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The composition of A Connecticut Yankee has been vigorously investigated by scholars for more than thirty years.1 Some of the details remain obscure, but the outlines of the chronology are clear. Mark Twain’s first contact with Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur probably occurred in November 1880, when someone in the Clemens household ordered from a Hartford bookseller a copy of Sidney Lanier’s shortened version (The Boy’s King Arthur, illustrated by Alfred Kappes, published by Scribner that same year). In 1883 Clemens referred in a letter to the incident of Launcelot’s exchanging armor with Sir Kay (an incident he would use in “A Word of Explanation” and in chapter 3 of A Connecticut Yankee). As Alan Gribben observes, these indications of familiarity with at least a part of Malory’s text qualify the anecdote recorded by Clemens in his notebook in 1889 and repeated with slight changes by George W. Cable after Clemens’ death in 1910.2 Both men imply that Clemens first became

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acquainted with the Morte Darthur in Rochester in 1884, when he and Cable (who were on tour with a joint program of readings from their own works) took refuge in a bookstore from a sudden shower and “Cable got a Morte d’Arthur & gave it me to read.”3 Even though these recollections may not have been precisely accurate, however, there is no reason to doubt that Clemens first became actively interested in the book during his tour with Cable. With his writer’s sensitivity to language, he responded to Malory’s prose as he had to Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus dialect a few years earlier. On December 14 he instructed his nephew, Charles L. Webster, head of Clemens’ publishing company in New York, to get a copy of the book for Ozias Pond, traveling manager for the tour,4 and on 4 February 1885 reported to his wife: “Some time ago, I gave Pond a full edition of the Morte d’Arthur, & addressed it to him as ‘Sir Sagramore le Desirous’—a name which we have ever since called him by. We have all used the quaint language of the book in talk in the cars & hotels.”5 The previous day Clemens and Cable, signing themselves “Sir Mark Twain” and “Sir Geo. W. Cable,” had sent Pond a telegram in Maloryesque language: “Now wit you well, Sir Sagramore, thou good knight and gentle, that there be two that right wonderly do love thee, grieving passing sore and making great dole at thy heavy travail. And we will well that thou prosper at the hand of the leech, and come lightly forth of thy hurts, and be as thou were tofore.”6

One is hardly surprised, therefore, to find in Clemens’ notebook the following entry, undated but apparently made during the tour with Cable:

Although this entry may possibly have originated in an actual dream, the dream has undergone a great deal of rationalization for comic purposes. Furthermore, the entry does not suggest that Mark Twain found the details of the narrator’s discomfort in Malory (who never descends to this mundane level of particularity). Clemens had traveled in Great Britain and on the Continent, where he had enjoyed ample opportunities to observe armor preserved in museums. (As the narrator of “A Word of Explanation” at the opening of A Connecticut Yankee Mark Twain represents himself as one of a group of tourists being shown an “Ancient hauberk” in Warwick Castle.)

Whatever the psychological context of the notebook entry, however, it is unmistakably the germ of a work of fiction belonging to a genre that had long been a favorite of Clemens’: a literary burlesque. Although “See Morte DArthur” does not necessarily mean “This idea is suggested by Malory,” it clearly designates Malory’s book as the potential target of the burlesque. In 1889 Clemens wrote in ink over the original penciled entry in his notebook describing the dream the statement that after Cable gave him a copy of Morte Darthur, “I began to make notes in my head for a book.”8 The notebooks covering 1885 and the early months of 1886 contain a number of entries showing what these notes in the writer’s head were like. One entry, made before the end of April 1885, is particularly relevant because it reveals that at this early date Mark Twain had already conceived the sensational Battle of the Sand-Belt, with which the Yankee’s narrative would eventually end: “Have a battle between a modern army, with gatling guns—(automatic) 600 shots a minute, with one pulling of the trigger, torpedos, balloons, 100-ton cannon, iron-clad fleet &c & Prince de Joinville’s Middle Age Crusaders.”9

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The notebook for the period April–August 1885 contains two or three further relevant entries. One, for example, couched in the uncertain German that Clemens frequently amused himself with during these months, and reflecting his preoccupation with the publication of Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs by the Webster company, reads as follows: “Er sagt in seine Erste Satz, dass er echter Amerikaner sei.”10 The first sentence in the Memoirs reads: “My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.” The first sentence of “The Stranger’s History,” Hank Morgan’s oral prelude to the written narrative he turns over to the narrator of “A Word of Explanation,” is “I am an American.” Just as the notebook entry concerning the dream suggests that Hank Morgan is at bottom Clemens himself, so here we have a hint that he is in some sense also Grant, a man whom Clemens admired without reservation. This suggestion is supported by a further entry in the same notebook, a list of four items labeled “Perfect”: “Abou ben Adhem & the Rubiyat. / And Sir Ector de Maris’s eulogy of Launcelot du Lak / And Gettysburg speech,”11 which is evidently a note for Clemens’ speech at a memorial service in Hartford in July of 1885 for the recently deceased ex-president. In his speech Clemens quoted the eulogy from Malory at length, applied it to Grant, and characterized it as one “whose noble and simple eloquence had not its equal in English literature until the Gettysburg Speech took its lofty place beside it.”12

One cluster of notebook entries, immediately preceding an entry dated “Dec. 11. ’85,” is especially rich in suggestions, some of them used eventually in A Connecticut Yankee, some abandoned:

It should be noted that at the very outset of his work on A Connecticut Yankee, Mark Twain had in mind the ending of the story essentially as it was finally published.

