by Ron Powers
The Routledges apparently had hearty appetites. “[T]hey had not had a bite to eat since breakfast. I helped them eat the meal; at eleven I helped them eat another one; at one o’clock I superintended while they took luncheon; during the afternoon I assisted inactively at some more meals…”20 They quickly developed an appetite for the Connecticut Yankee, and by the end of the day Sam’s gloom was gone. A couple of nights later, Edmund Routledge steered Sam to the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street for dinner with the Whitefriars Club, a Friday night salon of artists, writers, and actors. In an atmosphere of cigar smoke, ale, and wit, and with Ambrose Bierce among the guests, Mark Twain commenced his long mutual love affair with Great Britain. He responded to a toast with the claim that he, and not Henry M. Stanley, had discovered Dr. Livingstone in Africa. Here as in America, Mark Twain’s peculiar stagecraft worked its magic. The laughter that interrupted him, a journalist noted, was triggered as much by his “quaint and original manner” as by his words.21
Unlike the British reading public, the British press had not much cared for Roughing It. The papers disapproved of Mark Twain’s vulgarity, his slang, his accounts of brawls and drunken nights. But not even the British press could resist Mark Twain in person. His visit became an ongoing party: banquets, receptions, guided tours of the city. He took in the statues of Leicester Square, the “matchless” Hyde Park, the Zoological Gardens, the British Museum (“I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have nothing to do for—five minutes,”22 he advised a roaring audience at the Savage Club). His thoughts of researching a book about England were swamped by the merriment. “I accomplish next to nothing,” he wrote to Livy. “Too much company—too much dining—too much sociability.”23 Dickens’s former lecture-tour manager wanted to talk to him. He took lunch with Dickens’s favorite comic actor and a member of Parliament. He was written up in the London Graphic alongside an engraving of his face. He had some more photographic portraits made. He bought a watch for Annie Moffett and a fine new razor for himself. And then he turned his attention to John Camden Hotten. He went after the publisher in a letter published on September 20 in the Spectator, three days after the Graphic profile, and thus at the peak of his celebrity in the city. He began by conceding that no law prevented Hotten’s republishings, and then, noting the extra material shoveled in by the pirate, stuck his verbal cutlass in Hotten’s posterior.
My books are bad enough just as they are written; then what must they be after Mr. John Camden Hotten has composed half-a-dozen chapters & added the same to them?…If a friend of yours, or even you yourself, were to write a book & set it adrift among the people…how would you like to have John Camden Hotten sit down & stimulate his powers, & drool two or three original chapters on to the end of that book? Would not the world seem cold & hollow to you?…Let one suppose all this. Let him suppose it with strength enough, & then he will know something about woe. Sometimes when I read one of those additional chapters constructed by John Camden Hotten, I feel as if I wanted to take a broom-straw & go & knock that man’s brains out. Not in anger, for I feel none. Oh! not in anger; but only to see, that is all. Mere idle curiosity.24
He speculated how Hotten might feel (speaking of padding) if he, Mark Twain, were to call him “John Camden Hottentot,” and closed with a plea for fairness on behalf of Routledge & Sons. Hotten responded in crocodile-tear anguish a few days later, insisting incorrectly that the “additional chapters” had in fact been published by Mark Twain under the alias “Carl Byng” in the Buffalo Express. Clemens realized that he was helpless to prevent further Hotten depredations. Learning that the opportunist publisher was preparing yet another edition of his sketches, Sam choked down his choler and paid a visit to Hotten, offering to make revisions himself if Hotten would avoid drooling on the texts. Hotten accepted, but Sam was obliged to leave London before he could do the work. Hotten died the following year.
HE NOODLED around London through October and into early November. He wrote to Livy telling her how busy he was, how beautiful the English countryside, and how he wanted to return there with her in the spring. He ventured a bit of friskiness: “I am not going abroad any more without you. It is too dreary when the lights are out & the company gone…You may have observed that I do dearly love to go to bed & lie there steeped in the comfort of reading—& I have observed that you will not permit a body to get any satisfaction out of that sort of thing, but you always interfere.”25 Yet Sam clearly did not feel the urgency to get back home that he had expressed during his marathon lecture tours in America. It was not until Livy cabled him in the first week of November to insist, “Come home,”26 that Sam terminated his idyll. Finally, on November 12, Sam boarded the Cunard steamer Batavia at Liverpool and sailed home through stormy seas. Among his last errands in London was purchasing a secondhand toy steam engine for his nephew Sammy as a Christmas present. “Sammy must learn how to run it before he blows himself up with it,”27 he advised Pamela once home in Hartford.
