our times—his seeming excesses of burlesque were grounded in bizarre realities. Stanley Brodwin’s “The Useful & the Useless River: Life on the Mississippi Revisited” follows another line of continuity to displace the standard emphases, leading us both to appreciate an integrated river trilogy in Mark Twain’ s canon and, more particularly, to take and even admire the last half of Life on the Mississippi on its own terms. To be sure, Mark Twain moved on from the 1870s, to our decade and beyond. We try to fit him into the enduring perspectives; most theories of mimesis in effect exclude him, but as readers we are uneasy about that. Sherwood Cummings recovers Mark Twain’s sophisticated rationale, footed in the 1870s, for transmuting contemporary life into fiction that William Dean Howells could salute as realistic though the rationale and the fiction were sui generis.

DUKE UNIVERSITY

 David E. F. Sloane

On New Year’s Day, 1870, B. P. Shillaber penned a note to his younger colleague in the field of humor, Mark Twain: “I am glad to see such evidence of your popularity, that argues prosperity. The papers are full of you, from East to West, and all delight in genial Mark. You seem inexhaustible—the young juices not having all been exhausted in stalk is a promise of ripe growth. Well, bless you my dear fellow! Make your hay while your sun shines—advice that I can give from my own experience—as I have thrown away several fortunes through my cussed foolishness in neglecting to do what I now advise.”¹ The most remarkable part of the letter is not the economic injunction, for Twain proved adept at throwing away fortunes, too, but the recognition of potential. By 1870, Artemus Ward was dead; Nasby and Kerr were still active, but their comic veins seemed weakening; Billings was much on the scene with his almanacs; Max Adeler was just opening his career in Philadelphia—but none of them was to match Twain’s growing stature.

Shillaber was not to be alone in his recognition of Twain as the young writer’s special qualities and special themes emerged, and placing Twain’s writings of this period in juxtaposition with those of other literary comedians helps indicate how Twain’s consciousness infuses the materials of the 1870s, enriching them beyond the work of his contemporaries. Many of the specifics of Twain’s career were foggy even in his own mind as he entered the 1870s. He had not quite shaken loose from the idea that he was a newspaperman, although more and more of his work was directed at the magazine-reading public. As a humorist, Twain looked in several directions, proposing among other things a Mark Twain’s Annual to capture the trade of Josh Billings’ popular Allminax² and conducting a short-lived column in the Galaxy. Yet the major themes had already emerged in several instances, and their inclusion in the lower-keyed offerings of the 1870s comprises Twain’s real growth as a writer.

American literary comedy as it appeared in the 1860s and 1870s reflected historical developments over thirty years, and Twain’s themes lie close to those roots. Joseph Neal’s urban “Hard Cases” offered urban vulgarians to rival Baldwin’s Southwestern characters. The New York Knickerbocker gathered in comic sketches from both the North and South reflecting village character, and Shillaber’s Boston Carpet-Bag drew on a wide variety of Yankee

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comedians. Phoenix’s sophisticated literary burlesque gave way to Artemus Ward’s vulgarized dialect and idiom, but both Ward and Phoenix used humor in a unique way, to express reliance on common principles of the middle-class American democracy: simplicity, integrity, a certain degree of selflessness, and social equality. Nor were they in isolation. “Doesticks,” viewing New York City politics with a jaundiced eye, held similar presuppositions. The favored weapon of all these writers was burlesque, for the social realities did not measure up to the political idealism.

The Civil War obscured the urbanization of the North as a major independent phenomenon. It also pre-empted the consciousness of the literary comedians for most of the decade, galvanizing their language, funding their imagery, and molding their personae as no purely literary influence could have done. As much as the South-westerners may be seen as defending gentility and Whiggery in the 1850s,³ the literary comedians upheld individual freedom and the more practical aspects of democracy. The most widely-quoted line of the early 1860s was Artemus Ward’s query to the Prince of Wales:

“I axed him how he liked bein’ Prince, as fur as he had got    Middle-class Americans were delighted to see hereditary ranks as just another form of job, and Howells, introducing a volume of Ward’s sketches after the turn of the century, commented on the “universal joy” which the line brought to the nation.⁵

