Pudd’nhead Wilson and Twain’s Later Satire

Satire uses humor to attack something real: a habit, an institution, a lie people tell themselves. Twain had always been a satirist, but from the late 1880s his targets grew bigger and his tone grew harsher.

His life darkened too. He lost much of his fortune on a typesetting machine, the Paige Compositor, and filed for bankruptcy protection in April 1894, the year Pudd’nhead Wilson came out; he later paid his creditors in full. His daughter Susy died of meningitis in 1896, his wife Olivia in 1904, and his daughter Jean in 1909. Around 1900 he became an outspoken anti-imperialist, serving as a vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 until his death in 1910. Some of his sharpest late writing, including The War Prayer, was not published until after he died.

Context. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson was serialized in The Century Magazine in 1893–94 and published as a book in November 1894. It takes place in Dawson’s Landing, a slave-holding town “on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day’s journey, per steamboat, below St. Louis.” The story opens in 1830.

Summary. David Wilson, a young lawyer from the East, arrives in Dawson’s Landing and makes one joke too many. Hearing a dog howl, he says, “I wish I owned half of that dog.” Asked why, he replies, “Because I would kill my half.” The town decides he is a fool, a “pudd’nhead,” and the name sticks for “twenty long years.” He gets almost no legal work and fills his time with hobbies, including collecting people’s fingerprints on glass.

“On the 1st of February, 1830, two boy babes were born” in the house of Percy Driscoll: his son, Thomas à Becket Driscoll, and the son of Roxana, or Roxy, a young woman he enslaves. Roxy’s baby is named Valet de Chambre: “no surname—slaves hadn’t the privilege.” The two babies look alike. When Driscoll threatens to sell some of his household slaves “down the river” to the brutal plantations of the Deep South, Roxy is terrified that her son will one day be sold the same way, and she switches the babies in their cradles.

Her son grows up as “Tom” Driscoll, the spoiled heir. The real Tom grows up enslaved as “Chambers.” As an adult, the false Tom gambles, steals, and, after Roxy tells him the truth, sells his own mother down the river to pay his debts. Finally he murders his uncle, Judge Driscoll, with a knife belonging to Luigi, one of a pair of visiting Italian twins, and the twins are blamed. At the trial, Wilson uses his collection of fingerprints to prove who did it, and who is really who.

The most important passage in Pudd’nhead Wilson is a calm description of Roxy:

“Negro” here is the legal category of the time, and Twain is showing how absurd it is. One part of her ancestry in sixteen “outvoted” the other fifteen. Her son, one part in thirty-two, is still classed as Black and as property. The key phrase is “a fiction of law and custom”: race, as the town uses it, is something people made up and wrote into law, not something you can see. Later this way of thinking was called the “one-drop rule,” the idea that any African ancestry at all made a person Black; several U.S. states wrote it into law in the early twentieth century.

The switch proves the point. No one can tell the babies apart, so the whole town’s certainty about “blood” rests on what it is told. The boy raised as master becomes cruel and selfish; the boy raised as a slave learns to act like one. Even Roxy has absorbed the town’s thinking: when “Tom” behaves like a coward, she blames the small part of his ancestry that is Black, not the way he was raised. Readers have argued ever since about whether the novel fully escapes the racism it mocks. That argument is worth having in class.

The satire of slavery is just as sharp. After Percy Driscoll decides not to sell his house servants down the river, they thank him, “for like a god he had stretched forth his mighty hand and closed the gates of hell against them.” He feels generous for not doing something monstrous. And the ending is the cruelest joke of all. If “Tom” were white and free, a life sentence would be “no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter.” So “the Governor … pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river.”

Context. Twain’s source for Camelot was Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and some of its stories are “borrowed, language and all,” as his footnotes admit. Twain dated his preface “Hartford, July 21, 1889,” and the book appeared that year. He aimed it at romantic ideas of chivalry, at monarchy and nobility, and at an established church, one backed by the state.

Summary. Hank Morgan introduces himself plainly: “I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut.” A head superintendent at an arms factory, he is knocked out in a fight and wakes in England in the year 528. Chained to the stake to be burned, he remembers that a total eclipse of the sun is due and claims to cause it. Camelot is terrified, and Hank becomes the king’s chief minister, known simply as “The Boss.” He builds schools, factories, newspapers and telegraph lines in secret, travels the country with the damsel Sandy, and later goes in disguise among the common people with King Arthur himself. The two are sold as slaves.

The ending turns dark. When the Church places the country under an interdict, the knights rise against the Boss. With Clarence and “fifty-two fresh, bright, well-educated, clean-minded young British boys,” he defends a cave with electric fences, mines and Gatling guns. In the Battle of the Sand Belt, the knights die by the thousands: “we fifty-four were masters of England. Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.” But the bodies surround them, and as Clarence writes, “We were in a trap, you see—a trap of our own making.” Merlin, in disguise, casts a spell, saying “He sleepeth now—and shall sleep thirteen centuries.”

Context. Twain wrote The War Prayer in 1905, after the Spanish–American War and during the Philippine–American War, which he opposed. (The 1923 edition labels it “Dictated 1904–05.”) It was not published while he lived, partly because his family and friends feared it would be thought sacrilegious. It first appeared in Europe and Elsewhere (1923), a collection edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. A claim that it was printed in Harper’s in 1916 is a common mistake.

Summary. A town goes to war. “It was a time of great and exalting excitement.” Flags fly, young volunteers march, and on Sunday the church prays for them, ending: “grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!” Then an aged stranger walks up the aisle and announces, “I come from the Throne—bearing a message from Almighty God!” He explains that their prayer is really two: “one uttered, the other not.” He speaks the silent half aloud: “help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells,” and on through burned homes, widows and starving children. “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak!” No one answers. The last line: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”

• Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Project Gutenberg eBook #102 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/102).
• Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Project Gutenberg eBook #86 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/86).
• Mark Twain, “The War Prayer,” in Europe and Elsewhere (Harper & Brothers, 1923), Project Gutenberg eBook #68604 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/68604).
• Wikipedia, “Pudd’nhead Wilson” (serialized in The Century Magazine 1893–94, published November 1894; fingerprinting not yet in official use), “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (1889; the interdict), “The War Prayer” (written 1905, unpublished at his death, first collected in Europe and Elsewhere, 1923; the mistaken 1916 claim), “One-drop rule” and “Mark Twain” (the Paige Compositor and the 1894 bankruptcy, family deaths in 1896, 1904 and 1909, and the American Anti-Imperialist League, 1901–1910).
• Summaries are our own paraphrases. Every quotation on this page was checked against the Project Gutenberg texts above. Slurs in the novels are paraphrased, not printed.
• Art: the glass-strip illustration and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami.