Huck_Finn_Stuff

Full Text : COPYRIGHT 1995 University of North Texas What are we to do with a book which has the audacity, unapologetically dismissed as "old fashioned liberal humanism," to declare that the argument over the imputed racism of Samuel Langhorne Clemens is "urgently . . . unimportant"' Is every vital issue of hermeneutics, deconstruction, and relativism to be dismissed through this merely common sense criticism' Can a thoughtful scholar take the work of a once-benighted man on its own terms rather than those of the fictive strategies of race and gender' Tom Quirk reminds us, in one of the six essays that make up this slim volume, that Langston Hughes, with his character Jesse Semple, was often accused of backing into the future while looking firmly into the past. Tom's book - written as "Tom" in style and mood, not as "Professor Quirk" - seems like a throwback to the days of Brander Matthews, when criticism could be thoughtful speculation rather than closely documented dislocation. It is a strange experience, and an engaging one, in these days of hyperlinguistic critical flatulence to read plain English which sets out to be thoughtful and considerate of its subject, and, incidentally, to throw a few new insights upon it - never too heavy a burden for a much-belabored book like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To read Coming to Grips with "Huckleberry Finn" is to take a few moments for a ramble inside the head of one of the nation's senior Mark Twain critics. Throughout, Tom Quirk is disarmingly honest. For starters, he admits that he has not introduced the new finds in the first half of the "Huck Finn" manuscript, now at the Buffalo Public Library, into essays that had been written previously, but argues that the general outlines of his essays remain the same, and his brief summary of the new findings in his introduction suggests the simple rightness of this approach. He is also candid about admitting his admiration for Huck Finn the book, not on the basis of its structure or other neo-critical evaluative standards but rather because of the values which it brings to its readers, readers who, he will contend in the closing essay of the book, are capable of transcending local and racial identity and admiring and identifying with true virtue whether or not it comes embodied in their own sex or race. Twain, Quirk contends, "With Huck, imagined himself more completely human than he probably was himself, and in doing so provided his readers with th same opportunity" (p. 12). What more should we expect from such a diffident approach than a modest array of thoughtful nuggets, each one helpful in explaining how a pessimist like Twain could end up writing optimistic literature' One of the strengths of this book is that a reasonable reader, which I flatter myself that I am, can disagree at various points with one statement or another and still find plenty of ground to continue in overall sympathy with the analysis because of the virtue of its approach; Tom's style invites speculation on the issues surrounding and intruding into the creation of a classic work of literature - through sympathy rather than critical legalisms or linguistic gymnastics. The book has some method in its construction, leading from the writing of the manuscript to issues of autobiography, structure and realism, and finishing with the novel's heirs and its political correctness, the briefest of the essays not because the case is weak, but rather because this author is not the one to practice those literary slights of analysis by which a text can be derationalized to say that which it doesn't. Among constants through the six essays are a couple of noteworthy principles. First is that Huck Finn does indeed represent the best thinking of its culture about humanity. Second is that the book is probably what it pretends to be - even if Twain was not sure that was what he was trying to do in setting out to write it, in publishing it, or in trying to follow it up later. The discussion of the follow-up attempts causes a little difficulty in that "Jim" is here and there called "Nigger Jim," a phrase which occurs nowhere in Huck Finn proper. Third is the thoughtful recognition that Jim, as a character, escapes a lot of boundaries in Twain's imagination and has a degree of control over the novel which is probably beyond the original comic conception, thereby substantially elevating the book. Fourth is that, to a large extent, the book is really about Mark Twain himself - and about us - and thus the power of its vision. This idea is stated early on when the author suggests that Twain wrote in the 1870s with the overly tender conscience of a backslider rebelling against smoking, drinking, and swearing reforms that he was failing to impose upon himself for Livy's sake, and invested some of this tension in Huck. At other points in the analysis, Quirk finds varying components of Twain in Huck and Huck in Twain, but always with the idea that Twain took this material and turned it into positives rather than negatives: "Twain had resisted the pressures of reality by the efforts of his imagination and in a voice he eventually made his own" (p. 41). Elsewhere, there is room for more responsive divergence between reader and critic, for example, in treating autobiographical elements in the novel A Tramp Abroad and "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed." Was Twain making burlesque apologies for himself as a potential pariah in "The Private History," or was he, in the mood of Garrison Keillor, justifying the "just about average" Lake Woebegonian, laying out a home truth about personality that Stephen Crane could only get at through the tortured irony of The Red Badge of Courage' It is hard to imagine, however, how any reader could not be engaged by speculation on constructive elements in Quirk's third chapter, where he poses, among other ideas, the question: why not lynch Jim and be done with him as a troublesome piece of baggage heading south' The answer is perhaps not only that part of Twain was in Jim, but also, that realism does demand that Jim ends as he does a different and more dissenting Jim would have been a cultural lie that Twain saw no profit in inventing. For Quirk the realism of Huck Finn is emotional realism, and he argues the case persuasively. Recent commentary, as well, seems to back him up, and it is worth remembering such easily forgotten details as that Huck is indeed a CAO - child of an alcoholic parent. Twain's later comment that Huck would have ended up like his pap seems pessimistic to the critic, but it has a certain truth about it which suggests why Twain's later books dealing with Huck and Jim fall so far short of the mark - please pardon the pun: Twain didn't want to get into mature territory, so he struck out for the Indian one. The discussion of Huck's heirs poses a trio which, although it seemed to me unlikely at the outset - Ring Lardner, Willa Cather, and Langston Hughes - took on interest by the manner of discussion. The author covers the subjects thoughtfully and convincingly to suggest how Lardner was not, and Cather and Hughes were, capable of rising to the level of heroic vision that asserted positive values through their characters' actions, even when those actions were not strictly correct and proper in drawing room terms. For the latter two, Huck Finn provided the liberation to recognize that their own people were worthy of and capable of literary treatment. Thus, Huck becomes a contributor to Simple's fantasies of empowerment without being a source for Simple as such. In fact, in dealing with Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Was Huck Black', Quirk is at his most deft in some modest demurs while still insisting on the main point: the real achievement of the novel was to get an important black voice in there at all, and Twain achieves that. Whether it was partly invested in Huck or whether it was Jim's dignity, the yearnings and needs of a repressed race were brought forth in a way that challenged the reader's respect, leaving us with Huck and Jim as "twin images of nobility." And, ultimately, this is the real question. Having just lectured to a group of high school juniors and senior citizens who read Huck Finn jointly, I can testify that they were deeply engaged by the "let-down" of the last section of the book, and deeply impressed by the idea that through it Twain might be representing the "stupefied . . . humanity" which he identified in his essay on his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens (Walter Blair, Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom [Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1969; p. 50]), as part of the history of his region. So the heroes return of necessity back into Tom Sawyer's nonsense world. What other outcome could we expect from a narrator who has as many viewpoints as Quirk demonstrates in Huck, after all, but to see Twain's figures finally in a real world that is as compromised as our own' And what else could Twain have intended' DAVID E. E. SLOANE, University of New Haven Named Works: Coming to Grips with 'Huckleberry Finn': Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man (Book) Book reviews Source Citation: Sloane, DAvid E.E. "Coming to Grips with 'Huckleberry Finn': Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man."  Studies in the Novel. v27. n2 (Summer 1995): p232(3). Student Resource Center - Gold. Gale. UDLibSEARCH - Main Account. 27 Apr. 2010 . Mark Twain By Jessica Teisch      "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."--Mark Twain      In 1913, three years after Mark Twain's death at the age of 75, literary critic H.L. Mencken described Twain as "the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the blood royal" (The Smart Set, Feb. 1913). Through the touchstone of humor, Twain tested the innocence of boyhood, challenged institutions like slavery, denounced political and religious creeds, and distilled American adventures into universal experiences. During his lifetime he published more than two dozen novels and hundreds of short stories, articles, and essays. Each piece of work satirized different parts of human society, behavior, and ideology, from Yankee politics and Gold Rush greed to King Leopold's reign. Indeed, Twain's repertoire extended far beyond America's coming of age story as told in his most acclaimed novel, Huckleberry Finn. He endlessly parodied human behavior in different times and places, revisiting Camelot in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, lampooning South Sea cannibals in his autobiography, and even rewriting Judeo-Christian history in Eve's Diary. The sweeping view of human nature he exhibited in his children's tales, moralistic adult stories, travelogues, and sharp critiques of Gilded Age society gives him a range of thought perhaps unsurpassed in American letters.       |[pic] | |Mark Twain, Author, 1908 | | | Twain was born in 1835 as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the fifth child of Jane Lampton and John Marshall. He spent the first 25 years of his life near the Mississippi River, the carefree setting for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. His father died when Twain was twelve, forcing him to apprentice as a typesetter. He soon joined his brother's newspaper. After a brief stint as a river pilot on the Mississippi River, Twain joined the Confederate Army when Civil War broke out. He deserted after only two weeks to "light out" for the Nevada Territory with his brother.      Twain prospected in Nevada's silver mines and wrote for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (where he took his pen name) during the remainder of the Civil War. In 1864 he took a job with the San Francisco Call. While prospecting for gold in the Sierra Nevada, he wrote "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1867), which brought him international fame. Soon after, he set off on a tour of Europe and the Holy Lands, a tale recounted in his first book, Innocents Abroad. He married Olivia Langdon in 1870 and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he served as editor of the Buffalo Express and wrote some of his best work: The Gilded Age, Tom Sawyer, and Huck Finn. Yet after the death of his wife and two daughters, Twain abandoned the optimism that marked his earlier work. "Often it does seem such a pity," he wrote in Christian Science, "that Noah and his party did not miss the boat." Twain and His Critics      Perhaps no American novelist was as revered--and as controversial--in his time as Mark Twain. He hated imperialism, racism, and slavery. Though he believed in neither God nor man, he held unwavering faith in democracy.      Certainly no American novel has been attacked by the public for as long and as vigorously as Huck Finn, which has nearly 700 foreign editions and is considered one of the great American classics. The book was first banned in 1885 from the Concord Public Library, which denounced Twain for threatening childhood innocence and the purity of the English language. Twain responded kindly; controversy meant publicity, and publicity generated sales. When, in 1905, the Brooklyn Public Library removed Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the children's room because of their "deceitfulness and mischievous practices," Twain sarcastically compared his books' influence to reading the Bible at an early age.      Twain's description of African Americans as "niggers" raised new issues in the early 1900s. Nonetheless, Booker T. Washington wrote in 1910 that Twain, through Huck, "exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the Negro people" (North American Review, June 1910). Huck Finn weathered the storm through the 1930s, when it joined the ranks of classic literature. But controversy resurfaced during the Civil Rights era. In 1957 the NAACP accused Huck Finn of propagating racial stereotypes of African Americans, and the book was removed from the New York City school system. Over the following decades, schools throughout the country debated whether to keep Huck in their curricula. During the 1990s Huck went to court: Monteiro vs. Temple Union High School District (1998) used civil arguments to try to ban the book. Although the case was dismissed, the federal appeals court ruled that schools could be financially liable for fostering racially hostile environments.      