Literary comedians equal and lesser to Ward were even more completely submerged in the Civil War as a fund of literary experience. Nasby, as the postmaster of Confedrit X-Roads, made ringing demands for equality as opposed to social venality and self-serving political viciousness. Orpheus C. Kerr, punning on the political spoilsman, produced three volumes of war correspondence from the viewpoint of a tipsy literary bohemian among the common soldiers. The overwhelming issues of the Civil War brought them into conformity with a broad portion of the growing American middle class, perhaps broader than would otherwise have been the case, for their public was never again quite so large. Private Miles O’Reilly is another figure clearly related to the War, as is Bill Arp, the Southerner’ s answer to Artemus Ward. Even Josh Billings produced appropriate aphorisms (Bace of supplize, —Unkle Samuel’s pocketBook),⁶ but the aphoristic mode does not involve the dramatic commitment of persona which was required by the first-person letters and narratives of the other writers.

Mark Twain was if anything more sharply focused on the ethical dimensions of comedy than his counterparts, yet he largely avoided

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the political reference points of the War in shaping his voice and vision. He gloomed at thirty-four, in 1869, that his life was made up of apprenticeships, but this was also evidence of his flexibility and the variety of his potential subject matter.⁷ Even though his attitude toward art, history, and religion parallels the iconoclasm of the Civil War literary comedians, Twain’s genius lies in the ability to refocus humor on the broader philosophical aspects of culture and social relationships. Twain’s own ethics were firmly fixed in a “new” mode combining a liberated Presbyterianism with the practical roughness of a rising professional in a democratic society. Aspiring upward socially, like the other comedians, he was only interested in social manners where they bordered on broader human issues; unlike the other literary comedians’ writings, Twain’s were cosmopolitan in scope almost from the outset.

“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which nearly appeared in Artemus Ward’s Travels Among the Mormons (1865) but gained independent life and fame, is on a democratic theme: the stranger “don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” Proof of character comes through determination as with the Jacksonian bulldog; defeat through uncalculable circumstances is not loss of honor, but defeat through naive self-deception is ludicrous. Where the literary comedian’s letters were serial and digressive, however, Twain’s story is localized in perspective, framed, and given plot and characterization based on repeated action and accumulated detail. What in Ward was attached to contemporary popular events and in Billings to agrarian artifacts was only localized in type by Twain, with characteristics like pride developed through detail; the persona Mark Twain is colloquial as narrator, moreover, but does not freeze his speech in the local dialect of his characters—a crucial point for his later travel narratives and essays.

The Innocents Abroad cleaves to the same viewpoint as the “Jumping Frog” story, for which reason F. L. Pattee describes it as the voice of the new West filled with after-the-war Americanism.⁸ Much of the format, as Dewey Ganzel has convincingly shown, as well as the viewpoint of the Quaker City letters which became The Innocents Abroad in 1869, was already established before Twain arrived in situ.⁹ The thinking is once again the practical humanism of the middle class democratic American citizen, and Twain’s persona, deprecating its own “vandalism” but even more strongly attacking historical sham and its impositions, is appropriate to the conception. For proof of these points, one need only refer to the Turkish lunch

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sequence, the steam bath—which Twain had also decried in the same tenns in an earlier Alta letter from New York City—clothes buying, the Holy Land travels. Almost every sequence in the narrative expresses the viewpoint, frequently through American catchwords such as the credulous “Is he dead?” question about Columbus, an overt borrowing from Artemus Ward which all of Twain’s readers were intended to recognize.

Twain’s travel literature was unique, and since these writings largely characterized him in the 1870s, its special nature should be noted. With one or two exceptions, jokes were not placed in his works in isolation; events were exaggerated and altered to accommodate Twain’s burlesque experiences. For comparison, Nasby in Exile, published over a decade after Innocents, in 1882, still offers the same travel jokes, going back to Artemus Ward lectures in 1864, but fails to elaborate the jokes in relation to the narrator’s own attitudes or psychology. No Russian prince ever retired after a traveler’s visit to count the spoons, as is claimed three times in Innocents. Twain is creating a new genre which is best described as semi-fiction: a naive persona embroiders an exaggerated burlesque on the real “facts” of cosmopolitan travel and thereby develops his “American” skeptical vision. Innocents, Roughing It, short sketches in the Galaxy’s “Memoranda” column, and later A Tramp Abroad all manifest the unique pose; voice and diction are flexible although characteristically biblical and ethical in word choice; there is a bent for propagandistic melodrama—the whipping of young girls or the mistreatment of animals, separations of families and lovers, the connection of villainy with contemporary American experience through metaphors contained in the narrator’s commentary.

