[In the following essay, Dawson explores the Irish-American heritage of Huck and the ways it affects his relationship with Jim.]

In an article describing the source and significance of Huckleberry Finn's surname, James L. Colwell has proposed that Mark Twain chose his character's “joyously and unmistakably Celtic” family name very purposefully.” From the ancient Finn McCool to Finnegans Wake, it is a name that rings through Irish legend and literature.¹ (Its cognate appears in the name of the “Fenians,” the legendary Irish warriors under Finn McCool and others in the second and third centuries a.d., that was adopted by the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish-Americans who in the years immediately following the Civil War pledged themselves to aiding the revolutionary overthrow of the English government of Ireland.) After briefly summarizing the evidence of Twain's perception of the American Irish, Colwell explains that Huck's creator intended to capitalize on the currency of many widespread “connotations of the Irish in nineteenth-century America: typically servants and laborers in a status only slightly higher than that of the Negro, they were reputed to be gregarious, pugnacious, and given to strong drink. Decidedly not a part of the older American tradition of frugality, temperance, and Protestant morality, they seemed to those who were to be excellent material for comedy.”² Although Colwell's insights are pertinent and often very informative, he gives his principal attention to revealing the implications of Huck's given name. His analysis of the significance of the family name breaks off at the point where it might have proven most informative. A more extended study shows that—as though to bring all into accord with the Finn surname—Twain's account of the Finns' past, Huck's experience of his parents, his physiognomy, anti-social ideas, behavior, style of dress and moral instincts perfectly exemplify the traits and conduct that the dominant social class had for decades regarded as the distinguishing marks of Irish-Americans. That correspondence reveals a new dimension of what Twain and many of his readers would have seen in Huck's personality and his relationship with Jim. The surnames of the novel's characters provide a revealing initial index of their social world. For example, the fact of Jim's being without a family name conforms to the prevalent practice whereby enslaved blacks bore no surnames of their own. He is no more than “Miss Watson's big nigger, named Jim” or “Miss Watson's Jim,” the possessive case announcing that he lacks any identity beyond that of being his owner's chattel.³ That Jim is deprived of a family name epitomizes the deprivations of slavery. He is without the minimal insignia of personhood. In his family life, he and his wife are without the shared surname that white American society of the late nineteenth century recognized as the customary designation of their conjugal bond, nor might they pass on to their children this most commonplace emblem of their relationship ([The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] HF 124). A deeper irony and still further cruelty—and one that is yet another measure of the psychological destructiveness of “the peculiar institution”—is the fact that Jim and the other members of his family would not have shared even a single owner's name; since American slave law followed the Egyptian practice described in Exodus 21:24 whereby the children of slaves were treated as the property of their mother's master, the wife and two children from whom Jim has been separated by her sale, which is alluded to in Chapter Sixteen, would by the time of the novel's events be identified by her own subsequent owner's family name.⁴

The simple fact that Huck possesses a surname marks his condition as a free white off from Jim's as a black slave, but that he bears the family name he does indicates that he shares what the dominant American classes had come to see as his ethnic group's special kinship with American blacks. The most significant associations attaching to his surname are overlooked by Colwell, but these begin to become evident when one notes the striking contrast of the Finns' name with very nearly all the sixty other family names of those Huck lives amidst, meets with, or hears mention of in the course of his southward flight on the great river. Among the many whites who figure in that adventure, he and his father are all but unique in being without what would have been a recognizably Anglo-Saxon surname.⁵ Their singularity becomes conspicuous when one considers the following census of the family names of the characters met with and those persons of whom even passing mention is made in the course of the novel, a list which is extended to include the surnames Huck and Tom adopt for their plausibility in providing disguises that promise to be successful as they seek to pass themselves off among the white populace of the localities they pass through:

• Allbright
• Apthorp
• Barnes
• Bartley
• Bell
• Blodgett
• Boggs
• Bots
• Bradish
• Buckner
• Bunker
• Collins
• Damrell
• Douglas
• Dunlap
• Finn
• Foster
• Grangerford
• Hagan
• Harkness
• Harper
• Hatfield
• Hightower
• Hines
• Hobson
• Hooker
• Hopkins
• Hornback
• Hotchkiss
• Hovey
• Jackson
• Loftus
• Lothrop
• Marples
• Moore
• Nichols
• Packard
• Parker
• Penrod
• Peters
• Phelps
• Proctor
• Ridgeway
• Robinson
• Rogers
• Rucker
• Sawyer
• Shackleford
• Sherburn
• Shepherdson
• Thatcher
• Thompson
• Turner
• Utterback
• Watson
• Whipple
• Whistler
• Wilks
• Williams
• Winn

The Finns' surname—like that of the single other exception to the pattern, the notorious Sowberry Hagan, the memory of whose infamous profanity Pap invokes as the measure of his own foul-mouthed extravagance (HF 34)—marks off the scapegrace father and son as being unmistakably Irish.