Clemens informed Webster on 16 December 1885: “I am plotting out a new book, & am full of it.”14 He had evidently said something like this to his friend William Dean Howells, for on 18 January 1886 Howells referred to “that notion of yours about the Hartford man waking up in King Arthur’s time,” calling it “capital.” “I wish I had a magazine, to prod you with,” Howells added, “and keep you up to all those good literary intentions.”15 The implication was that Clemens had allowed his attention to be distracted from writing by other interests and activities—notably the publication of Grant’s Memoirs and the apparently interminable struggle to perfect the Paige typesetting machine. Perhaps because of the dazzling financial future Clemens believed the Paige machine offered him, he asserted more than once while he was writing A Connecticut Yankee that he intended to give up writing permanently when he had completed the book.16 In spite of Howells’ fears, however, he continued to work on the project in early 1886: on February 13 he reported to Webster that he had “begun a book, whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of tradition.”17 And later that month he read to his wife and daughters

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what Susy Clemens called “the beginning of his new book, in manuscript . . . founded on a New Englanders visit to England in the time of King Arthur and his round table.”18

What was in the manuscript that Clemens read to his family? There is every reason to believe that it consisted of the opening chapters of A Connecticut Yankee in a form closely approximating the text as finally published. The basis for the conjecture is newspaper reports of Mark Twain’s appearance before the Military Service Institute on Governor’s Island on 11 November 1886. This organization consisted of high-ranking army officers, and the audience included not only members but also wives and distinguished guests (such as General William T. Sherman and his brother, the millionaire Senator John Sherman). Mark Twain announced that he would read from “the first chapter” of an unfinished book, then outline “the rest of it in bulk.” Accounts published the next day in the New York Sun, Herald, and World contain long quotations corresponding so closely to the text of A Connecticut Yankee as eventually published that the reporters must have been allowed to copy Mark Twain’s manuscript. The quotations are in fact drawn from “A Word of Explanation” and the first three or four chapters of the book.19

Whatever material was read at Governor’s Island was probably written before the Clemens family made its usual summer hegira to Quarry Farm, the home of Olivia Clemens’ foster sister, Susan Crane, near Elmira, New York; for in September 1886 Mark Twain told an interviewer: “I left all the books I have started on at my home in Hartford, so that I couldn’t get at them, and I’m just lying around and

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resting. . . . I have started some new books, but I am in no hurry to finish them.”20

The extemporaneous remarks that Mark Twain made before the Governor’s Island audience reveal that he planned for the Yankee to get himself named second-in-command to the king by exhibiting an American humorist’s gift for telling tall tales. Sent by Arthur to free sixty princesses held captive by an ogre, the Yankee has not bothered to make an actual journey to the supposedly enchanted castle but has returned to court with a magnificent lie about how he released the princesses and sent them to their homes. What eventually became the Battle of the Sand-Belt is accounted for in this early version by having Sir Robert contract with the king “to kill off, at one of the great tournaments, fifteen kings and many acres of hostile armored knights.” Protected by an electrically charged barbed-wire fence, he mows down the king’s opponents with Gatling guns that he has manufactured, and “the next year he was running the kingdom all by himself on a moderate royalty of forty per cent. . . . King Arthur’s 140 illustrious knights had turned themselves into a stock Board, and a seat at the Round Table was worth $30,000.”21 The conception of the protagonist as a cynical operator was much to the taste of the newspaper reporters. They evidently delighted in his picaresque cunning, considering it to be true to the spirit of the native American art of the tall tale, just as they took Sir Robert’s urban and commercial slang to be native speech in the (basically rural) vernacular tradition.

The impression of Mark Twain’s new book conveyed by the press reports was distressing to Mark Twain’s old friend and literary adviser, Mary Mason Fairbanks, who evidently wrote him in alarm from her home in Cleveland. He tried at once to reassure her, saying that he had written “only two or three chapters of the book”; that he did not expect to finish it for thirty years; and that he did not expect to publish it, or indeed any other book. In a mood that must have been transient, and one that still puzzles the critics, he asserted that he intended no

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irreverence toward Malory. The story “isn’t a satire peculiarly,” he declared, “it is more especially a contrast. It merely exhibits under high lights, the daily life of the Arthurian time & that of to-day. . . .” Although this letter to Mrs. Fairbanks might seem disingenuous, we must keep in mind the use Clemens had already made of Sir Ector’s eulogy of Launcelot, and the various passages in the book that praise Arthur and Galahad:

