ability
to pick out those details that are eternal in the
lives of boys.

After breakfast they went whooping and
prancing out on the bar, and chased each
other round and round, shedding clothes as
they went, until they were naked, and then
continued the frolic far away up the shoal
water of the bar, against the stiff current,
which latter tripped their legs from under
them from time to time and greatly increased
the fun. And now and then they stooped in
a group and splashed water in each other's
face with their palms, gradually approaching
each other, with averted faces to avoid
the strangling sprays and finally gripping
and struggling 'till the best man ducked his
neighbor, and then they all went under in
a tangle of white legs and arms, and came
up blowing, sputtering, laughing, and

65
gasping for breath at one and the same time. 8

Mark Twain continually held that Youth was
superior to Age in regard to happiness. In the
following passag s he again captures and holds the
emotion that is Boy:

Saturday morning was come, and all the
summer world was bright and fresh, and
brimming with life. There was a song in
every heart; and if the heart wgs young
the music issued at the lips.

From a Negro Tom had learned a difficult method
of whistling, a liquid warble produced by a rapid
movement of the tongue against the roof of the mouth.
Clemens remarks, "the reader probably remembers how
to do it if he has eger been a boy." Tom strides down
the street whistling:

He felt much as an astronomer feels who
has discovered a new p1anet--no doubt, as far
as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is
concerned, the advantage was with the boy,
not the astronomer. 0
Prayer formed a definite part of Tom Sawyers life,

and although it was nefer as firmly entrenched as
Tom Aldrich's,it was a handy thing to have, even if
prayers didn't seem to get results, It will be recalled

that Tom Sawyer and his comrades considered omitting

 

8 Harper & Brothers, op.cit., p.357.
9 Ibid., p.293.
10 Ibid., p.290.

66

'prayers altogether on the island, but were afraid to
for fear of calling down a special thunderbolt from
Heaven; prayers, when performed by Tom, were from the
standpoint of supersition and fear. Huck Finn was a
confirmed skeptic. His prayers for fishing tackle had
come to nothing but thread. He couldn't use the thread
without the hooks and it wasn't very strong thread
anyway. "Prayers don't work," he said, "for only just
the right kind."

Possibly Horatio Alger's youth gave him a deep
aversion to prayer; he seems to shie away from.it
and his mentions of religious matters seem to be
concerned chiefly with the economic instability of
a minister's lot. In Helping_Himself young Grant
Thornton asks Deacon Gridley for two hundred dollars,
but does not get it. Grant, as the young son of
the local minister, has to go to New York. There, of
course, he finally earns far more than two hundred
dollars. He does not, however, have to attend Sunday
school to get it, nor does he of his own volition.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich speaks of the "gloomy
Sundays"_spent in the living room listening to
Grandpa Nutter read from the family Bible, but nowhere
is there any open rebellion beyond the uncontrollable

restlessness of youth.

67

In real life Mark Twain's sister Pamela was the
only one who could influence him to such an extent
that he would exert himself in memorizing verses.
Tom Sawyer tackled the verses of the Sermon on the
Mount under the "double pressure of curiosity and
prospective gain." 11 He received for his torture a
brand new Barlow Knife.

"Blessed are the--a--a--."

"Poor."
"Yes-~poor;:blessed are the poor-~a--a."
"In spirit---."
"In spirit; blessed are the poor in
spirit, for they-~they--." 2
Mark Twain handled the scenes in church in a
manner that Aldrich might secretly have agreed with,
but certainly never found the courage to express.
The swapping of the yellow, red, and blue tickets
for the prize Bible which was "so attractive that
on the day it was given out every scholar's heart
Awas fired with a fresh ambition that often lasted a
couple of weeks,“ was not the work of a religious
young man. 13 Nor was the naming of David and Goliath
as the first two disciples the work of a scholarly
young man.

Mark Twain gives one of those delightful bits

of descriptive writing in a picture of a fly which

 

11 Harper and Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.301.
12 Ibid.

13 IEiQ-. p.303.

68

alighted in front of Tom during a sermon which Tom
was enduring. Tom was fascinated. He longed to cup
his palm and sweep it in, although he did not dare,
for he knew that that would mean the instantaneOus

destruction of his soul.