Harold Beaver has fixed upon the point from which any approach to understanding the Finns' character must begin: “Huck is a chip off the old block. To understand Huck one must begin with Pap. Pap is his one sure model.” Different as the two in many ways are, “Huck is every inch Pap's son.”⁶ Heredity would have been the key to contemporary readers' appreciation of the Finns. In fact, as the many nineteenth-century Americans who shared Twain's sense of ethnicity and the transmission of racial traits would have recognized, Huck's personality and inclinations are best explained by searching still further into his family's past. When Pap accuses his son of disloyalty in ambitiously trying to distance himself from his parents and the others of his line who could not read—“None of the family couldn't” (HF 24)—his charge smacks of white society's sense of the genealogical determinism that both fed and fed on its racism. Lately, on the argument of Shelley Fisher Fishkin, it has been contended that Twain derived Huck's voice from his memories of a chance meeting with a young African-American.⁷ However, this contention runs counter to the findings of dialectologists, who have long identified his own and his father's speech patterns as being representatively those of backwoods Missouri whites. Their vocabulary and linguistic structures correspond with the idiom of the Missouri country folk living just down-river from Hannibal that the “Explanatory” note Twain included by way of a preface to Huck's story refers to as “the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect.” In the most sophisticated study of Huckleberry Finn's speech characteristics, David Carkeet has argued that the assignment of dialects in the novel is both faithful to that of the region and character-specific; the Finns' speech patterns are those of a locale and social stratum that in the second quarter of the nineteenth century were largely peopled by Irish-Americans.⁸

It is often remarked that the Anglo-Saxon British have never been able to understand their Celtic neighbors. For centuries the Welsh, Scots, and Irish have been seen by them as a breed—or breeds—apart. As early as the first English contacts with them, the Irish proved an especially vexing case, an unsettled and strange, even wild people. Their more emotional, spontaneous and sentimental temperament argued to their somehow being constitutionally different from the reserved Anglo-Saxons. Even more than the Celts of Britain, the Irish seemed recalcitrant to adopting English ways. Their ancient customs of tanistry and gavelkind, and the native preference for what was known as Brehon Law over the Common Law were the despair of the plantation owners who endeavored to improve them. Elizabethan writers like Edmund Spenser, Edmund Campion, and Sir John Davies were among the first to complain of the Irish stubborn resistance to the elevated English efforts at improving them. They attribute to the Irish the same predilections for dirt, superstition, and play that are Huck's proclivities. Together with drunkenness, violence, and lewdness—which mark the environment of debauchery in which Pap Finn meets his death—these were vices that Elizabethans associated with the Irish.⁹

It is not surprising that, as several historians and cultural anthropologists have remarked, when English colonists first encountered Native Americans in the seventeenth century, they appreciated the indigenous people of the New World by reference to their experience establishing plantations among the wild Irish in the preceding century. Here they met with another “uncivilized” people that lived in tribes (as the Irish did in clans and septs) rather than the defined socio-political units established among Western European peoples, followed a nomadic life of transhumance rather than residing in fixed settlements, talked a barbarous language, and practiced what the first English explorers and Protestant settlers looked upon as a not dissimilar superstition-filled, devil-dominated religion.¹⁰

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, large numbers of what would later be called Scotch-Irish immigrants—most of them Presbyterians from the Ulster North of Ireland—came to the New World to escape the unrelenting harsh economic conditions of their birth. Ironically, these staunchly evangelical Protestants continued to be termed “America's Irish” until the massive immigration of “green Irish” in flight from the Potato Famine of the mid-nineteenth century caused these earlier Celtic-Americans to adopt the double-term to distance themselves from the largely Catholic newcomers.¹¹

A great many of the earlier arrivals had settled in the backcountry South, especially in the Piedmont and Appalachians, and it was among these that one would have discovered the first New World Clemens forebears. Here as well were the beginnings of the social distinctions that were to prove important to the young Sam Clemens, who imbibed his severe frontier-lawyer father's pride that he might trace the family's descent to properly English origins. In previous generations the Clemens ancestors had lived in backcountry Virginia. Sam's father—whose “stern, unsmiling” demeanor evinced a personality that insisted upon maintaining traditional virtue—had been born in Campbell County in the Piedmont, and his son would retain the Anglo-Saxon families' feeling of superiority to their Celtic fellow-settlers of the inland and mountain regions.¹² The early frontier folk who followed Daniel Boone in pouring westward in the half-century after the Revolution and successively settled Tennessee, Kentucky, downstate Indiana, southern Illinois, and ultimately Missouri were for the most part drawn from these Appalachian mountain-folk. Although John Marshall Clemens—whose given names may be read as containing the proud promise of civic rectitude founded in the Common Law of England—was among these Celtic migrants in transplanting his family to the banks of the Mississippi, neither he nor his son ever mistook himself for being of them.