Mark Twain apparently jotted down numerous ideas for the development of his story during the winter of 1886–1887, but there is no evidence that he actually composed any additional chapters before July of the following year, when the Clemens family returned to Elmira for their regular summer sojourn.23 The most plausible hypothesis is that he began work in July 1887 with chapter 5. By August 15, according to Howard Baetzhold, he had accumulated a total

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of some three hundred fifty manuscript pages (present chapters 5–20, except for chapter 10), and the narrative had almost reached the end of the Yankee’s trip with Sandy to the enchanted pigsty.24 The addition of a heroine to the cast began to draw the narrative away from the picaresque mode, and an even more important change was taking place beneath the surface of the story. This was the awakening of the Yankee’s “concern for the political and social welfare of the Arthurians,”25 which first becomes explicit in chapter 13 in his conversation with the freemen who are repairing the road. We can perhaps date this change of perspective and emphasis more precisely by noting that Clemens complained to Webster in a letter dated August 3 that “the fun, which was abounding . . . up to three days ago, has slumped into funereal seriousness, and this will not do—it will not answer at all.” “The very title of the book requires fun,” he continued, “and it must be furnished.”26 The turn Mark Twain’s imagination had taken toward seriousness is probably represented by the description of the prisoners in Morgan le Fay’s dungeons. In any case, within a couple of weeks he had adjusted himself to the new direction his story had insisted on following. By August 15 he could write to Webster and Fred J. Hall, Webster’s assistant, that he had reread his three hundred fifty pages of manuscript and found he was “making an uncommonly bully book.”27

A few days afterward Clemens wrote Howells a letter that has often been quoted, expressing his developing political concern:

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Buoyed up by this emotion, or by the sheer energy of his creative impulse, Mark Twain grew confident of his ability to finish the book in short order. The matter was of great financial importance to him, for the publishing company needed a new book to sell, and the Paige typesetter was steadily consuming its thousands of dollars monthly without any return whatever. He jotted in his notebook a query for the Webster company: “Can you begin canvass for Yankee Jan. 15 & issue Ap. 1 if I furnish the copy Nov. 15?”29 In late August or early September 1887, the writer added to his manuscript a lengthy digression (later removed)—a revision of a satire he had written earlier that year. (The original version was published after his death as “Letter from the Recording Angel,” a scathing denunciation of Mrs. Clemens’ wealthy cousin Andrew Langdon for pharisaism and stinginess.)30

Mark Twain seems to have put aside his manuscript once more after returning to Hartford at the end of the summer, and to have taken it up again only after the family returned to Elmira in July 1888. He probably began writing this time with the second paragraph of chapter 21: there is a change of paper in the manuscript at that point.31 The notebook covering the months from July 1888 to May 1889 has many notes for the development of the narrative: “le Droit du Seigneur,” “Competitive examination for a 3d lieutenancy,” “Marinel—the leech hermit,” “Stylites must be a Free-Will Baptist,” “Impressment of sailors & soldiers. Vol. 3, last pages” (a reference to William Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century), “The building of the Mansion House,” “Grayling parties going out,” etc.32 Mark Twain apparently completed chapters 21–24 during the

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summer of 1888; and this year, with the end in sight, he continued writing after the family returned to Hartford. Baetzhold speculates plausibly that when the writer found himself describing the first newspaper, in chapter 26, he became aware of the need to account for the various machines Hank Morgan was using to industrialize Arthur’s kingdom, and wrote chapter 10 for insertion earlier.33 This statement by the Yankee is rather perfunctory: “In various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under way—nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization.”34

To avoid the distractions of his own household, Mark Twain took over an upstairs room in the Joseph Twichell house nearby as a study. On October 5 he wrote Theodore Crane, Mrs. Clemens’ brother-in-law, an account of the conditions under which he was working. Despite “the noise of the Twichell children and an army of carpenters to help,” he was making rapid progress: “It’s like a boiler-factory for racket, and in nailing a wooden ceiling onto the room under me the hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes, and jars my table a good deal; but I never am conscious of the racket at all, and I move my feet into position of relief without knowing when I do it.” He had written eighty pages in five days, and had conceived an imaginary connection between his book and the Paige typesetting machine that was under construction in the Pratt-Whitney machine shop in Hartford. “I want to finish the day the machine finishes,” he declared, “and a week ago the closest calculations for that indicated Oct. 22—but experience teaches me that their calculations will miss fire, as usual.”35

Mark Twain’s renewed excitement about his writing seems to have been at least partly due to yet another shift in perspective, which brought into play a fresh cluster of emotions: hostility to modern England as a society and a culture, a government and a legal system.

