Mark Twain’s Revisions for Public Reading, 1895–1896
Mark Twain prepared several selections from Huckleberry Finn for his 1895–96 world lecture tour by annotating volume one of Bernhard Tauchnitz’s two-volume edition (SLC 1895a), which he had purchased in Paris in 1894 or early 1895. This volume, comprising chapters 1–22, survives among the Mark Twain Papers (CU-MARK). Sixty-five pages (including the front cover) are reproduced here in photofacsimile. Five pages annotated by Mark Twain are not reproduced. On these five pages he indicated only where a particular selection was to begin or end, information which is reported at the end of this headnote.
At the age of fifty-nine, Mark Twain was reluctant to undertake a year-long tour, but the collapse of his publishing house and the failure of the Paige typesetting-machine venture obliged him “to mount the platform . . . or starve,” as he put it somewhat melodramatically to H. H. Rogers.1 Traveling with his wife, Olivia, and daughter Clara, he opened the tour in Cleveland on 15 July 1895, then made more than twenty stops in the United States and Canada before sailing on 23 August from Vancouver for Australia and thence to New Zealand, India, Ceylon, Mauritius, and South Africa, finally coming to rest in London.
The facetious plan of Mark Twain’s tour was to effect the moral regeneration of the human race by instructing it in principles of conduct illustrated from a variety of his own stories. The “Jumping Frog” tale, for example, illustrated the folly of putting too much faith in a passing stranger; the blue-jay yarn from A Tramp Abroad taught that every undertaking should be made wholeheartedly; and his reminiscence in The Innocents Abroad about the dead man he discovered as a boy in his father’s office taught that it was best to learn the limit of one’s personal courage early, so as not to strain it. The design of the “morals lecture” enabled Mark Twain to string together seven or eight unrelated stories that he selected from a working repertoire of about twenty-five—choosing according to his own mood and the temper of his audience.2 He began preparing for his tour in the spring [begin page 618] of 1895 by compiling several long lists of candidates for this repertoire. These included both favorite personal anecdotes and selections from his published works and a work in progress (Joan of Arc). More than twenty passages from Huckleberry Finn were so designated, and one list in particular reveals that in order to choose among them he had begun to consult the Tauchnitz edition. His page references in this list correspond to the selections that he annotated, the sole exception being “Polly-voo franzy?” on page 145, which contains no annotation:3
| Turning Robbers | H. 1–21. |
| Praying—Spiritual Gifts | 28 |
| Attacking the A-rabs. | 30. |
| Jim tells Huck’s fortune | 39 |
| Reforming H’s pap | 46 |
| Jim & the “bank.” | 87 |
| King Sollermun | 141 |
| Polly-voo franzy? | 145 |
| Small-pox & a lie save Jim | 160. |
| The Feud | 195 |
| ″ ″ | 204 |
| Duke & Dauphin | 217 |
Mark Twain probably annotated much of the Tauchnitz Huckleberry Finn sometime between late May and mid-July, when he started west. He may have worked on it during the initial weeks of the tour, since he was dissatisfied with his first few performances. In fact, he continued to expand and alter his repertoire throughout the North American phase of the trip.
He had been performing for a week before he actually used a selection from Huckleberry Finn. James B. Pond, his manager for the American portion of the tour, noted that on 23 July in Minneapolis Mark Twain “introduced a new entertainment, blending pathos with humor with unusual continuity. This was at Mrs. Clemens’s suggestion.”4 The selection was “Small-pox & a lie save Jim” (from chapter 16).5 It was enthusiastically received and Mark Twain himself was pleased with the results. “I am getting into good platform condition at last,” he wrote the following day. “It went well, went to suit me, here last night.”6 For the next three months, Mark Twain included the same selection in nearly every performance.
On 27 July, at his second performance in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Mark Twain tried out another selection from Huckleberry Finn—the “King Sollermun” passage from chapter 14, which had been a staple of his 1884–85 [begin page 619] lecture tour with George Washington Cable.7 But he seems not to have repeated the experiment.
Late in August, as he neared Australia, he knew he was facing a schedule that required as many as five performances in some of the larger cities. He had therefore to plan several different programs to avoid repeating himself too often in the same city. His notebook reveals that he considered including two further selections from Huckleberry Finn: “Jim’s Bank” from chapter 8, and the “Raft-Quarrel,” possibly the episode from chapter 15 in which Jim berates Huck for cruelly tricking him.8 But judging from numerous reviews of his lectures, Mark Twain did not actually use either selection.
