Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Alan Gribben

Contents

       Editor’s Introduction: The NewSouth Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

       Selected Relevant Print and Digital Works

      Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)

       Author’s Notes

       Twain’s Chapter Headings

       The Text

       Afterword: Satirical Targets in Huckleberry Finn

       About the Editor

Editor’s Introduction:

      The NewSouth Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

      Alan Gribben

      Mark Twain originally envisioned a cohesiveness between his most celebrated novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Nevertheless, ever since the mid-twentieth century these two works have customarily been separated by publishers, libraries, and bookstores, with Tom Sawyer relegated to “Juvenile” or “Young Adult” catalogs and Huckleberry Finn elevated to “Adult” lists, as though they have almost no relationship to each other. Literature teachers, too, understandably tend to impose a division between Tom Sawyer, with its limited village environs, and Huckleberry Finn, which features an eventful journey by raft in search of freedom. Severance of the two books has proceeded in spite of evidence that Twain wrote the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn soon after completing the manuscript for Tom Sawyer, and the fact that Huckleberry Finn announces in the sequel’s very first sentence, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.’” Moreover, characters and settings are shared by both novels.

      Twain even attempted to ensure that sample copies of Tom Sawyer were carried by his “canvassers” who fanned out through neighborhoods and farmlands to take book orders for Twain’s forthcoming Huckleberry Finn. (For nearly thirty years Mark Twain’s works were sold only through these “subscription” agents and could not be obtained in retail bookstores, a lucrative but somewhat disreputable practice for an author of his stature.) Twain recommended to his publisher that customers purchasing both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn be given a reduced price on the set. However, since Twain had left the press that brought out Tom Sawyer in 1876—and was rebelliously publishing Huckleberry Finn under the imprint of his own company—tangled negotiations with his previous firm prevented this joint sale of the volumes from materializing.

      Owing to difficulties in resolving plot developments and to other interruptions, the sequel to Tom Sawyer was delayed for eight long years. The hitches in Twain’s composition of Huckleberry Finn are comprehensible when his basic plot dilemma is grasped: somehow the author had to move a fleeing boy and a runaway slave farther and farther south on the Mississippi River below St. Louis—in other words, down to the part of the river with which Mark Twain had become familiar as a steamboat pilot. Yet logically the slave (and therefore his helper Huckleberry Finn) should want to head north toward the “free” states where human slavery had already been abolished by the 1840s, the decade in which Twain’s novel takes place. Twain solved part of this predicament by having Huck and Jim become lost in a dense fog at night and drift past the Ohio River inlet that led north.

      The second inspiration took longer to occur to Twain, but eventually he came up with the idea of having the raft on which Huck and Jim had lived so contentedly be commandeered by two rapscallions who, in a mockery of European titles, grandly style themselves the “King” and the “Duke.” That solution put Twain over the largest hurdle and he then managed to wrap up the novel by reintroducing Tom Sawyer, thus returning to the “boy book” playacting which had characterized Tom Sawyer and carried over into the early chapters of Huckleberry Finn. These serial stages of development meant that the volume did not issue in the United States until 1885. By that time even his most loyal readers had trouble thinking of the books as forming a seamless story, with the result that customers usually elected to order Huckleberry Finn in a green cover rather than the available blue cloth that would have matched the cover of the earlier Tom Sawyer. Today most people think of them as entirely separate works.

      The NewSouth Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

      Whether considered together or apart, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn do have one thing in common: racial slurs in their contents have increasingly presented a problem for teachers, students, and general readers. The editor’s decision to eliminate these epithets in Huckleberry Finn is likely to remain controversial. Quite simply, he hopes to introduce this book to a wider readership than it can currently enjoy. Twain, it should be remembered, was endeavoring to accurately depict the prevailing social attitudes along the Mississippi River Valley during the 1840s by repeatedly employing a linguistic corruption of “Negro” in reference to African American slaves. In Huckleberry Finn barely educated boys and uneducated adult characters in Missouri and Arkansas casually toss about this racial insult a total of 214 times (with the novel’s table of contents adding another one).

      The n-word possessed, then as now, demeaning implications more vile than any insult that can be applied to other racial groups. There is no equivalent slur in the English language. As a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact. Even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this pejorative racial appellative. In the 1870s and 1880s, of course, Twain scarcely had to concern himself about the feelings of African American readers. That population group was too occupied with trying to recover from the degradation of slavery and the institution of Jim Crow segregation policies to bother about an objectionable vocabulary choice in a popular book.

      When Samuel L. Clemens (who would adopt the pen name “Mark Twain” in 1863) was growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, his views on slavery were in keeping with those of his fellow villagers. His father, significantly, had owned as many slaves as he could afford. In a letter written when he was seventeen, Sam Clemens mockingly alluded to Northern people attempting to free slaves as “infernal abolitionists” (August 23,