A fly had lit on the back of the pew
in front of him and tortured his spirit by
calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing
its head with its arms, and polishing it so
vigorously that it seemed to almost part
company with the body, and the slender thread
of a neck was exposed to view; scraping its
wings with its hind legs and smoothing them
to its body as if they had been coat-tails;
going through its whole toilet as tranquilly
as if it knew it was perfectly safe...But with
the closing sentence his hand began to curve
and steal forward; and the instant the "Amen”
was out the fly was a prisoner of war..His
aunt detected the act and made him let it go. 14

Later on in the sermon Tom is responsible
for the hilarious dOg and pinchbug scene which broke
up the church meeting.

Tom went home quite cheerful, thinking

to himself that there was some satisfaction

about divine service when there was a bit of

variety to it. He had but one marring thought;f
he was willing that the dog should play with
his pinchbug, but he did not think it was
upright of him to carry it off.

It will be remembered that the pinchbug, while
admittedly carried off by the dog, was carried
unwillingly and as a grim passenger; it had fastened
its pincers securely in the fleshy part of the dog's

nose. This, however, is a small point and was ignored

*—

14 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.309.

15 Ibid., p.311.

69

by Tom Sawyer, who saw in the event the loss of a
valuable bug.

If young Sam Clemens was unable to find inspiration
in religious services he did find it elsewhere. Sam
at one time was so inspired that he became a member
. of the Christian Sons of Temperance. Paine, in his
biography of Mark Twain, records that, like Tom Sawyer,
Sam Clemens loved the glare and trappings of leader-
ships:

When the Christian Sons of Temperance
came along with a regalia, and a red sash
that carried with it rank and the privilege
of inventing pass-words the gaud of these
things got into his eyes, and he gave up
smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and
swearing (which he did only under heavy
excitement), also liquor (though he had
never tased it yet) and marched with the
newly washed and pure in heart for a full
month---a month of splendid leadership and
servitude. Then even the red sash could
not hold him in bondage. He looked up Tom
Blankenship and said, "Say, Tom, I' m blamed
tired of this. Let' s go somewhere and smoke'" 16

Mark Twain's views on the merits of treats
honestly come by and treats acquired by skill are
expressed in his autobiography. They are not views
which are shared by his "Aunt Polly" in the Tom

Sawyer book. In praise of Tom's fence painting

 

16 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.60.

7O

accomplishment Aunt Polly took him into the closet and,
selecting a fine apple, gave it to him along with an
improving lecture upon "the added value and flavor
a treat took to itself when it came without sin
through virtuous effort." 17 As she closed with a
flourish of Scripture, Tom "hooked" a doughnut.

It is difficult to see howAunt Polly could ever
"get to" Tom, but by Tom's own brusque admittance
she could, and his statement shows that Tom, rascal
though he was, had an innate goodness and a certain
ethical standard beyond which he could not pass. This
is revealed in a remark of his concerning his Aunt's
method of punishing him:-

"She! She never licks anybody-~whack

'em over the huad with her thimble--and who

cares for that, I'd like to know. She talks

awful, but‘talk denig hurt--anyways it don't

if she don t cry. -

And then Tom got back to the problem at hand:

"I'll give you a marvel. I'll give you
a white alley." 9

Here, then, is a boy who takes us through the

gamut of intense, painful, youthful emotions. In subtle

 

17 Harper & Brothers, gp,cit.,p.293.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.

71

derision of the melodramatic actions of Juvenile
characters of the time Hark Twain shows the difference
between the real and the "type".

There is the "martyr complex" in which Tom,
in a reverie of self-pity over being punished wrongly
for the breaking of a sugar bowl by his brother, Sid,
sees himself "sick unto death":

He knew that in her heart his Aunt
was on her knees to him, and he was
morosely gratified by the consciousness
of it. He would hang out no signals, he
would take notice of none...He pictured
himself lying sick unto death and his
Aunt bending over him beseeching one
little forgiving word, but he would turn
his face to the wall, and die with that
word unsaid. Ah, how would she feel then?
And he pictured himself brought home from
the river,dead,with his curls all wet,
and his sore heart at rest. How she would throw
herself upon him, and how her tears would
fall like rain, and her lips pray God to give
her back her boy and she would never, never
abuse him any more! But he would lie there
cold and white and make no sign---a poor
little sufferer, whose griefs were at an
end.

