“It was a mistake”: Abolitionism, Revision, and Mark Twain's “A Scrap of Curious History”

Abstract

Abstract Mark Twain did not publish any significant reflections on abolitionism in his lifetime, yet he did leave in his papers “A Scrap of Curious History,” an unfinished attempt to write fiction about abolitionist activity in antebellum Missouri that was initiated not by memory but by his witnessing a backlash to anarchist uprisings in France in 1894. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine published a revised and expurgated version of “A Scrap of Curious History” in Harper's Monthly a few years after Clemens's death, but existing commentary on the sketch has been minimal and has relied on Paine's bowdlerized text, not on the surviving manuscript. Paine's changes—including his writing a conclusion to the piece—deviated from Mark Twain's intentions to write a dramatic sketch, ponderously open-ended and blunt, that examined the anxieties underlying radical politics and their relation to justice, terrorism, and social progress.