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These notes give dates and general circumstances of composition for each work reprinted here, and they discuss topical allusions, furnish historical background, and define words or phrases not readily found in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Whenever Mark Twain modeled a fictional character after someone he knew, a note names the person. Names printed in Small Capitals indicate the person is more fully identified in the Biographical Directory.

Notes are keyed to page and line of the text: 4.10 means page 4, line 10 (chapter titles are not included when counting lines). Works are cited either by an abbreviation or by the author’s last name, followed by a page (or page and volume) number: (MTBus, 24) or (Conard, 4:192). If more than one work by an author is cited by last name, the year of publication is used to distinguish them: (Dodge 1877, 12) means page 12 of the volume Dodge published in 1877, rather than the one he published in 1883, cited elsewhere as (Dodge 1883). Complete bibliographical information for all works cited is provided in References.

Previously unpublished words by Mark Twain are © 1989 by Edward J. Willi and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation, which reserves all reproduction or dramatization rights in every medium.

“Boy’s Manuscript” is the earliest of Mark Twain’s fictional works to draw extensively upon his boyhood memories of Hannibal. It is, in Bernard DeVoto’s phrase, “the embryo of Tom Sawyer,” which Mark Twain began to write some four or five years later. In it the author demonstrates his evocative powers and his special gift for colloquial speech, as well as his intuitive preference for stories told “autobiographically,” like Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain completed “Boy’s Manuscript,” but did not publish it. The first two pages of the manuscript (and thus the author’s own title) are lost and have been [begin page 266] missing at least since Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’s first posthumous literary editor, found the surviving fifty-eight pages among the Mark Twain Papers. Typed on the envelope in which Paine stored the manuscript is the following: “Boy’s Manuscript, beginning page 3 Probably written about 1870.” When DeVoto first published the story in 1942, he adopted Paine’s phrase as the title, and later editors accepted that decision. Paine’s guess about the date of composition—“about 1870”—was also accepted by DeVoto and others (DeVoto 1942, 5–6, 7; TS, 419), but the physical evidence of the manuscript—paper, ink, and handwriting style—suggests a much earlier date, probably sometime between October and late November 1868. The paper is a type that Mark Twain used with some frequency in letters written between September 1868 and early January 1869, and then only infrequently until June 1869, when he stopped using it entirely. The compact handwriting and black ink make the manuscript, in overall appearance, nearly identical to letters he wrote in October 1868.

This physical evidence is reinforced by biographical fact. In the fall of 1868, Clemens was assiduously courting Olivia Langdon, of Elmira, New York. Early in September, she turned down his initial proposal of marriage, but by the end of November, after two more refusals, she had changed her mind. (The pair became formally engaged in February 1869 and were married a year later.) Clearly some of the vicissitudes of Clemens’s own courtship are reflected, obliquely and with gentle satire, in Billy Rogers’s wooing of “Darling Amy.”

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Four days after his marriage to Olivia Langdon on 2 February 1870, Clemens wrote this letter to William Bowen. The Clemenses had just settled into their house in Buffalo, a wedding gift from Olivia’s father, Jervis. Clemens, occupied as co-owner and co-editor of the Buffalo Express, was enjoying the success of his second book, The Innocents Abroad, a copy of which he had sent to Bowen. Published in late July 1869, Innocents had been very widely and favorably reviewed, and by the time of this letter had sold almost 40,000 copies, earning Clemens royalties of approximately $7,300 (Hirst, 285, 491 n. 17; American Publishing Company, 46–52). Bowen and the other Hannibal villagers named in the letter are identified in the Biographical Directory.

This depiction of a sleepy Arkansas town on the banks of the Mississippi was probably written between the fall of 1876 and the spring of 1880. Although Mark Twain abandoned the story after writing only nine and a half pages, he revived its imagery for Huckleberry Finn (1885). The dilapidated houses and the muddy streets lined with the town loafers reappear in chapter 21 of the novel, and the widow Bennett’s home shares several characteristics with the Phelps farm (modeled after John Adams [begin page 270] Quarles’s farm) in chapter 32. Mark Twain left the fragment untitled. The editorial title used here joins the two names Mark Twain gave to the village; he initially called it Tupperville, but in the final paragraph, which he added at a later time, he called it Dobbsville.