And Tom worked himself up so, that
shortly the tears were running down the side
of his nose and his eyes swam in a blur of
water..And such a luxury to him was this
petting of his sorrows, that he could not
bear to have any worldly cheeriness or any
grating delight intrude upon it; it was too
sacred for such contact; and so, presently,
when his cousin Mary danced in, all alive
with the joy of seeing home again after an

72

an age-dong visit of one week to the country,

he got up and moved in clouds and darkness out

at one door as she brought song and sunshine

in at the other. 20

This tragic picture is presented without comment.
by Mark Twain. In such a scene of sorrow none is
needed, but in a similar scene in which Tom Bailey's
love was spurned the tone was amused and tolerant.
Alger, of course, had no time for such passages. His
characters were never tainted by emotions of this
type.

There is.the supreme optimism of youth as
expressed by Tom after hours of futile digging for
"the treasure":

"Oh, I know what the matter is.

What a blamed lot of fools we are. You

got to find out where the shadow of the

limb falls at midnight, and that' s where

you dig” 1

This, of course, made it necessary to come back
at night and dig, but first they had to conceal their
labor for "they'd know in a minute what's here and
they'd go for it." 22 This whole episode had a strangely
familiar ring to it, as though Mark Twain were giving
us a Juvenile "Gold Bug" story in the style of Poe.

Paine states that this episode was autobiographical,

 

20 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.299.
21 Ibid., p.391.
22 Ibid.

73

although the original differs considerably from the
digging incident in the book. 23

Although the exuberance of Tom Sawyer is
delightful in reasonable amounts, thirty-two pages
of it in the rescue of Jim in Huckleberry Finn become
tiresome. There is a bit of human weakness in this
episode. The rescue is not so much a matter of moral
right or friendship as it is romance and excitement.
Where Jim's chain can be lifted over the leg of the
bed to free him , it takes thirty-two pages of pure
unadulterated fantasy for Tom to accomplish the rescue..
With a little fortitude on the part of Jim, Tom
believed that the rescue could be strung out to
eighty years---the best time on record:

Tom was in high spirits. He said it

was the best fun he ever had in his life,

and the most intellectural (sic); and said

if he only.could see his way to it we would

keep it up all the rest of our lives and

leave Jim to our children to get out; for

he believed Jim would come to like it better

and better the more he got used to it. He

said that in that way it could be strung out

to as much as eighty year, and would be

the best time on record. And he said it
would make us all celebrated that had a

hand in it. 2

This rescue seems to be something of a record in
itself. Aldrich's conservatism and self-conscious

style and Alger's stiffness do have their advantages

 

23 Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography, p.63.

24 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.619.

74

over such uncontrolled flights of fancy:

"Well, if that ain't Just like you,
Huck Finn. You can get up the infant-
schooliest ways of going at a thing. Why
hain't you ever read any books at all?
Like Baron Trenck, nor Casanova, nor
Benvenuto Cheeleeny, nor Henry IV, nor
none of them heroes? Who ever heard of‘
getting a prisoner loose in such an
old maidy way as that? No; the way all
the best authorities does is to saw the
bed-leg in two, and leave it Just so, and
swallow the sawdust, so it can't be found,
and put some dirt and grease around the
sawed place so the Very keenest seneskal
can't see no sign of its being sawed,
and thinks the bed-leg is perfectly
sound. Then the night you're ready,
fetch the leg a kick, down she goes; slip off
your chain, and there you are. Nothing to
do but hitch your rope ladder to the
battlements, shin down, break your 135
in the moat---because a rope ladder is
nineteen foot too short, you know---and
there's your horses and your trusty
vassles, and they scoop you up and fling
you across a saddle, and away you go to
your native Langudoc, or Navarre, or‘
wherever it is. It's gaudy, Huck. I wish
there was a moat to this cabin. If we
get time“ the night of the escape we'll
dig one.

