Origins: Twain's Life and Career

Hello.

I'm Dr Thomas Roy Smith,

senior lecturer in American literature and culture

at the University of East Anglia.

And today I'm going to be talking to

you about Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,

one of the most famous books in American literary history.

Now this is a book that actually begins with a warning.

Mark Twain tells us that persons attempting to find

the motive in this narrative will be prosecuted,

persons attempting to find a moral and it will be banished,

and persons attempting to find a plot in it

will be shocked.

But like many readers before us, we are going to ignore that warning.

And we are going to think about what this book means,

because Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deceptively simple book,

and it's hard.

It's the story of a poor, impoverished,

illiterate young boy who helps an enslaved man to freedom.

And that's one of the most iconic images, probably in

American literature in world literature, the image of Huckleberry Finn

and Jim on the raft heading down the Mississippi.

But this is a book that has always been freighted with ambiguity,

both in terms of what kind of this book this is,

and also what this book has to say about essential issues

in American life, especially issues relating to race and freedom

and what it has to say about those issues in ways that remain relevant today.

So today we're going to think about those things are gonna

try and unpack this book in a variety of different ways.

And I think the best way to think our way into

the book is by thinking about where it comes from.

So thinking about Mark Twain, the author,

thinking about his life up to the point that he writes Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn and also thinking about his literary career up to the point that he writes

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because

he writes the book when he's in his late forties.

He's had a very varied and interesting life up to that point,

and it begins

in the same part of the world that this book is set.

So events of Huckleberry Finn is set in the town of ST Petersburg.

But really, that town is modelled on the town of Hannibal, Missouri,

which is a small town on the Mississippi River where Mark Twain grew up

and that is in many ways the essential landscape of his writing.

It's also the same place that he writes about

in the book that comes before Huckleberry Finn.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,

the book that introduces the character of Huck Finn to the world.

And we can learn a lot to think about the

symbolism of this book by thinking about that place.

So when Twain grows up in Hannibal,

the river is absolutely at the heart of his life

and the lives of everyone else in the town.

Now, when he's a child,

this is much in the way of being a playground.

He talks a lot in later years about the way he would play in the river with his friends

almost drowned in the river, according to Twain,

lots of his friends did actually drown in the river,

so it's a playground.

But it's also a playground that has some dark currents

in it that's freighted with danger and potential death.

The other exciting thing that the river has is steamboats.

Steamboats move up and down the Mississippi River.

So even though Hannibal is a small town on what was really

very much still the frontier in the 18 thirties and forties,

when Twain was growing up,

the arrival of steamboats daily meant that Hannibal

was actually connected to the wider world to

river towns up and down the Mississippi and

really through the network of trade the whole nation

and steamboats had a real excitement and glamour to them,

especially for boys of Twain's generation, Um,

and eventually this goes on to become a very important part of his life, too,

because after he grows up in this small river

town after he spends some time as a printer,

he actually learns how to pilot a steamboat.

He spends four years on the river,

and he's able to pilot a steamboat from the town of

ST Louis down right down the river to New Orleans.

Um, this is a very high status position that he's reached, Um,

and yet it's also important to remember that

steam boating is not all excitement and glamour,

as Twain often positions because we need to remember as well.

The town of Hannibal, the state of Missouri in which it's situated in

was a place where slavery was legal,

So slavery is not just a part of everyday life

in Hannibal when Twain's growing up his family owned slaves,

for example.

But slavery is also a key part of the steamboat trade.

Um steamboats would have taken enslaved people down the

river to the slave markets in New Orleans,

and Mark Twain himself, when he's writing his autobiography in later Years,

remembers seeing groups of chained people sitting on the

river on the riverside on the levee in Hannibal,

waiting to be transported down to market.

He also talks about one of his childhood friends,

the model one of the models,

possibly for the character of Huckleberry Finn helping a runaway slave.

And that slave is later

chased by a mob from the town is lynched,

and apparently Train is one of the boys who finds the body.

So from the start, you can see the ways in which

the river environment of Mark Twain's childhood and early life really

helps to shape the narrative landscapes of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The Mississippi River is the central image of

the text in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,

just as the Mississippi River was the central symbol of Mark

Twain's early life before even thought about becoming a writer.

As I said, it's a place to play. It's a place to escape.

It's a place for adventure and excitement, as it is for Huck Finn in this book.

But on the other hand, it's also a place of slavery, of danger, of darkness, of death.