Huck Finn's continuing debate reveals as much about American society today as it does about the book itself. "By and by," Twain wrote, "let us hope, people that really have the best interests of the rising generation at heart will become wise and not stir Huck up" (Mark Twain's Autobiography). Mark Twain is unquestionably one of the greatest American writers, and his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), is often seen as the incarnation of America itself. For a start, the novel is written in a colourful, energetic, freewheeling dialect that revels in the idiosyncrasies and grammatical peculiarities of American English. Secondly, the hero is the personification of independence and freedom, the instinctive enemy of Old World manners and habits. Furthermore, the novel is a compendium of uniquely American landscapes, customs and superstitions. Borrowing the picaresque template from Don Quixote and Tom Jones, Twain takes his hero through a rich variety of loosely-connected adventures, all of them designed to show the good and bad sides of Huck Finn and the positive and negative elements of the United States. Although Huckleberry Finn takes place in the South, and draws on a racial and social context that is specific to Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas in the early nineteenth century, the novel is usually seen as a more general portrait of the New World, in which the young Huckleberry Finn stands for the young nation and its struggles to find an authentic voice, location, lineage and identity.      Several of Twain's other novels have been similarly prized. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is his first attempt to analyse the national character by way of a child, and it introduces the contrarieties of innocence and experience, wildness and civilisation, and obedience and autonomy that are further explored in Huckleberry Finn. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a playful and popular satire of Arthurian mythology which also compares nineteenth-century America to the backward feudal culture from which it sprung. Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) is a sombre tale about two children (one a slave, the other free) who are switched in their cradles.      Of all writers, Twain probably has most in common with Charles Dickens. Like Dickens, Twain started life as newspaperman before turning his hand to short stories and novels, works which owe much to his journalistic ability to write concisely and capture dialogue brilliantly. Like Dickens, Twain had an extremely high profile: he enjoyed giving lectures and readings, and liked to bury his private torments beneath a robust public persona. Above all, like Dickens, Twain was a superb and intuitive comedian who also took his readers to some of the darkest and most haunted parts of the national psyche. However, if Dickens is the most pervasive presence in Twain's writing, other authors also play a role. Bret Harte helped him to polish his style and tighten his narrative structures. Edgar Allan Poe influenced his short stories: both writers share a love of tall tales with Gothic elements. However, Twain has in turn influenced nearly every major figure in twentieth-century American fiction. Ernest Hemingway famously stated: 'all modern American Literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.' Twain's voice can also be heard in the writing of James Thurber, William Faulkner, Stephen Crane, John Steinbeck and others. Background      Twain was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, a town so small that he later joked that he 'had increased the population by one per cent'. His parents were John Marshall Clemens and Jane (Lampton) Clemens, both southerners, and he was the couple's fourth son and sixth child. The Clemenses moved to Hannibal, Missouri, in 1839 and believed themselves to be among the better families of the area. John Clemens, a storekeeper, speculated in land and habitually lived in the confident expectation that his investments would result in fabulous riches for his family, a bullish mentality inherited by his famous son. The elder Clemens died poor in 1847, and his children were forced to leave school for the more practical education of work. Early Career      From the beginning, this school of life provided Samuel with material that he would later use in his books. He became a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, and a journalist. As a printer he worked for his older brother Orion, a newspaper publisher, and also for newspapers in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and New York, thus inaugurating an amazing career of travel that would eventually include thirty-one trips to Europe. As a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River (1857-61) Clemens experienced what he later called the most gratifying moments of his life, and these years furnished his literary imagination with a dazzling variety of images and motifs that would distinguish his best books. The Mississippi was, in the writer's own words, his 'brief, sharp schooling' in human nature.      The Civil War interrupted his career as a pilot; Clemens briefly served as a lieutenant in a highly irregular Confederate unit, and this interlude became the subject of a characteristically tragicomic fiction, 'The Private History of a Campaign that Failed' (Century Magazine, 1885). With his piloting and soldiering careers ended, Clemens availed himself of the opportunities that the West still richly afforded to superfluous men in the East. In 1861 he became an assistant to his brother Orion Clemens, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, where the Comstock Lode had been discovered two years earlier. It was here that Clemens, previously an occasional contributor to newspapers, began to develop his talent as a journalist and first used the pseudonym by which posterity knows him--Mark Twain, the term used by Mississippi boatmen to indicate water two fathoms deep, just enough for navigation.      As Mark Twain, Clemens swiftly discovered his authentic voice, and he enjoyed immediate success. Beginning in 1862, when he began selling articles (many of them tall tales) to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he had no trouble finding Nevada and California newspapers and magazines willing to publish his work; then, in a momentous turning point, the Sacramento Union paid his way on a six-month sojourn in the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) as a travelling correspondent (March-August 1866). The dying embers of that pagan Polynesian culture glowed in Twain's imagination for the rest of his life. Hawaii would always be for him a romantic symbol of paradise, lost through an excess of civilisation and Christianity. This trip also provided him with the subject matter of his first lecture tour in the West, and Twain, with his witty and deadpan lecture style, found great favour with western, and soon eastern, audiences. Almost overnight he joined the ranks of the country's most eminent platform humorists, alongside such established performers as Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Artemus Ward.      On December 15, 1866, Twain left San Francisco on assignment for the Alta California as a travelling correspondent, first in the eastern United States and then in Europe and the Holy Land. The letters that he wrote for this newspaper and The New-York Tribune became the nucleus of his book The Innocents Abroad; or The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869), the success of which helped free him from routine journalism. (His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, published two years earlier, was a financial failure despite the lasting popularity of the title sketch.) At a time when many American authors were writing in a genteel Victorian style about an Arcadian Europe, Twain adopted a very different tone, humorously suggesting that the wonders of Europe had been praised out of all proportion to their actual merit. He asserted, in his flat, ironical, western style, that democratic Americans need not be intimidated by the cultural refinements of the Old World. Present in this was something of Twain's visceral anti-Catholicism, which he had imbibed in the deeply Presbyterian milieu of Hannibal, but Innocents was essentially a defence of American democracy. In one book after another throughout his career, perhaps most notably in the too earnest The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Twain upheld the principles of democracy while condemning the injustices of monarchy.      Twain's next book, Roughing It (1872), was a narrative account of his western and Hawaiian journeys. By then he had already taken the most important domestic step of his life, his marriage to Olivia Langdon (1870). Twain called his wife his foremost critic, editor, and censor, but it is doubtful that she exerted the dictatorial powers this implied to some critics. The daughter of a coal baron from Elmira, New York, she introduced her husband to a social and political milieu far above and to the right of anything in his experience. Twain's faith in capitalism had never been in question, but the conservative bourgeois Langdons and their circle formalised his natural frontier disposition to defend a free and open marketplace.      His own venture as a newspaper editor and publisher in Buffalo, New York (the Buffalo Express) failed with a loss of $10,000. In October 1871, having abandoned journalism for literature, he moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where he built a house in the Nook Farm neighbourhood, next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe.      For the next fifteen years Twain was one of the most prolific and successful writers in America. He continued to write travel books, his best being the epic work of social realism Life on the Mississippi (1883), part of which had been published in 1875 in William Dean Howells's Atlantic Monthly magazine. His first novel was The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. In this brilliant satire of Washington life he introduced one of his classic characters, Colonel Sellers, the symbol of the get-rich-quick robber-baron era, which has ever since been known by the book's title. From AOK to OZ: The Historical Dictionary of American Slang By Jessica Weintraub      "It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of to-day," Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1862.      The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, the first comprehensive dictionary of its kind, is under way. From Civil War diaries and pulp fiction to the film When Harry Met Sally and the television series Melrose Place, written and spoken sources are being scoured for slang words and phrases to include in the dictionary. Its thirty-five thousand entries will provide definitions of words used by teenagers, athletes, jazz, swing, and rock musicians, blue-collar workers, students, criminals, drug users, law enforcement officers, and armed forces personnel. It is the first historical slang dictionary to include citations from television, film, and the Internet.      Throughout the centuries, writers have taken opposing stands on the slang question. Samuel Johnson thought it would destroy the English language, and Daniel Defoe and Noah Webster condemned it; whereas Chaucer uses two hundred epithets in The Canterbury Tales, and Walt Whitman defends it in his 1888 essay "Slang in America."      Two language scholars, Jonathan Lighter and Jesse Sheidlower, have taken on the task of championing the much-maligned idiom. The editors are tracing the history of American slang from colonial days to the present. With NEH support, they have published the first two volumes of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, through Oz--the slang name for Australia--and will finish the third volume, which covers P through the middle of S, by 2006, and the fourth and final volume by 2009.      Sheidlower says slang's existence is dependent upon that of a standard language: because slang arises in opposition to formal speech, there must be a norm for it to violate. "People have a choice of what kind of language they use," he says. "It's not so much that people don't know the standard usages. There are situations that require standard discourse, but those represent a small part of everyday discourse."      "The standard is important because it gives us a set of expectations," Lighter says. For slang to stick there has to be a society that thinks about words as words: a mostly literate, modern, industrial society with permeable social boundaries.      Slang is often created as an in-group language. It differentiates the group from outsiders, creates a sense of commonality, and puts distance between the group and mainstream culture. Like the language of teenagers, it is informal, irreverent, and flouts convention; and it provides secrecy and status, Lighter says. It is a "nonstandard popular vocabulary that carries connotations and overtones of irreverence, cynicism, and humor."      "All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry," G.K. Chesterton wrote in his 1901 "Defence of Slang." Slang offers synonyms--often figurative--for standard English words and expressions. Most are terms for "good," "bad," "sex," and "drunkenness," as Lighter notes. In the Atlantic Monthly, he writes, "One rule of thumb about slang is that the more prevalent the object, activity, or behavior being described, and the more intense its psychological salience, the more numerous and diverse the slang terms available to describe it."      Some terms are vivid and humorous, such as No-Tell Motel--a place for trysts on the cheap--or an Oklahoma credit card, which is a siphon tube used for stealing gasoline. Others are taken from foreign languages, such as gung ho, which means work together in Chinese, and boondock, which means mountain in Tagalog.      Others derive from proper names, such as to hoover, which means to vacuum or to eat rapidly; to John Wayne, to attack vigorously; and Joe, whose entries fill three pages in the dictionary, ranging from Joe Average and Joe College to Joe Tentpeg, an Army term for "an ordinary enlisted soldier."      Slang is offbeat, catchy, and non-technical. The verb to google, which replaces to search for something on the Web, is not slang, because of its intrinsic technicality.      Although many dictionaries consider slang too ephemeral to document, the HDAS editors believe that once a slang term is established, it is likely to persist in the language.      The first two volumes of the dictionary show the longevity of several ostensibly new terms: the use of bad to mean good has been around since 1897. Not, an interjection that acts "to jocularly contradict one's own ironic assertion or another person's statement," according to the dictionary, was popularized by the 1992 film Wayne's World but actually dates to the 1890s--and is found in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Theodore Dreiser. Dude first appears in an 1877 letter from Frederick Remington, referring to his correspondent's drawings: "Don't send me any more women or any more dudes."      "'Okay' is used constantly; the more frequently and the longer it is used, the less likely it seems dated," Lighter says. "In the 50s 'cool' was associated with jazz and beatniks, but after fifty years it is used even more. Soon the meaning will crystallize and it will become part of standard English."      The dictionary project staff is studying linguistic links to culture, social psychology, and history through how people actually speak to one another. "Language and culture are inextricably connected," Lighter says. "If there weren't any language, there wouldn't be much culture, or any way to pass on mythology and religious beliefs. Language helps us communicate, which helps to engender innovations and change within culture."      Lighter calls the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) "pioneers for inclusion." By treating all words used in writing as equally important, the OED paved the way for the Historical Dictionary of American Slang as a historical and linguistic record. William Safire, the language columnist for the New York Times, believes the slang dictionary will follow the OED's lead and do for non-standard language what the OED does for the whole language.      Sheidlower, the principal editor of the OED for North America, has long had an interest in slang. He discovered volumes I and II of HDAS while working as a senior editor for Random House. He made it his goal to work with Lighter to finish the series and reach wider audiences. Volume III marks the first time the dictionary will be under the auspices of the Oxford University Press.      Lighter, the project's senior editor, began collecting slang expressions when he was in high school. His chief interest at the time was to become a novelist. He bought the single-volume OED, both available slang dictionaries--Partridge's and Wentworth and Fletcher's--and began to write down snappy words and phrases for use in dialog. He says, "It became clear that those 'snappy words' were more interesting than anything I had to say as a novelist." He was surprised that most of the quotes he found in movies, television shows, and conversation were not listed in slang dictionaries. "I thought I could put together my own dictionary in five years."      More than twenty-five years later, Lighter has amassed hundreds of thousands of slang expressions, written on note cards and then digitized. "There is the undeniable satisfaction of collecting. Plus, it's done cheaply--all you need is a library card and cable," he says. When a character uses an expression on a popular television show, millions of people are exposed to it. "The first time this probably happened was in 1961. Alan Shepard's sub-orbital flight was shown live on TV. In Shepard's communication with Shorty Powers, one or both of them said 'AOK,' a phrase that was probably coined in NASA. Forty years later we're still using it."      The slang expression okay was probably created in 1839 as a "ridiculous" synonym for "all correct," Lighter says. "Controversy about that origin continues, but our evidence is surprisingly good--no one has come up with a certifiable example to disprove it. It probably wasn't spelled as a word 'okay' until the early part of the twentieth century, after its origin had been forgotten."      Slang is often confused with other language variations: regional dialects, jargon, and cant. Informal expressions such as reckon or y'all are not slang; they were once regional and are now colloquial. Jargon refers to technical terms within an industry or profession, such as quark, the word physicist Murray Gell-Mann used to describe the subatomic particle with unpredictable characteristics. The story is that Gell-Mann lifted quark from a phrase in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake: "three quarks for Muster Mark." The scientific term quark does not classify as slang because it is a standard word used in formal contexts.      In the Dictionary, Sheidlower explains, semantic development is emphasized, not etymology. "We're interested in why 'cool' has grown to mean 'new, ingenious,' not the opposite of 'warm.' Instead of tracing words back to their Indo-European roots, we are focusing on historical developments of meaning."      Citations are drawn from primary sources, examined for their rhetorical and sociocultural content, and then arranged in the pattern established by the OED for historical dictionaries. Each main entry consists of the lemma, or headword, a functional label indicating the part of speech, etymology, field label (when a social milieu can be established), sense divisions and definitions in chronological order of development, citations for each sense division, idiomatic phrases and habitual collocations, and pronunciation when it is not self-evident--or when the pronunciation is what makes the word itself slang, such as "garbaaje," a slang variation of garbage.      "Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work," Carl Sandburg told the New York Times in 1959. There may be a correlation between an increase in the written use of slang and the forging of an American style. According to Lighter, from the nineteenth century on, writers began inventing characters that had distinctly American characteristics and actually spoke like Americans: such as Mark Twain's 1884 Huckleberry Finn, which is written in first-person vernacular. Although the book was criticized for its use of language, many writers have held it up as a milestone. Ernest Hemingway said fifty years after its publication, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before."      The first American definition of slang appeared in The Century Dictionary not long after, published in 1889. "Of obscure cant origin, the form suggests a connection with sling....'to sling epithets, to fling reproaches'. Slang enters more or less into inferior popular literature....and is apt to break out even in more serious writings. Slang as such is not necessarily vulgar or ungrammatical; indeed it is generally correct in idiomatic form, and though frequently censored on this ground, it often, in fact, owes its doubtful character to other causes."      Lighter says that slang was bolstered by the birth of hardboiled detective novels, particularly those of Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. "For the first time there was an infatuation with the tough guy as a kind of hero. Before that heroes were cultivated and refined, but Hemingway created heroes who were anything but."      Comics also put slang terms into circulation. R.F. Outcault's The Yellow Kid, featuring a single-toothed street urchin who narrates life in Hogan's Alley--a fictional New York City slum embodying the toughness of urban America--coined the term yellow journalism. The name of the color comic strip, first printed in the New York World in 1896, became associated with sensationalist news coverage.      Many slang expressions derive from music. Hip, which according to the dictionary means "fully aware; in the know" or "splendid; fine; enjoyable," became popular in the 1960s, but was used much earlier by black jazz musicians. Its first appearance has not been traced, although the dictionary cites a 1904 novel by George Hobart, Jim Hickey: a story of the one-night stands: "Say, Danny, at this rate it'll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip'"      Jazz slang such as cool and groovy came from the music culture of the 1940s and 1950s, and Louis Armstrong popularized the words dig and cat. In response to Edward R. Murrow's question to "What is a cat, Louis'" on the CD soundtrack of Satchmo the Great, Armstrong says, "He can be the lowest guy in the gutter all the way up to King, and if...he enjoys the music, then he's a cat!"      New technology is changing the way we speak. "The Internet has had a huge affect on slang," Sheidlower says. "While it is a bit overstated in the way that people think it coins words, the Internet greatly influences the spread and access to new terms." As for which is growing faster, standard English or slang, he says, "Standard English is a much larger corpus than slang, and both continue to grow, but percentage-growth wise--while impossible to truly calculate--more slang is being created than standard English."      "New words are constantly being unearthed and invented, so it is an eternally elastic process," he continues. "It's not science, it's a rhetorical examination of a certain kind of English vocabulary." Jessica Weintraub is a freelance writer in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang has received $721,667 in NEH support since 1988. Life Among the Lexicographers By Joseph M. Romero      Dictionaries are supposed to be anonymous.      If you happen not to know what a word means, you just look it up, and a faceless, utilitarian definition wells up to the surface. But there are people known in the trade as lexicographers--Greek for "those who write down lists of words"--who, for each potential dictionary entry, spend hours pouring over slips of paper, books, and surfing the Web to home in on a word, trace its history, and present it to you. It is a kind of writing that wants to go unnoticed, as I learned when I wrote articles for the grand-daddy (or pop-pop, as some say in mid-Atlantic coastal states) of all Latin dictionaries. It was the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, housed in Munich, Germany.      It may disconcert the reader to learn that there are actual people making principled and personal decisions about what to include and what to exclude in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). The fourth volume was published in December of 2002 under the chief editorship of Joan Houston Hall. "There are always cases where what will seem 'regional' to one editor will seem perfectly normal to another," said Hall. "Then you have to make a decision."      When in doubt, DARE editors tend to err on the side of inclusion. Many words are amply attested--that is, there are plenty of recorded uses. Others appear only once. Should poorly attested words be excluded' The phrase trade-last, for one--meaning a kind of quid pro quo--"I'll say something nice about you if you say something nice about me first"--is found scattered throughout the country, especially among older speakers. A regional variant, last-go-trade, is found in the middle and south Atlantic and has an entry of its own; but what about Alaskan trade, which means exactly the same thing but appears only once in the sources available to DARE' "It was important to include Alaskan trade even with only one instance, because it's a wonderful example of the process of folk etymology," says Hall. "Someone who is unfamiliar with the folk tradition of trading compliments hears the phrase last-go-trade, doesn't quite understand it, and tries to make it meaningful by substituting a word that is familiar. Since Alaska is, to most Americans, a far-away and exotic place, it makes sense to the hearer that the unusual custom would be an Alaskan trade."      Some terms may be widely recognizable, but carry alternate meanings in particular regions. The back forty, which means a large, remote, often barren stretch of land, and is used throughout the north and the west, takes on a figurative cast when lumberjacks in New England use it to refer to an out-of-the-way place. And if someone is wasting your time, a Michigander might say, "He's been plowing the back forty."      Modeled after the Oxford English Dictionary, DARE seeks to be a comprehensive source for words that will find no home in standard English dictionaries. With professional linguists, historians, museum curators, and casual researchers and committed browsers alike, the dictionary is becoming a fixture on the list of reference tools. Even actors and directors have used DARE to check the authenticity of their accents or the accuracy of their idiom--as actress Diane Keaton did for Manhattan Murder Mystery and director Michael Mann for Last of the Mohicans.      The DARE project was founded at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the 1960s, and a lexicographer and professor of English, Frederic Cassidy, was selected to take the helm. With graduate student Audrey Duckert--now a retired professor of English from the University of Massachusetts--Cassidy designed a program to collect regional words from the living language. From 1965 through 1970, Cassidy and Duckert dispatched eighty fieldworkers in selected regions of the United States, armed with detailed questionnaires and tape recorders. An archive of samples can be found on the DARE website. In addition to the nearly 3,000 interviews they conducted, the DARE staff has culled words from sources that range from eighteenth-century diaries, small-town newspapers, fiction, and folklore, to television shows, advertisements, and the Internet.      A page of queries on the DARE website asks readers to send an e-mail if they can give a definition for a word, name the region in which it is found, or report whether it is still in use. One current question asks about the word sloven, which may be a type of wagon: "We have two quotations from New England (one from the 60s) and one from Canada. Is this still known, and what exactly is it'" Another asks about speckled britches: "'An edible green,' A source on the Web identifies this as 'evening primrose,' but we'd like to know if anyone else knows this term and what they apply it to."      Some entries reveal cultural stereotypes or couch them in humor--which the dictionary marks joc.--as in the five-page list of terms beginning with Irish. An Irish nightingale is a bullfrog, an Irish hurricane refers to calm seas, Irish confetti are bricks or stones thrown in a fight, and a person might give an Irish whisper at top volume when a true whisper, or silence, would do.      Dictionary writing is something of an odd fish. A reader's appreciation of its writing is usually limited to utilitarian acceptance or, particularly in the case of DARE, the 'Oh, neat!" effect--"I didn't know Mainers called ancestors seed folks." While an underlying goal of lexicography is certainly to delight, the chief aim is to teach. Such lessons are stripped of the personality of the individual who collected the evidence, decided what was important enough to include, and actually wrote the definition. The lexicographer's art lies in the choices and order of evidence presented.      How is a dictionary written' Of course, with the introduction of the computer, things are changing and are bound to change still more when the DARE archives are coded and processed electronically, but for now the business of lexicography goes on as it has for a century or more. Each editor is also a contributing author. Editors proceed straight through the words alphabetically, working from small slips of paper, previous regional dictionaries, data culled from the fieldwork, and words submitted through the DARE website.      