Caroline B. Le Row (1844–1914), a teacher in the Brooklyn public schools, wrote Mark Twain in December 1886 that she lived “in a state of chronic and impotent rage at the process going on every hour of every day in nearly every school—ancient and modern swill ladled by the gallon into the pint cups of children's brains and crammed down with the handle.”1 To prove the point, Le Row enclosed a manuscript listing silly mistakes and malapropisms high school English students across the country had made in their recitations and examinations, including such hilarious blunders as these: Aborigines, a system of mountains.Ammonia, the food of the gods.Auriferous, pertaining to an orifice.Demogogue, a vessel containing beer and other liquids.Equestrian, one who asks questions.Eucharist, one who plays euchre.Franchise, anything belonging to the French.Republican, a sinner mentioned in the Bible.She was very quick at repertoire.He prayed for the waters to subsidize.A verb is something to eat.The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.Chaucer was the father of English pottery.2Le Row expressed the hope that the “compilation might be somehow made a two-edged sword of the spirit for educational reform” of the rote instruction common in the public schools3 and she asked Twain whether he thought “it ought to be published or not.”4On his part, Twain was so enamored with the “darling literary curiosity”5 that he persuaded Le Row to change its title from “Teaching the Young Idea” to “English as She is Taught.” More to the point, he offered to write an advance review of it for Century that she might then reprint as an introduction to the published edition. She was stunned by his generosity. “Your surprising and magnificent offer,” she replied, “has overwhelmed me with gratitude.”6 Twain quoted over half of the 4274 words in his notice directly from Le Row's English as She is Taught. On February 10, 1887, three weeks before its publication, he read the review at the Stationers’ Board of Trade Dinner in New York. He facetiously blamed the stationers “for selling the nonsensical school books from which parrot rules [of grammar] are drummed into children” and underscored “how much teaching has really been done and how much is worthless cramming.”7 The journalist Eleanor Kirk averred that the speech not only included “several side-splitting quotations” but “had the effect of stirring up considerable discussion in reference to the cramming process of our public schools.”8 Le Row immediately congratulated Twain on his success and reported she had been told that “you were never so funny in your life! . . . You have fired a blast which will reverberate through a whole century (‘beating all hollow’ Emerson's famous shot ‘heard round the world’) and I intend to keep up the firing all along the line.”9Twain read the essay twice more in public prior to its publication in the April 1887 number of the Century. At the Longfellow Memorial Fund meeting at the Boston Museum the afternoon of March 31, Charles Eliot Norton, professor of art history at Harvard, introduced Twain to the capacity crowd and invited him to offer a sip of his “precious, patent champagne-mandragora,” whereupon Twain “sauntered up to the little desk behind the footlights” and read selections from his review “showing some of the curious errors, with underlying truths in them made by school children.”10 The Boston Globe stated that he spoke “just as an old smoker would smoke a good cigar, dwelling long and lovingly on the aromatic parts, giving out the nicotine of mirth in great puffs.”11 According to the New York Tribune, Twain was “enthusiastically received” and “as usual irresistibly funny,”12 especially when he read from his article that Oliver Wendell Holmes was “a most profligate and humorous writer.” On the stage Holmes “was seen swaying and shaking with convulsions of merriment.”13 To judge from all accounts of these performances, Twain stuck to his script, adlibbing only once at the Longfellow benefit. “The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia,” he read from his review before adding, “and perhaps the last.”14 Though “humorous in tone,” the Boston Post added, Twain's recitation raised “serious considerations regarding the value of much that is called education in these times.”15 He spoke that evening before a capacity audience in the Common Pleas Courtroom at the New Haven City Hall and the New Haven Journal and Courier dubbed the event “An Evening with Clemens and His Hodgepodge of Fun.”16Twain's essay appeared on newsstands the next day—April Fool's Day—whereupon excerpts from it were widely syndicated in the U.S. and the U.K.17 Twain read the entire article aloud a final time before the cadets in the mess hall at West Point on April 30. Escorted by William M. Postlethwaite, chaplain and professor of history and law, Twain aroused “roars of laughter,” particularly when he read the line “There were donkeys in the Theological Seminary.” The Army and Navy Journal claimed that the line “was so indescribably funny” that the