During the rescue Tom scolds Huck for not entering
into the rescue properly. Huck is complaining that
there is no object in digging down to China if "Nigger
Jim" doesn't know anybody there:

"Jim don' t know anybody in China.”
"What‘ 3 that got to do with it? Neither
did that other fellow. You' re always

a-wandering off on a side issugsm can 't
you stick to the main point?"

 

25 Harper & Brothers, op.cit., p.612.
26 Ibid., p.615.

75

III Huckleberry Finn

It was not until Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry
E13p_that he really hit his stride. True, in the
dramatization of the rush, the sound and fury of
boyhood The Adventures of Tom Sawyer gives loosely
connected episodes of boyhood, but as Erskine points
outamark Twain gets a picture of life that is "outi
of focus, and makes it difficult for us to interpret
the exceptional events in terms of the normal parts of
his story." 1 Huckleberry Finn, however, tells a lot
more than he realizes about his world. Through his
eyes a sharply defined picture can be obtained that-
is not out of focus, but is an objective picture of
ourselves.

The superstitions, memories of boyhood, and the
middle west of the 1850's are presented as in The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer;, but in addition to these qualities

appears a satirical picture in which Mark Twain

 

1 John Erskine, The Delight of Great Books, p.263.

76

presents the adults of the community with their virtues
and their vices.

There can be no doubt that Mark Twain, unlike his
contemporaries, was not writing the stories of Huck
and Tom to further moral growth in children. He was
writing in the vein in which he liked to write, and he
was writing to earn a living. He was deeply outraged,
however, and his feelings were definitely hurt when
librarians saw in his books sources of corruption for
children. His daughter Susy tells of Mark Twain, sulky,
but dutiful, submitting Huckleberry Finn to Mrs. Clemens
for censorship:

. Ever since papa and mamma were married

papa has written his books and then taken

them to mama in manuscript, and she has

expergated (sic) them. Papa read Huckleberry

Finn to us... He would leave parts of it

with mama to expergate while he went off to

the study to work....We used to see her turn

down the leaves of the pages, which meant

that some delightfully terrible part must be

scratched out. 2

Huckleberry is not a good boy. He was “idle“,
"lawless", ”vulgar”, and "bad", to use the expressions

of the mothers of the town. In the opening pages of

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer a clear picture of Huck

 

2 Asa Don Dickinson, "Huck Finn is Fifty Years Old--
Yes;:But is He Respectable?" Wilson Bulletin for

Librarians, December; 1935.

77?

is given:

All of the children admired him, and
delighted in his forbidden society, and
wished they dared to be like him. Tom was
like the rest of the respectable boys, in
that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy out—
cast condition, and was under strict orders
not to play with him. So he played with him
every time he got a chance. Huckleberry
was always dressed in the cast-off clothes
of full-grown men, and they were in
perennial bloom and fluttering with rage.
His hat was a vast ruin with a wide crescent
lopped out of its brim; his coat, when he
wore one, hung nearly to his heels and had
the rearward buttons far down the back; but-
one suspender supported his trousers; the
seat of the trousers bagged low and
contained nothing; the fringed legs dragged
in the dirt when not rolled up.

Huckleberry came and went, at his own
free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine
weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he
did not have to go to school or to church,
or call any being master or obey anybody;
he could go fishing or swimming when and where
he chose, and stay as long as it suited him;
nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit
up as late as he pleased; and he was always
the first boy that went barefoot in the
spring and the last to resume leather in the
fall; he never had to wash nor put on clean
clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In
a word,everything that goes to make life
precious, that boy had. 50 thought every
harassed, hampergd, respectable boy in
St. Petersburg.

The result of such a bringing-up, or lack of one
produced a character whose approach to life could not

possibly have been the normal and average approach.

 

3' Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.313.

78

Mark Twain, therefore, had an agent who could view
even the most outrageous situation with complacency
and present it as matter of fact while remaining
absolutely unaccountable to any living person. That.
Mark Twain relished this, as well as realized it,

is readily apparent when the passages dealing with
the vices and the narrow virtues of the community are
read.

