The Unexpurgated A Connecticut Yankee: Mark Twain and His Illustrator, Daniel Carter Beard

Abstract

Readers must have reacted with shock and surprise when in December, 1889, they entered the sixth-century world of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee and found it peopled with familiar nineteenthcentury figures. Sarah Bernhardt, whose exploits had charmed and embarrassed audiences during her 1880 and 1887 American tours, was pictured as a young page who befriends the Yankee, Hank Morgan. The petite actress Annie Russell, whose success in the hit play Esmeralda filled New York theaters in the eighties, appeared “in the pages as Sandy, the heroine” of the novel. One “supercilious young knight was modelled after the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm; the jovial Baron after the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII); and the greedy, grasping merchant after one of the important American capitalists of the eighties,” Jay Gould.