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Social and Moral Vision in Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Nicolaus C. Mills
Nicolaus C. Mills
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , July 1970 , pp. 61 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

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page 61 note 2 Blair, Walter, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley, 1960), pp. 61, III, 310–14.Google Scholar

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page 63 note 1 These distinctions are made by Smith, Henry Nash in Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 121–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 63 note 2 Henry Nash Smith discusses the dialectical quality of Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, p. 113.

page 63 note 3 Dorothy Van Ghent points out this relationship in The English Novel: Form and Function (New York, 1965), p. 134.Google Scholar

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