Contrast the scrubbed and neatly patched Alger
hero with Huck, who, rich and the possessor of an
income for life, has been dragged into the home of
the widow Douglas.\His lament at such a fate is not
at all like the proud and clean Algerian character.
Prodded out of an empty hogshead behind the slaughter-
house by Tom Sawyer, who has been searching for the
fugitive, Huck emerged unkempt, uncombed, and clad
in his ruin of rags. His plea was pitiful:

"Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried

it, and it don't work; it don't work, Tom.

It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The

widder's good to me, and friendly; but I

can't stand them ways. She makes me git

up Just at the same time every morning;:

she makes me wash, they comb me all to

thunder; she won't let me sleep in the

wood shed; I got to wear them blamed clothes

that Just smothers me, Tom; they don't

seem to let any air git through 'em,

somehow; and they're so rotten nice that

I can't set down, nor lay down, nor

roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on
a cellar- door for--well, it seems like

years; I got to go to church and sweat

and sweats-I hate them ornery sermons:

I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't

chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday.

The widder eats by a bell; she goes to

bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell--

everything's so axful reg'lar a body

can't stand it."

This is Huck Finn; this is Boy. His morality,
his strange religion that is not religion, his
complete freedom from restraint of any kind, his
trips along the great river, his traffic with the devil
during the rescue of Nigger Jim give a glimpse of a
land that is not only pastoral, but a land that is
filled with violence and terror on every hand. And
through this violence and terror the shrewd Huck Finn
threads his way, sizing up mankind and not being very
much impressed with what he finds. For he finds that
men are senseless and cruel as he views the Granger-
ford-Shepherdson feud; he learns that liquor can
make them do strange and horrible things as he watches
his father through the night and falls asleep holding
a shotgun; he learns that fear in man is stronger~
than humanity and plays upon that trait when he invites
the boatload of armed slave hunters aboard his raft to

give aid to a "man suffering small-pox“ , and thus,

 

4 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.433.

79

80

saves Jim from capture.

Brander Matthews compares Mark Twain to Cervantes
because he makes us laugh first and think afterwards.
Unlike Cervantes' work, it has not taken a full century
for readers to find out that The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were more than funny books:

It likerhaps rather with the picaroon
romances f Spain that Huckleberry Finn is

to be compared than with the masterpiece of
Cervantes; but I do not think it will be a
century or three generations before we Americans
generaly discover how great a book

Hucklebergy Finn really is, how keen its
vision of character, how close its

observation of life, how sound its philosophy,
and how it records for us once and for all
certain phases of Southwestern society which
it is very important for us to perceive and

to understand. The influence of slavery, the
prevalence of feuds, the conditions and the
circumstances that make lynching possible-~all
these things are set before us clearly and
without comment. It is for us to draw

.our own mgral, each for himselfs as we do

when we see Shakespeare acted.

Phillips brings out the same point, but goes a
step further. Pointing out that Huck Finn is more
than Lazarillo of the picaresque novel; even
superior than Hugo's Gavroche, "the immortal
ragamuffin of fiction."

For they were only gamins, the outcasts

of the lowest round of society. Huck Finn
is the equal not only of all the characters

 

5 Brander Matthews, "Mark Twain—His Work," The Book

81

of the book, but of all readers. In spite
of his birth he is human; he has our
sympathy; we must own him brother. It is
the consummate art of the author that has
brought this result to bear. But it is the
broad spirit of equality, the result of
actual experience and long familiarity with
the ideas and ideals of that early
southwestern life, that, in the first
instance made the cogception of such a
character possible.

 

6 R.E. Phillips, "Mark Twain; More Than Humorist,"
W . Vol. 22 (1901). p.199.

82

IV The Character of Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain felt that humorous story-telling was
distinctly an American creation. The basis of this
art was to "string incongruities and absurdities
together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless
way and seem innocently unaware that they are
absurdities.",1 He practiced this in his mannerisms
on the stage and in his writing..

Huck, unspoiled, uneducated, and yet blessed with
the vivid and almost pictorial imagination that so
often is given to the uneducated? was the product ot‘
a literary genius who had developed the art of
humorous story telling to the highest. Where Tom
Sawyer was smart, self-assertive, and inclined to
take hold of any situation in a grandiose and highly
melodramatic way, Huck always avoided making direct‘

comments in telling his story. Although this clever
literary device is well known, the principle is a lot

 

l R.E. Phillips, op.cit., p. 196.

8}

easier to state than to follow. Mark Twain's Huck Finn
is the first of the Juvenile characters to break away
from the traditional "story with a lesson" and

"story with opportunities for moral growth." He broke
from the traditional manner of presentation because

he realized that Huck Finn's reactions would bring
about the desired response in his readers. Some of the
greatest passages of satire ever written are in the
oratory of the "Duke" and the"Dolphin" aboard the
raft. There is no comment on any of this, either by
Huck or Jim. There is no necessity for it.

Tom Bailey would have hastened to reassure the
"gentle reader" that he realized the two were imposters
and scoundrels. Horatio Alger, who never allowed his
readers' minds to do any heavy lifting, would have
devoted a paragraph of editorial writing to the cause.
Religious publications for the betterment of children's
minds and other Juvenile publications would not have
allowed such a scene to be printed.

Huck is definitely a skeptic, but he does have a
conscience. At times it bothers him. "Borrowing" was
the term he applied to stealing. It was usually necessary

for Huck to borrow whenever he wished to eat. This fact

was particularly troublesome during the trip down
river with Nigger'Jim.

Mornings before daylight-I slipped into
corn-fields and borrowed a watermelon, or
a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn,
or things of that kind. Paptalways said it
warn't no harm to borrow things if you was
meaning to pay them back some time; but the
widow said it warn't anything but a soft
name for stealing, and no decent body would
do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was
partly right and pap was partly right; so
the best way would be for us to pick out two
or three things from the list and say we
wouldn't borrow them any more---then he
reckoned it wouldn't be no harm to borrow the
others.

So we talked it over all one night,
drifting along down the river trying to make-
up our minds whether to drop the watermelons,
or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or
what. But towards daylight we got it all
settléd satisfactory, and concluded to
dr0p crabapples and p'simmons. We warn't
feeling Just right before that, but it was
all comfortable now. I was glad the way it
come out, too, because crabapples ain't
ever good, and the p'simmons wouldn't be
ripe for two or three months yet..2

Prayers were "interruptions" that cooled the
food and made it taste like "cold cannibal". 3
However, Huck could be genuinely shocked by un-Christian
conduct. This is shown by his reaction to the

Grangerford-Shepherdson feud:

 

2 -Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.506.

3 Ibid.,p.605.

85

Next Sunday we all went to church,
about three mile, everbody a-horseback..The
men took their guns along, so did Buck and
kept them between their knees or stood them
handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons
done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching,
all about brotherly love, and such-like
tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a
good sermon, and they all talked it over
going home, and such a powerful lot to say
about faith and good works and free grace
and predestination, and I don't know what
all, and yet it turned out to be one of 4
the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.

Huck's decision to help Jim escape from
slavery brings on another struggle with his conscience.
Stealing was bad enough, but it could be rationalized.
Nigger-stealing, however, was another thing. It was
the most dastardlygat known to man. It was a sure
ticket to Hell; he would not only go to Hell , he
would be despised by all men. Even Huck had a horror
of those who aided niggers in their escape. Balanced
against these emotions were his relations with Jim,
the terror evinced by Jim at the thought of being sold,
and the adventures that the two had had tOgether. Hell
still seemed like a bad place in which to live, so
Huck wrote out the following note:

Miss Watson,

Your runaway Nigger Jim is
down here two mile below Pikesville, and hr. Phelps

 

4 Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p. 519.

86

has got him and he will give him up
for the reward if you send.

