Prince and the Pauper (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 378).
    Parker had hit one of Twain’s tender spots, for Twain, too, had worried that he had a reputation as a humorist, but not as a serious writer. So it was at the urging of both Parker and another Monday Evening Club member, Hartford mayor Henry Robinson, that Twain decided to undertake more serious work on The Prince and the Pauper, even as he wrestled with the difficulties he was encountering in Huck Finn.
    Writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nettled Twain greatly; he wrote to William Dean Howells (1837-1920) that he found much to dislike in it, primarily the plot, and considered “pigeon-holing it” (that is, putting it aside) or even burning the manuscript! The writing of The Prince and the Pauper seems to have presented no such problems. He began the novel in the winter of 1877 and worked hard at it, telling his older brother Orion Clemens (1825-1897) that he labored on The Prince and the Pauper “with an interest that almost amounted to intemperance.” If that was the case, it was an intemperance that paid off handsomely. The book was finished by mid-1880, and Twain was enormously pleased with the result. He was sure that he had written something of lasting value, a book that was definitely a cut above his usual output. It was an opinion confirmed for him within his own family. He wrote to an old friend, “What am I writing? A historical tale of three hundred years ago. I swear the Young Girls Club [Twain’s wife and daughters] to secrecy and read the manuscript to them half a dozen chapters at a time.” (Camfield, p. 445) The girls and his wife were enthusiastic.
    One of the most interesting, persistent, and specious myths of Twain lore is that his wife of some thirty-five years, Olivia Langdon Clemens, was a prude and a bluenose who restrained her husband’s more earthy tendencies, bowdlerizing his books and taking little or no pleasure in—in fact, being embarrassed by—his writing and his fame. This was not true, of course, even though the primary architect of his wife’s buttoned-up reputation was Twain himself.
    Olivia Langdon was born into a wealthy family in upstate New York in 1845. She was a delicate and retiring woman who spent much of her early life, a period lasting from her early teens into her twenties, as an invalid. As the cosseted daughter of rich and doting parents, “Livy” must have seemed timid and retiring next to the far more ebullient Twain. Two people could not have had less in common, but Twain was determined that she would be his wife. Olivia’s parents were avid supporters of the temperance movement, and in order to win them to his cause Twain actually took the pledge, a move that horrified his old friends. They could not know that the pledge would not last long: Within a year he was teaching Livy “to drink a bottle of beer a night.”
    Far from being the prim prude she was thought to be, Mrs. Sam Clemens was a great help to her husband, a sounding board for ideas, a secretary, and a first editor. Twain relied heavily on his wife and valued her opinions highly. It was due to this great love and regard that her posthumous reputation developed. Although her health had never been strong, Olivia had lived through four pregnancies and the trauma of a Clemens family bankruptcy (Twain lost a great deal of his formidable income on ill-advised ventures in the stock market and on the promotion of various inventions, which swallowed enormous amounts of money for development and never returned a penny), but in 1902 she suffered a cataclysmic collapse in her health. A doctor advised a change to a warmer climate, and so in 1903 the Twains moved to Florence, Italy. She died there in 1904. Twain was devastated. It was his own posthumous tributes to his wife that made her reputation as moral paragon and hence a brake on Twain’s more earthy side.
    When The Prince and the Pauper was published in 1882, reviews were, in