The autumn of 1872 had been a tumultuous one at Nook Farm and in the nation. Ulysses S. Grant won reelection to the presidency over Horace Greeley on November 5, after an ugly campaign laced with charges of corruption from both sides. Greeley was shocked to find himself pilloried by Thomas Nast—by now a friend of Mark Twain’s—who savaged the old utopian idealist with a series of drawings for Harper’s Weekly that showed Greeley conspiring with the loathsome Boss Tweed. Nast’s drawings helped Grant win in a landslide. Greeley, devastated by the hateful attacks and by the recent death of his wife, suffered an emotional breakdown and died on November 29, four days after Sam’s steamship docked in New York Harbor. Shortly afterward, the erstwhile guest at Greeley’s glittery reception congratulated the cartoonist: “Nast you, more than any other man, have won a prodigious victory for Grant—I mean, rather, for Civilization & progress…”28 (In 1872, Samuel Clemens still believed in Civilization and progress; that would change.)
The tumult at Nook Farm struck far closer to home, and was if anything more sordid. Henry Ward Beecher, whose theology radiated with exhortations to all-embracing love, had been publicly accused of taking the concept a bit too literally by having an affair with the wife of one of his parishioners. The woman was a Sunday-school teacher at Beecher’s church named Elizabeth Tilton. Her husband Theodore was a religious journalist, also a church member, whose shorthand transcriptions of Beecher’s sermons had helped to amplify the cleric’s fame. The charge gained national attention and has endured as one of the signature scandals of the American 19th century. Beecher’s first accuser, ironically enough, was the most prominent free-love advocate of the times: Victoria Woodhull, a former fortune-teller and stockbroker (backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt), and more recently a close ally of Isabella Beecher Hooker in the women’s-rights movement. When Woodhull sprang the charge at a Boston spiritualists’ convention on September 25, she was the Equal Rights Party’s candidate for president, sharing the ticket with Frederick Douglass, who with inspired timing had rediscovered his deep common cause with the fair sex. It wasn’t so much the act of adultery itself that she denounced, Woodhull told her audience, but Beecher’s double standard: he condemned free love in his sermons, but practiced it in private. It was probably significant that among those whom Beecher condemned from the pulpit was the party animal Victoria Woodhull who, with her sister, was arrested and jailed (for a month) for sending “obscenity” through the mails.
“How stands Elmira on the Beecher Scandal?” Sam queried Olivia’s mother a few days after arriving home.29 He seemed more bemused than concerned by the developments, opining that Beecher’s buttoned lip was mighty suspicious.
I think the silence of the Beechers is a hundred fold more of an obscene publication than that of the Woodhulls…Silence has given assent in all ages of the world—it is a law of nature, not ethics—& Henry Ward Beecher is as amenable to it as the humblest of us…the general verdict thought of the nation will gradually form itself into the verdict that there is some fire somewhere
in all this smoke of scandal.30
The verdict in the Beecher scandal would not be reached until the famous trial of 1873, when Beecher was acquitted.
With Livy, her hair sensibly braided and piled high on her head, and the tiny Susy beside him at the hearth, Sam settled into a comfortable Yuletide season in the embattled Hookers’ Nook Barn. Sam wrote some letters to the editor, and crafted a letter of introduction to Thomas Nast on behalf of Mary Fairbanks’s admiring seventeen-year-old son Charlie. In his reply, the cartoonist invited the author to visit him in his Morristown, New Jersey, home, and expressed the hope of soon seeing the book of English travels: “How much I should like to go with you and illustrate it.”31 Mark Twain had lost interest in that project after writing thirty-six draft pages. He put it aside, hoping to rekindle his enthusiasm with a return to England in the spring. A new book idea had begun to consume Mark Twain’s imagination. More precisely, it was a new impetus to seize hold of an old idea, one that derived from his fascination with Washington, its political currents and its characters. He had not been exaggerating (for a change) when he told Livy in the summer of 1870, “I have gathered material enough for a whole book!”32 He had hesitated to develop that material—perhaps because the only form conceivable for it was the novel, and Mark Twain felt unsure of his grasp of the novel’s technical requirements. But he was never one to turn down a literary helping hand, and now, in the waning days of 1872, he found one, right in the Nook Farm neighborhood.