Huck Finn 5

This done, Huck felt "all washed clean of sin for
the first time,“ gnd sat there thinking how good it was
all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost
and going to hell." 7 As he sits there feeling so good
about having reformed and turning Jim in, his mind
takes that curious turn it so often does and his innate
sense of Justice, a revolt against the laws and customs
of men begins to struggle with his conscience. His

mental struggle is acute:

...and I see Jim before me all the time:
in the day and in the night-time, some-
times moonlight, sometimes storms, and

we a-floating along, talking and singing
and laughing. But somehow, Ivgguldn' t seem
to strike no places to harden me against
him, but.0nly the other kind. I'd see him
standing my watch on top of hisn' t, 'stead of
calling me, so I could go on sleeping;:
and see him how glad he was when I come
back'QUt of the fog; and when I came to
him again in the swamp, up there where

the feud was; and such-like times; and
would always call me hone, and pet me,

and do everything he could think of for
me, and how good he always was;vahd at
last I struck the time I saved him by
telling the men we had smallpox aboard,
and he was so grateful, and said I was

the best friend old Jim ever had in the

 

S Harper & Brothers, The Family Mark Twain, p.593.
Ibid.
7 Ibid.

87

world, and the only one he's got now; and then
I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and
held it in my hand. I was_a-trembling
because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt
two things, and ngnowed it. I studied for
a minute, sort of holding my breath, and
then says to myself: “All right, then, I'll
go to hell," and tore it up.

It was awful_thoughts and awful words ,
but they was said. And I let them stay said
and never thought no more about-reforming.

I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and
said I would take up wickedness again, which
was in my line, being brung up to it, and

the other warn't..And for a starter I
weald go to work and steal Jim out of
slavery again; and if I could think up
anything worse, I would do that, too;
because as long as I was in, and in for

good I might as well go the whole hog..8

"’

Previously Huck had had to assuage his conscience
when the slave hunters had approached the raft. At
that time he had passed it off by saying that "a body
that don't get sgggggd right when he's little ain't
got no show." 9 He had had quite a talk with himself
over the situation:

Then I thought a minute, and says to
myself, hold on; s'pose you'd 'a' done
right and give Jim up, would you felt
better than what you do now? No, says I,
I'd feel bad---I'd feel Just the same way
I do now. Well, then, says I in my head,
what's the use you learning to do right
when it's troublesome to do right and
ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the
wages is Just the same? I was stuck. I

 

8 Harper a Brothers, op.cit., p.593.
9 Ibid., p.506.

‘O

88

couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I
wouldn't bother no more about it, but
after that always do whachever come
handlest at the time.

There is no questioning the fact that Huck felt
outside the pale of civilization. He knew that he
had no "upright folks“ who were a part of the community
in which he lived. He felt of himself as "lowdown" and
not worth mentioning. He felt no strength of
character in his decision to help Nigger Jim at the
expense of going to Hell, and his complete simplicity
is brought out when he puzzles over Tom's willingness
to help in the dastardly crime:

Here was a boy that was respectable
and well brung up; and had a character to
lose; and folks at home that had
characters; and he was bright and not
leather-headed; and knowing and not
ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and
yet, here he was, without any more pride,
or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop‘
to this business, and make himself a
shame, and his family a shame, before
everybody. I couldn't understand it no
way at all. It was outrageous, and I
knowed I ought to Just up and tell him
so, and so be his true friend, and let,
him quit the thing right where he was
and save himself, and I did start to 11
tell him; but he shut me up and says....

 

10’ Harper & Brothers, op.cit., p.506.
11 Ibid., p.607.

89

Huck, it is true, was only the trampish son
of a drunkard. He stole his food, he lied his way out
of any difficulty into which his carefree life of
drifting down the river led him. He despised his
conscience for the weak thing that it was in his eyes.
Mention has been made of his statement to the effect
that if he had a "yaller" dog worth what his
conscience was worth he would shoot it. He has been

"brung up" to wickedness. It was his lot and he did
not, could not rebel against it, but somehow, out

of low station, ignorance and wickedness his loyalty
to Nigger Jim, as well as to the strange code by which
he lived , always rose above the problems that beset
him.

And as he drifted down the Mississippi burdened
with the flailings of his conscience, frightened by
the supersitions on every hand, he experienced the
Joys of life to the point of saturation; he squeezed

the very Juice out of life.