After gathering the word--called a lemma, from the Greek for "a plucking"--and sorting out how many examples are available, the lexicographer plots out on a map where they came from--as with wines, this is called their provenance--and tries to establish the earliest and latest recorded uses. When that business is concluded, the lexicographer is ready to write: that is, lay out the word, its spelling, pronunciation, meanings, and a historical survey of recorded uses. To make visual the provenance and possible diffusion of a word, he or she may draw up a map: a regional linguistic map, which corresponds in a general way to the geographical map of the United States. The author then passes the article to a second editor to review; Hall, as chief editor, has final approval over each dictionary definition.      Even when we are "just speaking English," we are speaking varieties thereof. Part of the mission of the DARE project is to record what is local about our language. Standard English only tells part of the story--it does not constitute the full range of American Englishes of which standard American English is only a subset. DARE offers a complex and comprehensive account of American English--and Americans--as a whole. It assembles a testimony of who we have been and who we are at our most elemental level: the words we live in.      There is a pervasive myth in our society that we all talk, or need to talk, the same language. DARE shows that our language groups will always be partial, local, in short, regional. Leaving aside slang, which it deems too evanescent, DARE sets its sights on words used consistently within specific regions, but also tracks usage within various age, gender, class, and other sub-groups. Accompanying maps that lay out the geographical distribution of words are the clearest evidence that we, as a nation, are not as homogenous as we think. Each of us could without too much difficulty make up a list of non-slang words that fell outside of our formal education--in the southern midlands, toothpicks may be called quitting sticks, in Pennsylvania a sledding slope might be called a rutschie, or out West a animal team driver might be called a skinner.      How do the forces of mass culture affect the study of linguistic regionalism' They do complicate matters, if only a little. Take, for example, the relatively innocuous word skrid, meaning "a piece, scrap, bit." With written references appearing as early as 1860 in the Atlantic Monthly ("They're glass chips, and brittle shavings, slender pinkish scrids") and continuing for more than a century in oral and print sources throughout Maine and New Hampshire, Hall reasonably thought she had this one nailed down as a New Englander. But with twenty years elapsing since her last citation, Hall took to the Internet to see if she could find something more recent. Lo and behold, she found a reference to a website of a printer based in California. It turns out the printer was dating a woman from Maine who must have shared her regionalism with him. What are the chances of skrid catching fire in California' Probably not very good, but the example shows how contemporary realities can alter the distribution of where we find regionalisms on a linguistic map. Will the word flower in its new home or will the bearer move back to New England with his girlfriend' It is hard to predict.      Hall manages to integrate her life with her work. She hikes in the Porcupine Mountains--known to locals as "The Porkies"--and enjoys preparing and eating foreign cuisine. Hall and the other editors at DARE are working steadily to complete the fifth volume (S1-Z) and a sixth and final volume of supplementary data. The life of a lexicographer is one of constant fieldwork, because you cannot, and you cannot even want to, get away from the thing that you have spent a fair portion of your life studying: you study you. Joseph M. Romero is assistant professor of classics at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, VA. From 1999-2000 he was a fellow at the THESAURUS LINGUAE LATINAE in Munich, supported by the American Philological Association and NEH. the Dictionary of Regional American English has received $7,107,204 in NEH support since 1976. Its website can be found at polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html.   Back to top ^ Summary: "Throughout the centuries, writers have taken opposing stands on the slang question. Samuel Johnson thought it would destroy the English language, and Daniel Defoe and Noah Webster condemned it; whereas Chaucer uses two hundred epithets in The Canterbury Tales, and Walt Whitman defends it in his 1888 essay 'Slang in America.' Two language scholars, Jonathan Lighter and Jesse Sheidlower, have taken on the task of championing the much-maligned idiom. The editors are tracing the history of American slang from colonial days to the present." (Humanities) This article highlights the editors' work. A sidebar on the process of dictionary writing is included. Racism In Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn In recent years, there has been increasing discussion of the seemingly racist ideas expressed by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn. In some extreme cases the novel has even been banned by public school systems and censored by public libraries. The basis for these censorship campaigns has been the depiction of one of the main characters in Huckleberry Finn, Jim, a black slave. Jim, is a "typical" black slave who runs away from his "owner" Miss Watson. At several points in the novel, Jim's character is described to the reader, and some people have looked upon the characterization as racist. However, before one begins to censor a novel it is important to separate the ideas of the author from the ideas' of his characters. It is also important not to take a novel at face value and to "read between the lines" in order to capture the underlying themes of a novel. If one were to do this in relation to Huckleberry Finn, one would, without doubt, realize that it is not racist and is even anti-slavery. On a superficial level Huckleberry Finn might appear to be racist. The first time the reader meets Jim he is given a very negative description of Jim. The reader is told that Jim is illiterate, childlike, not very bright and extremely superstitious. However, it is important not to lose sight of who is giving this description and of whom it is being given. Although Huck is not a racist child, he has been raised by extremely racist individuals who have, even if only subconsciously, ingrained some feelings of bigotry into his mind. It is also important to remember that this description, although it is quite saddening, was probably accurate. Jim and the millions of other slaves in the South were not permitted any formal education, were never allowed any independent thought and were constantly maltreated and abused. Twain is merely portraying by way of Jim, a very realistic slave raised in the South during that time period. To say that Twain is racist because of his desire for historical accuracy is absurd. Despite the few incidences in which Jim's description might be misconstrued as racist, there are many points in the novel where Twain through Huck, voices his extreme opposition to the slave trade and racism. In chapter six, Huck's father fervently objects to the governments granting of suffrage to an educated black professor. Twain wants the reader to see the absurdity in this statement. Huck's father believes that he is superior to this black professor simply because of the color of his skin. In Chapter 15 the reader is told of an incident which contradicts the original "childlike" description of Jim. In chapter 15 the reader is presented with a very caring and father-like Jim who becomes very worried when he loses his best friend Huck in a deep fog. Twain is pointing out the connection which has been made between Huck and Jim. A connection which does not exist between a man and his property. When Huck first meets Jim on the Island he makes a monumental decision, not to turn Jim in. He is confronted by two opposing forces, the force of society and the force of friendship. Many times throughout the novel Huck comes very close to rationalizing Jim's slavery. However, he is never able to see a reason why this man who has become one of his only friends, should be a slave. Through this internal struggle, Twain expresses his opinions of the absurdity of slavery and the importance of following one's personal conscience before the laws of society. By the end of the novel, Huck and the reader have come to understand that Jim is not someone's property and an inferior man, but an equal. Throughout the novel, society's voice is heard through Huck. The racist and hateful contempt which existed at the time is at many times present. But, it is vital for the reader to recognize these ideas as society's and to recognize that Twain throughout the novel disputes these ideas. Twain brings out into the open the ugliness of society and causes the reader to challenge the original description of Jim. In his subtle manner, he creates not an apology for slavery but a challenge to it.   The fact that a literary work written 113 years ago still stirs up intense debate in the press and the media in general is quite amazing. This may seem even more surprising if we take into account that the book was canonized some forty years ago, which should make it an uncontested classic. But it is precisely this canonization and the arguments behind it that make The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn such a polemical work.      If we wanted to trace back the roots of the debate, we should probably look for them in Lionel Trilling's 1948 introduction to the Rinehart College Edition of Huckleberry Finn, which according to Arac "changed a book, once felt as a nationally shared yet personal possession, into assigned reading" (1997:108). And even if we did not read this specific piece of criticism, we could use any other article or work written between 1945-50, the period when Huckleberry Finn was canonized.      However, most of the reasons for the canonization of the book had already been aired. in the aftermath of its publication in 1885. Indeed, the debate that took place from February to June 1885 laid the bases for the canonization of Huckleberry Finn.      There are two main studies of the 19th-century reception of Huck Finn. The first was written by Vogelback in 1939 and was published in American Literature. Since Vogelback missed many of the 19th-century reviews and criticisms, he believed that "Huckleberry Finn received at the time practically no critical attention in America" (266). But he also made some good points, indicating, for instance, that "The adverse criticism was based less on artistic gounds than on moral" (269). Vogelback's article, though certainly limited, was not a totally wrong account of the 19th-century reception of Huckleberry Finn.      The second major article was written by Victor Fischer in 1983 and published in American Realism. It is very well documented and gives a clear picture of the critical reaction to Huckleberry Finn in 1885. Fischer uncovered numerous reviews and comments and gave a descriptive analysis of them, with some interesting conclusions in the last part of his article. He examines Twain's predictions about the behavior of the press and the way he tried to stage-manage the critical reaction to the book. Fischer also considers the way the press was divided about the vaiue of Huckleberry Finn and about Twain as a writer and/or person.      The purpose of the present article is to review the arguments used in the 1885 debate, both for and against the book, and to assess their importance for later criticism. Not all the 1885 reviews and comments will be analyzed. I have focused on the newspapers that participated most actively in the debate, i.e. those from Hartford, Boston, Springfield, New York, and San Francisco, and also on two important magazines, the Century and the Atlantic. The critical reactions to Huckleberry Finn will be analyzed from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view and important historical facts such as the Concord library banning of the book will also be taken into account.      It is worth reviewing all the 1885 criticism again in order to clarify the extent to which it affected Twain's success. Also, it may illustrate the different attitudes towards art in the late 19th century and the reasons why the discourse that won the battle did so.      Anyone more or less familiar with the 19th-century debate over Huckleberry Finn might believe it was of little relevance for later critics or even readers since, because of several incidents and due mainly to the Concord ban, the book was rarely considered on its own merits. But this is a false impression. Many reviews dealt with the intrinsic merits of the book quite profusely. Indeed, most of the reasons why Huckleberry Finn is praised today were already pointed out and discussed by 19th-century critics.      Some factors concerning Huckleberry Finn or Twain himself may have contributed to this apparently poor evaluation of the book's merits. First, the book was not new to the reviewers; excerpts of it had been read during a lecture tour which preceded its publication and some chapters had appeared in the Century magazine and had ellicited comments that probably biased readers and reviewers. Second, before the book appeared, some engravings were manipulated in a way that made them look obscene; although these engravings were not printed in the book, they reached the public through an advertising brochure that had already been distributed when the publishers realised the obscenity of the engravings. Third, Twain sued Estes & Lauriat, a Boston publishing firm, because it had released a catalog--before the book came out--that offered the book at a lower price than the one that was supposed to be charged by subscription agents. The lawsuit was followed by the Boston newspapers, which were delighted to print full accounts of it and especially of the final verdict, which favored Estes & Lauriat. Fourth, the book was sold by subscription, a method that newspapers did not like, because it meant that the book would not be advertised in their pages. Finally, and most important, the book was banned within a month of its publication. The Concord, Massachusetts, Public Library decided to exclude Huckleberry Finn from its shelves on the grounds that it was "rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people". In other words, they thought it was "the veriest trash" (Boston Evening Transcript, March 17 1885, p.6). The banning of the book was widely echoed by the press and ellicited a considerable number of editorial comments and criticism.      