The collaboration that produced The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day seems to have been inspired by an after-dinner conversation one night at Nook Barn during the Christmas season, among Sam and Livy and their guests from the neighborhood, Charles Dudley Warner and his wife Susan. Warner, the co-owner (with the former Connecticut governor Joseph R. Hawley) and editor of the Hartford Courant, was a genial, literary sort of fellow who admired Mark Twain’s work, and in fact had more or less retraced his Innocents Abroad itinerary a few months after the Quaker City voyage. A lean, quizzical-looking man whose wavy hair was more silvered than his thick goatee and mustache, Warner was valued for his repartee and erudition; but his prose writing was conventionally polite and stilted, even “dainty” in one reviewer’s formulation—Fairbanksian, in other words. His vivacious wife was a skillful pianist who accompanied Sam in his postprandial singing of the spirituals and jubilees of his Missouri youth. On the evening in question (the date is not known), the foursome’s talk veered toward books, as it often must have. Mark Twain recalled to Paine that the two husbands had begun abusing “the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment.”33 Susan and Livy challenged them to write one that was better. A newspaper colleague of Warner’s, Stephen A. Hubbard, wrote—based on Warner’s memory—that the challenge arose from a remark about The Innocents success: “Thereupon both Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Warner began to twit Mark Twain; they made all manner of good-natured fun of his book, called it an accidental hit, and finally ended up by defying him to write another work like it…”34 Warner and Clemens agreed to build a novel together, taking turns writing sections. The two would read their work to the wives each week, and defy them to identify which part was written by which husband. What started out as an extended parlor joke quickly enlarged into a property aimed at the market—a simulacrum of the dynamics now propelling the nation, and the novel that would describe the same.
A NEW, postwar avarice was building in America, a fascination with centralized capital and bureaucratized power, and the exploitative opportunities afforded when the two were combined. Ulysses S. Grant’s inattentive administration had opened up a scoundrel’s paradise: smart pols and speculators diverted huge reservoirs of public wealth to their private gain, as in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, in which some Union Pacific stockholders rigged shares toward crooked congressmen, who in turn overbudgeted the railroad’s construction costs so that all the fat cats made out. Sam’s admirer and Grant’s vice president, the well-upholstered Schuyler Colfax, was among those who saw their reputations ruined in the ensuing investigation. In New York, the bigbellied Boss Tweed was on trial as the figurehead for that metropolis’s teeming graft. The fat Senator Samuel Pomeroy, a hero of the free-soil struggle in Kansas before the Civil War, was exposed for bribery in his own reelection. Cynicism seemed to leak into other spheres of American life: the Beecher scandal, the sensational shooting by Laura Fair of her lover in San Francisco, a sense of expediency everywhere.
Expedience mocked the public trust, for example, at the New York Tribune in the wake of Horace Greeley’s death. A majority of Tribune stockholders with ties to Jay Gould, the railroad speculator who himself was close to Tweed, tried to harness the newspaper to their narrow business interests. They offered Greeley’s job of editor in chief to the disgraced Colfax. Whitelaw Reid, the honorable acting editor, resigned in protest of this corrupt power play. John Hay and several others followed suit. Reid’s career and the Tribune’s integrity were spared only when Colfax himself declined the appointment, perhaps acting under pressure. By Christmas, Reid had regained editorial control of the Tribune and declared his intention to keep it a “frank and fearless newspaper.”35 Mark Twain wrote a friendly, mock-heroic poem about the episode for the Hartford Evening Post.