Almost from the beginning, the American South's traditional social hierarchy has long made a sharp distinction between the two lowest classes of whites. Over against the adherents of the Protestant ethic familiarly known as “poor whites”—those who, however economically hard pressed, were to be credited with observing and inculcating the virtues of industry, truth-telling, cleanliness, church-going, lawfulness, and honesty—have been those called “white trash,” the no-account sort perceived as having given themselves over to slovenliness, deceit, disregard of family obligations, marital infidelity, violence, willful ignorance, and other vices.¹³ Throughout the society that extended from the Atlantic seaboard to such frontier communities as Hannibal and St. Petersburg, these cousins of Faulkner's Snopses were disdained. Censorious whites, who recognized the impositions that prevented slaves and emancipated blacks from structuring their lives as they would have wished, did not excuse any of their own who did not live by the ethic of principled Protestantism, meeting their expenses, seizing every advantage, disciplining their children, and improving their lot in life.

The researches of Walter Blair, Dixon Wecter, and others have established that Huck's character was largely drawn on that of Samuel Clemens' boyhood friend Tom Blankenship, whose alcoholic father appears to have in many ways served as a model for Pap. However, the fictional family's name and much of the father's personality derive from another figure of debauchery, Jimmy Finn, who reigned as the resident town drunk and public care of Hannibal during young Sam's earliest years.¹⁴ Decades later Twain would remember that Judge Clemens himself had been drawn into the circle of earnest and devout villagers who endeavored to reclaim the incorrigible drunkard from his self-destructive ways, but the relapses that unfailingly followed the real-life Finn's half-hearted attempts at sobriety earned him an enduring place of disgrace among Hannibal's legends:

Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, reformed, and that broke up the only saloon in the village. But the temperance people liked it; they were willing enough to sacrifice public prosperity to public morality. And so they made much of Jimmy Finn—dressed him up in new clothes, and had him out to breakfast and dinner, and so forth, and showed him off as a great living curiosity—a shining example of the power of temperance doctrines when earnestly and eloquently set forth. … Jimmy Finn couldn't stand it. He got remorseful about the loss of his liberty; and then he got melancholy from thinking about it so much; and after that, he got drunk. He got awfully drunk in the chief citizen's house, and the next morning that house was as if the swine had tarried in it. That outraged the temperance people and delighted the opposite faction. The former rallied and reformed Jim once more, but in an evil hour temptation came upon him, and he sold his body to a doctor for a quart of whiskey, and that ended all his earthly troubles. He drank it all at one sitting, and his soul went to its long account, and his body went to Doctor Grant. This was another blow to Hannibal. Jimmy Finn had always kept the town in a sweat about something or other, and now it nearly died from utter inanition.¹⁵

Although the village cynosure died shortly before young Sam's tenth birthday—“Jimmy Finn … died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion”—his legend had become so deeply and firmly lodged in the boy's memory that decades later the aging derelict remained for the adult author “a monument of rags and dirt; he was the profanest man in town; he had bleary eyes, and a nose like a mildewed cauliflower; he slept with the hogs in an abandoned tanyard.”¹⁶ Clemens found it easy work to reincarnate the village reprobate in Huck's no-good father. The boys of St. Petersburg are familiar with Pap Finn as one who also “used to lay drunk with the hogs in the tanyard” (HF 10), and his father tells Huck of his having again gravitated there when he first returned to town (HF 25). But his life was to end in even worse circumstances than did that of his real-life original: his naked body is found amidst the traces of debauchery with loose women and gambling with masked men—probably gangsters—who have shot him (HF 60-62, 361-62).