To all these factors we should add the fact that Twain was already a well-known author who had supporters and detractors. This could have led to a kind of criticism based on the author and his actions, rather than the book itself.      There were many reviews and comments on Huckleberry Finn in 1885 (cf. Fischer:1983). Most of them were concentrated in five cities: Boston, Hartford, New York, San Francisco and Springfield. My analygis of the 19th-century reception of Huckleberry Finn will be based on the articles published by newspapers in these cities, as well as the reviews in the Century, Atlantic and Life magazines.      Our corpus thus comprises some thirty-five articles. They have been classified according to their predominantly positive and negative attitude towards the book. Ten categories have been established in order to quantify the presence of various arguments in the debate over the book. These categories correspond to the lines of analysis that the articles follow. That is to say, they have not been established a priori, but after reading all the articles and seeing the arguments they use for and against. The categories are:      1. Comparison of the book with Twain's previous works.      2. Evaluation of the portrayal of human nature in the book.      3. Evaluation of the faithfulness with which Southwestern life is portrayed.      4. Evaluation of the use of dialects in the book.      5. Evaluation of the cohesiveness of the work.      6. Comments on the respectability of the readers of the book.      7. Comments on the tastefulness of the contents.      8. Evaluation of the truthfulness of the events and characters in the book.      9. Reference to the author's initial "warning".      10. Appropriateness and quality of the humor in the book. Twain's Career and Its Influence on the Reception Process      As has been indicated above, it was quite tempting for reviewers to measure the quality of Huckleberry Finn against Twain's previous works. Fourteen articles did so, eight of them considering Huckleberry Finn to be an advance over Twain's previous works. Only three of them considered that the book was in a sense a partial sequel to Tom Sawyer. The Atlantic said, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (C.L. Webster & Co.) is in some sense a sequel to the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, though each of the two stories is complete in itself"; a month previously, the Hartford Daily Times of March 9 had said, "Everybody will want to see Huckleberry Finn, Mr Clemens's story--a sort of continuation of his Tom Sawyer". In spite of these slightly hesitant criticisms, Huckleberry Finn was considered an advance over Twain's previous works by those newspapers that praised the book, to the point that the San Francisco Chronicle's review, published on March 15, shortly before the book was banned by the Concord Public Library, described Huckleberry Finn as "the most amusing book Mark Twain has written for years". All these epithets could be expected from any positive article.      What might be more interesting is the opinion of the newspapers that criticised the book. Again, it would be quite normal for all of them to say that the book was worse than Twain's previous works. Yet, surprisingly, they recognized Twain's prestige and popularity, even when they regretted it. The Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican of March 17 said "It is time that this influential pseudonym should cease to carry into homes and libraries unworthy productions". The Assessment of Humor in Huckleberry Finn      Twain's prestige and his previous books were widely taken into account by contemporary critics. This could be seen as indication that the book was not judged on its merits. However, in most cases, comparisons of Huckleberry Finn with Twain's previous works was indeed followed by a discussion of the book's features. Often, both supporters and detractors assessed the book's particularly humorous passages as a way of reinforcing their opinion about it. Newspapers that supported the book praised the humor, some of them more enthusiastically than others. The detractors, of course, said that it contained little humor.      However, there was not a uniform condemnation of the book on the basis of humor. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin of March 14, the newspaper that presented the most wide-ranging and devastating critique of Huckleberry Finn, praised the humor, although it said it was immoral:      "It is an amusing story, if such scrap-work can be called a story. The author rarely fails when he sets out to tickle the ribs of young or old. [...] The funny book will always be read in this world of dryness and dearth".      Other newspapers praised the humor in Twain's previous books but complained about the humor in Huckleberry Finn. The Boston Evening Traveller of March 5 said, "Mr. Clemens has contributed to some humorous literature that will hold its place, but his Huckleberry Finn appears to be singularly flat, stale and unprofitable." It is interesting to notice that the Evening Traveller here quoted from Hamlet, a piece of classically canonical literature, in its attack to a work that proposed a passably new concept of literature. Both the Evening Bulletin and the Evening Traveller found moral reasons for their attack on the humor: "dearth", "dryness", "stale", "flat" and "unprofitable" are subjective epithets that seem not to correspond to a serious analysis of a work of literature. The journalists and critics that supported Huckleberry Finn also used non-technical epithets to praise it. Some of them made some small negative comments on specific sections of the book in which the humor was not as effective as in the rest. For this, they also used moral epithets. Nevertheless, supporters of Huckleberry Finn grounded their appraisal of the book better than did detractors. The San Francisco Chronicle said, "Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the antebellum estimate of the slave." And the Century devoted one paragraph of its review to the book's humor, praising it highly but commenting on some passages that were not as perfect as they might have been. For instance, "the fun in the long account of Tom Sawyer's artificial imitation of escapes from prison is somewhat forced." Yet, this is just a minor comment within general approval of the book and its humor. When praising Twain's humor, the Century also gave quite specific reasons for its opinions: "His [Huck's] perverted views regarding the unholiness of his actions [trying to free Jim] are most instructive and amusing." As we can see, supporters of the book made comments that were more specific and not as moralizing as those of the detractors.      Humor was one of the features that both supporters and detractors coincided in commenting on. They also coincided in commenting on the author's note or "warning." Twain's Irony and His "Warning" About the Lack of Motive, Moral and Plot in the Book      At the beginning of Huckleberry Finn. Twain published the following notice: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." (Twain, 1996:XX) His detractors did not hesitate to remark on several occasions that the notice was true. We thus find comments like:      "As to the work itself, it is well described by the author, as being without a motive, a moral, or a plot."--(San Francisco Daily Examiner, March 9, 1885, p.3)      Supporters also expressed their opinion about the notice, saying it was not true. Surprisingly, the first comment on the notice in a positive article appeared before any detractor said that the notice was true: on February 15 the New York Sun stated that Huckleberry Finn can "brag of both a motive and a fairish plot, while a beautiful moral decorates nearly every one of its shining pages [...]." Another comment on the falsehood of the "warning" appeared in the Century.      The points that both supporters and detractors discussed were Twain's previous works, the humor and the author's "warning". In general, though, the discourse of those who praised the book was quite different from that of those who did not. If anything characterizes the 19th-century reception of Huckleberry Finn, it is the difference in the arguments used by its supporters and detractors. This difference nevertheless became less noticeable after the Concord ban, when critics and journalists started quoting and dismissing each other's arguments about the banning of the book. The Arguments Used by Detractors      The book was attacked mainly because of its bad taste and lack of respectability, as well as the supposed truthfulness of the authorial warning, which said that the book had no plot, no motive, and, most important, no moral. • Good Humor, Bad Taste      Supporters of Huckleberry Finn did not deal with the issue of tastefulness. However, detractors used this argument to deprecate the book. The Boston Daily Advertiser of March 12 remarked, "One cannot have the book long in his hands without being tempted to regret that the author should so often have laid himself open to the charge of coarseness and bad taste." The Boston Evening Traveller of March 5 opined, "The taste of this gratuitous presentation is as bad as the book itself, which is an extreme statement." Other newspapers, while not commenting directly on the tastefulness of the book, made clear allusions to it. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin said, "Many fastidious people hide their scruples, because they want to be amused." After the ban, other newspapers reproduced the censors's edict, which attacked the book harshly on the basis of tastefulness. On March 17, the Boston Evening Transcript stated:      "'Huckleberry Finn' Barred Out. The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not want to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The librarian and other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to the intelligent, respectable people."      The issue of tastefulness was only used by detractors of the book, which tells us something about the possible ideology behind them. We will deal with this issue below.      The book was attacked quite unanimously with respect to the respectability of its contents. Up to mid-March 1885, three newspapers had questioned the respectability of Huckleberry Finn. Before the book was published, the Herald (Boston) reviewed the chapters that had appeared in the Century and remarked, "It is pitched in but one key, and that is the key, of a vulgar and abhorrent life." (Herald, February 1, 1885, p.17) On March 5 the Boston Evening Traveller stated, "It is doubtful if the editon could be disposed of to people of average intellect at anything short of the point of the bayonet." And the San Francisco Evening Bulletin commented:      "Huckleberry Finn is, in a restricted sense, a typical character. Yet the type is not altogether desirable, nor is it one that most parents who want a future full of promise for their young folks would select without some hesitation. [...] [I]t must also be admitted that not a little of the assisted wit' is of the more dreary sort." The Supporters' Reaction to the Attacks      The attacks continued after the book was banned, when some supporters reacted to these attacks and leapt to the defense of Huckleberry Finn. The New York Herald of March 18 ironically stated,      "The sage censors of the Concord public library have unanimously reached the conclusion that Huckleberry Finn is not the sort of reading matter for knowledge-seekers of a town which boasts the only 'summer school of philosophy' in the universe."      The Hartford Courant and the San Francisco Chronicle reacted to these accusations. The Courant published the following short note, also on March 18:      "The public library committee of Concord, Mass., have given Mark Twain's new book, Huckleberry Finn a wide advertisement by refusing to allow it to be put on their shelves. The result will be that people in Concord will buy the book instead of drawing it from the library, and those who do will smile at the idea that it is not for respectable people."      And on March 29 the San Francisco Chronicle, after praising several features of the book, said, "These are only a few instances which go to show that this is not a boy's book and does not fall under the head of flippant and worthless literature."      It is true that some newspapers that gave decisive support to Twain mentioned the issue of his work's respectability, but this was their reaction to what had been a recurrent theme in the detractors's comments. The Supporters' Discourse      Supporters of the book focused on a different set of categories in their comments and reviews. The beauty of Huck's soul and actions, the truthfulness of the narrative and the cohesion of the book were the categories mainly used by supporters and not so much by detractors. • Was the Southwest Like This' Realism in Huckleberry Finn      Another topic that was quite common in reviews was the portrayal of speech varieties in Huckleberry Finn. Eleven texts in our corpus deal with this issue. The appropriateness of the language in Huckleberry Finn was mainly debated before the Concord ban. The portrayal of speech varieties was attacked only on one occasion. Before the ban, the Boston Daily Globe of February 20 had questioned Twain's mastery of language. Its brief comment on the recently appeared book said:      "Mark Twain makes the hero of his new book tell the story in what is supposed to be a boy's dialect. On the very second page this 'low-down', uneducated urchin is made to say 'commence', where any boy, especially if he hadn't been to school, would have said 'begin'. The less education, the more Anglo-Saxon, and, generally, the better grammar. Mark ought to know this." Surprisingly, this is a quite objective criticism of the book. However, it doesn't apply to the whole book, it is not, by any means, generalizable.      Apart from this, there were no further attacks on Twain's mastery and portrayal of dialect. What is more, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, which attacked Huckleberry Finn considerably, praised the use of dialects in it, in saying that "The author turns his knowledge of Western dialects to account."      