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The denunciation of medieval tyranny modulated itself into a denunciation of the vestiges of monarchy and aristocracy which Clemens perceived in nineteenth-century Britain. Although he was basically an admirer of the British and their culture, and had been well received in the United Kingdom both as a lecturer and as a writer, he had a low flash point when subjected even indirectly to what he considered adverse criticism. During the 1880s he had been deeply annoyed by remarks about the United States published by two English visitors in particular: Sir Lepel Griffin, author of a book called ironically The Great Republic (1884), and Matthew Arnold. In an essay entitled “Civilisation in the United States,” which appeared in the London Nineteenth Century for April 1888, Arnold had referred with approval to Sir Lepel’s assertion that “there is no country calling itself civilised where one would not rather live than in America, except Russia.”36 Six years earlier, in 1882, Arnold had published an article entitled “A Word about America,” in which he cited Mark Twain’s humor as an indication of the degraded condition of the nation’s literature.37 Both Howells and Clemens’ neighbor and former collaborator Charles Dudley Warner, editor of the Hartford Courant, had published replies to Arnold, but Clemens had merely confided a few pointed observations to his notebook.38 The Clemenses gave a tea for Arnold when he came through Hartford on his lecture tour in November 1883; Twichell’s diary reports the occasion as entirely decorous.39 But when Arnold published a two-installment review of

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Grant’s Memoirs in Murray’s Magazine for January and February 1887 which, although generally favorable, took exception to infelicities of Grant’s style such as his management of “shall-will” and “should-would,” Clemens the publisher and virtual idolater of Grant was furious.40 His notebooks for the following months show him collecting ammunition for an energetic reply, and his annoyance was not lessened by Arnold’s “Civilisation in the United States,” which cited disreputable American newspapers and “the addiction to ‘the funny man,’ who is a national misfortune there” as illustrations of the lack of distinction in this country.41 The death of Arnold in April 1888, however, obliged Mark Twain to give up the notion of publishing his rejoinder. It seems likely that some of his pent-up irritation with Arnold found expression in the gibes at English aristocracy, for which Mark Twain considered Arnold to be a spokesman, in the later chapters of A Connecticut Yankee.42

One last indication of the writer’s progress with his book is provided by his appearance on 17 January 1889 in Baltimore on the stage with Richard M. Johnston, the Georgia humorist and local-color writer. Clemens (an emergency replacement for Thomas Nelson Page, whose wife had suddenly died) read passages from the manuscript of A Connecticut Yankee. According to a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, he read a single chapter and said he had completed thirty-five more.43 The material he read, however, consisted of selections from the first six chapters of the book as we now have it. The protagonist was called Peters,44 but otherwise the text was apparently almost identical with the final version of the manuscript.

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Like all publications of the Webster company, A Connecticut Yankee was to be sold by the subscription method, and this meant that it had to be illustrated. Mark Twain began thinking about the choice of an artist even before he finished his manuscript. In March he inquired about Frank T. Merrill, who had made the drawings for The Prince and the Pauper in 1881. After delivering the manuscript, he asked his representatives in New York to get in touch with Reginald B. Birch, illustrator of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), and Daniel C. Beard, who had illustrated a story with an Oriental setting in the March 1889 Cosmopolitan.45 On June 14 the Webster company sent Beard and his brother Harry the following letter, which presupposes prior discussion:

Beard made a sample drawing, which Hall sent on to Clemens; and when this proved satisfactory, an agreement was made calling for “two hundred and fifty or sixty illustrations” at an over-all price of $3,000. Clemens accepted Beard’s terms. His agent, Franklin G. Whitmore, drafted a letter from Clemens’ dictation on the envelope of Hall’s letter of July 19 which reads:

In a letter to Beard, Clemens declared: “I have aimed to put all the crudeness and vulgarity necessary in the book, and I depend on you

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for the refinement and scintillating humor for which you are so famous.”48

Because Clemens and Hall were determined to have the book published in time for the Christmas trade, everyone connected with it had to work under pressure of time. Beard recalled later that all the drawings were produced in seventy working days.49 Only a month after the artist began work on the illustrations, Clemens was able to examine and approve of what must have been a considerable number of them. On August 28 he wrote to Beard:

Relations between author and illustrator continued to be excellent. Beard recalled later that “every suggestion of humor, every touch showing research, either in costumes, customs, history or economics was immediately seen and appreciated by Mr. Clemens.”51 Shortly after the book was published Mark Twain declared that Beard “illustrated the book throughout without requiring or needing anybody’s help suggestions; & to my mind the illustrations are better than the book—which is a good deal for me to say, I reckon.”52 After the drawings were all done, he wrote further to Beard: “Hold me under permanent obligations. What luck it was to find you! There are a hundred artists who could illustrate any other book of mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one. Yes, it was a fortunate hour that I went netting for lightning-bugs & caught a

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meteor. Live forever!”53 More specifically, many years later (in 1905), Clemens praised Beard’s drawings for supplementing the novel’s “vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the servilities of our poor human race, and also at the professions and the insolence of priestcraft and kingcraft—those creatures that make slaves of themselves and have not the manliness to shake it off.”54