This unfinished tale is a curious blend of fact and fantasy. Set in Hannibal, most of its characters bear names of actual residents: a jeweler named Stevens, storekeepers named Selmes and Brittingham, and a lunatic boy named Ratcliff who tries to murder his mother are all mentioned in “Villagers of 1840–3” (and identified in the Biographical Directory). The story is a product of Mark Twain’s continuing interest in psychic phenomena. In 1878 he wrote an article he called “Mental Telegraphy” (his term for thought transference), in which he claimed to believe in telepathic communication, despite never having seen a convincing clairvoyant performance. Fearing he would not be taken seriously, however, he did not publish the article for thirteen years (SLC 1891). Meanwhile, in 1884 he joined the Society for Psychical Research in London, writing its founder, William Fletcher Barrett, that he was convinced “people can have crystal-clear mental communication with each other over vast distances” (SLC to Barrett, 4 Oct 84, in Barrett, 167). And in 1895 he confirmed his belief in telepathy in a second article on the subject, “Mental Telegraphy Again” (SLC 1895b).

Albert Bigelow Paine supplied the title “Clairvoyant” on the manuscript of this story, dating it only “80s.” The physical evidence—paper, pencil, and handwriting—suggests late 1883 or 1884 as the most likely date of composition.

When Mark Twain began writing “Indians” in July 1884, he was reading galley proofs of Huckleberry Finn, then scheduled to appear in December. That book concluded [begin page 271] with Huck and Tom promising to “go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory.” Mark Twain planned to publish his sequel while that promise was still fresh in the minds of his readers. But he neither completed nor published “Indians,” abandoning his effort in mid-sentence after only nine chapters.

Mark Twain’s nephew and publishing partner, Charles L. Webster, enthusiastically approved the new literary project. He provided practical assistance by filling Clemens’s requests for books about the West, particularly for “personal narratives of life & adventure out yonder on the Plains & in the Mountains . . . especially life among the Indians” (SLC to Charles L. Webster, 6 July 84, NPV, in MTBus, 265). Mark Twain was especially eager to find narratives that would help him refute the romantic portrayals of the Indian popularized by James Fenimore Cooper and others. He had become skeptical of Cooper’s “noble savage” by 1861, when he journeyed overland from Missouri to Nevada Territory, observing Indians along the way and after his arrival. In Roughing It (1872) he wrote that it was the poverty and squalor of the Gosiutes (or Goshutes), natives of the inhospitable Nevada-Utah border region, that prompted him, “a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man,” to wonder if he “had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance.” His disenchantment left him disgusted with Cooper’s romantic portrayals and unsympathetic toward the American Indian: “It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive—and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings—but Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine—at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s” (Roughing It, chapter 19).

In writing “Indians,” Mark Twain’s primary source of information about Indian character and culture was Our Wild Indians (1883), by army officer Richard Irving Dodge, a book full of biased generalizations, but highly commended for accuracy in its day. Dodge hoped to dispel the romantic image of the “noble Red Man” and at the same time to educate those who saw only an “ignoble savage.” He regarded the Indian as a partially civilized primitive who would become a useful citizen once instilled with a sense of morality: “If our good missionaries would let him alone in his religion . . . and simply strive to supply him with a code of morals, his subsequent conversion might be easy and his future improvement assured.” While he forcefully condemned the government’s policy of “debasing, pauperizing, and exterminating” Indians, he saw “no future for the Indian as Indian.” He advocated the gradual breakup of the tribal system so that Indians could be “individually absorbed in the great family of American citizens” (Dodge 1883, 41, 56–58, 641, 645–46). “There’s a man who knows all about Indians, & yet has some humanity in him,” Mark Twain wrote of Dodge, adding that “knowledge of Indians, & humanity, are seldom found in the same individual” (SLC to William Dean Howells, 22 Feb 77, OFH, in MTHL, 1:172).

Mark Twain supplemented Our Wild Indians with several other books: The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants (1877), also by Dodge; Sheridan’s Troopers [begin page 272] on the Borders (1870) by De Benneville Randolph Keim; The Oregon Trail (1849) by Francis Parkman; My Life on the Plains (1874) by George Armstrong Custer; and William F. Cody’s autobiography, The Life of the Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide (1879). His indebtedness to his sources is traced in the explanatory notes that follow (see also HH&T, 81–91).