Up to seven newspapers commented on Twain's ability to use dialects. On February 20; the same day that the Boston Daily Globe's attack on Huckleberry Finn appeared, the Hartford Courant said, "And the dialects of the people, white and black--what a study are they; and yet nobody talks for the sake of exhibiting a dialect." The San Francisco Chronicle commented that, "in regard to the dialect it surpasses any of the author's previous stories in the command of half dozen species of patois which passed for the English language in old Missouri".      The argument that the book portrayed Southwestern life faithfully was used in more than half the positive reviews, whereas it only appeared in two negative reviews, and one of those said that it was one of the good aspects of the book.      But this was the only attack on Twain's realism in Huckleberry Finn, perhaps because praise for realism erased the possible effect of the attack. The San Francisco Chronicle said, "It is a more minute and faithful picture of Southwestern manners and customs fifty years ago than was 'Life on the Mississippi'." And the Century commented that, "every scene is given, not described; and the result is a vivid picture of Western life forty or fifty years ago. [...] [T]he book is a most valuable record of an important part of our motley American civilization".      The Hartford newspapers also praised this aspect of Huckleberry Finn. The Daily Times said, "Mr. Clemens describes things as they really were, in Missouri--and as they still are, to a somewhat modified extent; and this book is as good as a trip through all the regions which it treats." New York did not have much to say about this aspect of the book. Only The Sun of Feb 15 said "we get no end of stirring incident, river lore, human nature, philology and fun." • Huck's Good-Heartedness      Reference to Huck's moral nature appears in half the reviews and comments made by those who had a positive attitude towards the book. On February 15, the New York Sun said, as has been quoted above, that the book contained much of human nature. Other critics did not comment directly on the beauty of Huck's soul but showed interest in his qualms of conscience. The Century said, "Another admirable instance [of humor] is to be seen in Huckleberry Finn's mixed feelings about rescuing Jim, the negro, from slavery. His perverted views regarding the unholiness of his action are most instructive and amusing."      Only two detractors commented on Huck's qualms of conscience or on the immorality of any specific action. Mostly they attacked the book in general. Despite these attacks, positive comments on the goodness of Huck's nature prevailed over negative opinions. • A Small Debate About the Cohesiveness of the Book      The cohesion of the book was another point of discussion in which supporters had more to say than detractors. The debate over this issue was concentrated in San Francisco. Three newspapers from that city dealt with the cohesiveness of Huckleberry Finn, on the 14th and the 15th of March, just before the ban. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin said, "There is very little of literary art in the story. It is a string of incidents ingeniously fastened together," thus revealing, in a sense, the cohesion of the work. The San Francisco Chronicle, while saying that "the plot is extremely simple", opined that "when the story gets under good headway it is remarkably well proportioned and the interest is never allowed to flag for a moment."      With regard to the cohesion of the narrative, supporters differed from those who said that the authorial notice was true. Only the Argonaut (San Francisco) acknowledged that Twain's claim that the book has no plot was right. However, the Century praised the unity of the work, saying:      "This later book, 'Huckleberry Finn', has the great advantage of being written in autobiographical form. This secures a unity in the narration that is most valuable; every scene is given, not described; and the result is a vivid picture of Western life forty or fifty years ago. While 'Tom Sawyer' is scarcely more than an apparently fortuitous collection of incidents, and its thread is one that has to do with murders, this story has a more intelligible plot."      The comments on the cohesion of the book may be taken as a sequel to the opinions about the notice. • The Truthfulness of the Story      Supporters commented more confidently on the truthfulness of the narrative. Indeed, it is logical they did so, because half of the reviews with a favorable attitude to Huckleberry Finn praised its portrayal of the Southwestern life. The issue of truthfulness, though, did not interest many reviewers. Only San Francisco newspapers and the Century commented on the truth contained in Twain's recently published book. The San Francisco Chronicle, which had praised Twain's realism, remarked towards the end of its review that, "Any one who has ever lived in the Southwest, or who has visited that section, will recognize the truth of all these sketches and the art with which they are brought into this story." The same newspaper made similar comments on March 29, in a second review that appeared in reply to the Concord ban. The Century also had its say: "What makes it valuable is the evident truthfulness of the narrative, and where this is lacking and its place is taken by ingenious invention, the book suffers." Non-Literary Factors in Reviews      So far we have been looking at how the book was evaluated in terms of chiefly literary and moral criteria. However, the 19th-century reception of Huckleberry Finn was importantly marked by the weight that factors external to the book had on its evaluation. The presence of external factors in reviews was significant from February to mid-March 1885. This is the period when the book was on the market and had not yet been banned by the Concord Public Library. Reference to external factors appeared in almost half the reviews in our corpus. The non-literary factors that will be assessed here are the complaints and reports of publication details, (delays in the publication and problems with the engravings) comments on Twain's eagerness for money, reference to Twain's self-advertising strategies, and the role of the Century in the success of the book.      Three newspapers made extensive reference to non-literary factors in their attacks on Huckleberry Finn. On March 5, the Boston Evening Traveller stated:      "It is little wonder that Mr. Samuel Clemens, otherwise Mark Twain, resorted to real or mock lawsuits, as maybe to restrain some real or imaginary selling of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', as a means of advertising that extraordinarily senseless publication. [...] This publication rejoices on two frontispieces, of which the one is supposed to be a faithful portrait of Huckleberry Finn, and the other an engraving of the classic features of Mr. Mark Twain [...]"      The San Francisco Evening Bulletin published a rather long article on Huckleberry Finn on March 14, basing most of its attacks on external factors:      "Mark Twain long since learned the art of writing for the market. His recent books have the character of commercial ventures. He probably estimates in advance his profits. His books are not sold to any great extent over the counters of booksellers, but are circulated by subscription agents. Lately Mark Twain, it is reported, has become the silent partner in a publishing house, the imprint of which is on the present volume. [...] No book has been on the market with more advertising. Then the Century gave the enterprise a lift by publishing a chapter of the book in advance, which, while an advertisment, was still a readable article. 'Huckleberry Finn' has been introduced to the world as it were with the blare of trumpets. [...] The book is attractive enough to command commercial success, and that, it may be supposed, was the inspiring motive in its production."      The Boston Evening Traveller and the San Francisco Evening Bulletin devoted more than a half their comments to attacking the book on the basis of aspects that had to do with the author's life.      Another San Francisco newspaper, the Daily Examiner, began its article by saying, "The San Francisco agents of this book give notice that, though some unavoidable delays have occurred, this volume is well ready for delivery to subscribers." It goes on to state that the book gives a false picture of life in the West, then returns to arguments against the author, noting that, "[...] when he paid a visit to his old haunts on the Comstock, a party of his former intimates played a practical joke on him, he was one of the maddest mortals who could be seen in a day's march."      In addition to these three articles, two further newspapers made reference to the chapters in the Century, but they commented on the content of the chapters and not on the fact that the magazine actually contributed to the success of the book.      After the ban, references to external factors increased considerably. Almost all newspapers made reference to the ban. The opinion of those who had reviewed the book favorably remained favorable: they pointed out that the banning was contradictory, because, in their attempt to censure Huckleberry Finn, the censors had given it considerable publicity. Supporters also ridiculized Concord as the home of nonsensical and obsolete philosophy. On March 17 the New York Sun said, "Trascendentalism, even before it was second hand, and humor never got along with each other, and Concord has pampered its Over-soul at the expense of its understanding."      The newspapers that had reviewed the book unfavorably either quoted the censors' words or said that the Concord ban reinforced their opinion about the book. Some of them, however, realized that the ban was counter-productive for their interests, because it would stir up the interest in the book. Other detractors reacted even more negatively to the ban. The Boston Daily Globe, which had deprecated Twain's use of language, commented:      "They [the members of the Concord Public Library committee] do not pick out any particular passage, but just sit on the book in general. When Mark writes another book he should think of the Concord School of Philosophy and put a little more whenceness of the hereafter among his nowness of the here."      Defamers of Huckleberry Finn returned to their bitter attacks after Twain directed an ironic letter to the Free Trade Club of Concord, which had elected him as an honorary member. Thus, the Boston Daily Globe of April 2, in spite of having laughed at the ban some days before, stated:      "'Huckleberry Finn,' 'alias Mark Twain', alias S.L. CLEMENS, began life as the writer of grotesque sketches that were coarse and strong and humorous. At first the humorous predominated, and out of this he made a reputation and a fortune. Having won these he has consented to convert himself into a walking sign, a literary sandwich, placarded all over with advertisements of his wares.[...] Lately he has made a new departure. Not contented with crying his goods alone he has asked the world to assist him. Some have complied. Of these he says nothing. Those who have refused are made objects of ridicule. His letter to the Free Trade Club is the last effort is this direction."      Defamers of the book included many more comments on external factors than did defenders. Defenders began to talk about these issues when they had become a recurrent aspect in the defamers' reviews. Effects of the 1885 Criticism      About half the 1885 reviews and comments on Huckleberry Finn were unfavorable. This, together with the events that affected Twain's reputation, like the lawsuit, the Concord ban, the incidents with the engravings, the denunciations of his eagerness for commercial sucess, and the press hostility to the subscription method, could have affected the success of Twain's recently appeared work. However, it did not. Victor Fischer (1983:2) makes the following comments:      "Although disapproval of the subscription publishing and the bad publicity affected some contemporary reaction, they did so principally in Massachussetts. Critics in Boston and New York did deplore the book, and their attitudes to some extent influenced opinions expressed in other cities around the country. However, Huck was also well received and intelligently praised in New York, Connecticut, Georgia, California and even Massachusetts. Moreover, the Concord Library ban which drew out so many hostile comments on the book, was also well and repeatedly denounced by editors who already reviewed the book favorably or who took the opportunity to definit it for the first time. [...] In fact, the intrinsic merits of the book combined with this large scale to unify its readers over the next ten years."--(1983:2-3) Fisher also notes:      "Contemporary critics of Huck Finn can be placed in two rough caterogires: those who took the book seriously and reviewed it, favorably or unfavorably, as a literary work; and those who wrote about it as a scandal, an event, or an episode in Mark Twain's life."(35)      These points are largely correct, as will be shown below and can be deduced from the anlaysis above. Fischer, unlike Vogelback, who thought that the general reaction to the book had been negative, basically says that:      a) Unfavorable attitudes toward the book were concentrated in one area that influenced other places.      b) The ban was not totally negative in effect.      c) The book overcame the debate; it was only in trouble for a few months.      d) Both the positive and the negatiave criticism can be divided into serious and sensationalist. The validity of these arguments is attested by the reviews and comments cited above.      However, Fischer's findings can be fleshed out and a deeper analysis of the debate around Huckleberry Finn can be made. In particular, we might add that:      a) The debate around the book was concentrated in four cities located in two main areas. These areas influenced the other States, which were not in a position to speak for themselves.      b) The most serious and influential reviewers were on Twain's side.      c) Unfavorable criticism performed poorly.      d) The Concord ban was decisive for Twain's success.      e) The 1885 criticism set the basis for further analyses of Huckleberry Finn.      