Clemens’ delight in Beard’s illustrations points to the major problem posed by contemporary reviews of A Connecticut Yankee, for Beard was in an important sense the first reviewer of the book. His drawings constitute a clear and emphatic interpretation of a work in which other readers, then and later, would find widely divergent meanings. Beard’s overall interpretation is presented in condensed form in the illustration without a caption on page 487. Here the artist has evidently tried to find a way of graphically depicting the relation between sixth-century Britain (represented by the helmeted knight on the left) and nineteenth-century Britain (represented by the figure at the upper right, whose bowler hat, monocle, and high stiff collar suggest the stereotype of a dandified aristocrat). The Yankee, clad from the waist down in medieval garb but from the chest upward in the cheap plaid suit of his nineteenth-century incarnation, is plunging through the centuries of English history. The silhouette figures at the bottom of the drawing may be intended to represent organic evolution from a primitive marine organism (here a lobster or crayfish, conceivably an allusion to the “Adam-clam” mentioned by the Yankee on page 208) to the only slightly less primitive form of life represented by human figures in combat as if in a tournament. The Yankee arouses consternation in the aristocratic English observers in both eras; the implication is that they are basically alike. And other drawings insist upon similarities between the abuses of medieval and modern societies. The illustration on page 411, for example, shows with painful explicitness that in the scales of justice in the sixth century a crown outweighs the hammer of “Labor,” whereas in the nineteenth century the same function is performed by a bag labeled “$1000000.”

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The parallel between sixth-century and nineteenth-century oppression is made especially vivid in Beard’s drawing of “The Slave Driver” (p. 405) with the easily recognizable features of Jay Gould. Gould’s name never appears in this or any other drawing, but when Mark Twain was interviewed for an article in the New York Times upon publication of the book, he “pointed specially to a fine portrait of Jay Gould in the capacity of ‘the slave driver,’ ” and he told an enquirer, “I merely approved of the pictures—& very heartily, too, the slave-driver along with the rest.”55 There is evidence that he had long shared the widespread view of Gould as a ruthless and dishonest manipulator of the stock market: an illustration in Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography (1871) had labeled Gould a swindler along with “Diamond Jim” Fisk and John T. Hoffman. The denunciation of American Robber Barons, however, activated emotions quite different from those growing out of American resentment of the British aristocracy. When Beard ends up clothing Hank Morgan in the striped trousers, top hat, and goatee of Uncle Sam, with a Yankee Doodle feather in his hatband, and places him astride a copy of Common Sense aiming a quill-pen lance at the bloated midriff of a Tudor aristocrat (pp. 454, 492), he offers some basis for the question asked by a hostile British reviewer in the London Daily Telegraph: “Which, then, is to be most admired—the supremacy of a knight or the success of a financier? Under which King will the Americans serve—the ideal or the real? Will they own allegiance to King Arthur or Jay Gould?”56

In defying such British sneers, Mark Twain was capable of accepting the oversimplified analysis they implied of the conflict represented in his book. An entry in his notebook covering the period just following the publication of A Connecticut Yankee reads as follows:

Yet a page of notes for an essay on recent American history which Clemens jotted down more than a decade later contains the statement: “Cal. that is, the discovery of gold in California & Gould were the beginners of the moral rot, they were the worst things that ever befel Amer.”58

Nevertheless, prepublication advertising for A Connecticut Yankee played upon Anglophobia rather than hostility toward American financiers. The prospectus for the book—a document whose contents Clemens approved—tried to appeal to crude popular feelings:

Clemens’ friend Edmund Clarence Stedman, a poet who was also a successful Wall Street broker, took a similar line. When he read the manuscript before publication, he commented: “You are going at the still existing radical principles or fallacies which made ‘chivalry’ possible once, & servilities & flunkeyism & tyranny possible now.”60 This interpretation sees Hank Morgan not as a spokesman for an exploited working class against nobles and king, but as an individualist preaching American self-reliance in opposition to British respect for rank and social status.

Howells also offered enthusiastic approval in his prepublication comments on A Connecticut Yankee,61 but his published review, in

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Harper’s Magazine for January 1890, is more interesting because he tries to devise a logical connection between the contrast of medieval and modern civilizations, and the attacks on England both past and present. Calling the book “an object-lesson in democracy,” he says:

Yet Howells discreetly recognizes Beard’s gibe at Gould also. The book, he adds,

By this rather fluid method of reasoning, Mark Twain’s jingoism can be made to virtually disappear. The result is a reading that retains something like Beard’s populism with none of the Anglophobia that he shared with Clemens. Furthermore, Howells seems indifferent to the theme of progress resulting from advancement in technology. He minimizes the difference between past and present; the contrast of civilizations becomes instead a comparison. Thus the “heart-breaking scene” of the young mother hanged for theft of a piece of cloth to keep her child from starving becomes

But Howells has to admit that the book does not have a consistent pattern: “The scheme confesses allegiance to nothing; the incidents, the facts follow as they will.” The Boss