Events such as these disgusted the deeply principled Warner. In his newspaper essays, he called for a literature dedicated to a moral examination of the great questions of right and wrong. Mark Twain shared this reformist passion. Here was a chance for the two men to practice what they preached. They chose a thematic universe scarcely visited by novelists until that time, and seldom by serious ones since: Washington politics, as it intertwined with corrupt business speculation and sexual intrigue. Alternately inspiring, rejuvenating, goading, and subtly competing with each other, they attacked their exotic tale full-throttle through the winter and spring of 1873. By April they had completed a curious Siamese twin of a novel, two distinct voices joined at the plot: 161,000 words spread among 63 chapters and 574 book pages when it was issued in December of that year. Mark Twain’s and Warner’s idle quest for a topic of substance that went beyond mere “entertainment” found its logical target in the American public that already absorbed their intellectual interests.
The Gilded Age ranks among the most combustible works of a tepid time in American letters: a veering, improvised mess of a book that nonetheless contains some of the most memorable characters in all Mark Twain’s writing; improbable melodrama coexisting with some of the most trenchant and informed Washington political satire to be found in the fiction of any American era; a social vision equally authoritative in the backwaters of antebellum Missouri and the postwar salons of corrupt cosmopolitan power—and a title at once fanciful and a permanent synonym for the era it described.
The shifting and jam-packed plotline follows a trail of greed and graft that stretches across half a continent, tracing Mark Twain’s most obsessive memories. The story begins with the transmigration of an eastern Tennessee family, headed by land-burdened Si “Judge” Hawkins, to Stone’s Landing, a small river town in northeastern Missouri in the 1840s. The family survives a steamboat explosion en route, and a minor character named Uncle Dan’l puts in a cameo appearance. The instigator of the move is the flamboyant backwoods dreamer and loudmouth opportunist Beriah (“There’s millions in it!”) Sellers, a friend of Si’s whose get-rich schemes propel him to Washington, accompanied by Hawkins’s offspring Washington and Laura. The latter is brilliant and “had the fatal gift of beauty,” but is unlucky in love. Laura Hawkins becomes a cynical player in Washington political society, and thus the reader’s guide through a rogue’s gallery of crooked senators, money-grafting lobbyists, toadying journalists, sinister bosses, and lecherous committee chairmen. By the novel’s end she has gunned down her married lover, the ex-Confederate Colonel Shelby; is acquitted at trial; and sinks obligingly into the desuetude and death that is the fate of all fallen Victorian women, no matter how beautiful. Judge Hawkins, after bungling several
chances to sell the accursed acreage, dies imploring his family to never lose sight of the Tennessee land. A pair of clean-cut young Eastern land surveyors get involved in a Sellers plot to turn Stone’s Landing into a navigation and rail metropolis. Fortunes are won and lost, crooked senators try to purchase their reelections, telegrams are sent, unsuspected identities are discovered, and the novel’s reformed malingerer, Philip Sterling, finally gets rich in coal mining. Somewhere along the way, Sellers serves the Judge’s son Washington a dinner of turnips and fresh water.
The novel belongs mostly to Mark Twain. Warner supplied a few characters and his knowledge of the surveyor’s art, but Samuel Clemens’s autobiographical discharge floods the narrative. One can almost feel his elation as he discovers how usable the past is—and, for him, how accessible. His Washington is even, to some extent, a flattened-out Virginia City with a capitol dome: wide-open, muddy, aswarm with arriving opportunists of all stripes, and little garrisons of studied refinement.
Less overtly apparent is Mark Twain’s deployment of his great gift for engaging and understanding process. One can find in the novel an authoritative depiction of how Washington works—officially, socially, and indictably—as well as the intricacies of finance, the methodology of land-scamming con artists, the décor of salons and parlors, the lore of mines. In many ways, The Gilded Age anticipated both the 20th-century “public novel” championed by Tom Wolfe, and the Washington novel of ideas as executed by Gore Vidal.
“We’ll…so interweave our work that these wives of ours will not be able to say which part has been written by Mark Twain and which by Charles D. Warner,”36 Stephen Hubbard has Mark Twain saying in his reminiscence. If Mark Twain in fact said such a thing, he was being nice. Warner added many valuable elements, but crackling phraseology was not among them. An instructive example is the way in which each man handled the voice of Beriah Sellers. Here is Warner: