has his letter-writer, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, tell the woeful story of his American experiences. Ah Song Hi’s reports, in the face of great expectations, are uniformly painful. He who “wanted to dance, shout, sing, worship the generous Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” is beaten from his very arrival in San Francisco. He is imprisoned, attacked by his fellow prisoners (whose wickedness and crimes he catalogs), then found guilty of disorderly conduct after a farcical trial. Other pieces of social criticism appeared in the Galaxy. They include “About Smells,” which concerns a Brooklyn clergyman’s objections to the odors of common working people in his church, and a critique of a minister who would not officiate at the funeral of an actor. Most of the pieces, however, fulfill his assignment as a humorist, such as his account of how he edited an agricultural paper despite abysmal ignorance. He ludicrously discusses oyster beds under the heading “Landscape Gardening” and recommends the importation of the guano, “a fine bird.”
Perhaps the most amusing piece is a putative review of The Innocents Abroad, ascribed to the London Saturday Review (that journal had reviewed the book favorably with great condescension). Mark Twain fooled many readers into believing that his hoax had actually appeared in England. Mark Twain’s mock review finds much exaggeration in the Innocents and expresses astonishment at the author’s “stupefying simplicity and innocence,” “his colossal ignorance.” For example, “He did not know, until he got to Rome, that Michael Angelo was dead! And then, instead of crawling away and hiding his shameful ignorance somewhere, he proceeds to express a pious, grateful satisfaction that he is gone and out of his troubles!” The reviewer continues, “The book is absolutely dangerous, considering the magnitude of the misstatements, and the convincing confidence with which they are made…. The poor blunderer mouses among the sublime creations of the Old Masters, trying to acquire the elegant proficiency in art-knowledge, which he has a groping sort of comprehension is a proper thing for the travelled man to display.” The author of The Innocents Abroad proves to be the ideal victim of Mark Twain’s irony.
Some thirty-three of the Express and Galaxy pieces were preserved—mostly in revised form—in Sketches, New and Old, the selection from his short pieces that Mark Twain published in 1875. Except for the social criticism, the Galaxy and Express pieces represent no new development in the writer’s career but are rather a continuation of the sketch writing he had begun in the West. To his brother Orion he referred to it as “periodical dancing before the public.”
It was the success of the Innocents as well as the strain of producing sketches on schedule that would turn Mark Twain to other kinds of writing, although he continued to write a few sketches. He declared to a correspondent on March 3, 1871, that he was determined to write no more for periodicals but instead to write books. He made a similar protest in print, as an introduction to “My First Literary Venture.” Accordingly, most of the later short pieces, until the 1890s, are properly stories or essays, such as the damning attack on Commodore Vanderbilt he published in Packard’s Monthly in March 1869.49 By the late 1890s, the writer looked back at his early work with distaste. “I find that I cannot stand things I wrote a quarter of a century ago. They seem to have two qualities, gush and vulgarity.” The pieces are decidedly uneven, but a few, such as “Some Learned Fables” and “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man,” are still amusing and deserve more attention than they have customarily received.
Strange as it may seem, Mark Twain’s writings after he went east had much wider publication in book form in England than in the United States; this was due partly to the activities of literary pirates, who gathered his pieces without authorization from the writer or his American publishers. Two thin volumes, Eye Openers and Screamers, collected Express, Galaxy, and other sketches in 1871. Besides other small volumes, a fat collection of sixty-six pieces was published by Routledge in 1872 as Mark Twain’s Sketches; this one was, however, authorized. In it a prefatory note from the author states, “This book contains all of my sketches which I feel willing to father.” Although he himself prepared this volume for publication, he used the versions of his work that had appeared in England in 1871 as the basis for the printer’s copy of a number of the pieces, despite the fact that these versions had been heavily edited by the unauthorized publisher, John Camden Hotten. Hotten himself drew attention to this strange practice of accepting a stranger’s unsought editing in a letter to the English journal Spectator published June 8, after the 1872 Sketches was published. He noted, for example, that he had found a “rather strongly-worded article entitled ‘Journalism in Tennessee’” likely to profit from the elimination of “certain forcible expressions,” such as “bumming his board” and “animated tank of mendacity, gin, and profanity”; and so he performed the pruning.50 Now in an authorized edition the same changes had appeared.
Hotten later published a volume of 107 sketches, along with the Innocents, combined as The Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1873). After Hotten died in June 1873, he was succeeded by the man who was to become Mark Twain’s authorized publisher, Andrew Chatto, whose firm became Chatto and Windus. Chatto obligingly gave the American writer the opportunity to revise his work, and he did so, deleting seventeen sketches and making revisions. In 1874, The Choice Humorous Works appeared, “Revised and Corrected by the Author.” None of these volumes appeared in the uniform edition the writer assembled toward the end of his career. Only Sketches, New and Old serves there to represent his early work.
Although Mark Twain was resolved to concentrate on writing books after 1871, just what he would undertake next was not clear to him for a time. In July 1866, he had recorded an idea in his notebook: “Conversation between the carpenters of Noah’s Ark, laughing at him for an old visionary.”51 In August 1869, he asked his sister to send him his “account of the Deluge (it is a diary kept by Shem),” which he described as being of “70 or 80 pages.” When he wrote to Elisha Bliss about it in January 1870, he called it a “Noah’s Ark” book. He supposed, with hope, that “maybe it will be several years before it is all written—but it will be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.” Although he returned to this work at the end of his life, only partial drafts survive.52 In 1939, Bernard DeVoto prepared for publication Mark Twain manuscripts he called “Papers of the Adam Family,” eventually published in 1962 in the collection Letters from the Earth. Rather more to the point is a letter written to Mrs. Fairbanks a little earlier. Here he explained that the success of the Innocents had so encouraged him that he intended “to write another book during the summer.”
The popularity of the Innocents was to have a great effect on Mark Twain’s career. In the preface to the second volume of an English edition of the work, he described his modest expectations. “I did not seriously expect anybody to buy the book when it was originally written—and that will account for a good deal of its chirping complacency and freedom from restraint: the idea that nobody is listening, is apt to seduce a body into airing his small thoughts with a rather juvenile frankness.”
In March 1870, following his marriage, Clemens was still thinking about a book. He had decided, he wrote the Langdons, that his activities at the Express would be limited to writing only “one or two sketches a month”; that chore and his work for the Galaxy occupied him “fully only six days every month.” He needed time, he explained, “to write a book in.” One of his Express pieces, published in April, was about the West, “The Facts in the Great Landslide Case,” and in May he wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks that since his publishers wanted another book, “I doubt if I could do better than rub up old Pacific memories & put them between covers along with some eloquent pictures.” For this purpose he expected to go west with Olivia. But he did not commit himself to a book until July 15, when he signed a contract with Bliss while he was in Elmira, New York, where Jervis Langdon, Olivia’s father, was fatally ill. Langdon had accepted Clemens and given him the vital reassurance that it was possible for a wealthy, respectable person to be principled and upright.53
He contracted to complete the book in less than six months and immediately began preparation by writing to Orion about their journey to Nevada in 1861. “I propose to do up Nevada & Cal., beginning with the trip across