We shall now investigate each of these points. The Concentration of the Debate in New England and California      The pre-1885 debate around Huckleberry Finn dealt mostly with external factors, with the lecture tour and with the Century chapters, and did not attract New England and California critics as much as it did in 1885. Positioning with respect to the book, however, had already begun, despite the fact that there had been relatively little debate before 1885. Sides were taken clearly in January and mainly in February 1885. Boston became the center of opposition to the book and Hartford became the stark protector of Huckleberry Finn. New York entered the debate a little later, with a first positive appreciation by the Sun, which remained without a negative opinion until two weeks later. San Francisco entered the debate in March, with a negative review of the book. The debate was concentrated in these cities. The only other city that was active was Springfield (Massachusetts), through its Republican. The positions of these newspapers were echoed throughout the country by other newspapers. It seems that most reprinted reviews were from newspapers with unfavorable attitudes toward the book. But these were usually short notes with few arguments, or direct quotes without editorial comment. Moreover, newspapers supporting Huckleberry Finn could also be read beyond the cities of publication.      Initially there were two cities supporting the book and three attacking it. Before the book was published, Boston commented quite extensively about the Century chapters. But the comments were usually short, for example:      "Mark Twain's 'Royalty on the Mississippi' has a trifle of 'too muchness of that sort of thing,' which is the prevailing characteristic of this sort of writing. It is pitched in but one key, and that is the key of a vulgar and abhorrent life."--(The Herald, February 1, 1885) This was supposed to be a review of the excerpts in the Century.      However, Boston was not the first city to review the book. The first review of Huckleberry Finn that appeared in the cities of our interest was in the New York Sun on February 15. The review was entitled "Some Interesting Sketches from Life on the Mississippi Forty Years Ago." It called Mark Twain "The greatest living authority on the Mississippi River and on juvenile cussedness", said that the author's "warning" was by no means true, and also that "we get no end of stirring incident, river lore, human nature, philology, and fun." In this review, Huck's moral decision in chapter #31 is also commented upon, but I will deal with that issue below.      Many of the lines of analysis that were to become commonplace had been set out in the first of the reviews in our corpus. On February 17, the Hartford Evening Post reviewed the book, considering the "warning" and the frontispieces as examples of Twain's sense of humor, commenting positively on the use of dialects, and saying the following about Huck's moral nature: "Huckleberry Finn is a bad boy and a sharp one, who makes many acquaintances in his island retreats and river wanderings and finally assists in stealing an ante-bellum 'nigger'--a philantropic act that will long keep his memory green." Three days later, both the Hartford Courant and the Boston Daily Globe published their reviews. Whereas the Daily Globe only wrote about Twain's use of language in the book, saying that it was inaccurate in making Huck say "commence" instead of "begin", the Hartford Courant's reviewer wrote a far longer review and praised Huckleberry Finn because it was an advance over Tom Sawyer, because of the realism in both the depiction of life and the portrayal of speech varieties, and also because of the doses of humor and human nature which could be found in the book. By February, it seemed that the supporters were winning the battle. In March, however, the book was not reviewed so favorably, at least initially. The New York World began its review by assuring the reader that Huckleberry Finn was a bad book by an author whose reputation was firmly established. It implicitly acknowledged that the book was humorous and it complained about the lack of respectability on which this humor thrived. It also attacked Twain's use of dialect, saying that the varieties were indistinguishable. The review, in general, concentrated on respectability. Two other attacks followed, including the first review from San Francisco.      The Boston Evening Traveller criticized the book on the basis of the lawsuit, Twain's supposed eagerness for money, and the book's lack of respectability and excess of bad taste. The San Francisco Daily Examiner announced that, after some delays, the book was available to the public, and started reviewing it by confirming the truthfulness of Twain's "warning". It was the only newspaper to deny the authenticity of Twain's depiction of Southwestern life. The main body of the review, though, dealt with Twain's ambiguous sense of humor. On the same day, the Hartford Daily Times reviewed the book and praised the same aspects that the Courant had praised three weeks before. The Boston Daily Advertiser, a much quoted newspaper, regretted in its review that "the author should so often have laid himself open to the charge of coarseness and bad taste," and stated that the "warning" was quite true. The longest attack on Huckleberry Finn came from San Francisco, on the first page of the Evening Bulletin. The attack was based on the commercial character of Huckleberry Finn, the help received from the Century, and the truthfulness of the author's notice. Yet the reviewer focused on the issue of morality. He also praised some qualities of the book, like the humor (regretting its moral shortcomings, of course), the use of dialects, and the presence of river scenes. The reviewer thus deprecated the book's respectability but praised its formal aspects. Right before the ban, one the most favorable reviews came out: the San Francisco Chronicle added some new arguments to the already known qualities such as the cohesiveness of the work. The reviewer showed awareness of the negative appreciations of the book and said, "The person who can withstand the abounding humor of this book must be proof against all jokes except of the Joe Miller order."      Then the book was banned at Concord, and criticism took a different course. Three newspapers printed in Boston published accounts of the ban on February 17. Most of them consisted of a brief explanation of the library's action followed by some quotations of the committee members' words. It is quite predictable that the first ones to react to the ban were defamers, because they would use it to reinforce their judgements. However, the Boston Daily Globe, which had attacked Huckleberry Finn a month before, aligned itself with Twain by criticizing the "Concord School of Philosophy", as we have seen above. Also, the New York Herald attacked Concord bitterly on March 18.      But not everyone was so unhappy about the Concord decision. The Boston Literary World said, "We are glad to see that the commendation given to this sort of literature by its publication in the CENTURY has received a check by this action at Concord." And the Daily Republican of March 17 attacked Mark Twain and summarized the reasons behind the attacks saying "The trouble with Mr. Clemens is that he has no reliable sense of propriety." Comments on the decision of the Concord Public Library were common in March and April. Detractors of Huckleberry Finn kept on deprecating it on the grounds of tastefulness and respectability. Some of them abandoned their unfavorable attitude towards the book. The Boston Daily Advertiser, which had attacked Huckleberry Finn harshly, said:      "In papers from one end of the country to the other the statement is published and commented upon that the public library committee of Concord has marked 'Huckleberry Finn' as unworthy of a place on its shelves. Strange to say, few if any of these journals find any reasons to differ from the book judges of Concord. Probably the editors have all tried to read the book."      The newspapers that had supported Twain replied to detractors' charges on the book and often reviewed it again. Thus, the San Francisco Chronicle on March 19 qualified the Concord action as absurd and praised the book, adding some comments to its previous review (the main focus of the review was to stress that it was not a boys' book). The main effect of the ban was to trigger a total polarization of opinions. While those newspapers that had reviewed Huckleberry Finn favorably did not change their attitude, the detractors were not so stable: in some cases they changed sides, which suggests that their assessment depended much more on Twain's irksome behavior than on the intrinsic properties of his book.      This survey of the reception of Huckleberry Finn from January to April 1885 also shows that detractors based their attack on two arguments, respectability and tastefulness, and that they did not deny the qualities that were praised by supporters. The supporters, however, used a greater range of arguments in favor of the book, grounded their statements on specific reasons or excerpts, and replied to the charges that had been made against the book.      It is clear that the debate was concentrated in the five cities mentioned above. News and reviews from those newspapers were quoted and reprinted all over the States (cf. Fischer 1983). To give just a few examples, the New York Sun review was reprinted in the Sacramento Daily Bee; the Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican ban report was reprinted, among other newspapers, in the Providence Evening Bulletin, the Cincinatti Commercial Gazette and the CRITIC, and the New York World's report of the Free Trade Club Letter was reprinted in three further papers. This can only mean that the opinions and news from the most influential areas were reprinted by papers that did not have much to say about Twain or were shy enough to wait for authoritative opinions to which they could cling.      A dialectical war between some newspapers was established. Thus, on March 29 the San Francisco Chronicle said, "There is a large class of people who are impervious to a joke, even when it's told by as consumate a master of the art of narration as Mark Twain." And the Hartford Courant of April 4 opined that "the Boston Advertiser attacks Mark Twain as venomously and persistently as if his recent suit against a Boston publishing-house had been brought against itself." Apart from these two overt allusions there were several indirect attacks on Huck's detractors. The detractors, however, did not fight back. Authority Was on Twain's Side      Although there were many attacks on Twain, they were mainly from voices with little literary authority. It was moral rather than literary authorities that attacked Mark Twain and his book. Contemporary literary authors like W.D. Howells decidedly supported Twain. And the most important authority who placed himself on Twain's side was Thomas Sergeant Perry, who wrote the review for the Century, which also published Howells's Rise of Silas Laphan and James's Bostonians.      The Century's review did not say anything new about the book. It commented on the same issues that the Hartford and San Francisco newspapers (and New York ones to a lesser extent) had referred to, except for speech varieties. Cleverly enough, it ignored the ban and the charges of coarseness. But it said, in a clear reply to the detractors, "Yet the story is capital reading." The Century's review closed the debate over the book, reasserting all the arguments that had been made in favor of the book and ignoring the attacks on it. By ignoring all the external factors that had surrounded the immediate reception of the work, Perry put himself on the level of formal literary criticism, which had a more authoritative literary voice than the would-be moral giants of the time, as will be shown below.      Arac (1997:74) argues that the main reason behind the canonization of Huckleberry Finn, Huck's decision to go to hell, was already praised in the initial reception of the book. He states that "In fact, chapter 31 won praise from the book's first appearance." With respect to Perry's statement that "His [Huck's] perverted views regarding the unholiness of his action are most instructive and amusing", Arac commented that "Perry saw not exemplary heroism but a humorous instance of good-hearted ignorance." This is quite true. However, the Century only re-adapted an argument that had been used in many favorable reviews of the book. In spite of the fact that the Century's review was the most influential, other reviews created a state of opinion about Huck's decision in chapter #31 which resembles very much the opinions of critics that made Huckleberry Finn enter into the American canon. The Hartford Courant had said:      "Mr. Clemens strikes in a very amusing way certain psychological problems. What, for instance, in the case of Huck, the son of a town drunkard, perverted from the time of his birth and how does it work' Most amusing is the struggle Huck has with his conscience in regard to slavery. His conscience tells him, the way it has been instructed, that to help the runaway nigger Jim to escape [...] is an enormous offense that will no doubt carry him to the bad place; but his affection for Jim finally induces him to violate his conscience and risk the eternal punishment in helping Jim to escape."      Further, as we have seen above, the Hartford Evening Post qualified Huck's decision as "a philantropic act that will long keep his memory green". These arguments are more or less in the line of the critical reasoning that has placed Huckleberry Finn on a level that Arac qualifies as "hypercanonization". But, active as it was, the debate provided the 1885 audience with interesting reflections about Huckleberry Finn. One of these was brought up by the Sun on February 15, in commenting that,      "As they neared Cairo, Huck's moral nature began to experience a singular reawakening. A conscience that was sufficiently elastic on the subject of mendacity, and that never kicked when Huck stole chickens or watermelons, or appropriated the goods and chattels of other people, was strongly agitated by the thought that here he was helping a slave to escape to freedom [...]"      However, after deconstructing what was to become a myth, the review built it up again:      "Although this seems like an audacious burlesque of religious sentiment, reaching quite the limits of the permissible, the reflections attributed to Huckleberry on the enormity of his transgression are probably as true as anything else in the book to the Missouri cread of forty years ago."      