Mark Twain’s dependence on these “authorities” helps account for his inability to complete his story. Striving for an unsparingly realistic depiction of the brutality he believed to be characteristic of the Great Plains Indians, Mark Twain made their abduction of his heroine the keystone of his plot—even though his sources asserted that rape was the inevitable fate of such captives. Unable to write frankly about rape, yet convinced that realism demanded he do so, Mark Twain abandoned the story, probably around the middle of August 1884. Although his normal practice with recalcitrant material was to pigeonhole it and return to it at a later date, there is no evidence that he ever resumed work on “Indians.” There are, however, two indications that he was interested in continuing the tale: in 1889 or 1890, he had the incomplete manuscript printed on the Paige typesetter, the mechanical composing machine whose development he financed for a decade; and in November 1890, he made a notebook entry reminding himself to have Tom Sawyer play the role of a medicine man (N&J3, 594).

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In early November 1890, in response to a proposal from a newspaper syndicate “that furnishes all the western newspapers with patent insides,” Orion Clemens wrote a biographical sketch of Jane Lampton Clemens, who had died on 27 October (Orion Clemens to SLC, 1 Nov 90, CU-MARK). The surviving pages of his sketch show it to have been anecdotal but conventional (HH&T, 381–82). After reading it in manuscript, Mark Twain sent Orion a “dispatch to halt.” He was, however, evidently inspired by Orion’s sketch and decided to write a memorial “magazine article” himself (Orion Clemens to SLC, 13 Nov 1890, CU-MARK). The result was “Jane Lampton Clemens,” a warm and unconventional tribute, richly revealing of its author as well as its subject, although there is no indication that Mark Twain ever attempted to publish it. It was probably written in November or December 1890.

Mark Twain made these notes about the people of Hannibal, Missouri, in late July or early August 1897, during a summer stay in Weggis, Switzerland. Hannibal, on the Mississippi River, had barely a thousand inhabitants when Clemens’s family settled there in November 1839, a few weeks before his fourth birthday. By June of 1853, however, when seventeen-year-old Clemens left to seek employment as a printer in St. Louis, the town’s population had more than tripled. Although his family’s connection to Hannibal ended just a few months later—with Jane, Orion, and Henry Clemens moving to Muscatine, Iowa—Clemens himself never lost touch with his boyhood home. He maintained lifelong friendships with a few of its residents and kept informed about others through correspondence and also through occasional reunions. He visited Hannibal at least seven times between his initial departure and the writing of “Villagers”: in 1855 to attend to family property; in 1858 to bury his brother Henry; in 1861 before serving for a few weeks in a company of Confederate irregulars; in 1867 to lecture; in 1882 while he was traveling on the Mississippi River in preparation for the writing of Life on the Mississippi; in 1885 to lecture again; and in 1890 to bury his mother. Moreover, he supplemented his own store of information by purchasing a copy of Return Ira Holcombe’s History of Marion County, Missouri upon its publication in 1884; the volume contained sketches of Hannibal’s prominent citizens, including one of John Marshall Clemens that Orion Clemens had helped to prepare.

Clemens was keenly aware that his boyhood impressions had a strength and vividness unrivaled in his store of memories. In 1886, having depicted antebellum Hannibal as St. Petersburg in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn during the preceding ten years, he acknowledged that “recent names & things take no hold on my bald-headed memory; they slip-up & slide off: but when you come to the names [begin page 279] & things of thirty-five years ago, you are uttering music, & my memory is alert” (SLC to George H. Himes, 17 Jan 86, MoPeS). “Villagers,” with its wealth of arresting, highly accurate detail about the people, events, and social customs of Clemens’s youth, proves that Hannibal’s “hold” on him remained consistently strong.

Although writing for himself only, Clemens superficially disguised his immediate family, a stratagem that perhaps facilitated his particularly candid portraits of his stern and undemonstrative father (Judge Carpenter), his feisty, good-hearted, and eloquent mother (Joanna Carpenter), and his feckless older brother Orion (Oscar Carpenter), as well as his passing remarks about his sister Pamela (Priscella Carpenter), his younger brother Henry (Hartley Carpenter), and himself (Simon Carpenter). He attempted no disguise for other relatives, however, not even when his memories included unpleasant details: his cousin James Quarles’s alcoholism and dissipation, for example, and his aunt Ella Lampton’s affair with the young doctor who boarded with her and her husband. And he used the real names of other Hannibal residents, with only two exceptions: Dr. Richard F. Barret (called Dr. Ray), an early suitor of Jane Clemens’s, and the “unbeliever” Blennerhasset, whose identity remains unknown. Hannibal is referred to as “St P”—an abbreviation for St. Petersburg—but the names of other towns and cities appear without disguise. Although Clemens’s title assigned the dates “1840–3” to this compendium of recollections, only a few actually belong to that period, when he was between the ages of four and eight. Possibly “1840–3” was merely an inadvertence, since his recollections actually span the years 1840–53, the length of his residence in Hannibal.

