Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900)

This book was certainly not my favorite Mark Twain writing. In fact, I found the writing choppy and the characters either lifeless or caricatures. Perhaps the disjointed nature of the book is due to it being the product of two writers. It was not cohesive, and the women characters were terribly flat. However, the story provided a glimpse of the boom-or-bust speculative character of the late 19th century and a strong indication of the hypocrisy and corruption (graft, bribery) in the upper echelons of power in Congress, and the get-rich-quick schemes of speculators, gilded over by glittering industrial and economic growth for the haves, but not so much for the have nots. It was a time when the nation was rebuilding itself following the devastating Civil War, and wherever sums of money were being thrown around, you can be sure greed and corruption followed. One would have to understand that Twain was first and foremost a satirist, so a lot of what seems like praise is criticism. However, this novel dragged a lot and the narrative and structure hardly measure up to the Twain I know. Sadly, its depiction of political corruption and massive greed in the late 19th century is just as familiar as in the early 21st century.… (more)

By 1873, Mark Twain and his Hartford neighbour Charles Dudley Warner were both quite well-known as travel-writers and essayists, but neither had tried his hand at a full-scale novel. Their collaboration on this one is said to have come about through a challenge from their respective wives during a dinner party discussion of the failings of current fiction ("Well, you should write a better one, then..."). They seem to have worked fairly briskly and without much planning, passing the manuscript back and forth between them as each finished a section. At first, it's pretty easy to see who wrote what, with Twain's story focusing on the impoverished family of "Judge" Hawkins migrating from Kentucky to Missouri and getting enmeshed in dubious land deals, whilst Warner's equally autobiographical plot deals with two young men from Yale knocking about New York in search of a worthwhile career. But the two storylines soon get firmly entangled with each other, and we get into a fast-moving satire of the political and financial sleaze of the Grant administration, with a cast of Washington lobbyists, crooked politicians, railroad promoters, and duped investors. Rather like The way we live now, but much, much sleazier. In the foreground are the irrepressible Colonel Sellers, a man who seems quite genuinely to believe in every one of the crooked schemes he is canvassing support for, and the glamorous Miss Laura Hawkins, a lobbyist who can twist any man in Washington around her little finger.

Some of the finance is a bit too complex, and the humour a little too obvious, perhaps, and the structure of the novel shows evidence of its unplanned nature, with all sorts of interesting plot lines running off into the sand and being forgotten about (Twain actually prints an apology in the end of the book for their not having managed to track down Laura's father, despite their best efforts...). But it's a lively, fast romp with some good memorable characters, and it has a serious point: Twain keeps reminding us that the reason crooked politicians exist is that citizens are too prepared to leave politics to other people.

Apart from its standing as the first major work of fiction Twain worked on, the book is also famous for the slightly sophomoric running joke of the chapter epigraphs, which are taken, untranslated, from no fewer than 47 foreign languages (including Amharic, Cornish, Ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, and numerous Native American languages), mocking the pretentious way many novels of the time used Latin and Greek epigraphs. They were provided by another Hartford neighbour, the scholar J. Hammond Trumbull. Disappointingly, it turns out that quite a few of them were taken from Bible translations into the languages in question, which seems rather a cheat, but they are all wittily relevant to the content of the chapters they head.… (more)