This positive evaluation of chapter #31 may be seen as an example of the authority that some of the favorable reviewers had. Although, as Vogelback's and Arac's opinions show, the Century's opinion was the one that most influenced later critics, other favorable reviews were certainly influential, since they used a wide variety of arguments, grounded on textual examples, replying quite successfully to defamers and identifying a set of qualities in Huckleberry Finn that influenced the Century and probably other late-19th-century reviewers. The defamers succeeded in creating a certain hesitation among some critics and people who still valued a novel according to outdated moral standards. However, this would fade out of the context of criticism in the long run, mainly with the change of social values in 20th-century society. The Poor Performance of Defamers of Huckleberry Finn      Defamers of Huckleberry Finn did not seriously threaten its success. Several reasons show that the detractors's way of attacking Huckleberry Finn was naive and unconvincing, in spite of the fact that many of them still held a position of power, at least in terms of morality. The events that surrounded the publication of the book facilitated attacks on Twain and also led some people who probably might have remained neutral to take the defamers's side, since Twain had attacked their friends (for instance, some Boston newspapers seem to have become angry with Twain because of the lawsuit and because of his attack on canonical writers like Longfellow).      Twain's irreverent and satirical behavior made his book appear clearly antimoral and unethical. A sequence of chapters, known as "Royalty on the Mississippi" appeared in the Century before the book was available. These chapters were ambiguous enough to be interpreted as immoral. This, together with Twain's irreverence and obvious financial interests, earned Twain the enmity of most moral giants.      The lawsuit against Estes & Lauriat increased the conception of Twain as a writer for whom money was more important than the transmission of knowledge and ideas. When combined with his obstination in subscription publishing and the fact that he had a share in the publishing business, this could only reinforce his image of money-seeker. Supporters of the book did not pay attention to these aspects and based their writings mostly on textual appreciations. The defamers, however, saw in Twain's supposed greed a starting point to consider him an unethical writer. For people who based their ideal of literature on tradition (see the passing use of Shakespeare in the Boston Evening Traveller above) it was unethical for a writer to care seriously about business matters and not to care at all about charges of coarseness and bad taste. Not only did Twain's lack of ethics become the focus of negative criticism, it also became the only argument against Twain's new book.      When the book actually appeared, the critical positions had already been taken. Defamers of Huckleberry Finn did not need to start reading the book in order to attack it. The authorial note not only said that the book had no motive, but also that it had no plot and, what is more important, no moral. If the book did not have a plot, then it was of low literary value, because it did not resemble the great books written by Hawthorne or Melville. And by denying that the book contained a moral, Twain would seem to have deprived himself of the immediate entry into the Boston canon.      An analysis of the pre-ban criticism made by defamers shows that most of them thought that the book was by no means elevating or that its contents were. Only two reviews out of seven did not mention this issue. More than half the reviews deemed Twain's "warning" true and were disgusted by it. Another category shared by defamers was humor. They said that there was humor in the book and that it would make readers laugh, but they regretted its low morality and its coarseness and distastefulness. However, there was not such a consensus with respect to the formal aspects of the book and some of the reviewers even praised some formal features like characterization.      Supporters also shared many of the criteria for praising the book. Humor was almost unanimously praised, as was realism (either because of the faithful depiction of southwestern life or because of the portrayal of speech varieties). Half the reviews made reference for Huck's moral nature and some of them commented on Huck's moral struggle in chapter #31. As far as the "warning" is concerned, all the newspapers that commented on it coincided in saying that it was not true.      Two issues must be taken into account to assess the extent to which supporters and detractors may have met with success:      a) Supporters dealt with the same topic. Although they differed in the focus of their reviews, they shared a basic set of categories (realism, humor, invalidity of the "warning", human nature). Detractors also shared a set of categories, but all their argumentation was based on respectability, with all other arguments supporting this main one.      b)Supporters did not hesitate in praising everything that had to do with Mark Twain and his new book. They were also ready to reply to the attacks. The detractors condemned the book but praised some qualities of it and its author, in spite of having to condemn the book because of its lack of respectability. Respectability, the Main Argument in the Defamers' Discourse      The New York World of March 2 wrote "Literary Ability Wasted on a Pitiable Exhibition of Irreverence and Vulgarity" as a heading for its review. The Springfield Daily Republican of March 17 said "Mr. Clemens is a genuine and powerful humorist, with a bitter vein of satire on the weaknesses of humanity which is sometimes wholesome, sometimes only grotesque, but in certain of his works degenerates into gross trifling with every fine feeling. The trouble with Mr. Clemens is that he has no reliable sense of propriety."      The last judgment from the Daily Republican explains overtly the reason why the book was attacked so fiercely by many conservative newspapers.      Supporters started reacting against detractors even before the book was banned. The San Francisco Chronicle, in the last part of its review, opined,      "There is a large class of people who are impervious to a joke, even when told by as consummate a master of the art of narration as is Mark Twain. For all these the book will be dreary, flat, stale and unprofitable."      It is a clear allusion to the Boston Evening Traveller's words. Defamers did not react against these attacks neither did they deprecate any of the qualities praised by supporters. The Effects of the Concord Ban      Huckleberry Finn was banned at Concord in mid-March 1885. The ban was the key for the success of supporters of the book. Before the ban, supporters and detractors formed two groups that were quite homogeneous within themselves, in spite of the above-mentioned issues. The Concord ban, while unifying the opinion of supporters, divided detractors. So not only did defamers not fight the supporters's accusations against them, they also implicitly defended the book on some occasions by attacking Concord.      But not all detractors were so upset about the ban. The Springfield Daily Republican said "The Concord public library committee deserve well of the public by their action in banishing Mark Twain's new book, 'Huckleberry Finn,' on the ground that it is trashy and vicious."      However, the Concord ban did away with any possibility of triumph for the defamers of Huckleberry Finn. The Concord School of Philosophy was unpopular and was ridiculized even by newspapers with a conservative bias, even though it represented an extreme of conservative American thinking. If such a ridiculized institution used the same arguments to censure the book as had been used by detractors, detractors were on the ridiculous level of Concord ban philosophers. The only solution for the detractors was to find a new set of categories to attack the book, which they did not do.      The supporters reacted to the ban by praising again the qualities of the book and by laughing at Concord. The most scornful newspapers were those from New York. The New York Sun on March 18 stated, "Transcendentalism, even before it was second hand, and humor, never got along with each other, and Concord has pampered its Over-Soul at the expense of its understanding."      On many other occasions the irony was not so much directed against Concord but against newspapers, especially against the Daily Advertiser. The reason for this shift in focus seems to be the Advertiser's rage after Twain's ironic letter to the Free Trade Club of Concord, which had elected him as an honorary member.      Newspapers that had attacked Twain and then laughed at Concord, now attacked Twain again because of his letter to the Free Trade Club, thus showing that the main reason behind their attacks was Twain's irreverence and not so much the qualities of his book. The Advertiser said on April 2:      "The general condemnation of 'Huckleberry Finn' is an indication that in matters of humor the tide has turned at last and that the old school of coarse, flippant and irreverent joke matters is going out to return no more. 'Huckleberry Finn' is little if at all worse than earlier works by the same author, but the public taste has improved [...]."      Two days later, the Hartford Courant stated, "The Boston Advertiser attacks Mark Twain as venomously and persistently as if his recent lawsuit against a Boston publishing-house had been brought against itself." And the New York Sun was even more bitter:      "From the shores of the lake commonly known as the Boston Frogpond, there comes a solemn deliverance. We quote from the columns of our esteemed contemporary, the Daily Advertiser, a newspaper whose department of Shipping Intelligence is edited with rare critical ability."      Both newspapers said that Concord's decision was due to the fact that the Concord Trustees only acquired non-fictional works. They ironized this idea. The Courant said "the life of Huck Finn is not the only biography that partakes of the nature of fiction, and the Concord library would be further depleted if all the biographies that are true were cast out from it." The Sun continued in its ironic vein:      "It is not more than six weeks since the trustees of the public library at Concord, who rigidly exclude works of fiction from the shelves of their institution, purchased a copy of this sane book, 'Huckleberry Finn,' under the impression that they were getting the autobiography of one of the Pilgrim Fathers."      It is clear that at first the newspapers reported the Concord ban as being due to the "coarseness and bad taste" that the trustees found in the book...Later on, they said that it was due to the fictional character of the work. Detractors did not pay attention to this, and they charged at Twain because of his ironic letter to the Free Trade Club. Supporters did not mention the issue of tastefulness and focused on the fictional character of the work to explain Concord's action. By doing so, they avoided confrontation with moralists and could laugh at Concord, as has been shown in the above quotes.      It is evident that all the attacks on Huckleberry Finn came from conservative moral authorities. In spite of the fact that attacks on Huckleberry Finn were echoed in other newspapers throughout the States, supporters did not hesitate on any occasion to express their opinion of the book. The discourse of those who deprecated the book was based on conservatism and on attacking primarily Twain and then his book. As has been pointed out, they committed many mistakes and were not able to reply to the supporters' charges. In May, when most newspapers were silent, an important literary authority had his say in favor of Huckleberry Finn. Perry's review was probably radically in favor of Huckleberry Finn because of the attacks that detractors had made on the Century. Century's review was the clearest sign that Huckleberry Finn had overcome the attacks upon it. The Weight of the 1885 Criticism      It was not until 1983, when Victor Fischer's article appeared, that the general impression of 19th-century criticism of Huckleberry Finn began to change. However, there are still many people and critics who think that the reception of Huckleberry Finn in the aftermath of its publication was only an uproar caused by incidents external to the book.      I believe that the 1885 reviewers set the basis for most of the 20th-century criticism. The book has been recurrently classified as a piece of humorous or realist literature and the theme of human nature has recently become the most widely commented topic in Twainian criticism. The difference between the 1885 criticism and that of the present-day lies in the topics on which they focus. For 19th-century critics, the issue of race was not as important as, for example, realism. This is not the case nowadays.      Detractors of the book did have their influence on many critics during the nineteenth century. But they only caused hesitation about some extremely uncoventional passages. After 1885, reviewers praised Huckleberry Finn highly. In 1891, Andrew Lang wrote in the Illustrated London News "Now I do not mean to assert that Mark Twain is 'an impeccable artist', but he is just as far as from being a mere coarse buffoon" and "I have no hesitation in saying that Mark Twain is one among the greatest of contemporary makers of fiction". Lang commented on minor shortcomings, but gave an enthusiastic appraisal of the work.      Five years later, the Punch said, "I have not space to dwell on all great points of this Homeric book--for Homeric it is, in the true sense, as no other English book is that I know of". The (Boston) Daily Globe April 2, 1885 p. 4 The Man and His Book. Newspaper readers have seen a great deal about "Huckleberry Finn" and "Mark Twain" of late, and wondered how the two were associated. The doubt that shrouded these two semi-mythical characters--as to which was which, whether they were synonymous, and, therefore, interchangeable, and, if so, to what extend and how--might have hung over us for a long time if the Concord Free Trade Club had not elected one of them an honorary member. We don't know which one was elected; but we do know that the individual who responded to the honor was "Mark Twain." That letter solved the whole mystery. It showed that the writer is a man who can guy justice without pleasantry, and return thanks for favors in a paragraph that has no object except to advertise himself. "Huckleberry Finn," alias "Mark Twain," alias S.L. CLEMENS, began life as the writer of grotesque sketches that were coarse and strong and humorous. At first the humorous predominated, and out of this he made a reputation and a fortune. Having won these he has consented to convert himself into a walking sign, a literary sandwich, placarded all over with advertisements of his wares. People remembered how much fun he had afforded them, and forgave him many times. Lately he has made a new departure. Not contented with crying his goods alone he has asked the world to assist him. Some have complied. Of these he says nothing. Those who have refused are made objects of ridicule. His letter to the Free Trade Club is the latest effort is this direction. [pic]