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Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Thomas Vranken is a postdoctoral researcher and sessional lecturer at the University of Melbourne. His dissertation examined the initial magazine publications of Huckleberry Finn, Dorian Gray, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
Notes
1 Letter reproduced in Blair and Fischer eds. 1988, 496.
With thanks to Stephen Knight and Clara Tuite, and to this article’s two anonymous reviewers.
2 As with most magazines, the Century came out at the end of the month prior to that listed on the issue’s cover, meaning that even the “February” issue of the Century appeared in the United States about a month before the full novel. In the United Kingdom, the novel was released on the 10th of December 1884. Whereas Huckleberry Finn immediately entered between 190,000 and 225,000 homes when it was published in the Century (John, 129), five weeks after the stand-alone novel was published in America only 43,500 copies had been sold, after which time sales “dropped sharply” (Hill 1967, 187; Smith Citation1970, 597).
3 Twain did include a separate excerpt from the manuscript of Huckleberry in a biography of the Mississippi River (Life on the Mississippi) he published a year before Huckleberry Finn appeared in the Century. However, Twain ultimately decided not to include the excerpt when he published Huckleberry Finn as a book. Huck and Jim were also almost entirely absent from the excerpt, which Twain included in Life on the Mississippi not as a highlight from a forthcoming publication but instead as an “illustrat[ion] of keelboat talk and manners, and [of] that now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life” (Twain, Citation1883, 42).
4 Perhaps the best example of such an edit is that which occurs halfway through the third and final extract. Here, after failing to impress with his first theatrical production, the duke concludes “these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy – and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy” (1885b, 552). As such, the duke has some playbills printed for a new production, “the King’s Camelopard or The Royal Nonesuch”. In the first book edition of Huckleberry Finn, the playbill ends with “the biggest line of all”: “ladies and children not admitted” (“‘there’, says [the duke], ‘if that line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw!’”): 195. In the Century, meanwhile, the final line of the playbill and the duke’s commentary upon it are omitted, leaving the magazine’s readers somewhat perplexed.
5 Notable exceptions include Janet Gabler-Hover’s (1995) contribution to Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America and Mark J. Noonan’s (Citation2010) Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. In The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form, Harold Kolb (1969) discusses the Century’s Huckleberry Finn excerpts in relation to the other, now-canonical, novels being serialised in the magazine: William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham and Henry James’s The Bostonians.
6 In an 1893 letter, Twain told his publisher “I like the Century and Harper’s, but I don’t know that I have any business objecting to the Cosmopolitan if they pay as good rates. I suppose a man ought to stick to one magazine, but that may only be superstition” (letter reproduced in Hill ed. 1967, 337). Yet, far from being as publication-agnostic as this statement might suggest, Twain developed some fairly firm views about the main journals operating in late nineteenth-century America, and the kind of writing that was appropriate for each of them. The Atlantic, Twain reminded W.D. Howells in 1880, “goes to only … the select high few” (letter reproduced in Smith and Gibson eds. 1960, 320); the editors of Harper’s, Twain declared in 1892, were “idiots” – “I don’t believe Gilder is such a fool as that” (letter reproduced in Hill ed. 1967, 326-7).
7 Richard Watson Gilder, “My Dear Mr Clemens”, October 10 1884: correspondence held by the Mark Twain Papers.
8 This, it must be admitted, is only inferred from the incomplete Gilder-Twain correspondence held by the official Mark Twain archive (the University of California, Berkeley’s “Mark Twain Papers”). In a letter dated 13 October 1884, Gilder writes to Twain “Your long letter is at hand. We’ll drop the idea of the serial (with profound regret on my part). If you are so doubtful about it, I don’t think we ought to consider it”: Richard Watson Gilder, “My Dear Mr. Clemens (Oct. 13 1884)”; the custodians of the “Richard Watson Gilder Papers” (held by the New York Public Library) have told me that they do not hold any of the Gilder-Twain correspondence from this period.
9 In a letter to Clemens, Gilder refers directly to having “omitted … a few cuss words”: Richard Gilder, “My Dear Mr. Clemens (Oct. 17 1884)” (correspondence held by the Mark Twain Papers); in chapter 6, Huck tells us that while he had briefly “stopped cussing, because the widow didn’t like it”, once back with his father he “took to it again” (1885d, 46); in chapter 19, he informs us that when on the raft he and Jim “was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us” (159); in chapter seven, he recounts having “bloodied [an] ax good” when attempting to fake his own death and thus escape his father (57); and, in chapter 10, he follows Jim’s suggestion, disguising himself on land by “dress[ing] up like a girl” (83).