Howells’ list illustrating the diversity of incident in the book has for its last item the conclusion of the story: “It all ends with the Boss’s proclamation of the Republic after Arthur’s death, and his destruction of the whole chivalry of England by electricity.” The wording here is remarkably euphemistic: the heap of twenty-five thousand decaying corpses which traps the Yankee and his small band of loyal followers in their fortified cave has become a featureless abstraction—“the whole chivalry of England”—and destruction by electricity does not sound nearly so ghastly as the combination of exploding land mines, slaughter by Gatling guns, and electrocution which constitutes the Battle of the Sand-Belt. The tranquil tone is sustained when Howells immediately begins a new paragraph with the sentence, “We can give no proper notion of the measureless play of an imagination which has a gigantic jollity in its feats, together with the tenderest sympathy.”62 Yet bewildering as these opinions may sound today, they do not bespeak callousness in Howells so much as a conception of genre different from ours. He interprets the carnage of this last sequence as one would the boast of Mark Twain’s Mississippi raftsman, the Child of Calamity: “I’m the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my enclosed property, and I bury my dead on my own premises!”63 Other reviewers were as indifferent as Howells toward an incident that seems revolting to a post-Hiroshima reader. Just as eye gouging had been accounted a source of amusement in backwoods humor a generation earlier, so the sheer scale of horror in Hank Morgan’s technological slaughter apparently

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caused it to be interpreted as another specimen of tall-tale exaggeration.64

Howells’ enthusiastic review of A Connecticut Yankee was the only serious attention, favorable or unfavorable, that the book received in a standard literary magazine; and it should be kept in mind that he published his essay in “The Editor’s Study” of Harper’s, a department in which he could set his own policy since it was distinct from the regular section of book reviews. The Century, which had run excerpts from the book in November, had no reviewing section and thus no occasion for further comment. The Atlantic Monthly gave A Connecticut Yankee rather less than two inches as the fourteenth (and next to the last) item in a “Books of the Month” section, saying that “it was a delightful idea to take a Hartford man of the present day to the England of the sixth century,” and finding his adventures there “pleasing” and (rather oddly) “natural,” but dismissing out of hand any supposed relevance to the nineteenth century with the comment, “Incidentally the feudal system gets some hard knocks, but as the feudal system is dead there is no great harm done, and the moral purpose shines.”65

Scribner’s Magazine used the book as a peg on which to hang a ponderous thousand-word editorial expressing Arnoldian reservations about the American cult of humor. The review acknowledges that the nation has attained uncontested pre-eminence in this “activity,” but argues that

Only two other critical notices of A Connecticut Yankee in literary magazines have been discovered. One is a rancorous piece in the Boston Literary World declaring that “the serious aim under Mark Twain’s travesty is the glorification of American Protestant democracy” which “fails through the extreme partiality of the procedure.” The Boston reviewer also echoes British objections to the vulgarity of the burlesque of Malory and Tennyson.67 Finally, the New York Critic offered a casual but refreshing note: “We do not at all approve of Mark’s performance: it is very naughty indeed: but—and that is all he and his publishers want—we cannot help laughing at it.”68

Among newspaper notices, by far the most elaborate was the long and prominently displayed article in the Boston Herald by Sylvester Baxter. Clemens had first met Baxter in 1880, when he arrived in Hartford with letters of introduction from Howells to interview Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner. Clemens had found him “a kind-hearted, well-meaning corpse . . . but . . . horribly dull company.”69 In November 1889 Baxter wrote to Mark Twain that Howells had spoken to him enthusiastically about the new book, and suggested that advance sheets be sent him so that he might “give a good story about it in the Herald.” Clemens promised, “I will have 2 sets of sheets sent to you, so that you can make extracts if you should wish to,” but asked Baxter to maintain contact with Howells in order to avoid having his notice appear before the publication of Howells’

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review in Harper’s.70 On November 20 Clemens wrote Baxter at length in jubilation over the overthrow of the monarchy in Brazil. “Another throne has gone down,” he declared, “& I swim in oceans of satisfaction. I wish I might live fifty years longer; I believe I should see the thrones of Europe selling at auction for old iron.” He continued,

Clemens concluded by exulting over rumors of restive slaves and a tottering throne in Portugal. Baxter answered on November 22: “I enjoyed your letter immensely and agree with it wholly. . . . I will work in the ‘plagiarism,’ all right.” He invited Clemens to speak at a Boston meeting sponsored by the Nationalist movement which would also be addressed by Edward Bellamy, whose Utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) had inspired the development of the organization. Baxter had been among the founders of the first Nationalist Club in the country. Already, he announced, the movement had spread throughout the United States in the eleven months since its beginning; it was “getting ready to give the Plutocracy a shaking up before many years.” On that same day Clemens sent Baxter a brief note, saying, “I have asked Howells to write & tell you, if he has no objections to your notice coming out before his. If he hasn’t any,—let fly!” And, significantly: “Please don’t let on that there are any slurs at the Church or Protection in the book—I want to catch the reader unwarned, & modify his views if I can.”71 A couple of days later Clemens declined the invitation to speak at the Boston meeting: “Indeed I would like to be there, & meet the man who has made the accepted heaven paltry by inventing a better one on earth, but I am otherwise booked & cannot extricate myself.” Later correspondence bears on a

