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THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

MARK TWAIN was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. When Sam was four, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi river, where he spent an idyllic boyhood. His father died when he was twelve, and he was apprenticed to a printer, which began his career of reporting and writing entertaining, humorous sketches. But in 1857 he yielded to his boyhood ambition and trained with the great Horace Bixby as a river-boat pilot (from which experience he took the name Mark Twain). The Civil War, however, put an end to the river traffic – and an end to Twain’s career as well. After a brief, hilarious war experience (chronicled in ‘The History of a Campaign that Failed’) he turned his hand to silver prospecting, went back to journalism, and finally published his first short story in 1865.

Mark Twain’s career was a central, representative one in American letters, making the already established role of humorist into a central post of social observation. His worldwide reputation was based on a gift for mixing the boyish mischief and innocence of a naïve, vernacular vision with a dark, bitter view of man as hypocrite, victim and self-deceiver. His finest works are generally considered to be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Life on the Mississippi (1883), not a novel but a superbly evocative memoir, a brilliant account of pilotage and a criticism of the South; A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889); The American Claimant (1892); Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894); and his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), one of the world’s great books. Mark Twain died in 1910.

Before his retirement PETER COVENEY was a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at Nottingham University, where he specialized and published in the history of the French seventeenth century. He is the author of The Image of Childhood (which was published by Penguin in its Peregrine list) and has also edited George Eliot’s Felix Holt for Penguin Classics.

RICHARD MAXWELL took a doctorate in English literature from the University of Chicago. The author of The Mysteries of Paris and London (1992), and editor of The Victorian Illustrated Book (2002), he has also written extensively on the historical novels of John Cowper Powys. He is now working on a study of historical fiction between the seventeenth century and the present. He teaches in the Comparative Literature and English departments at Yale University.

MARK TWAIN

The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn

Edited with an Introduction and
Notes by PETER COVENEY

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 1884
Published in the Penguin English Library 1966
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1985
Reprinted with new Chronology and Further Reading 2003
12


Introduction and notes copyright © Peter Coveney, 1966
Chronology and Further Reading copyright © Richard Maxwell, 2003
All rights reserved


Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

CONTENTS

Chronology

Introduction

Further Reading

Note on the Text

HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Appendix. ‘The raft passage’

Notes

CHRONOLOGY

1835 30 November Samuel Langhorne Clemens born in Florida, Missouri, where his family had recently moved from Tennessee; the fifth surviving child of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens.
1839 Family move to Hannibal, Missouri (on the Mississippi River).
1847 24 March Death of father.
1848 Apprenticed to Joseph Ament, Hannibal printer.
1851 Publishes first extant sketch, ‘A Gallant Fireman’, in his elder brother Orion’s newspaper, the Western Union.
1853–7 Works as printer and journalist in St Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk (Iowa) and Cincinnati.
1857–60 Works as steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, training under Horace Bixby. Gets job on the steamboat Pennsylvania for his brother Henry, who later (1858) is fatally injured in a boiler explosion. Licensed as pilot 9 April 1859. Publishes a few humorous newspaper sketches.
1861–4 Civil War begins 1861 (will end 1865). Clemens has two-week military career with a volunteer Confederate group, the Marion Rangers (an experience later fictionalized in ‘The Private History of a Campaign That Failed’, 1885). Travels to Nevada with Orion, where he briefly and unsuccessfully prospects for silver. From August 1862, works as a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise (of Virginia City, Nevada), writing many humorous sketches. On 3 February 1863, publishes for the first time under the pseudonym ‘Mark Twain’. His taste for journalistic hoaxes and scandals finally forces him out of Nevada.
1864–6 While living in San Francisco, works as reporter. Early contacts with Bret Harte (then editor of the Californian, in which he publishes). 18 November 1865 publishes ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog’, in the Saturday Press; this sketch makes him nationally known. Visits Hawaii, and writes 24 letters on his journey for the Sacramento Union. Follow-up lecture tour is a great success.
1867–8 Publishes his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. Visits Europe and the Middle East. Lectures and writes. Courts Olivia (‘Livy’) Langdon.
1869–70 Engagement to Livy Langdon, whose father lends him money to purchase an interest in the Buffalo Express (New York). Publishes The Innocents Abroad (describing European trip). Early contacts with William Dean Howells, who becomes a lifetime friend. 2 February 1870, marries Livy. Langdon Clemens born prematurely 7 November.
1871 Family move to Hartford, Connecticut.
1872 Publishes Roughing It. Susan Olivia (‘Susy’) Clemens born in March. Langdon dies in June. August to November tours England and is received as celebrity.
1873 Publishes his first novel, The Gilded Age (written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner).
1874 Clara Langdon Clemens born in June.
1875 Atlantic Monthly serializes ‘Old Times on the Mississippi’. Publishes Sketches New & Old.
1876 Publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Begins writing Huckleberry Finn.
1877 Quarrel with Bret Harte; end of their friendship.
1878–9 Family travel in Europe. In Paris, Clemens meets Turgenev; in the Lake District, Charles Darwin. Accompanied by Joseph Twichell, takes walking tour through the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps. Further work on Huckleberry Finn.
1880 Publishes A Tramp Abroad (based on tour with Twichell). Jane Lampton (‘Jean’) Clemens born in July. Early investments in Paige typesetting machine.
1881 Publishes The Prince and the Pauper.
1883 Publishes Life on the Mississippi. Further work on Huckleberry Finn.
1884 19 December The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published in England and Canada.
1885 16 February The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published in the United States. Webster & Co., Clemens’ firm, buys and publishes Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs. Invests in many inventions, especially the Paige machine. Pays board for a black student at Yale Law School.
1888 Receives honorary M.A. from Yale University.
1889 Publishes A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
1890 Death of his mother.
1891 Losing money at a great rate, from publishing and technological ventures. Family give up their Hartford home, and take trip to Europe for Livy’s health.
1892 Publishes The American Claimant.
1893–4 Heavy investments in Paige typesetting machine, compounded by panic of 1893, compel Clemens to declare the bankruptcy of Webster & Co. (April 1894). Publishes The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and Tom Sawyer Abroad.
1895–6 Beginning in August 1895, takes world lecture tour, as a way of paying back debts. Death of Susan. Publishes Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Tom Sawyer, Detective and Other Stories. Two collected editions of Twain’s work underway.
1897 Publishes Following the Equator. Death of Orion.
1898 Finally works his way out of bankruptcy.
1899 Publishes ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’ in Harper’s Magazine.
1900 Portrait painted by James McNeil Whistler.
1901 Honorary doctorate from Yale.
1904 Death of Livy.
1906 Publishes What Is Man? in private, anonymous edition. Begins publishing instalments of autobiography in North American Review.
1907 Honorary Litt.D. from Oxford University. Publishes ‘Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven’ in Harper’s Magazine.
1908 Moves to house Clemens names ‘Stormfield’, in Redding, Connecticut.
1909 Death of Jane. Clara Clemens marries the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch.
1910 21 April. Death of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
1916 Publication of The Mysterious Stranger (edited – drastically – by Albert Bigelow Paine, his literary executor).

Richard Maxwell