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The Use of History in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James D. Williams
James D. Williams*
Affiliation:
Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, N. J.
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Extract

Despite Mark Twain's prefatory disclaimer of any pretense to historical accuracy, a number of early reviewers of A Connecticut Yankee saw it as fundamentally historical and consequently “a very irrational proceeding.” William Thomas Stead, who read the Yankee with sympathetic insight and thought it a highly significant novel, conceded that it contained “much strange misreading of history.” And Andrew Lang, in a spirited defense of Mark Twain against his English detractors, admitted that he had not read the Yankee because its author did not have “the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the Middle Ages.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , March 1965 , pp. 102 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 The Literary World (Boston), xxi (15 Feb. 1890), 52–53.

2 The Review of Reviews (Feb. 1890), p. 144.

3 Illustrated News of the World (14 Feb. 1891). Mark Twain had requested Lang to defend him as an entertainer of the “Belly and the Members” (Letters, ed. A. B. Paine, New York, 1917, pp. 525–528). Lang had written an appreciation of Malory's prose style for the H. Oskar Sommer edition of Le Morte D Arthur the year before, and he may have found a parody of Malory particularly unwelcome.

4 Roger B. Salomon, Twain and the Image of History (Yale Studies in English, No. 150; New Haven, 1961), p. 102; Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 138.

5 Speeches, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1923), p. 151.

6 Samuel Charles Webster, Mark Twain, Business Man (Boston, 1946), p. 355.

7 Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, ed. Dixon Wecter (San Marino, Calif., 1949), p. 257.

8 DeVoto 21 (oversize), in the Mark Twain Papers, subsequently referred to as MTP; © 1965 by the Mark Twain Company.

9 A. B. Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (New York, 1921), p. 1656.

10 Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York, 1940), p. 211.

11 Mark Twain referred to “scant chronicles” in his Baltimore reading of 1888. His secretary in later life, Isabel Lyon, stated in 1933 that he had read “deeply” in the Early English Chronicles collected in the Bohn library, and that he wrote A Connecticut Yankee under their inspiration. The “chronicles” available in the Bohn library in 1884 were: Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, The Chronicles of the White Rose of York, Chronicles of the Crusades, Joinville's Memoirs of Saint Louis, and Froissart's Chronicles.

12 See Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley, Calif., 1960), pp. 135–145, 179–186, 310–313.

13 A History of European Morals (New York, 1911), i, 110.

14 Notebook 19, pp. 31–32 (MTP).

15 Notebook 23 (i), p. 21 (MTP).

16 European Morals, ii, 107–111.

17 A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1888), iii, 538; see Notebook 23 (i), p. 19 (MTP).

18 European Morals, i, 133.

19 Mark Twain-Howells Letters, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), i, 291.

20 For this and all subsequent references to Mark Twain's marginal notations in Lecky, see The Twainian, xiv (May 1955-December 1956). Chester L. Davis, who edited the notations for The Twainian, believes Mark Twain made them in 1906. Walter Blair, on the contrary, believes that some, and perhaps all, were written much earlier; see Mark Twain and Huck Finn, p. 401, n. 6.

21 He could also have found scorn for the Christian condemnation of suicide in Charles Ball's Autobiography (see below).

22 European Morals, i, 363–364 n.

23 The press gang was a subject Mark Twain planned to include in the Yankee. The Boss would break the system by “mistakenly” impressing nobles. See Notebook 23 (i), p. 19 (MTP).

24 The incident in The Prince and the Pauper of the stolen pig—whose owner is horrified to learn of the possible punishment for the culprit—is probably based on the same passage in Lecky.

25 Lecky, vi, 233, and i, 549; see also Notebook 23 (i), p. 24 (MTP). Both references are included in the Boss's conversation with Dowley in Ch. xxxiii. In The Prince and the Pauper (Ch. xxviii), the pilloried Hendon comes close to injury at the hands of the crowd.

26 Miss Isabel Lyon, in a 1933 letter (Berg Collection, New York Public Library), stated that Lingard was Mark Twain's constant reference during the writing of A Connecticut Yankee.

27 Notebook 24, p. 15 (MTP).

28 The True-Blue Laws, p. 13.

29 Mark Twain's Notebook, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1935), p. 150.

30 Manuscript, ii, 221–226 and 235–237 (Berg Collection).

31 Notebook 22 (ii), p. 40; see also Notebook 23 (i), p. 3 (MTP).

32 The Court of Charles II (London, 1886), p. 62.

33 Notebook 24, p. 3 (MTP); © 1965 by The Mark Twain Company.

34 Notebook 21, p. 49 (MTP).

35 Mark Twain-Howells Letters, p. 595.

36 Memoirs (trans. Bayle St. John, London, 1888), iii, 56.

37 Notebook 24, p. 14 (MTP).

38 The Ancient Regime (trans. John Durand, New York, 1885), i, ii and iii.

39 Notes on England (trans. W. F. Rae, New York, 1885), p. 242.

40 Anderson Auction Company Catalogue, 7 and 8 Feb. 1911.

41 Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. 207. He planned to use excerpts in the appendix to the Yankee; see Notebook 24, p. 14 (MTP).

42 The French Revolution (New York, 1956), i, vi, 3. The borrowing seems quite certain because Twain had just finished reading The French Revolution when he wrote this scene. Cf. Mark Twain-Howells Letters, p. 595, and the chronology of composition in Harold G. Baetzhold's “The Course of Composition of A Connecticut Yankee: A Reinterpretation,” AL, xxxiii (May 1961), 195–214.

43 The North American Review, cxci (1910), pp. 827 ff. In The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York, 1920), p. 142, Van Wyck Brooks accepted Triumphant Democracy as the inspiration of A Connecticut Yankee.

44 Mark Twain's Letters, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1917), p. 578.

45 Mark Twain in Eruption (New York, 1940), p. 42.

46 Triumphant Democracy (New York, 1886), p. 9.

47 Notebook 23 (i), p. 11 (MTP).

48 Manuscript, i, 147B (Berg Collection).

49 Notebook 23 (ii), p. 54 (MTP).

50 Clemens to Hall, 24 November 1889 (Berg Collection).

51 See Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. 208.

52 Notebook 23 (ii), p. 60 (MTP).

53 Notebook 24, p. 13 (MTP).

54 Notebook 23 (i), p. 14 (MTP).

55 The Atlantic Monthly, xxic (Oct., Nov., Dec., 1869), 495–502, 581–598, 711–718.

56 Manuscript, i, 153 (Berg Collection).

57 Fred Hall to Clemens, 16 October 1889 (MTP).

58 Mark Twain's America (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), p. 273.

59 History of England (London, 1883), i, 417.

60 Notebook 23 (ii), p. 60 (MTP).

61 Notebook 24, p. 13 (MTP).

62 It was published in New York in 1837 as part of the Cabinet of Freedom Series. An 1859 edition bears the title Charles Ball's Autobiography, or Fifty Years in Chains.

63 Slavery in the United States, pp. v, viii. Like Mark Twain's Morgan LeFay, a Southern slave owner, according to Ball, was free to murder a slave as long as he paid for him.

64 See his marginal comment on European Morals, ii, 72, in The Twainian, xiv (May-June 1955).

65 Ball, p. 37. Some of Mark Twain's description of the slave gang was probably drawn from George Kennan's current articles on Russia. See Howard Baetzhold, “The Course of Composition of A Connecticut Yankee: A Reinterpretation,” pp. 207–211.

66 Ball, p. 72, describes a similar incident.

67 Ibid., pp. 151, 159.