cadets “continued to laugh and applaud for fully five minutes.”18 When Postlethwait stood and bowed, Twain turned and assured him “nothing personal” was meant.19Meanwhile, the Century editors had sent Le Row proof of Twain's essay in mid-February. She thought it “capital,”20 though she also revised it slightly, removing “what she thought reflected unpleasantly” on teachers.21 Notoriously prickly about any unauthorized changes to his manuscripts prior to their publication, Twain acquiesced to Le Row's emendations because, as she explained, “It will never do for teachers to be held responsible for the existing atrocious state of things. As well blame the sailors for shipwreck who faithfully follow the orders of their captain. ‘Where the offense is let the great axe fall.’ It is the ‘Boards’ (woodenheads, oftentimes), the ‘Trustees,’ the ‘Committees’ who lay out the work.” Twain dutifully accepted Le Row's correction. The published essay contains this sentence: “If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, but the unintelligent teacher—or rather the unintelligent Boards, Committees, and Trustees—are the proper target for it.”22 In addition, Twain forwarded the $250 (approximately three-months of a teacher's salary or some $7250 in modern dollars) that he was paid for the essay to Le Row, and she appreciated the present. “I do not accept the check as my right or due in any sense,” she wrote him, “but as a most generous gift from you which I fully appreciate and for which I most sincerely thank you.”23 Twain's gesture was widely publicized, one editorialist declaring that should “he run for School Commissioner in Brooklyn . . . he would have all the teachers working at the polls for him.”24 Le Row's pamphlet was finally published by Cassell and Company of New York in mid-April 1887 and by London by T. Fisher Unwin of London in late May. By August 1 it had sold over five thousand copies and earned Le Row almost three hundred dollars in royalties.25The implications and importance of Twain's sociolinguistic study (though he would not have hung such a technical term on it) occasioned a fierce debate among reviewers. Many of them focused on the question whether it was a satirical comment on the failures of American public education or merely a weird comic spoof—that is, whether or not Twain wrote it with a deliberate “moral purpose.” On the one hand, some critics acknowledged its humor but focused on its underlying message. In the April 1887 number of the Century, the same issue in which his essay first appeared, the author of the “Topics of the Times” column opined that while it was “amusing” the “thoughtful reader” should also be dismayed: “Undoubtedly many of these children have been poorly taught and poorly taught in the same way, but the trouble lies back of indifferent teachers and even back of indifferent or ambitious school boards. It rests upon us all as a people” for failing to demand more accountability for their mediocre education.26 The Saint Paul Globe echoed the thought: “No thoughtful reader can read Mr. Clemens’ humorous article without being impressed with a feeling of dismay at the lack of thoroughness in our system of public instruction. . . . The results of this cramming educational process are humorously presented by Mr. Clemens, and yet through all his inimitable humor can be seen a faithful and sorrowful portraiture of the defects of our educational system.”27 Likewise, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press cautioned that the howlers Twain cited “ought not only amuse the public” but “point a moral.”28 The Philadelphia Inquirer agreed that the “mass of absurdities” Le Row had gathered were “undoubtedly genuine” and that Twain's inference—“that pupils in the public schools are too often loaded with “rules” which they are never taught to apply—is a legitimate one.”29 The Wilmington News emphasized the “dismal side to the fun in the reflection that these parrot-like and senseless appeals to memory” are the result of the “cram” method of public instruction.30 The New Orleans Times-Democrat reiterated that “despite its laughter-provoking quality,” the evidence Le Row and Twain marshalled “of the ignorance, stupidity, and incompetence of public school scholars” was “absolutely pathetic in its grotesqueness and constitutes a pitiable showing of the inadequacy of the public school system.”31 Three major newspapers in Lincoln, Nebraska, even “respectfully but firmly” insisted that the members of the local school board read Twain's article because he “very effectively illustrates what is the matter with the alleged teaching of English grammar in our own schools.”32Several reviewers in Great Britain were also attuned to Twain's purpose. For example, as the Salisbury and Winchester Journal declared, “It is well enough to laugh at these funny mistakes of the struggling scholar; but it is more profitable to inquire how they came to be made.”33 Appalled by the evidence Twain marshalled “of the manner in which young minds are not fed but crammed and choked,” the