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proposed visit to Hartford of Baxter and Bellamy, whom Clemens further characterized as “the maker of the latest & best of all the Bibles.”72

When Baxter’s review appeared in the Herald (on 15 December 1889) it was accompanied by six of the illustrations, for which cuts had been sent from the Webster company office. Baxter’s interpretation of the book, from the standpoint of Nationalist ideology, closely resembles Beard’s own single-tax reading of it. Baxter declares, for instance:

Many of Beard’s drawings, declares Baxter, “embody instructive allegories,” and he lists several of the more explicit ones, pointing out for example that “one little cut shows ‘Decorations of Sixth Century Aristocracy’ as ‘Rewards for all Babes Born Under Specified Conditions,’ such as ‘Slave Driver,’ ‘Robber of Unarmed Savages,’ ‘Robber of Orphans,’ ‘Absorber of Taxes,’ ‘Murderer of Rivals,’ etc., the whole supported by ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense!’ ”73

It is not surprising that the anonymous review in Henry George’s New York Standard should have been even more enthusiastic than Baxter’s piece in the Herald. It ran to two and a half pages (of standard newspaper size) and was accompanied by five illustrations somewhat larger than those in the Herald, all of them with explicit captions. “Who could have suspected Mark Twain of being a political and social reformer?” asks the opening sentence. “Yet that is the character he assumes in his latest book.” The reviewer emphasizes the satirical function of the contrast of civilizations: “Villeinage serves as a setting

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for thinly disguised pictures of our own slavery period.” Furthermore, abuses existing in “not very remote periods of English history, are identified with the present power of the rich over the poor.” This critic, like Baxter, might be said to be reviewing Beard’s book rather than Mark Twain’s. He is candid in acknowledging the distinction:

In short, Beard is “not only an excellent artist but an intelligent single-tax man as well.”74

Other newspaper notices adopted the same populist line, with greater or lesser admixtures of Know-Nothing doctrine and of Anglophobia. The Keokuk (Iowa) Gate City, for example, declared that A Connecticut Yankee is “the book of an American democrat having his fight out with the Roman Catholic church and with England.”75 The Woodland (California) Democrat characterized Mark Twain as “a cosmopolitan Democrat; he is a friend of the world’s freeman,” and at the same time “one of the builders of literature.” The book is a “forcible arraignment of the English nobility for its oppression of the people.” But

Furthermore, “The book is illustrated according to the spirit of the text. The artist is a humorist, or else Mark Twain sharpened his pencil for him.” On 13 January 1890 Clemens wrote a note to the reviewer,

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Charles W. Thomas, thanking him and declaring, “Yes, you are right—that is the book’s purpose.”76

The Quincy (California) Plumas National also emphasized the anti-British aspect of A Connecticut Yankee: “It is one long satire on modern England and Englishmen, under the clever guise of an attempt to picture the England of the sixth century and of Arthurian legend.” But the reviewer managed to merge the anti-British and populist themes: “Mark Twain has come up from the people. He is American to the backbone, and the assumption of natural superiority by titled English aristocrats and the terrible wrongs inflicted on the working people, evidently galled him beyond endurance.”77

British reviewers of A Connecticut Yankee were for obvious reasons less well disposed toward the book than were the Americans. William T. Stead, a radical spokesman for the left wing of the Liberal Party, made A Connecticut Yankee the “Novel of the Month” in his recently founded Review of Reviews with an approving introductory note and ten pages of extracts. He acknowledged that in doing so he exposed himself to “many remonstrances” because English readers were likely to find “a certain profanation in the subject.”78 The nationalism that had been stimulated by the celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1887 was still running high. Furthermore, as the appropriately named James Ashcroft Noble pointed out in the Academy, “the Arthurian legends, . . . to us of the age of Tennyson, have become saturated with spiritual beauty and suggestiveness.”79 Thus even a critic who, like Desmond O’Brien in Truth, might believe that Mark Twain’s denunciation of the oppression of the English people by “the Nobles, the King, and the Church” was “thoroughly sound doctrine, . . . needed still . . . sorely in England and Ireland,” was likely to feel that although “his fooling is admirable and his preaching is admirable, . . . they are mutually destructive.”80 The London Daily Telegraph set forth more fully the nature of Mark Twain’s blasphemy: “An attack on the ideals associated with King Arthur is a coarse pandering to that passion for irreverence which is

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at the basis of a great deal of Yankee wit.” Of course, Mark Twain is merely following the normal practice of American humorists, who “now live by shocking decent people who still retain love for the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Scott, and Tennyson.” The “Yankee scribe chooses to fling pellets of mud upon the high altar.”81 More generally, the Saturday Review of London dismissed A Connecticut Yankee in three lines as “a triumph of dulness, vulgarity, and ignorance such as none but a Yankee in the time of Queen Victoria can compass.”82