It's a place that means, even though he wants to often position

ST Petersburg and Hannibal

as a place of innocence and almost idyllic childhood,

it's also a place that is always

still concerned with those wider, problematic issues in American life, like race

and slavery.

Um, and this is something that commentators have often been keen to pick up on. T. S.

Eliot is one of the more famous ones, Um, and for him, he says.

But for the river,

the book might only be a sequence of adventures with a happy ending.

The River makes the book a great book,

so it's always worth pausing on the river as a symbol in this

book and thinking about which of it's very kind of multi valued,

ambiguous meanings.

It's symbolising at any moment.

So Mark Twain, as I said, becomes a steamboat pilot,

and he said in later life that really he would have remained a steamboat

pilot for the rest of his life if the Civil War hadn't arrived.

So the American Civil War is an immensely

important and traumatic moment in the 19th century,

and, um, in the context that we're talking about today.

In a sense, the Civil War also changes the course of American literature,

because when the war starts, the Mississippi River is closed.

Mark Twain carburettor steamboat pilot anymore.

For a moment, he dabbles with fighting for the South and for the Confederacy,

which would, of course, mean fighting

for the side in the American Civil War that was

fighting to retain slavery as an institution in American life.

But like many other young men,

he also soon decides that war was not ultimately his calling.

So what does he do? He does what Huck Finn does at the end of the book, and he heads West.

So while the Civil War was being fought, Mark Twain headed to California, Nevada.

He spends some time as a minor.

He spends more time as a journalist is the

place where he adopts the pen name Mark Twain.

Up until this point, he's just been playing old Sam Clemens. Um,

and

this is really the place in which

he develops the literary style that is going to make him famous.

And he actually becomes famous just at the moment that

the American Civil War is coming to an end.

So the American Civil War comes to an end in 18 65 and Mark Twain happens

to publish a short story at that point

called the celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,

which is a vernacular tall tale, a purely comic story

which gained extraordinary popularity both in America and in Britain as well.

At this point, at least in American terms,

it's as if America is looking for something to take

its mind off the wall that it's just heard.

So it gravitates towards the kind of humour that a writer like Mark Twain

is producing. At this point,

I've said that the war comes to end in 18 65.

But of course, what's important to remember,

especially when we're thinking about a book like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,

in many ways the war does not end in 18 65 and in

many ways you could argue the war is still going on in 2019,

when we think about the fact that people are arguing about whether memorials

for the Confederacy should still be allowed to be displayed in public places.

Um, so these are still ongoing issues in American life,

and America comes out of the war,

and a whole host of questions are being asked,

What was life in America going to be

like for those people who were previously enslaved?

Because, of course,

the great result of the American Civil War is

that slavery is now abolished is made illegal.

So what's life going to be like for people who were previously enslaved?

How would the war be remembered? How would

the defeated South be reintegrated into American life?

And those are all issues that are

absolutely flowing through events of Huckleberry Finn,

and we can see Twain thinking about those things throughout.

So even though this is a book set in the

18 thirties or Stems to be back in Twain's childhood,

you also need to remember there's always a book that is very much about

the moment that's being written in the late 18 seventies and 18 eighties,

when the issues flowing out of the American Civil War

are still very much alive political questions in American life.

See you at the Civil War ends.

Mark Twain becomes a famous, humorous writer,

and his career develops from there. Um, he joins a tour of the Holy Land in Europe.

Uh, and out of that, he writes an enormously popular comic travel account.

Um, that sells huge amounts of copies, really establishes his fame.

Um, from there, his literary aspirations grow, and he moves into writing fiction.

Crucially, too, he gets married,

and he marries a young woman called the Libya Langdon,

whose family is enormously wealthy.

So it becomes very much an established, respectable domestic person.

At that point, he becomes a father,

and he starts writing books for Children.

First of all, another extremely famous book.

He publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 18 76

and this is the book that introduces Huck Finn to the world.

And as soon as he finishes writing Tom Sawyer,

he knows he wants to write another book still kind of set in this world.

He writes to his

friend, the great editor and writer William Dean Howells,

that he's going to take a boy of 12 and run him on through life in the first person.

So as soon as he's conceiving of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,

it's this distinctive first person narration that is key to what he wants to do here

and alongside comic adventure of the kind that he'd written in Tom Sawyer.

This was also going to be a deeper meditation on the issues of slavery

and its legacies in American life that drew deeply on his foundational

experiences of life in small town America and life on the Mississippi.