While en route to Australia, however, he did develop and refine his introduction for “Small-pox & a lie save Jim,” the most popular and commented-upon selection in his program. In his notebook he wrote out his introduction to it:
Next, I should exploit the proposition that in a crucial moral emergency a sound heart is a safer guide than an ill-trained conscience. I sh’d support this doctrine with a chapter from a book of mine where a sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers defeat. Two persons figure in this chapter: Jim, a middle-aged slave, & Huck Finn, a boy of 14, son of the town drunkard. These two are close friends, bosom friends, drawn together by community of misfortune. Huck is the child of neglect & acquaintd with cold, hunger, privation, humiliation, & with the unearned aversion of the upper crust of the community. The respectable boys were not allowed to play with him—so they played with him all the time—preferred his company to any other. There was nothing against him but his rags, & to a boy’s untutored eye rags don’t count if the person in them is satisfactory.
In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck & his father the worthless loafer should feel it & approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience—that unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early & stick to it.9
[begin page 620] Another notebook entry, perhaps a revision of the end of the “Small-pox” episode, shows how Mark Twain was trying to make Huck’s conflict as explicit and intense as possible: “Well, old Jim was safe. And as I set there floating along & thinking it over, my conscience was bitter sorry I had done wrong;—but as for me, I was mighty/awful glad I hadn’t done right.”10
This selection continued to receive high praise from newspaper reviewers throughout the tour. One Melbourne reporter commented:
In telling the half humorous, half pathetic story of Huck. Finn’s dilemma in sheltering a runaway slave, the author gives us in much greater detail than in the book the terrible struggle which goes on between Huck.’s sound heart and his “deformed conscience.” The audience fairly roared with laughter at Huck.’s naïve remark, “The truth is plenty good enough in ordinary places, but when you get into a tight place you can’t rely on it,” just as they accentuated with their perfect silence the pathos of the hunted slave’s cry across the water, rendered with tears in his voice by the author, “Dah you goes, de ole true Huck., de bes’ frien’ poor Jim ever had, de ony frien’ poor Jim has now.”11
And a reviewer in Bombay was moved to philosophize in earnest, if extravagant, terms about “Mark Twain’s power as a speaker, a writer, and a humorist”:
He is a personal embodiment of the truth that the springs of merriment and of pathos lie close together in the emotions of mankind. Mark Twain is not alone the laughter-maker that his books would pronounce him to be. That he has not allowed the humorous to smother the pathetic in his nature was abundantly evident in his narration of the escape of the slave by the aid of Huck Finn. It may be said that Mark Twain has the Virgilian sense of tears in human things, and he knows the acute suffering of the soul.12
Mark Twain clearly succeeded in achieving the effect he sought. The surviving Tauchnitz revisions for this and other passages in the book give us a rare opportunity to see the author at work as he shaped his own published text for platform delivery—more than ten years after it had been written.
The following marked pages of selections for reading are reproduced below. The titles are Mark Twain’s, taken either from his annotation on the cover of the Tauchnitz Huckleberry Finn or from his notebooks.
| “life at widow’s” | 12–15 |
| “Praying—Spiritual Gifts” | 28–29 |
| “Attacking the A-rabs” | 30–34 |
| “Jim tells Huck’s fortune” | 39–40 |
| “Reforming H’s pap” | 46–48 |
| “Encounter” | 82–84 |
| “Jim & the ‘bank’ ” (or “Bees & bank”) | 87,90 |
| “King Sollermun” | 140–42, 144 |
| “Small-pox & a lie save Jim” | 160–67 |
| “Arrival at Buck’s” | 173–82 |
| “Spidery Girl” | 183–85 |
| “The Feud” | 193–98 |
| “The Feud” | 203–208 |
No facsimiles are provided for five pages on which he merely marked where a selection began or ended: “Turning Robbers” began on page 21 and ended on page 26 (“So we unhitched a skiff . . . that settled the thing,” 8.33–12.10); “Call this a gov’ment” began on page 54, but Mark Twain did not indicate where he would end it (“I got the things . . . ,” 33.3); and the “Duke & Dauphin” began on page 217 and ended on page 225 (“One of these fellows . . . their own way,” 160.4–165.17).
Most of Mark Twain’s holograph revisions in the Tauchnitz Huckleberry Finn are reasonably legible in the facsimiles and have not been transcribed, but a few that present unusual problems have been transcribed using conventions similar to those in the transcriptions in other appendixes. Words underscored once are rendered in italics; deletions are shown with a horizontal rule (“lean”); and inserted words or characters appear enclosed by carets (“ sour & moral ”). Transcribed text is cued to the line where it was intended to be read, regardless of where on the page it was written. The revisions are all in a black ink that in places has faded to brown. The diagonal slashes drawn in the margins to mark the beginning and end of the selected passages are in pencil, occasionally overwritten or duplicated in ink, except for those on pages 12, 82, 84, 173, 194, 198, and 203, which are in ink only.