Saturday Review advised his readers to “stifle the laughter” and ask “how long our educators are going to be satisfied with the mechanical kind of teaching which is now in vogue.”34 Ditto the Publishers’ Circular: Fun or no fun, Mark Twain's article again throws light upon the evils of the cramming system now in vogue in English as well as American schools. This cramming is especially noticeable in the study of literature. . . . Many a laugh will ring out over the pages of Mark Twain's latest effusion, but there is another side to the question which should commend itself to the notice of the upbringers and guardians of youth.35The North-Eastern Weekly Gazette similarly noted that while the examination answers “might waken laughter in the gloomiest pessimist” they also “confirm the pessimist's views about the efficacy of teaching. The children who give these answers know literally nothing.”36 Le Row was gratified by “the row” she and Twain “kicked up,” as she wrote Twain in late April. She only hoped “that the dust raised so far is but the beginning of the trouble. How can I ever thank you for what you have done not only for me personally but in this most holy crusade?”37On the other hand, a variety of reviewers contended that nothing in Twain's “amusing” or “entertaining” essay should be taken seriously. The Boston Globe (“a rich source of pure humor”), Baltimore Sun (“richest humor”), London Morning Post (“delightful”), Leeds Mercury (“unpremeditatedly funny answers”), and Antrim Northern Whig (“full of quaint drollery”) failed even to acknowledge the possibility it served an ulterior purpose.38 Read solely in the context of his reputation as a humorist, that is, Twain's article was merely a humorous essay. Despite Twain's assurance that all the student responses in Le Row's book were genuine, that “none of them have been tampered with or doctored in any way,”39 a number of commentators questioned their authorship, some even suggesting that Twain had invented all the funny answers and that anyone who thought “English as She is Taught” a social critique was the victim of a hoax akin to “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson” (1863).Foremost among this clique of critics, ironically, was Twain's friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had been in the audience when Twain read his essay at the Longfellow benefit in Boston on March 31. Higginson mused in his review of it a month later in Harper's Bazar that Twain was “eminently a humorist who enjoys his own jokes, and surely the crowning enjoyment of his life was when he looked through the newspapers the day after his ‘English as She is Taught’ appeared in the Century. From the grave editor” of the Centuryto the conductor of the smallest country newspaper, every soul fell into the trap and felt bound to point a moral against our long-suffering school system. . . . That these [bits of fun] should be seriously taken for childish blunders shows how easily people get away from the mental habits of their own childhood. This is not naïve and unintentional wit, but is overt, deliberate, experienced; not the delicious childish blundering but something concocted with malice aforethought; not the product of immaturity but of maturity,though the “extremely amusing” answers Twain ostensibly concocted “may have here and there imbedded” in them “something actually said by a child.”40 An anonymous writer in the Pittsburgh Post soon replied to Higginson's assertion that Twain had “invent[ed] every line” in the essay. “I saw this book put together a little at a time by the teacher mentioned, and that every line was taken from actual examination papers. And also that Mark Twain has not changed a line nor added one. What will Mr. Higginson say now?”41Of course, this exchange failed to quell the controversies swirling about the purpose and the authorship of the essay. The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail conceded that Twain might have indicted rote learning in the public schools but that his “primary object” was “to make men laugh.”42 Other reviewers allowed that the implications of Twain's article were alarming, but only if the dubious accuracy of his citations could be verified. “If the work be what it purports to be—the actual mistakes of pupils,” the San Francisco Chronicle editorialized, for example, “it shows more clearly than anything that has ever been printed the vices of the public-school system of instruction,” which “crams the child-mind with facts which it cannot assimilate any more than a three-months’-old baby can digest a beefsteak.” But “it will take more faith than most people possess to believe that the answers” in Twain's “amusing article” are genuine.43 Twain's article “is amusing,” the Indianapolis Journal elsewhere allowed, “but would be more so were it not for the impression made on the reader that the ‘mistakes’ were perpetrated by the humorist himself rather than by the children of the schools.”44 According to the Topeka Lance, “Mark Twain's queer compilation of ridiculous blunders made by school children” was “of such a funny kind that one must seriously doubt” such a collection had “been made and half suspect that it is but another turn of Twain's humor.”45 The Woolwich Gazette quipped that some of the “side-splitting” quotations in Twain's essay were “so extraordinary that one is almost inclined to doubt the[ir] authenticity”46 While Twain claimed to cite authentic student answers, the Northern Christian Advocate alleged he only pretended to vouch “for the genuineness of the contents.” That is, he designed the essay “merely to provoke laughter” and “succeeded.”47 The Michigan Moderator was even more skeptical of Twain's intent: Mark Twain must enjoy to the fullest of his fun-loving capacity the serious way in which some papers take his compilation of absurdities. . . . How he must revel in mirth as he sees the solemn sermons preached on the subject of our public schools. It has always been a little difficult to tell Twain's truths from his lies, but these were so plainly marked in the article referred to that no one should err. But some people had a sermon all written and jumped eagerly to find a text to hitch it to.48The Brooklyn Eagle charged that many of Twain's “sham samples” were “not the errors of childhood” but of “self-confident ambition,” that members of the Union League and University club had wagered “on the genuine or sham character of those remarkable samples,” and that Twain would “make money out of the doubt which prevails, for he makes money out of everything relating to himself—and keeps it, too”49—his despite the fact that he had signed the $250 check he received for the essay over to Le Row.Still other critics quibbled with Twain's conclusions, blaming not the system of rote learning for the mistakes of children but the failures of the adults administering the exams. According to the Akron Summit County Beacon, Twain's article had merely established “that there are some dull pupils in the public schools; and the additional fact, possibly, that children are often asked questions which are beyond their age, and therefore that the fool was the questioner and not the child.”50 Not only is the reader “left in doubt as to who is the real author” of Twain's essay, the San Francisco Bulletin avowed, but the very questions the children purportedly answered were as “idiotic” as real questions “frequently used to drive young and uninstructed children to despair.”51 Similarly, the Portsmouth, England, Hampshire Telegraph observed that the “answers alleged to have been made by [the] pupils” were “sometimes almost as foolish” as “the questions of the examiners”;52 and the St. Johnsbury, Vt., Caledonian warned that “before the reader laughs too heartily over the absurdity of some of these answers he would do well to try his hand at answering them or similar questions on the spur of the moment.”53 The Ulster, Northern Ireland, Gazette blamed incompetent teaching for the student gaffes (“the mistakes of the pupil are often as attributable to the teacher who does not know how to teach”), the exact opposite conclusion Le Row and Twain hoped readers would reach.54 Ironically, the Lancaster, Pa., Semi-Weekly New Era rallied to the defense of the teachers Twain had ostensibly defamed and blamed their “stupid pupils”: “To say that Mark Twain's article is not eminently readable is untrue” but “to admit that it is a correct picture” is quite as far from the truth. . . . The most painstaking and competent teacher in the world cannot prevent stupid pupils from uttering blundering answers to questions. . . . To hold teachers responsible, therefore, for the amusing, meaningless and ridiculous answers children between the ages of six to twelve years may make concerning subjects they but faintly comprehend is to the full as silly as anything we find in “English as She is Taught,” and ungenerous and unjust as well. . . . That there are defects in the American system of school instruction—if we have what can be called a system—is undeniable. But that it turns out regularly and continually the kind of grist quoted in Twain's “English as She is Taught” is untrue and is besides a slander upon a profession which in the aggregate leads all others in intelligence and conscientious devotion to ill-requited duty.55On an entirely unique note, the New Hartford, Conn., Tribune minimized the significance of Twain's “delightfully amusing article” on the grounds that it contained nothing out of the ordinary: “any intelligent child under, say, fifteen years of age, will occasionally make a quaintly ridiculous error in the use of his mother tongue.”56Oscar Wilde discovered yet another reason to praise Twain's essay—not the laughable answers of students to the silly questions of teachers but the precocious wisdom the children betrayed in their responses. On April 13, 1887, less than two weeks after the April issue of Century with Twain's article in it was issued in the U.S., Wilde asked the editors of the Court and Society Review in London, “Shall I do for you an article called the ‘Child