10 See Richard Watson Gilder, “My Dear Mr. Clemens (Oct. 17 1884)” (correspondence held by the Mark Twain Papers).
11 “My Dear Mr Clemens (Oct. 10 1884)” (correspondence held by the Mark Twain Papers).
12 As John C. Gerber, Paul Baender and Terry Firkins note, “[f]rom Mark Twain’s point of view, the early sales of Tom Sawyer were deeply disappointing, even disastrous” (1980, 29). In its first year, only 23,634 copies were sold (this, compared to 50,325 copies of The Gilded Age, 65,376 copies of Roughing It, and 69,156 of Innocents Abroad) (ibid.).
13 Tom and Huck would go on to appear in a number of other, less well-known, books by Twain: in the incomplete Huck and Tom Among the Indians (written in 1884), they spend time with native Americans; in Tom Sawyer Abroad (first serialised in St. Nicholas, the Century Co.’s magazine for children, 1893-4), they travel to Northern Africa with Jim in a hot air balloon; and, in Tom Sawyer, Detective (first serialised 1896, in Harper’s Monthly), they attempt to solve a murder mystery.
14 Twain’s advocacy of stronger copyright legislation is well-known. When, in 1886, a promising copyright bill was being prepared for Congress, Twain readied himself to speak in its favour; twenty years later, he did the same in relation to patents. In 1907, he took even more immediately consequential actions, registering his pseudonym as a trade mark and founding “The Mark Twain Company”. Indeed, Twain’s decision to publish Huckleberry Finn in America and Britain simultaneously was largely motivated by his desire to secure British copyright in the novel, his early publications having been routinely pirated by British publishers (see, for instance, Edward Hudon’s discussion of Twain and John Camden Hotten, “one of the most enterprising of the British literary pirates” [1966, 57]). On Twain and intellectual property more generally, see also Loren Glass’s article “Trademark Twain”, and Martin Buinicki’s “Staking a Claim: Samuel L. Clemens’ Pragmatic Views on Copyright Law”.
15 The Chace Act ensured that American copyright would be recognized in the United Kingdom, and vice-versa.
16 Neither Harper’s New Monthly Magazine nor The Atlantic Monthly placed copyright notices on either their front pages, or on their table of contents pages during this period. They did, however, each have notices at the bottom of the first article in every issue: the Atlantic declaring “Copyright, 1885, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.”, and Harper’s (seemingly-reluctantly) noting “Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1885, by Harper and Brothers, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington”.
17 It could be that this was the result of coincidence rather than design. At a mere two and a half pages, the January instalment of Huckleberry Finn is significantly shorter than almost any other prose item published in the magazine. As such, it begins in the middle of the magazine’s page, rather than the top. It is possible that this unconventional formatting was responsible for the unconventional placement of the instalment’s copyright notice.
18 Four of Grant’s articles appeared in the War series between February of 1885 and February of 1886.
19 For Twain’s account of this dispute, see Smith et al. eds. 2010, 75-98.
20 In the December issue, we find three pieces by Unionists (Warren Lee Goss’s “Recollections of a Private”, General Lew Wallace’s “The Capture of Fort Donelson”, and General James B. Fry’s “The Number of Men Engaged at Bull Run”) and only one by a Confederate (General Thomas Jordan’s rebuttal, “The Number of Men Engaged at Bull Run”); in the January number, we find two pieces by Unionists (James B. Ead’s “Recollections of Foote and the Gun-Boats”, and Henry Walke’s “Operations of the Western Flotilla”) and no pieces by Confederates; and, in the February number, we find four pieces by Unionists (Ulysses S. Grant’s “The Battle of Shiloh”, Fitzgerald John Porter’s “The Offer of Union Command to General A.S. Johnston”, Robert E. Patterson’s “General Robert Patterson and the Battle of Bull Run”, and William Todd “Uniform of the Highlanders at Bull Run”) and two by Confederates (William Preston Johnston’s “Albert Sydney Johnston and the Shiloh Campaign” and Thomas Jordan’s “Notes of a Confederate Staff-Officer at Shiloh”).
21 Walke’s narrative centres upon Missouri’s southern border with Arkansas; we subsequently learn that Huck and Jim are themselves somewhere in Arkansas (“the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare … ” (1885b, 552).