In an 1895 interview, Clemens remarked: “I don’t believe an author, good, bad or indifferent, ever lived, who created a character. It was always drawn from his recollection of someone he had known. Sometimes, like a composite photograph, an author’s presentation of a character may possibly be from the blending of . . . two or more real characters in his recollection. But, even when he is making no attempt to draw his character from life . . . he is yet unconsciously drawing from memory” (Budd, 52–53). In compiling “Villagers,” Clemens had at least one literary project in mind—a book, which he tentatively called his “New Huck Finn.” In July 1897, with an eye to shaping that story, he had filled thirteen pages of his notebook with random recollections of Hannibal (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS pp. 56–62). “Villagers” clearly was to serve the same function as the notebook, but in a more comprehensive and orderly fashion. Before the summer of 1897 was over Clemens began two new stories based on his memories of Hannibal: “Hellfire Hotchkiss” and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.” The latter apparently was intended to be the “New Huck Finn.”

It was probably when he was writing “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” in mid-August 1897, that Clemens separated the final nine pages of “Villagers”—“to persuade the other . . . of her tongue.” (105.21–108.12 in the present text)—from the rest of the manuscript. The discussion of Oscar Carpenter (Orion Clemens) in the opening chapter of “Hellfire Hotchkiss” grew directly out of the characterization of him in the concluding pages of “Villagers,” and Clemens may have hoped to utilize the earlier description in his new story. When he discontinued work on “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” he stored the manuscript in an envelope together with the final pages of “Villagers,” labeling the “Villagers” segment “rejected MS that may come good.” The separated [begin page 280] pages were mistakenly published as part of “The Hellfire Hotchkiss Sequence” in 1967 (S&B, 200–203). Two years later, when “Villagers” was first published, it was reported to be “a fragment inasmuch as the last entry breaks off in the middle of a sentence at the bottom of a page” (HH&T, 23). Not until August 1981 did Sam Howard, then an undergraduate at Claremont College, point out that the fragment included in “The Hellfire Hotchkiss Sequence” was in fact the proper ending of “Villagers,” which is here published in its entirety for the first time. Almost all of the individuals mentioned in it are now identified, from contemporary documents and other sources, in the Biographical Directory.

“Began Hellfire Hotchkiss” Mark Twain wrote in his notebook on 4 August 1897, in Weggis, Switzerland (NB 42, CU-MARK, TS p. 24). On the envelope in which he kept the manuscript he affirmed his choice of title, while recording a potential alternative: “Hellfire Hotchkiss, or Sugar-Rag ditto.”

The setting here, Dawson’s Landing, is, like St. Petersburg, a re-creation of Hannibal. Mark Twain had previously used this name for the town in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), but “Hellfire Hotchkiss” was not a sequel to that novel, even though Wilson is mentioned in passing (121.3, 8–9). Rather it is a continuation of the narrative about Oscar Carpenter (Orion Clemens) which Mark Twain began to develop as he came to the end of “Villagers of 1840–3.”

[begin page 287] Mark Twain had long seen literary possibilities in his erratic and capricious brother. In the burlesque “Autobiography of a Damned Fool,” begun in 1877 but never completed, he had depicted Orion “at 18, printer’s apprentice, soft & sappy, full of fine intentions & shifting religions & not aware that he is a shining ass” (SLC to William Dean Howells, 23 Mar 77, MH-H, in MTHL, 1:173). In 1878 he and Howells began collaborating on a play about Orion, which they soon agreed to abandon. Repenting that decision, the following year Clemens urged Howells to

And again:

Nothing came of these proposals, however, and the depictions of Orion as Bolivar in “Autobiography of a Damned Fool,” as Albert in an 1892 fragment called “Affeland (Snivelization),” as Oscar Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” and as Oliver Hotchkiss in “Schoolhouse Hill,” are the only known direct portrayals of him in Mark Twain’s fiction (for the text of the “Autobiography” and a partial text of “Affeland,” see S&B, 136–61, 170–71).

Two other figures prominent in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” had their genesis in “Villagers.” James Carpenter, Oscar’s intolerant, irascible father, obviously is a version of Judge Carpenter (John Marshall Clemens). His wife, Sarah, parallels Joanna Carpenter (Jane Lampton Clemens) in her devotion to Oscar, although Sarah’s conventional personality and uncomplicated piety do not comport with Clemens’s characterizations of his mother either in “Villagers” or in “Jane Lampton Clemens.” The Carpenters’ conversation in the opening chapter of “Hellfire Hotchkiss”—humorous, but embittered by James’s sarcasm and his contempt for both wife and son—leaves one wondering how closely Clemens modeled their relationship on actual relations within his family.

