tour, Clemens wrote to Olivia frequently, and since his chief enjoyment while on tour was reading, in his letters he tried to provide her with a literary education. The books he recommended had to pass his strict moral sensibility, since for him Olivia’s greatest virtue was her purity. Often he marked up the books so that she knew what he wanted her to attend to but sometimes told her not to read books, such as Tristram Shandy and Gil Bias that might, he wrote, “offend your delicacy.”
Clemens was back in Hartford for the birth of the second of the Clemens children, Olivia Susan (called Susie and later Susy). But in June the first child, Langdon, died. Eighteen months old, he had never been strong. Later Clemens assumed an unwarranted burden of guilt for his son’s death. Perhaps he felt inadequate as a result of his efforts to adapt to the ways of the genteel Langdons, and this feeling was a source of his guilt. Whatever the cause, throughout his life he was to find much to feel guilty about, and being “found out” became a theme in many of his literary works.
Clemens’s scientific reading was reinforcing his religious skepticism. He wrote in his notebook, “Geology. Paleontology, destroyed Genesis” and “Is there any word of God except in geology, paleontology, and astronomy?”3 He was so interested in these subjects that he wrote what he called “A Brace of Brief Lectures on Science,” published in 1871, in which he found a way to show his familiarity with modern sciences, specifically geology and paleontology, as well as his abilities as humorist.4 He began to read with care Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871, the year the book was published.5
After a summer on the Connecticut coast without much literary productivity—unless, as is possible, he began Tom Sawyer at this time—the writer went to England for his first visit on August 21, 1872. His purposes were twofold. The first was somewhat pressing: to arrange for British publication of his books. He had lost much to pirated editions, and although he had arranged with George Routledge for publication in England of Roughing It, he was eager to establish a continuing arrangement for British copyright. Second, he was interested in looking at the possibility of writing a book about England, one like the Innocents. (This idea had originated with Routledge’s New York agent, Joseph Blamire.) In London he saw the sights and met many famous people, including the writers Charles Reade and Thomas Hood. He was asked to lecture but decided that lecturing should await a return trip, the next year, when he would have Mrs. Clemens with him. “I came here,” he wrote in November to his family, “to take notes for a book. But I haven’t done much but attend dinners & make speeches.” Although he took many notes, he produced little in England and left on November 12. During the winter of 1872–73, he lectured a few times in Hartford and New York and prepared two long articles for the New York Tribune on the Sandwich Islands. He wrote up some English sketches and returned to, or began, Tom Sawyer. That, however, was to be his second novel.
For some time, Mark Twain had been thinking of writing a novel. As early as April 6,1871, he had written to the publisher of the Galaxy, “I begin to think I can get up quite a respectable novel, & I mean to fool away some of my odd hours in the attempt, anyway.” Instead, his first complete novel was begun during the winter of 1872–73 as a “partnership novel” with his Hartford friend and neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner. Working with a more experienced writer was helpful because, as Clemens had explained to Whitelaw Reid, “When a man starts out in a new role, the public always says he is a fool & won’t succeed.” The collaboration was the result of a conversation about the inadequacy of recent novels. His biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, describes the origin in this way:
At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. The wives naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to furnish the American people with better ones. This was regarded in the nature of a challenge and as such was accepted—mutually accepted: that is to say, in partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it immediately.6
Warner was a newspaperman and essayist; like Clemens, he had never written a novel. But he was very much a member of the Nook Farm society that the Clemenses were seeking to join.
According to Paine, Mark Twain had in mind from the beginning that the book would be about a character modeled after his mother’s eccentric cousin, James Lampton. The plan was to hatch “the plot day by day,” then each would take a turn in writing. It was, Warner noted, “a novel experiment.”7 Next, as Clemens told Mrs. Fairbanks in April, the writers and their wives gathered nightly “to hear Warner & me read our day’s work; & they have done a power of criticizing, but have always been anxious to be on hand at the reading & find out what has happened to the dramatis personae since the previous evening.” The role of the wives is shown by Mark Twain’s comment in the same letter about a vital part of the plot. “My climax chapter is the one accepted by Livy and Susie, & so my heroine, Laura, remains dead.” By the end of April, the book was finished.
The Gilded Age is unduly long (subscription-book length), badly plotted, and uneven. Perhaps the best thing about the book is its title, which supplied a name for the postwar Grant era. Clemens correctly observed in 1883 that the two authors’ “ingredients refused to mix, & the book consisted of two novels—& remained so, incurably & vexatiously, spite of all we could do to make the contents blend.” Because it was a partnership novel, one seldom senses Mark Twain’s literary personality in the telling of the story, although incidents and scenes resemble his earlier work. Nonetheless, Mark Twain’s portion contains interesting elements of autobiography. Many of the events and characters are based on real people he knew or knew of. The first eleven chapters introduce the subject of the “Tennessee Land” that his father, John M. Clemens, purchased before the family moved to Missouri, and it provides as well a version of the adventures of the Clemens family before Sam’s birth. The picture of the fictional Obedstown, Tennessee, and the steamboat scene are effective, but the chief feature of these early chapters is the introduction of Washington Hawkins, a character based on Orion Clemens, and Colonel Sellers, one of the most vivid of Mark Twain’s creations, who was modeled after James Lampton.
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