Mark Twain’s Working Notes
Most of Mark Twain’s notes for A Connecticut Yankee are in his note-books, although some, made during the course of composition, are in the margins of his manuscript and are presented in the textual notes. The working notes in this appendix survive on separate sheets of paper or on the backs of letters and manuscript pages. They have been presented here as faithfully as the rendering of handwriting into type allows.
The notes have been grouped on the basis of physical characteristics, comparison with the manuscript, the subject matter treated within each set, internal cohesion, and topical references. When Mark Twain numbered his pages, his numbers have been printed. In addition, a number has been given to each manuscript leaf within a sequence.
No emendations have been made in Mark Twain’s holograph notes. His ampersands have been retained. Words with single underlinings are rendered in italics. Cancellations are included and marked as struck through: complete. Added words and phrases are preceded and followed by carets: Hank. Editorial explanations are in italic type and enclosed in square brackets. Groups A and C are in the Mark Twain Papers, and Groups B and D are in the Berg Collection.
Mark Twain wrote these working notes on heavy wove cream-colored tablet paper measuring 23.8 by 14.8 centimeters (9 ⅜ by 5 13/16 inches). The name “Hank Smith” suggests that the notes were written after November 1886, for in the Governor’s Island reading the Yankee’s name is “Robert Smith,” while the plans for the sign-carrying knights in notes A-3 and A-4 suggest a terminal date of 1887, when chapter 16 (in which the advertising knights appear) was written. It is particularly interesting that Mark Twain was thinking up illustrations for his book as he mapped out his plot ideas.
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Hank Smith must occupy the reserved seat at the T. R.
Court of King’s Bench. Arthur at dawn in the palace gate del holding Court. Sir Lamorak de Galis.
Fine heliotype portraits of Arthur & Launcelot in armor. “Getting their first photographs taken.”
Oldest joke. Punch’s advice.
Subject & slave are the same thing.
No bells; no funerals; no weddings; no tournaments; no festivals. Silence everywhere. King & Country under an interdict for steam-press &c. “steampress &c.” possibly added later
Knights’ lies inspired by the jug.
Picture: The first locomotive tearing along, & priests, people & steel-clad knights breaking in every direction for the woods.
Priests excom “casting out” this devil with due & awful ceremony.
Train of hotel & palace cars fetching knights to tournament. “Tickets!”—stick check in knight’s helmet.
TrExcursion trains, ½ rate, good for 10 ten days, 100 pounds of baggage free, forbring the public to the tournament.
Express Co. bring knights’ horses; they check all their extra armor & the bagge-smashers try their level damdest to wreck it—but can’t.
Prize-candy boys drives a prodigious trade on the train, with the knights, who are as pleased as children with the prizes, & eat a bushel of candy to get one.
Knights by & by begin to succumb to luxury & lose energy; find it pleasanter to go holy-grailing by rail & steamboat—& seeking adventures.
Trial by battle. A green knight from a far country, seeking adventures, sees the locomotive coming, lays his lance in rest & charges it; air-break out of order. Picture of the collision.
Trial by battle. I gave a knight a pass to go holy-grailing, the train was ditched & he wana new suit of armor ruined. He
wanted me to pay for it. I declined, because he was not paying his way [begin page 513] & we had no contract with him. Wager of battle decided on by the king. I dodged him & then lassoed him.
I did everything I could to bring knight-hood errantry into contempt. Sent steel-clad riders through the country w between bulletinboards: “Persimmons’s Soap” or “Noyoudont’s Toothwash” or “No family complete happy without a barrel of Astoria; the children cry for it.”
When there were 150 the R. T. was full.
Your theology would be is just perfect except for one flaw. You take advantage of a baby that is helpless, you ought to have some way to get the advantage of a man that is helpless. As it stands now, between absolution & death a man isn’t situated so he can commit sin—he is in a halfconscious, dreamy state—& so first you know he slips away & gets to heaven in spite of you. Now what you want to do is to add one little device & you’ve got the whole human race as good as checkmated, the grown as well as the babies: you want to damn a man for sins committed in his dreams! [Precede it with a dream.]