Philosopher’? It will be on Mark Twain's amazing and amusing record of the answers of American children at a Board School.”57 To be sure, Twain had noted in “English as She is Taught” how often “we do slam right into the truth” in the student answers “without even expecting it.”58 In his unsigned review of Twain's review, Wilde elaborated on this point. “Mr. Mark Twain's fascinating article,” he maintained, throws an entirely new light on that enfant terrible of a commercial civilisation, the American child, and reminds us that we may all learn wisdom from the mouths of babes and sucklings. For the mistakes by the interesting pupils of the American Board-Schools are not mistakes springing from ignorance of life or dullness of perception; they are, on the contrary, full of the richest suggestion and pregnant with the very highest philosophy.For example, Wilde declared that “the description of the Plagiarist [‘a writer of plays'] is the most brilliant thing that has been said on modern literature for some time.” Wilde expressed the hope “that when the next bevy of beauties land on our shores from American, they will bring with them one specimen at least of the native school boy. For many of his utterances are obviously mystical and possess that quality of absolute unintelligibility that is the peculiar privilege of the verbally inspired.” He concluded that “Twain deserves our warmest thanks for bringing to light the true American genius. American patriots are tedious, American millionaires go bankrupt, and American beauties don't last, but the schoolboy seems to be eternally delightful.”59Twain returned to his review of English as She is Taught while writing Following the Equator (1897), his final travelogue. In chapter LXI, he quotes extensively from a book entitled Indo-Anglian Literature that, like Le Row's pamphlet a decade earlier, was “well stocked” with “baboo” English “acquired in the schools” of India. “Some of it is very funny—,” he noted, “almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to write in a language not our own.” He compared excerpts from it with some of the excerpts he had cited from Le Row in “English as She is Taught” to “show that when the American pupil is using but one language, and that one his own, his performance is no whit better than his Indian brother's.”60Twain's essay was reprinted with minor changes no less than four times over the next few years—as a slightly revised introduction to a reprint of Le Row's pamphlet issued by the Mutual Book Company of Boston in 1900; an abridged ten-cent “Cornhill Booklet” issued in March 1901 in Boston under the title “English as She is Instructed”; and introductions to reprints of Le Row's book issued by the Century Company in 1901 and 1905. It was one of Twain's most popular essays and it inspired a host of imitators, though he never reprinted it in a volume of his own collected stories and essays. With the exception of the 1901 reprintings, however, critics ignored these releases and reviewers of the 1901 issues broke little new ground. The Brooklyn Eagle again refused to admit “that Mark Twain could have edited these gems without adding or altering a word” but conceded that his essay was “in reality a ferocious satire on the absurd and foolish presumption of so-called civilization with its barren, mechanical, useless teachings” and was so funny it “would make a horse laugh.”61 Most of reviewers acknowledged the satirical purpose of the article: e.g., the St. Louis Republic (“drawing deductions as to the correctness of the teaching methods employed”), New York Tribune (condemns “what Mark Twain calls in his introduction to the book ‘brickbat culture’—cramming with obscure and wordy rules”), Phillipsburg, Kans., Dispatch (“denounce[s] many of the school methods, such as cramming children's memory”), Wilmington Journal (“the lesson those answers impress is that we are wasting much valuable time in teaching”), and Baltimore Sun (“a needed protest against the attempt to cram the memories of school children with information”).62 The Trenton Times again blamed not the students but “the school authorities, who believe in cramming pupils.”63 Only the Lancaster, Pa., Inquirer proposed a new scapegoat: “the textbooks furnished as the teachers’ implements.” In other words, the Inquirer indicted “authors and publishers—to which two classes the humorous Mark belongs.”64A final note: On January 23, 1897, the Brooklyn Eagle carried an Associated Press wire report that Mark Twain had filed for bankruptcy.65 The following day, Caroline Le Row wrote Twain to thank him again for his “immense kindness” in 1887. “You not only named my little book,” she remembered, “but you gave me the money . . . the Century paid you for making it famous. More than all you assured me a literary reputation which has been profitable to me ever since.” She closed by asking for “the great privilege of returning to you” the $250 he had given her—“your own money, really.”66 There is no evidence that, despite his straitened circumstances, Twain granted the request.