Pudd’nhead Wilson with Those Extraordinary Twins: The Authoritative Edition by Mark Twain, edited by Benjamin Griffin
By Timothy Sandefur
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024
835 pp. $19.95 (paperback)
Pudd’nhead Wilson is an odd book by any measure. Originally published in 1894, it contains much of Mark Twain’s celebrated irony and cleverness, as well as his most earnest and brilliant denunciation of racism—far more powerful in that respect than anything in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yet it’s also strangely misshapen, weakened by flaws in characterization and plot and featuring a storytelling device that on one hand appears ingenious and, on the other, so carelessly conceived that some readers thought Twain was defending racism.
Perhaps the book’s most remarkable feature—and a strong hint as to the source of its shortcomings—is the fact that the author chose to remove a major section of the story before publication and to publish that as a separate tale (called Those Extraordinary Twins) in the same volume. He explained in a postscript that it dawned on him while writing it that half the story was tragedy and half was comedy, so he decided to extract the comedy—“a kind of literary Caesarian operation,” as he put it—and print the two stories side by side (353).
Now the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, which since 1967 has published scores of marvelously detailed scholarly editions of Twain’s writings, has released the “authoritative” Pudd’nhead Wilson by combining in a single volume the version Twain printed (i.e., Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins) and the manuscript version as it stood before Twain cut it in two—and has never before appeared in print. The result of this astonishing feat of literary detective work is a fascinating window into Twain’s creative skills and an entertaining, though flawed, “new” story from one of America’s most beloved authors.
Pudd’nhead Wilson is a detective tale set in a fictional pre–Civil War Missouri village called Dawson’s Landing. The title character is a failed lawyer—failed because he is too intelligent, and his cleverness alienates and confuses the ignorant villagers. But he’s not the book’s most interesting character. That honor goes to Roxana, an enslaved woman who is only one-sixteenth black and whose son can so easily pass for white that she switches him with a white child of the same age when they are both babies. The white child grows up in slavery, the “black” child with all the privileges of a good education. The latter becomes a crooked gambler and ne’er-do-well who eventually betrays Roxana by selling her to a plantation owner in Arkansas to pay off his gambling debts.
At last, she escapes and manages to return to Missouri to confront him. “‘You be Judas to yo’ on mother to save yo’ wuthless hide,’” she cries. “‘Would anybody b’lieve it? No!—a dog couldn’t! You is the low-downest orneriest hound dat was ever pup’d into dis worl’—en I is ’sponsible for it!’—and she spat on him” (174). Meanwhile, Wilson solves a local mystery by using what in the 1890s was a cutting-edge forensic technology—fingerprinting—to uncover Roxana’s baby-swapping trick. In the courtroom, he reveals the matching prints, proving the identity of the guilty party, and liberating the wrongly enslaved white man. “The real heir suddenly found himself rich and free, but in a most embarrassing situation,” Twain wrote. “He could neither read nor write. . . . His gait, his attitudes, his gestures, his bearing, his laugh—were all vulgar and uncouth; his manners were the manners of a slave” (200).
Twins and doppelgängers were favorite plot devices for Twain. He employed them in, among other works, The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and The American Claimant (1892). But here, the trick enabled him to assail the ludicrous evil of the “one drop rule”—by which a person could be legally deemed black and sentenced to a lifetime of servitude and oppression if he had even “one drop” of black blood in his veins—and, indeed, to condemn racism as a whole. “To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one-sixteenth of her which was black out-voted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro,” wrote Twain. “She was a slave, and salable as such. Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a negro” (13). The child-swapping plot device gave Twain the opportunity to dramatize—and cut down by sharp satire—the irrationality of dividing people by racial ancestry. Roxane is virtuous; her son, vicious—the color of their skin does not determine the content of their character.
Yet Twain never managed to make full use of these materials. One reason was that he initially interwove this plot with a second story—a farce featuring a pair of conjoined twins named Angelo and Luigi, who arrive in Dawson’s Landing to confound and astonish locals. Like their real-life inspirations, Italian brothers Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci, who toured the United States in the 1890s and were connected at the torso, Angelo and Luigi share the same legs but each has two arms. But for comedic purposes, Twain gave them conflicting personalities and beliefs. Angelo is a teetotaler, but Luigi drinks. Angelo is religious; Luigi, a “freethinker.” Angelo is a Whig, and Luigi is a Democrat. The high jinks climax in a scene in which Luigi, enraged at a political meeting that Angelo carries him to against his will, kicks a man and is put on trial for battery. Pudd’nhead Wilson is his defense lawyer.
This second courtroom drama makes for a farce as delightful as any Twain ever wrote. Yet he was right to detect a discordant note between his two stories. To merge the horrors of Roxana’s slavery and the racism she’s subjected to with the slapstick antics of Angelo and Luigi would have required exquisitely careful plotting, which might have taken years—time that Twain did not have. The 1890s were hard on him and his family. The previous decade had seen some of his greatest triumphs: He had published not only his own masterpieces, The Prince and the Pauper, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi, but also the enormously profitable memoirs of President Ulysses S. Grant. In the years that followed, however, he squandered his fortune in a series of poor business decisions, losing the equivalent of $9 million in today’s money by, among other things, publishing a biography of the pope that nobody bought and financing the development of an automatic typesetting machine that never worked. Meanwhile, his beloved wife suffered from a heart condition that required lengthy treatment in European hospitals.
