Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

by Mark Twain

  ‘Pudd‘nhead was right at the start—we ought to have hired the official half of that human phillipene to resign; but it’s too late now; some of us haven’t got anything left to hire him with.’

  ‘Yes, we have,’ said another citizen, ‘we’ve got this’—and he produced a halter.

  Many shouted: ‘That’s the ticket.’ But others said: ‘No—Count Angelo is innocent; we mustn’t hang him.’

  ‘Who said anything about hanging him? We are only going to hang the other one.’

  ‘Then that is all right—there is no objection to that.’

  So they hanged Luigi. And so ends the history of ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’.

  FINAL REMARKS

  As you see, it was an extravagant sort of a tale, and had no purpose but to exhibit that monstrous ‘freak’ in all sorts of grotesque lights. But when Roxy wandered into the tale she had to be furnished with something to do; so she changed the children in the cradle; this necessitated the invention of a reason for it; this, in turn, resulted in making the children prominent personages—nothing could prevent it, of course. Their career began to take a tragic aspect, and some one had to be brought in to help work the machinery; so Pudd’nhead Wilson was introduced and taken on trial. By this time the whole show was being run by the new people and in their interest, and the original show was become side-tracked and forgotten; the twin-monster, and the heroine, and the lads, and the old ladies had dwindled to inconsequentialities and were merely in the way. Their story was one story, the new people’s story was another story, and there was no connection between them, no interdependence, no kinship. It is not practicable or rational to try to tell two stories at the same time; so I dug out the farce and left the tragedy.

  The reader already knew how the expert works; he knows now how the other kind do it.

  MARK TWAIN

  ENDNOTES

  1 (p. 3) Giotto’s campanile ... a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak: Twain is referring to the tower beside the Duomo, or cathedral, in Florence, designed by Giotto. In his reference to “a chunk of chestnut cake,” Twain is making a joke about castagnaccio, a flat, gooey confection made of chestnut flour and rosemary, eaten by many in the winter season and disliked by just as many. Ghibellines and Guelphs were warring factions in Dante’s Florence.

  2 (p. 6) Dawson’s Landing was a slaveholding town: The legality of slavery was an issue considered state by state, not town by town. Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1820. Northern politicians had attempted to prevent Missouri’s entrance as a slave state, which would give the South more senators than the North had—hence, the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Maine as a free state at the same time, preserving the equal balance in the Senate between slave states and free states. The Compromise also outlawed slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36th Parallel. Northerners were not happy with the Compromise, because it did not address the imbalance between free and slave states in the House of Representatives. The U.S. Constitution says nothing about slaves, but it makes provisions for how persons who owed service or labor should be counted to determine the population of a given state (and how many representatives that state was therefore entitled to): Such persons were counted as “three-fifths of all other persons.” The Missouri Compromise, which is sometimes spoken of as the measure that only postponed the American Civil War, was overturned by passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which permitted slavery in those territories.

  3 (p. 11) people’s finger-marks: Sir Francis Galton’s Fingerprints (New York: Macmillan, 1892) helped promote the use of fingerprints in criminal detection. Langston Hughes, in his 1959 introduction to Pudd’nhead Wilson, tells us that in 1896 the International Association of Chiefs of Police met in Chicago and decided to set up a Bureau of Criminal Identification to study ways in which fingerprinting might supplant the first scientific method of criminal identification, the “Bertillon system” of body measurements.

  4 (p. 12) Only one sixteenth of her was black: In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), Thomas Jefferson advances with much regret the theory that blacks are inferior to whites in body and mind. He works out the arithmetic for what constitutes a quadroon (a person who is one-quarter black, having one white and one mulatto parent; a mulatto has one white parent and one black parent) and an octoroon (a person who is one-eighth black), and the percentage of black blood that made a person legally black. Before the Civil War, the black was regarded as an alien, an individual who could not be assimilated. Later in the nineteenth century, state legislatures agreed that a Negro would be defined as anyone with one-sixteenth African or black blood. Under this definition, Tom, who passes for white and is only one-thirty-second black, is not legally black at all. In 1860 only 8 percent of the slave population was listed as mulatto or mixed, whereas 37 percent of the free black population was listed as such.

  5 (p. 68) There was a strong rum party and a strong anti-rum party: The temperance movement that culminated in the Prohibition Act of 1919 had numerous nineteenth-century antecedents, often linked with evangelical fervor. Methodist revivalism in the 1840s left in its wake “Blue Laws” in many counties, North and South, that restricted the sale of alcohol on Sundays.

  6 (p. 87) Cap’n John Smith: Smith was an explorer who came to the Virginia colony in 1607 and became its president. He claimed that when he was captured by the Indians, the princess Pocahontas intervened and saved his life. Her husband was not African; she married an Englishman, John Rolfe.