90

CHAPTER IV
Conclusion

Mark Twain's early life gave him complete independence
of thought. Living along the banks of the Mississippi
river he was exposed to all of the influences of its
bustling excitement during the era of expansion.

His lack of a formal education along traditional
lines of thought gave him a clarity of Judgment that
refused to accept anything except at its face value.

He refused to be abashed or intimidated when he came into
contact with both EurOpean thought and works, or the
work of his contemporaries.

When this complete independence of thought was
brought into contact with the traditional type of writing
as represented in the current periodicals and the Juvenile
literature of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Horatio Alger,

a sympathetic reaction on the part of Mark Twain could
not be expected. His very nature rebelled against it.

Although he was too politic to give vent Openly to
his opinions of the Juvenile literature of the time, a
study of the incidents in The Adventures of Tom Sawyeg'

and Huckleberry Finn shows that Mark Twain followed'

91

closely the pattern set by his friend.Aldrich, not with
a view of imitation, but with the idea of putting his
characters into similar situation in order that he
might handle those situations with the same impudence
that made him wear a white tuxedo to match his hair.
It was this impatience with restrictions that made it
- impossible for Mark Twain to conform to the current style.
Ittwas never Mark Twain's habit to remark when he
could make the reader form his own conclusions.
Huckleberry and Tom were characters used as a powerful
medium for satire of man's inner weakness and the
docility with which he follows accepted patterns of
behavior and of writing. No comment on contemporaneous
Juvenile writing was given by Mark Twain. His flair for
descriptive writing, his presentation of action, and

his choice of material made it unnecessary.

92

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. The Story of a Bad Boy, Boston:
Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1869.7

Clemens, Samuel L. Mark Twain's Autobiography, New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1924.

DeVoto, Bernard. Mark Twain's America, Boston: Little,
Brown a Company, 1932.

DeVoto, Bernard. Mark Twain in_§ruption, New York:
Harper & Brothers,—1940.

Erskine, John. The Delights of Great Books, New York:
World Publishing Company,.1941.

 

The FamilyMark Twain, New York::Harper & Brothers,l935.

Mayes, Hubert R. Alger, A Biography Without a Hero,
New York: Macy-Masius, Inc., 1928.

Nevins, Allen. The Evening Post, a_gentury of Journalism,
New York: Boni and Liveright, 1932.

Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark TwainI a Biography, New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1912.

Pattee, Fred Lewis. A History of American Literature
Since 1870, New York: The Century Company, 1916}

Phelps, William Lyon. Essays on Books, New York:
Macmillan Company, 1922.

Phelps, William Lyon. Essays on Modern Novelists,
New York: Macmillan Company, 1910.

Wagenknecht; Edward. Mark Twain, The Man and His Work,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935.

*4.-

Allen, F.L. "Horatio Alger, Jr.“ The Saturday Review of
Literature, (September, 1938 .

93

Beck, Warren. "Huck Finn Versus the Cash Boy." Education,
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Book Revigw Section, The Congregationalist, Vol. 12(1883),
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Brown, Rebert. "Life On the Mississippi." The Acadegy,
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Chamberlain“ Joseph Edgar. "The Self-Revelation of Mark
Twain. Book Section, Boston Evening Transcript,
(October 18, 1924).

Clark,.Charles H. "Mark Twain at Nook Farm.” The Critic,
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Dickinson, Asa Don. “Huckleberry Finn is Fifty Years Old
Yes; But is He Respectable?" Wilson Bulletin for
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Harris, J.C. "Mark Twain's Semi-Centennial." The Critic,
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"Horatio Alger Created 119 Synthetic Heroes.“ New York
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"Horatio Al er's Method of Writing a Story.“ Munsey's,
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"Horatio Alger's Standard Hero.” Reader's Digest, (November,
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Howells, William Dean. "Mark Twain: An Inquiry." North
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\

"In School With Becky Thatcher and Tom Sawyer." The Literary
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"Mark Twain On the Platform.” The Critic, Vol. 28(1896), p.286.

Mason, Laurens D. “Real Peeple in Mark Twain‘s Stories.“
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Masters, David. "Mark Twain's Place in Literature."
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