Roughing It continues in the semi-fictional technique, although critics such as Minnie Brashear have seen a significant advance in it.” Like Innocents, the real ethos of the book lay in the Civil War era, and letters home from the West in the early 1860s foreshadow Twain’s intention to do a Western book.’² The pretense to “realism” is extensive, and Twain drew heavily on notebooks and on his friend Joe Goodman in constructing the book. Exploded incidents such as the dictionary in the stagecoach and Bemis and the buffalo dominate the early going. Figures like Slade achieve both dramatization and anecdotal narrative account, thus fusing the supposedly real events of the naifs journey with the “Western” myth.

Like every other book on the West, Roughing It must deal with the Mormon question. For Ward, the treatment of the plural wife system was isolated in a burlesque letter in 1859 or handled

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awkwardly in the serious portion of Travels Among the Mormons. Adeler also wrote a longish burlesque dramatization of a Mormon who acquires and loses several hundred wives, “The Tragedy of Thompson Dunbar,” in Random Shots (1878). Twain likewise burlesques the Mormon plural wife system through the problems of buying gifts, but he throws his story into a frame which detaches the author from the teller and allows for the story to have a life of its own as a “story” encountered in the West. The willingness to be imposed on by such stories is part of the characterization of the narrator, in fact. The “Hank Monk” story, which Twain, Ward, and many others told, is used in the same way. Retold until it becomes funny by repetition, the story finally kills the last would-be teller, who attempts not to tell it to Twain and his companions in gratitude for their rescuing him. Again, semi-fiction warps events into fantasy.

 Twain’s remarks on the Goshoot Indians show the most significant influence of the semi-fictional technique in making Twain’s narrative unique. The mind of the narrator, his psychology, develops social comment through its movement toward humor. Thus, Twain launches an attack on the Cooperian view of the Indians, such as that held by a Broadway clerk after two weeks at the Bowery Theatre. The focus of the comment shifts off literary burlesque, where it would have remained if Ward’s or Kerr’s: “There is an impression abroad that the Baltimore and Washington Railroad Company and many of its employes are Goshoots; but it is an error. There is only a plausible resemblance. . . .”¹³ So Western commentary blends with Eastern comedy in the narrator’s voice, and a social statement emerges. In the widest sense, the narrator’s travel experience is a metaphor for social experience. Consequently, the seemingly localized literature by Twain continues to be readable where other descriptions—of the West by Horace Greeley, J. Ross Browne, Dan De Quille, and Ward—of Europe by Ward, Nasby, even Sam Slick—and of the American village experience by the Danbury News Man, Burdette, Shillaber, and virtually everyone else—have become merely historical artifacts.

As much as Slade may be a symbolic figure of the West, it is the author’s own literary ability which conditions his readers to find such figures and representative types as Slade, or Scotty Briggs, or the “flush times” milieu of Virginia City. Within the treatment of experience lies the development of social hierarchies and the covert analysis of them through humor. Milton preoccupies himself with

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the principalities of the Platonic heavens; Twain describes the orders of democratic frontiersmen through their occupations:

 This hierarchy is actually symbolic of orderings of human relationships. Twain’s later anecdotes undercut the vanity underlying this social ordering in the same dead-pan mode that characterized the “Jumping Frog”:

 

It is easy to move from Roughing It to the more cohesive expression of a truly professional community in the “Lightning Pilot” episode which highlighted “Old Times on the Mississippi” in the Atlantic Monthly. Set off by itself in the February, 1875, number, this later symbolic moment heightened the interplay between naivete and tested ability; in the same issue was an article on John Brown in Virginia, Clarence King reviewing Bancroft’s contributions to the study of the Pacific races, and poetry by Cilia Thaxter and E. C. Stedman; the “tone” and the verisimilitude accreted around the fictive moment are overwhelming. As extensive as all of the localist detail appears, however, the narratives are shaped by human values:  needs, services, abilities. And it is the values which are crystallized in dramatic action—a projection of values through stories which are possibly true but more probably half true and transformed, almost unnoticeably, by the author’s perspective. This is the ripe growth which Twain had promised.

In comparison, the 1870s was not a time of growth for some of the other literary comedians dominant in the 1860s. Kerr’s tone had been sophisticated and bohemian, but post-Civil War America offered little scope for an aesthete who claimed kinship with Disraeli.¹⁶ He confessed that his social satire was reduced to a burlesque of parvenus and rootless Romanticism. His overblown irony,

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which had carried its own point when applied to national and international issues in the l860s, distracted from fictional plotting, and he was unable to change tone. His last novel for Lipincott’s in 1883 is free of his “voice” but lacks humor and interest.

Nasby’s problems were somewhat similar to Kerr’s. He commented to Twain in 1869 that the rights of the African were about squeezed out as a source of satire,¹⁷ but The Struggles of P. V. Nasby (1872) was still a collection of dated Reconstruction materials far more limited in subject than pieces which Twain resurrected. In 1875, The Morals of Abou Ben Adhem combined Sut Lovingood plots with lower middle class urban life—a husband locks himself out in his nightshirt, falls into the wash house, and almost freezes to death by morning, for example. In “The Wise Old Rat,” Abou recounts to a young seeker from Boston the story of a rat who floats to a safety on a board thrown at him by a nasty boy: “The truly great is he who makes good use of opportunities.”¹⁸ The burlesque Arabian voice is amusing, but it has little to do with the earlier Nasby; the Confederate Post-Master’s line had run out. Nasby’s novel A Paper City (1878), was criticized by reviewers for the “unpleasantly real Western flavor” of its small-town milieu.¹⁹ Humor is caustic, as in the description of a rat-faced type whose vices are limited only by his cheapness; Western wild-catting is exposed but with little humor; a dimension is missing.

Nasby and Kerr were occupied with localized topics, but Twain fixed his sights on the national issues of a government which serves the people. In The Gilded Age (1873), he roasted a cross-section of American politics, noting the “odor of sanctity” emitted by such Congressmen as Brother Balaam in “the Congressional prayer-meeting.”²⁰ This exaggerated authorial voice blended easily into jokes about trains which ran so slowly that the cowcatcher should have been on the rear to protect passengers from the animals climbing aboard from behind.a1 In comparison to this flow of exaggeration and dead-pan sarcasm, “Porte Crayon’s” “Confessions of a Candidate,” in Harper’s Monthly, 52 (February, 1876), illustrates the weaknesses of some contemporary political humor. Noting that princes and planets have no importance in modem politics, Squire Candid admits that the people are the true source of power, “while wisdom and counsel are only to be found in the voice of the multitude,” and so he runs for office under the aegis of “Bully M’Cue, who kept a billiard table and a gambling room at the other end of the village—a notorious character, whom heretofore I had always civilly avoided.” The central figure is already cut off from a

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set of vices in which Twain would have engulfed his own persona, and the sketch is consequently predictable. The Whiggish Candid is humiliated in running for office, the electorate is shown in a vulgar light, and the mock-heroic loser leaves the reader with ironic comments on democracy and the press. Even in travel literature having nothing to do with politics Twain could be at once more sharply focused and broader based than this. “Rambling Notes on an Idle Excursion,” in the Atlantic Monthly, 41 (January, 1878), concludes with a salvo at customs which touches official corruption, individual sloth, and hypocrisy. Twain notes that you can buy a permit to land after hours, but not honestly: “Our ship and passengers lay under expense and the humiliating captivity all night, under the very nose of the little official reptile who is supposed to protect New York from pestilence by his vigilant ‘inspections.’ This imposing rigor gave everybody a solemn and awful idea of the beneficent watchfulness of our government, and there were some who wondered if anything finer could be found in other countries.”²² When the “intricate ceremony of inspecting the ship” turns out the next morning to be merely accepting a paper in a cleft stick, Twain launches into further rhetoric—causing the Atlantic to censor him, which makes for even more rhetoric in a footnote added by Twain—and ends by suggesting that inspection permits and fees be exchanged by mail.²³ As elsewhere, the exaggerated persona develops a semi-fictional experience which holds political and ethical overtones but is generalized, also, in dramatizing the Twain attitude.

Comparing Twain pieces with work by Max Adeler is equally illuminating in terms of ethical projection and dramatization. Sketches, New and Old (1875) and Out of the Hurly-Burly (1874) offer a variety of short pieces with parallel motifs. Adler’s book sold 250,000 copies, a good sale, by the end of the decade and was appreciated in Europe for its documentation of the American village experience. Sketches was the occasion of a major review by Howells in the Atlantic. Although some of its sketches went back to the middle 1860s, Howells praised “the growing seriousness of meaning in the apparently unmoralized drolling”: “here is the burlesque, that seems such plain and simple fun at first, doubling and turning upon itself till you wonder why Mr. Clemens has been left out of the list of our subtle humorists.”²⁴ One of the remarks of the Nation’s review of Out of the Hurly-Burly placed it in the class of Artemus Ward followers, of which Mark Twain was the best-known example, thus, one supposes, equally damning both Adeler and Twain with faint praise.²⁵

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Out of the Hurly-Burly offers a pair of anecdotes using cannibalism in away which compares with Twain’s “Cannibalism in the Cars” from Sketches. Lieutenant Smiley, a drop-in visitor to the Adelers’ middle class home, describes a missionary who mesmerizes his cannibal converts, causing them to eat each other while he escapes to places where “the popular appetite for warm clergymen is not so intensely vivid.”²⁶ A second story of Smiley’s concludes with the missionary’s bereaved widow exclaiming, “I know he is better off . . . but you know what a very particular man he was, and oh, Mr. Smiley, I fear that those brutal savages boiled him with cabbage.”²⁷ Smiley muses that onion would have been better. The setting is not brought into play, and Smiley is merely a drop-in character in the frame. In Twain’s story, cannibalism serves to reverse political clichés. The legislative “friends” of a candidate for dinner nominate him to be eaten and even Nature must “yield” the floor to hunger. The language and preoccupations of democracy are burlesqued, and the frame detaches the story from reality but leaves it as a philosophical speculation on government. The final discussion of various candidates in terms of honesty and substance, applicable to political appraisals, is carried on in terms of taste and texture. The subtle doubling noted by Howells is quintessentially intellectualized political humor, showing its origins in the Civil War era, but marked by Twain’s voice unmistakeably.

Longer stores highlight the same distinction of theme. Twain’s “A True Story,” his first major effort in the pages of the Atlantic, offers a story of loss and rediscovery which parallels the loss and redemption of honor theme in Adeler’s “A Delaware Legend.”²⁸ Adeler’s heroine, Mary Engle, is accused of stealing an heirloom brooch and, under harsh Delaware law, is sentenced to whipping. Scorned lovers, falsely implicated, and an earnest doctor/detective cannot resolve the case. Melodrama builds as the cruel sheriff whips a black woman into senselessness, accepting the crowd’s cheers “with the calm indifference of a man who feels the greatness of his office and his confidence in his own skill.” At the last moment, Mary’s fair white skin glistening, back bared, with copious sentimental detail concerning her shame and doom, pardon arrives! The doctor marries Mary’s mother, the lovers are reunited, and the story closes with a verse of “that grand old hymn of comfort and hope.” The item substitutes melodrama for humor. Adeler’ s attack on whipping and unduly harsh punishments is clear, but psychological and social dimensions are subservient to sentiment. This is the reverse of Twain’s object in “A True Story.”

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“A True Story” is framed, but only at the start, for obvious dramatic reasons. Social and natural implications are present in details; colored Aunt Rachel sits “respectfully below our level” and laughs as naturally as a bird sings. Blackness and whiteness are described in relation to the universality of a mother’s love at the same time that a key phrase is introduced: “I wa’nt bawn in the mash to be fool’ by trash. I’s one ‘o de ole Blue Hen’s Chickens, I is!” Personal dignity and force are asserted in dramatic speech rather than through authorial voice; the bird reference is carried on, and the slavery context is modified by defiant individuality. Rachel’s children are sold in a melodramatic scene; twenty years pass; the now-ex-slave’s naiveté is established when she asks Union generals if they’ve seen her son in the North. She is made “boss” of the Union kitchen, where she reuses her characteristic phrase, and, despite her sense of loss knowing that her child must have changed, she is reunited with her grown son and asserts in summary of her own story: “I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!”²⁹ The story is resonant with themes which permeate Twain’s longer fiction. Naiveté distinguishes the ability to feel; the sense of loss also belongs to Huck Finn and Hank Morgan (“Hello Central”). The melodrama of slavery and brutality is set against the sense of self-dignity of the “boss” figure, a term used by both Huck and Hank to designate their practical working abilities as democratic men making their way in the world. Although the story masquerades as a local color anecdote, it is almost wholly consistent with Twain’s major themes of humanity, dignity, and separation. It is no truer than Adeler’s legend; it is only richer in its “American” vision.

Critics continued to advise Mark Twain the humorist to make hay while his brief sun shone even into the 1880s. They were balanced by Twain’s friends, like Houghton and Howells of the Atlantic and many others, who recognized an ethical significance in Twain’s humor which was beyond that of Adeler and Billings and Nasby and Kerr. There was no sudden coming of age for Twain in the 1870s. Like the other literary comedians, Twain, conscious of public issues, shaped his comic viewpoints in the late 1850s and the 1860s. Unlike the other literary comedians, he escaped the bounds of the local. His ability to semi-fictionalize experience allowed him to exaggerate and burlesque detail, freeing him, as Nasby or Adeler was not free, to generate his broadly democratic and humanistic themes in his own persona in travel writings and fiction alike. His coming of age was merely his acceptance in his own flexible literary voice of the ethical imperatives already apparent in his writings in the 1860s and already recognized by the most visionary of his critics, as by Howells and Shillaber.

 UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAVEN

 

NOTES

 

    ¹B. P. Shillaber to Mark Twain, ALS in Mark Twain Papers, dated 1 January 1870, reprinted by permission of the trustees of the University of California.
   ²Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, 1867–1894, ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 40.
    ³Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959).
   ⁴Artemus Ward, The Complete Works of Artemus Ward (London: Chatto & windus, 1922), p. 98.
    ⁵William Dean Howells, “Introduction,” Artemus Ward’s Best Stories (New York: Harper, 1912), p. ix.
   ⁶Josh Billings, His Sayings (New York: G. w. Carleton, 1866), p. 31.
   ⁷Cited by Frank Baldanza, Mark Twain (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), p. 1.
   ⁸F. L. Pattee, A History of American Literature Since 1870 (New York: Century Co., 1915), p. 55.
   ⁹Dewey Ganzel, Mark Twain Abroad (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968).
   ¹⁰Ward, Works, p. 420.
   ¹¹Minnie M. Brashear, Mark Twain, Son of Missouri (1934; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964). p. 6.
   ¹²Collected in Franklin Rogers’ The Pattern for Mark Twain’s Roughing It (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. 1961).
   ¹³Mark Twain, Roughing It (Author’s National Edition; New York: Harper, 1917), I, 134–35.
   ¹⁴Ibid., I, 39.
   ¹⁵Ibid., I, 89.
   ¹⁶Orpheus C. Kerr, ‘Apology,” The Cloven Foot (New York: 0. W. Carleton, 1870), p. 10.
   ¹⁷D. R. Locke to Mark Twain, AL5 in Mark Twain Papers, dated 14 July 1869, states that the Fifteenth Amendment ended the problem which his lectures were aimed at by giving the Negro equal rights.
    ¹⁸P. V. Nasby, The Morals of Abou Ben Adhem (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875), p. 118.
     ¹⁹Nation, 28 (6 February 1878), 106.
    ²⁰Mark Twain, The Gilded Age (Author’s National Edition; New York: Harper, 1917), II, 118.
    ²¹Ibid., p. 119. Twain also used this joke on the platform.
    ²²Atlantic Monthly, 41 (January 1878), 18-19.
   ²³The censored phrase is Twain’s comment on his exasperation, which the sight of that “health-official’s ashes on a shovel could hardly sweeten.” In the footnote, he explains the censorship and commiserates with the reader who will miss his “lurid colossus”: “Let the blank remain a blank; and let it suggest to the reader that he has sustained a precious loss which can never be made good to him.”
    ²⁴[William Dean Howells], “Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly, 36 (December 1875), 749.
   ²⁵Nation, 18 (18 June 1874), 401.
   ²⁶Max Adeler, Out of the Hurly-Burly (Philadelphia: P. Garrett, 1874), pp. 178-80.
   ²⁷Ibid.
   ²⁸Ibid., pp. 211-36.
    ²⁹Mark Twain, Sketches, New and Old (Author’s National Edition; New York: Harper, 1917), pp. 240-47.

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