The title character, Rachel “Hellfire” Hotchkiss, may have been inspired by Mary Nash, the older sister of a boyhood friend of Clemens’s. In 1897–98 working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and “Schoolhouse Hill,” Clemens characterized Mary Nash as “wild” and “bad” (HH&T, 383; MSM, 431). In his autobiography—momentarily confusing her with Mary Lacy, another schoolmate—he described her as “pretty wild and determined and independent” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:213). Rachel, just as independent, and a paragon of beauty and intelligence as well, is a unique figure in Mark Twain’s fiction: an emancipated woman. And “Hellfire Hotchkiss” touches, although tentatively, on the subject of sexual identity. [begin page 288] As Rachel notes, she and Oscar (ironically nicknamed “Thug”) are hampered by their “misplaced sexes” (133.14). Or, as Pudd’nhead Wilson is reported to have put it, “Hellfire Hotchkiss is the only genuwyne male man in this town and Thug Carpenter’s the only genuwyne female girl, if you leave out sex and just consider the business facts” (121.3–5).

But Mark Twain clearly was uncomfortable with unconventional female behavior of any sort. In recalling Mary Nash, he reported approvingly that, far from being “incorrigible,” as all Hannibal believed, “she married, and at once settled down and became in all ways a model matron and was as highly respected as any matron in the town” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:213). Rachel Hotchkiss likewise resolves to reform and become a respectable member of her community, but her story breaks off at just that point. Mark Twain had reached an impasse. His impulse was to champion Rachel’s independence of thought and feeling, thereby criticizing society’s narrow-minded efforts to “sivilize”—much as he had done in writing about Huck Finn. But he could not wholeheartedly endorse rebelliousness in a heroine. Nor, on the other hand, could he produce a tame domestic novel about a “purified” Rachel. Consequently, only three chapters into “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” he set the story aside. There is no evidence that he ever returned to it. Nevertheless, late in 1898 he did plan a further appearance for Hellfire herself. His working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” show that he considered having Forty-four fall in love with her (MSM, 438).

Mark Twain here tried to write another sequel to Huckleberry Finn (1885). Tom, Huck, Jim, Aunt Polly, Widow Douglas, Miss Watson, and Judge Thatcher all appear in this story, and the plot turns on the machinations of those scoundrels, the king and the duke of Bilgewater.

As early as 1883 Mark Twain had planned to include, in a Hannibal story, an antebellum Missouri phenomenon that was to figure significantly in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.” “Pater-rollers & slavery,” he jotted in his notebook then, recalling the vigilante patrols that endeavored to prevent abolitionists from helping slaves escape (N&J3, 30). Not until 1896, however, did he make the notebook entry that is the true germ of “Conspiracy”: “Have Huck tell how one white brother shaved his head, put on a wool wig & was blackened & sold as a negro. Escaped that night, washed himself, & helped hunt for himself under pay” (NB 39, CU-MARK, TS p. 22). The following year he noted “Tom sells Huck for a slave” and, among ideas for a “New Huck Finn” book, sketched this scenario: “Tom is disguised as a negro & sold in Arkansas for $10, then he & Huck help hunt for him after the disguise is removed” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS pp. 34, 57, 58). In Weggis, Switzerland, during the summer and early fall of 1897, Mark Twain developed the story on the “Tom is disguised” plan.

Although primarily a sequel to Huckleberry Finn, “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” derives some of its energy from Mark Twain’s long-time fascination with detectives and detective fiction. In San Francisco in the mid-1860s he had genuinely admired the exploits of police detective George Rose, who, he nevertheless joked, followed suspects “by the foot-prints they make on the brick pavements” (CofC, 178). By the late 1870s he had read the sensational stories by renowned detective Allan Pinkerton, whose accounts of his agency’s activities often strained credulity. (In “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” the insignia of the Sons of Freedom is based on the Pinkerton emblem: a vigilant eye over the motto “We Never Sleep.”) And by the mid-1890s he was familiar with some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures.

For years Mark Twain had attempted to capitalize on the popularity of such tales. In 1877 he wrote his “light tragedy,” “Cap’n Simon Wheeler; The Amateur Detective,” which the following year he tried to turn into a comic novel, “Simon Wheeler, [begin page 290] Detective” (for texts of both the play and the unfinished novel, see S&B, 220–89, 312–444). He burlesqued detective work in “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882), treated it more seriously in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and satirized it again in “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896).