  7 (p. 100) De law kin sell me now if dey tell me to leave de State in six months en I don’t go: Many legislatures in slave states passed laws that held that a slave who had been emancipated or who had purchased his or her freedom had to leave that county or that state within six months, or else he or she could be returned to slavery. Thus, slave families whose members were working to purchase the freedom of their loved ones were often separated by freedom as well as by slavery. Though most free blacks in the South lived in towns, the authorities regarded the presence of free blacks as a subversive influence, a danger to the slave system.

  8 (p. 109) runaway-nigger bills: In the 1830s free blacks in the North had vigilante groups to keep watch for the agents of slaveholders who routinely kidnapped blacks and returned them South, or sent blacks (and white children) who were legally free back into slavery. In 1850 Congress passed the ill-advised Fugitive Slave Law—“the Man-Stealing Law” or “the Bloodhound Bill,” as abolitionists called it. The Fugitive Slave Law allowed no jury trial in the case of runaways; thus denying blacks the protection of the Sixth Amendment. The fugitive was taken to a special commissioner rather than to an officer of a court, and that commissioner received a larger fee when the fugitive was declared slave property than when not. The Fugitive Slave Law also sought to punish those whites who did not assist in the capture of runaways: An officer who refused to arrest a runaway could be fined $1,000; citizens who obstructed an officer or refused to help capture a runaway could be liable for $2,000 in fines and could be sentenced to six months in jail. But people in the North began to resist the law immediately. Author Herman Melville witnessed a struggle in Boston between outraged people and the authorities attempting to escort a black man to a ship that would take him back to slavery.

  INSPIRED BY MARK TWAIN AND PUDD’ NHEAD WILSON

  Mark Twain’s enormous contribution to the American novel often overshadows his substantial involvement with the theater. Two years before publishing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and twenty years before Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Twain had a smash hit with his play Colonel Sellers (1874). The production, which netted Twain $70,000, was a dramatization of The Gilded Age (1873), a satire he co-wrote with Charles Dudley Warner. In Twain’s fertile mind, stories emerged as plays, novels, collections of nonfiction, newspaper articles (he was a journalist as early as 1862), and humorous lectures. Four of Twain’s most important early prose works—The Innocents Abroad (nonfictio
n; 1869), Roughing It (nonfiction; 1872), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and The Prince and the Pauper (1881)—all began as plays.

  Twain’s lecture tours, which were much like one-man shows, garnered as much fame for the author as his published works. With titles such as “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” and “The Twins of Genius” (which co-starred George Washington Cable), the lectures formed a substantial portion of Twain’s income and activity for more than forty years. Many of these addresses, which frequently incorporated material from the author’s written work, are collected in Paul Fatout’s Mark Twain Speaking (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976). Legendary actor Hal Holbrook mimics these presentations in his one-man show Mark Twain To-night!, which in 2004 celebrated fifty consecutive years of performances by Holbrook.

  Pudd‘nhead Wilson was one of seven plays Twain authorized for dramatization by other artists. The actor-playwright Frank Mayo, known across America for twenty years of playing Davy Crockett, approached Twain during a difficult time in the writer’s life. Twain was in debt to the tune of $100,000 due to the failure of his printing company and in need of money. He authorized Mayo’s adaptation but did not participate in the process of transferring the work to the theater. Fortunately, along with Twain’s five-continent lecture tour in 1895 and 1896, Mayo’s successful adaptation of Pudd’nhead Wilson helped alleviate Twain’s financial obligations. Rehearsals for Pudd‘nhead Wilson began in March 1895, and the play opened in Hartford on April 8. The review of the New York City premiere in the April 16, 1895 New York Times criticized some technical aspects of the play but gave great praise to Mayo’s acting: “In the title role Mr. Mayo portrayed with a skill, which it would be difficult to praise too highly, the gentle Pudd’nhead, misjudged by all around him, and patiently waiting for recognition and appreciation from the ignorant villagers. The part is a delightfully sympathetic one, and Mr. Mayo played it with a simplicity and sincerity that enabled him to preserve all its humor, while never losing the dignity of an underlying seriousness.” Mayo played Pudd‘nhead around the country to great profit for another year before tragedy struck: The actor was killed in a train wreck on June 8,1896, while touring with the play. Tedious rights problems issuing from Mayo’s death and a subsequent inept restaging of the play by Mayo’s son Edwin caused great heartache for Twain, who had hoped the play would run for years. Pudd’nhead Wilson eventually did get back on its feet, playing to audiences and scoring royalties for Twain’s estate as late as 1923.

  COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

  In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

  Comments

  THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY

  Mark Twain is the representative of what is really a national trait, and this trait is a good part of what America is contributing to the thought of the world, and, intellectually, perhaps its greatest part. This vulgarizing, denigrating spirit finds its expression in the life and literature of the new democracy. It is not the mere arid buffoonery of a few merry-andrews; it is as important in its way as the loud roystering hilarity of Rabelais or as Molière’s wit—as important, that is to say, to the historian. After all, when we rid our minds of the notion that literature is a manufactured product, and perceive that it is really humanity speaking, just as politics is humanity governing, then a manifestation that belongs to a whole large country assumes serious importance. The political career of America is certainly worth study: it is of the nature of an unfolding enacted prophecy for the rest of the civilized world; and in American humour it is easy to detect one side of its spirit.