These stresses manifested in his writing. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which appeared in 1889, contains an apocalyptic vision of a world war made horrifically deadly by the use of machines—behind which the reader can detect his frustration with the typesetter. And the two sequels to Tom Sawyer that he published in these years—Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)—are grotesquely unfunny, the obvious product of a writer desperate for cash.
Yet Twain had good enough judgment in writing Pudd’nhead Wilson to realize that his effort to blend comedy and tragedy was not working. Thus, he divided the novel in two, in a way that makes his reference to surgery a particularly apt metaphor: He rewrote it to eliminate the fact that Angelo and Luigi are conjoined twins. That required removing most of the comedic scenes, which shortened the novel considerably, but it also introduced notable problems with the plot. For example, in his published version, the brothers are always in each other’s company for no specific reason, despite the fact that they hate each other.
Worse, Twain passed up the opportunity to use the conjoined-twins device as a metaphor to reinforce his point about slavery and racism. If he had had more time and fewer distractions, he might have used Angelo and Luigi to represent the white and black races, or the northern and southern states, thereby making a more profound point about the need to reject irrational prejudices and live together in respect and harmony. But in the pressure of completing the book, he appears not to have thought of that.
Arguably the biggest problem with Pudd’nhead Wilson, however, was the fact that the baby-switching device backfired. That’s because the villain of the piece is the black child whom Roxane swaps for her own, whereas the white child raised in slavery hardly appears in the story at all; when he does, he is portrayed as honorable. As a result, some readers thought that Twain, far from blasting the foolishness of the “one-drop rule,” was justifying it. As editor Benjamin Griffin notes, a stage play adapted from the book in 1894 with Twain’s permission led one New Orleans reviewer to call it a vindication of racism: After all, the black child’s “taint of negro blood” leads him to become “a thief, a would-be murderer, and to kidnap and sell his free mother into slavery . . . while his foster brother, of pure white origin, grows up to be a brave, gallant and noble man, despite the fact that he has been brought up a slave” (591). It’s plain from even a casual reading of the novel that this was the opposite of Twain’s intention, but by leaving this unaddressed—and particularly, by failing to give the born-white, raised-black child something to do in the novel—Twain gave racists all the room they needed to adapt it into pro-racism plays and silent films in the decades that followed. Even the usually insightful critic Willa Cather, who saw the play in 1898, wrote that it “demonstrated that circumstances and environment could not make a slave a gentleman or a gentleman a slave”—when Twain’s point had been that circumstances, environment, and personal character are what make these things (591).
With all that said, what’s remarkable about Pudd’nhead Wilson is that it is still quite enjoyable. Twain’s skill at prose and wordplay, his masterful handling of dialogue, and his comedic timing were so extraordinary that the novel remains entertaining, suspenseful, and at least partly effective in its denunciation of racism. That effectiveness is somewhat improved by this restored version, because the reader can first enjoy the never-before-published original, with the farce and drama blended, and then compare it to Twain’s published version. What’s more, the editors’ meticulous scholarship—tracking down even the minutest differences between the various manuscripts and explaining Twain’s sometimes obscure references with detailed endnotes—add to the enjoyment. (For example, one character refers to Angelo and Luigi as “that phillipene! [sic]”; the note explains that “phillipene” was a 19th-century slang term for a nut with two kernels, such as a peanut [421].)
Particularly entertaining is the editors’ account of the difficulties Twain encountered getting the book into print. Not only did he wrestle with two different plots, but his European and American publishers’ nitpicking caused him frequent headaches. The chief culprit was Century magazine, which serialized the novel but imposed its Victorian sense of propriety by altering his writing—removing references to illegitimacy and even gentle curses such as “damn.” Twain finally lost patience in September 1894 when he learned that they had even changed his punctuation—something he could not stand. (He was “inflexibly particular” about his punctuation, he once told a friend, having “learned it in a hundred printing-offices when I was a journeyman printer. . . . I reverence it.”)1 In a letter to his wife, he described how he exploded at the Century offices:
The criminal was an imported proof-reader from Oxford University. . . . I said I didn’t care if he was an Archangel imported from Heaven, he couldn’t puke his ignorant impudence over my punctuation, I wouldn’t allow it for a moment. I said I couldn’t read this proof, I couldn’t sit in the presence of a proof-sheet where that blatherskite had left his tracks; so Johnson [the editor] wrote a note [saying that] . . . the laws of his printing office must be modified, this time; that this stuff must be set up again & my punctuation restored, to the minutest detail, & always be followed hereafter throughout the story. So I’m to return there tomorrow & read the deodorized proof. (559)
In the end, Twain ceased complaining about the Century’s alterations because he expected that after their serialization was done, his own publishing company would release a final, definitive book version in which he could reverse all their changes. His worsening financial situation rendered that impossible, however, and the book went to print in 1894 with many of the Century’s alterations still in place. By presenting the world with Twain’s manuscript version, which has spent all these years at the Morgan Library in New York, Griffin and his team have at last enabled readers to see the story as close as possible to the way Twain intended it.
Mark Twain was a temperamental man, foolish in the world of business and sometimes a poor judge of the quality of his own work. Yet he was a brilliant literary artist whose best writings Americans are wise to cherish. Alas, his reputation has come under fire in recent years—as it seems to with regularity—due to the way his novels, particularly Huckleberry Finn, address racism. With its fascinating explanatory essays, its meticulous explanatory notes, and its respectful treatment of this previously unpublished story, the Mark Twain Project’s authoritative edition of Pudd’nhead Wilson is an important scholarly resource, a delightful read for Twain devotees, and an opportunity for readers at large to gain more insight into the author’s sincere, if imperfect, efforts to attack the scourge of racial prejudice.