In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
The Author.Ⓐemendation Ⓔexplanatory note
EXPLANATORY . . . The Author.] Mark Twain was neither joking nor being deliberately obscure, despite the conclusions drawn by some critics (see, among others, Rulon, and Buxbaum). David Carkeet has shown that, except for what he characterizes as some inconsistencies overlooked during the long course of composition and revision, Mark Twain indeed made distinctions among “dialects,” or kinds of nonstandard English (Carkeet 1979; see also the introduction, pp. 781–90 passim). The seven mentioned in this notice can be identified with the following speakers:
2. “the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect”: Arkansas gossips (Sister Hotchkiss and others, chapter 41);
3. “the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect”: Huck, Tom, Aunt Polly, Ben Rogers, Pap Finn, Judith Loftus, the duke, Buck Grangerford, the Wilks daughters, and the watchman of the Walter Scott passage;
4–7. “four modified varieties of this last”: | (a) thieves on the Walter Scott; | (b) the king, Tim Collins; | (c) the Bricksville loafers; | (d) Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps, the Pikesville boy.
Editorial work on the complete manuscript and other documents has shown that many, though not all, of the “inconsistencies” noted by Carkeet were intentional: Mark Twain regularly had different speakers within these seven groups use different locutions, and he made fine distinctions within the speech even of a single character, often through meticulous revision. For instance, Huck always says “again” while Pap almost always says “agin,” even though both are “ordinary” Pike County speakers. And Jim is made to say both “ain’ dat” and “ain’t it,” dropping the t of “ain’t” only when the word following begins with a consonant. In 1874, preparing to revise “A True Story,” Clemens wrote to William Dean Howells, “I amend dialect stuff by talking & talking & talking it till it sounds right—& I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro sometimes (rarely) says ‘goin’ ’ & sometimes ‘gwyne,’ & they make just such discrepancies in other words—& when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer’s carelessness. But I want to work at the proofs & get the dialect as nearly right as possible” (20 Sept 74, NN-B, in L6 , 233). On 17 January 1885, his sister-in-law Mollie wrote from Keokuk, Iowa: [begin page 378] “Sam I have just finished Huck Finn. It simply amazes me to see how you kept up the dialects and the underlying moral lesson without a particle of apparent effort. It is real, to me” (Jane L. Clemens and Mary E. [Mollie] Clemens to SLC and OLC, 17 Jan 85, CU-MARK). As early as 1872 John Hay publicly praised Mark Twain’s Roughing It lecture, acknowledging his authority as “the finest living delineator of the true Pike accent.” And in 1891 Melville D. Landon (Eli Perkins) expressed a preference for Huckleberry Finn over Mark Twain’s other books “because it has the truest dialect” (Hay 1872; Landon, 76). Mark Twain himself once told an interviewer, “the only one of my own books that I can ever read with pleasure is . . . ‘Huck Finn,’ and partly because I know the dialect is true and good” (Blathwait, 26).