As these works indicate, Mark Twain’s predominant impulse was to poke fun at the improbable and pretentious behavior of fictional sleuths—even as he devised a plot that depended on the application of their techniques. “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” is another such contradictory work. Detective Jake Flacker bears the brunt of Mark Twain’s scorn, while Tom Sawyer’s application, and misapplication, of the detective arts advances the story. Mark Twain was not, however, satisfied with the result. After working on “Conspiracy” intermittently over several years, possibly until 1902, he abandoned it, just a few pages short of completion.

In the fall of 1897, Mark Twain began work on a tale about a mysterious stranger’s visit to earth. The story was to occupy him for nearly eleven years, during which he [begin page 294] attempted at least four versions of it: two set in nineteenth-century Missouri (the “St. Petersburg Fragment,” 1897, and “Schoolhouse Hill,” 1898), one in eighteenth-century Austria (“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” 1897–1900), and one in medieval Austria (“No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” 1902–8). For texts of all three surviving versions (what survives of the “St. Petersburg Fragment” was incorporated into “The Chronicle of Young Satan”), see Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (MSM, 4–11, 35–405, 487–92).

Mark Twain drafted his initial plan for “Schoolhouse Hill” in a notebook entry of mid-November 1898, which read in part:

Shortly after making this entry, Mark Twain began writing “Schoolhouse Hill.” He worked on it through the latter half of November and December 1898, completing only 139 pages before putting the manuscript aside. Thirty-three pages of working notes establish his commitment to the story, however, and indicate the direction it was to have taken: Little Satan, or Forty-four, was to fall in love (“the kind that sex arouses”) with Hellfire Hotchkiss (or with Annie Fleming, daughter of Petersburg’s Presbyterian pastor) and find that the purely intellectual happiness of Hell was tame compared to earthly love. Meanwhile, dismayed by mankind’s pettiness, ignorance, and lack of freedom, he would help humans recover their original innocence by ridding them of their vanity and by founding a church to abolish their diseased “Moral Sense.” He would preach against hypocrisy and, with the help of an army of little red devils summoned from Hell, print his own Bible—which Mark Twain planned to publish as an appendix, together with Forty-four’s sermons and dialogues. And Forty-four was to work his wonders in a world Mark Twain populated with Hannibal residents—including John, Jane, Orion, and Pamela Clemens—in new as well as familiar fictional guises (MSM, 430–49).

Given this well elaborated scheme, it is difficult to say exactly why Mark Twain abandoned “Schoolhouse Hill” after only six chapters. Perhaps as his philosophical purpose continued to evolve, the story’s humor came to seem inappropriate. In a letter of 12 and 13 May 1899 to William Dean Howells, Mark Twain reported that he had embarked anew on a work in “tale-form” that he had not started “right” before: “I believe I can make it tell what I think of Man, & how he is constructed, & what a shabby poor ridiculous thing he is, & how mistaken he is in his estimate of his character & powers & qualities & his place among the animals” (NN-B, in MTHL, 2:698–99). “Schoolhouse Hill” had been, in this estimation, just a false start. Even so, it remains an entertaining, even illuminating, fantasy, brisk in its humor and [begin page 295] language, caustic in its commentary upon human nature, and sharply evocative of small town life.

This anecdote—which Mark Twain titled, probably tentatively, for its narrator—is based on an incident that occurred in Hannibal. Mark Twain had included a version of the story in chapter 53 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), in his account of his 1882 return to the town. During a conversation with an “old gentleman” he met on the street:

In 1897 Mark Twain recalled this same incident in “Villagers of 1840–3,” identifying the prankster as Roberta Jones (97). That year, amid ideas for lectures and for new stories about Huck and Tom, he made three notebook entries which indicate that he planned to reprise and rework this episode: “Tale of scaring the woman into insanity by skull & dough face”; “Scaring woman with doughface”; and “Scaring poor Miss * * to madness—Roberta Jones” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS pp. 36, 45, 58). And in his notebook for 1902, which contained numerous notes for a story about Huck and Tom “50 Years Later,” he wrote: “Dough-face—old lady now, still in asylum—a bride then. What went with him? Shall we visit her? And shall she be expecting him in her faded bridal robes & flowers?” and “doughface, but scare no one mad” (NB 45, CU-MARK, TS pp. 12, 21).

Mark Twain probably wrote this story in 1902, when he was contemplating writing a novel in which Tom and Huck return to St. Petersburg as old men.