Peterson’s Prophylactic Tooth-brushes.
[Get some from Magazine ads.]
Ch VII, p. 352. This is one of the beautiful chapters. Launcelot & his son Galahad descended from Christ. In what way? A curious tradition; Christ left no offspring.
L. must have descended from God, through the Virgin’s other children.
The Grail appears, covered.
Galahad swears to go seek it a year & a day. Whereupon the whole tribe resolve to go grailing, & Arthur is grieved.
Is here my chance to push a RR along, while they are out of my way?
These two pages are written in black ink on the cream-colored Keystone Linen (1) paper that Mark Twain used for much of the first half of the Connecticut Yankee manuscript. B-1 is written on the verso of manuscript page 199A (see the emendations and alterations lists, 147.34), and B-2 is on the verso of a letter from Clemens to Fred Hall, 2 September 1887. Although B-1 is numbered “5” and B-2 is numbered “7,” the pages are not necessarily part of the same sequence. B-2 is canceled with three vertical lines.
[begin page 514]Russell believes that the pages are all that remain of the “extracts” from Sir Robert Smith’s journal mentioned in the Sun’s account of the Governor’s Island reading, and theorizes further that they may be part of an ur-version of A Connecticut Yankee which Clemens read to his family in December 1885 (James Russell, “The Genesis, Sources, and Reputation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” [Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1966, pp. 7–12]). They are far more likely to represent plot notes or rough drafts for chapter 12 (which includes MS I, p. 199A), however. In that case, they should be dated 1887, when chapter 12 and the letter to Hall were written.
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wilderness, where you can travel a whole day on a stretch & never see even a shanty. However, never mind about these details—I’ve got to get down to business. The thing for me to do is to feel hunt out that ogre & his little batch of summer boarders. Take the castle by myself!—& lick the ogre. Well, not if I can compromise with him. I never saw such a bull-headed lot as this Round Table crowd; never think of doing anything by strategy, must do it all by force. If they’ve got any brains, I reckon
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The knights of the Round Table clothe him in armor—his first experience in this line—& start him off on horseback. He turns his feelings loose a little further on in his diary—as follows:
“Well of all the infernal straight-jackets idiotic contrivances that was ever invented, this boiler-iron straight-jacket takes the cake. By the time I had ridden an hour in the sun, it appeared to weigh a couple of tons. The sun warmed it up, & it was as sultry inside there as it could have been in any other stove. It got hotter & hotter all the time, & it did seem to me that if
Mark Twain wrote these notes sometime in the summer of 1887 on a sheet of the cream-colored Keystone Linen (2) paper that he used intermittently for his manuscript between the end of chapter 13 and the be- [begin page 515] ginning of chapter 16. The notes may have been written before chapter 11, in which Sandy is first introduced.
sandy.
Sandy could be Isolde or any of those, & could appear at court “unknown,” for these people respect each other’s romantic projects & lies, & none would have let on.
He passionately loves her, but
At the end she comes out of scarlet fever deaf, & he knows she will soon be dumb; the only obstacle to their union being thus removed, he resolves to marry her
Mark Twain wrote this page of notes sometime in the summer of 1887 on the Keystone Linen (1) paper that he used for much of the first half of the Connecticut Yankee manuscript. Howard G. Baetzhold suggests that Mark Twain may have written the page early in the summer ( MT&JB , p. 14).
appendix.
Make an appendix in support of the assertion that there were no real gentlemen & ladies before our century. Take the incident of the chamber-pot from Madame Campan—& some others. & remark that in morals Louis XVI was the cleanest man of his century). Instances from “ l’ancien Regime of Taine; from St Simon et al. Refer to Fielding’s chief novels, & Richardson’s, & Miss Burney’s, & even Vicar of Wakefield; giving instances where printable & explaining that others (note their places) are not. Take that death scene from Rousseau’s Confessions—& she was a lady. Look into Standring’s book, & Zola’s, (to show that modern French are the same yet) Herbert of Cherbury, Benvenuto, & Margravine of Beyreut—(get the latter in French.) Scene in Campan where L XV lies stabbed by Damiens. Take from Mad. du Barry—French edition.