Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900)

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 show more 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. show less

Re-read this one after many years. I remember really liking the biting and only somewhat satirical descriptions of the dysfunctional American congress at work, but it took a long long time to get to that part through all of the various failed get-rich-quick schemes of the Hawkins family and their friends. The fact that this book was co-written did not work in its favor. You can almost tell which parts were written by Twain from the humor alone, but Charles Dudley Warner wasn't quite the show more comic writer that Twain is and the novel often gets bogged down. It's a shame that this is so uneven because when it shines, it shines brightly. show less

This book made me sad. It's the first Twain that I haven't picked up with delight and looked forward to reading. Instead, I picked it up thinking, "I can't wait until I'm done with this one."

That's not how you should feel about a book unless it's Henry James. Then it's okay because that man could make a three word sentence last for three pages.

I suspect that the parts I disliked were written by the co-author as others seem to indicate. I can't imagine Twain being as wagless as the passages show more indicate. The words show that humor is attempted, but fails. Not my Twain.

I was amused by how much things remain the same in American politics. Some things never change. And I become more and more cynical for it. show less

Despite the dated language and caricatures, the subtitle "a Tale of Today" still seems true. Greed and avarice still abound (Wolf of Wall Street, anyone?). What little actual legislating that occurs in congress is done with much back room dealing and there are undoubtedly members whose votes are for sale in some fashion. So the mid-nineteenth century doesn't differ much from the early twenty-first. That's the shame of it.

Makes me wonder what sort of tale Twain might spin if he were alive today.