  —from St. James Gazette ( July 5, 1883)

  WILLIAM LIVINGSTON ALDEN

  Puddenhead Wilson, Mark Twain’s latest story, is the work of a novelist, rather than of a ‘funny man. ’There is plenty of humour in it of the genuine Mark Twain brand, but it is as a carefully painted picture of life in a Mississippi town in the days of slavery that its chief merit lies. In point of construction it is much the best story that MarkTwain has written, and of men and women in the book at least four are undeniably creations, and not one of them is overdrawn or caricatured, as are some of the most popular of the author’s lay figures.

  —from an unsigned review in The Idler (August 1894)

  LONDON CHRONICLE

  There is in this volume a good deal of Mark Twain at his best, and not a little of Mark Twain at his worst. The story is one of the strangest compounds of strength and artificiality we have read for many a day Pathos and bathos, humour and twaddle, are thrown together in a way that is nothing less than amazing. While the puerile preface is enough to warn off the stoutest admirer of the American humourist, the first line of Pudd’nhead Wilson’s philosophy is bound to lure him on again. When he is deep down in despair at the imbecility of much of the incident, a flash of the old wit or a page pregnant with feeling and humanity compels him again to pursue the narrative. And when he has closed the book he will admit that it has entertained him even with its faults, and that Mark Twain has written worse things, as he has written things incomparably superior.

  —December 13, 1894

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  The wit of Mark Twain was avowedly and utterly of the extravagant order. It had that quality of mad logic carried further and further into the void, a quality in which many strange civilisations are at one. It is a system of extremes, and all extremes meet in it; thus houses piled one on top of the other is the idea of a flat in New York and of a pagoda in Peking. Mark Twain was a master of this mad lucidity. He was a wit rather than a humorist; but I do not mean by this (as so many modern people will certainly fancy) that he was something less than a humorist. Possibly, I think, he was something more than a humorist. Humour, a subtle relish for the small incongruities of society, is a thing that exists in many somewhat low society types, in many snobs and in some sneaks.... But wit is a more manly exercise than fiddling or fooling; wit requires an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic. A wit must have something of the same running, working, and staying power as a mathematician or a metaphysician.

  —from T.P.’s Weekly (April 19, 1910)

  THOMAS WOLFE

  I think of you with Whitman and with Twain—that is, with men who have seen America with a poet’s vision, and with a poetic vision of life—which to my mind is the only way actually it can be seen.

  —from a letter to Sherwood Anderson (September 22, 1937)

  LANGSTON HUGHES

  Mark Twain, in his presentation of Negroes as human beings, stands head and shoulders above the other Southern writers of his times, even such distinguished ones as Joel Chandler Harris, F. Hopkins Smith, and Thomas Nelson Page. It was a period when most writers who included Negro characters in their work at all, were given to presenting the slave as ignorant and happy, the freed men of color as ignorant and miserable, and all Negroes as either comic servants on the one hand or dangerous brutes on the other. That Mark Twain’s characters in Pudd’nhead Wilson fall into none of these categories is a tribute to his discernment. And that he makes them neither heroes nor villains is a tribute to his understanding of human character.

  —from his introduction to Pudd’nhead Wilson (1959)

  WILLIAM FAULKNER

  In my opinion, Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us are his heirs, we descended from him. Before him the writers who were considered American were not, really; their tradition, their culture was European culture. It was only with Twain, Walt Whitman, there became a true indigenous American culture.

  —fr
om Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 (1968)

  Questions

  1. William Faulkner described Mark Twain as “the first truly American writer.” Is he correct? What, outside of local dialects, is so distinctly American about Twain’s writing? Is it the subject matter? Twain’s attitude toward his subject matter? Is it something nebulous, its spirit or sense or worldview?

  2. Think about the theme of twinship in this novel. Is there something especially appropriate about using twins in this way? How does the idea of twins relate to the subjects of slavery and racial prejudice?

  3. Could a critic who loves to debunk accepted ideas argue that Twain did not mean to comment on either slavery or racial prejudice, but rather chose to use these as the raw materials for a good story? Do you think Twain had a political or other agenda when writing Pudd‘nhead Wilson?

  4. There is something both traditional and original about Pudd’nhead Wilson himself. There are many tales of a man or woman who is scorned, derided, or even exiled by his or her community, but who triumphs in the end over the monster or villain who is threatening that community—and he or she triumphs by virtue of those very traits that originally drew the derision and scorn. And yet, Pudd‘nhead’s story does not feel like a cliché. Why is Pudd’nhead Wilson not simply a representation of this familiar story?