“A Reputation That Can Stand Fire”: Mark Twain's Early Reception through 1910

Abstract

This humble appreciation has not seemed to be welcome to all literary Americans. They are not as proud of Mark as one could wish. —Andrew Lang, 1888 PEOPLE WILL GIVE DOLLARS to see a clown when they would not give a farthing to hear a sermon,” growled the author of “Tom Sawyer's Chum,” a review of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Others were less kind. Newspapers attacked the work as low and even dangerous, the Boston Advertiser lamenting its “coarseness and bad taste” (“Mark Twain's New Book” 368). Deemed “trashy and vicious,” the book was banned from the Concord Public Library because its “perusal cannot be anything less than harmful” (“Concord Library” 4). Under the headline “HUCKLEBERRY FINN BARRED OUT,” the Boston Evening Transcript reported the library board's condemnation of the book as “the veriest trash” and “more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people” (6). Much of the negative criticism assumed the book would be read by children, and Robert Bridges, writing in Life magazine, ironically promoted Twain's “blood-curdling humor” as appropriate for “Lenten parlor entertainments and church festivals” (265). One should be careful not to overstate the influence of the “moral icebergs,” as Twain called them in his “Letter to the Concord Free Trade Club” after his induction as an honorary member (1). Many enthusiastic reviews appeared and, as scholar Bernadette Lear has convincingly demonstrated from library records, “Twain's works were quite common in public libraries during his lifetime” (218). Nevertheless, that presence has been frequently challenged. In Twain's day, some rejected his work because of the reputation he had for penning coarse, inelegant, unedifying works. Twain chafed at this, so he appreciated William Dean Howells's May 1887 “Editor's Study” in which he expressed his famous dictum, “Let fiction cease to lie about life,” instancing Mark Twain's fiction as the exemplar of the real and true (49). Recognizing Howells's importance as a literary arbiter, Twain thanked him. I haven't as good an opinion of my work as you hold of it, but I've always done what I could to secure & enlarge my good opinion of it. I've always said to myself, “Everybody reads it, & that's something— it surely isn't pernicious, or the most respectable people would get pretty tired of it.”