Reginald B. Brett, in the Pall Mall Gazette, was even more explicit on the subject of the ideals that Mark Twain was besmirching: “The quest of the Holy Grail was the symbol—in the old romance—of individual effort to arrive at perfection in personal life, to attain to high, unselfish, irreproachable conduct.” Following the example of the reviewer for the Daily Telegraph in invoking religious sanctions, Brett intimated that Mark Twain might as appropriately have burlesqued the Sermon on the Mount.83 These are the implications of summary statements like that of the Scots Observer, to the effect that Mark Twain is endorsing “Yankee ’cuteness and Wall Street chicanery as compared to the simple fidelity and devotion of the knightly ideal.” Waxing personal, the reviewer notes that “Mr. W. de Howells” has ventured to compare Mark Twain with Cervantes—with the result that one begins “to pity the poor devil.”

Disturbed by adverse criticism in Great Britain, Clemens wrote to Andrew Lang, who had praised Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a curious letter asking for Lang’s help in placing himself in a better light before the British public. The letter has disappeared, but a draft of it (apparently lacking the first page) is in the Mark Twain Papers. Whether or not this document presents an accurate text of what Lang

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received, it provides something available nowhere else: an apologia by Mark Twain for his own career and a statement of his goals as a writer. Putting aside his various earlier comments about A Connecticut Yankee, he describes himself as a writer who has not addressed “the thin top crust of humanity—the cultivated,” “but always hunted for bigger game—the masses.” Without apparent irony, he asserts: “It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best worth lifting at, I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath.” He classes his own work with an astonishing list of unpretentious kinds of art that lift the common people a little way toward the “far light” of culture, including chromos, “the hurdy-gurdy & the villagers’ singing society,” “Kipling’s far-reaching bugle-note,” the Salvation Army, and “the cheap terra cotta groups” (presumably like those of John Rogers). It is hard to believe that Mark Twain seriously intended to analogize his work either with Kipling’s (the “bugle-note,” for that matter, seems to refer to verse rather than prose fiction) or with the only other example of current literature mentioned, “the little everybody’s-poet whose rhymes are in all mouths to-day & will be in nobody’s mouth next generation.”85 And it is even more unlikely that he was now disposed to make for himself in earnest the claim embodied in the sobriquet of “Moralist of the Main,” which he had enjoyed in his Bohemian days as a newspaperman in San Francisco.86 In short, the letter seems to be an improvisation expressing only a passing mood.

Lang responded handsomely to Clemens’ letter a year later with an article in the Illustrated London News calling him “one among the greatest of contemporary makers of fiction”—but he still refused to read A Connecticut Yankee, on the ground that he could not believe Clemens knew enough about history to be “a sound critic of the ideal of the Middle Ages.”87

Although it is easy to recognize salient features of both American and British popular culture in the reviews of A Connecticut Yankee, these reviews reveal an astonishing variety of interpretations. The confusion is increased by the statements that the writer himself made

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about his intentions in the book (many of which have been quoted above). To these should be added the fragments of several unpublished prefaces included in Appendix C of the present volume. The book functions as if it were the ink-blot of a Rorschach test: it offered such an abundance of suggestions, it touched so many powerful drives, some of them evidently only half-conscious, that critics were impelled to discover in it, or rather to project into it, their own strongest feelings and beliefs about the course of human history and the nature of Occidental society toward the end of the nineteenth century. With regard to A Connecticut Yankee, however, Mark Twain himself should have the last word. It is one of his most memorable—a comment to Howells:

A Connecticut Yankee was published on 10 December 1889. Its sales were disappointing—only thirty-two thousand copies during the first year, whereas Mark Twain’s immediately preceding book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, had sold fifty-one thousand copies fourteen months after publication, and his first book, The Innocents Abroad, sixty-seven thousand in its first year. By August 1890 Hall was apologizing for A Connecticut Yankee’s poor financial return. “The book was a very expensive one to make up, as you can see,” he explained in a letter accompanying a formal accounting. Beard’s fee of $3,000 had been high, as had the cost of engraving and of high-quality paper to print the illustrations. “We also went to rather exceptional, heavy expense in circularizing, & in keeping a couple of men on the road to appoint agents, etc. . . . For some reason it has been a hard book to push and that is one of the causes of the heavy expenses.” The Webster company’s accounting showed a gross profit of only $12,079.98 for the first six months (when 25,000 books had already been sold) and the company’s financial condition was so poor that Hall found it impossible to forward even a portion of the money Clemens was owed. The British sales of A Connecticut Yankee during

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1890 were less than fifteen thousand, about average for one of his books in England.89 Nevertheless, the basic fable has continued to hold its charm. A silent film version with Harry C. Myers as the Yankee was made in 1921, and sound versions were produced in 1931 (starring Will Rogers) and 1949 (a musical, with Bing Crosby). A musical comedy by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, produced in 1927, was the first work of this team to run for more than four hundred performances; and in 1943 they produced another version of A Connecticut Yankee in which the Yankee was a lieutenant in the Navy and Sandy a WAC corporal.90

H.N.S.