Twain's play upon Huck's Irishness is evident as early as his writing in 1875. In the preliminary scenario of the play he at that time intended to copyright as Tom Sawyer: A Drama, he planned a concluding tableau vivant that would show the novel's two principal characters in another fifty years; Tom would appear as an army general and Huck Finn as—of all things!—a bishop.¹⁷ Although by the later decades of the century Catholicism had come to be seen as the principal feature of the Irish-American personality, religion is no more than a peripheral, perhaps even irrelevant factor in assessing the Celtic strain in the Finns.¹⁸ The title page of the 1885 first edition of Huckleberry Finn situates its events having taken place “Forty to Fifty Years Ago,” that is, between 1835 and 1845, the decade preceding the great influx of Catholic Irish immigrants during the years immediately preceding and following mid-century. That Huck and his father are so insistently unchurched establishes that it is ethnic rather than religious prejudice that debars them from the society of their social “betters.”¹⁹

Between the date of the action in Twain's novel and its publication, a similar categorization had developed among the families of the mid-century Celtic immigrants. The responsible, industrious, ambitious and upwardly mobile “lace curtain Irish” had long been at pains to distance themselves from the indolent, resolutely ignorant sort among them. The “shanty Irish” that became the Northern variety of “white trash” found literary enshrinement in the families of the Fitchburg Railroad squatter John Field and the farmer James Collins who are the targets of Thoreau's scorn in Walden.²⁰

The high degree to which the Finns conform to the stereotype of the disdained Irish directs attention to Twain's absorption of the nativist tradition of bigotry in his boyhood years. His admirers have cited such evidence as his support of an early black student attending Yale in proclaiming his possessing an enlightened attitude toward blacks, and he has been praised for the fair-mindedness shown in his 1870 newspaper piece indicting San Francisco's virulent persecution of Chinese-Americans, “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy.”²¹ But it must be admitted that Twain's attitude toward immigrants from Ireland was not nearly so generous-spirited. Edgar Marquess Branch has noted that anti-Catholicism—which at mid-century was synonymous with anti-Irishness—permeated Hannibal's social climate throughout the years in which Sam Clemens was growing up.²² Although the Catholic presence along the Mississippi of those early years was chiefly shaped by the predominantly French archepiscopates of New Orleans and St. Louis, reports of the swelling numbers of Catholic Irish immigrants in the cities of the Eastern seaboard were already exciting nativist fears along the River. The editor of Twain's correspondence finds evidence of this specifically anti-Celtic prejudice being displayed from a very early age by both Sam and his older brother Orion: “Since both Clemens brothers had strong nativist views at this time, either of them might have regarded the conjunction of ‘American’ with ‘Irish’ as a sort of blasphemy.” Louis J. Budd has identified other early signs of Twain's antipathy toward the Irish in newspaper articles he wrote as a young man; in these he was not above joining in the widespread cheap humor that found fun in the discriminatory employment announcements that were commonly accompanied by the warning that prospective workers who were “Irish need not apply.”²³

For those raised in Samuel Clemens' Missouri, dirt and drink were the expected environment of the Irish. It is not surprising that, when Twain decided to include a no-account character similar to Jimmy and Pap Finn in the abortive Autobiography of a Damned Fool, a book he began writing in 1877 during a break from his work on Huckleberry Finn, Twain thought it appropriate to give its alcoholic drifter Si Higgens another unmistakably Irish surname.²⁴ The recurrent failure he assigned Irish characters was epitomized in a truism in Life on the Mississippi, another work contemporaneous with his portrayal of the stereotypically Irish Pap Finn. There, Twain writes, “Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper and the beer corrodes it; but whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.”²⁵

The anti-Celtic prejudices of Clemens' boyhood resurfaced in The Gilded Age, published in 1873, three years before he began Huckleberry Finn. The same chapter also tells of the rise of such nouveaux-riche Irish-American types as Oliver Higgins, who owed his prosperity to his having been a saloon-keeper in the Indian Territory, and “Patrick O' Riley (as his name then stood),” whose family came to style themselves with what Bernard De Voto termed a “gallicized Irish” name. The parvenu O'Riley had begun in the New World as a hod-carrier. Soon after opening his first New York “whiskey-mill,” he moved to a fancy uptown saloon and went on to become a building contractor. By being the “bosom friend of the great and good Wm. M. Weed himself”—for which one is to read William Marcy Tweed, the notorious political boss of Tammany Hall—he grew rich through political chicanery and was elected to the State Legislature before being tried for graft. By the grace of a rigged jury, he was acquitted. Thereupon he and his wife betook themselves and their children to France and on their return styled themselves as “Hon. Patrique Oreille and family.”²⁶

Since a time before the Civil War, Irish-Americans were mocked for what was said to be their most representative physical feature, a conspicuous prognathian jaw.²⁷ In The Gilded Age, next to a sketch of a man with “an unmistakable potato mouth,” Laura Hawkins gives a description of “a dear old friend of our family named Murphy. He was a very charming man, but very eccentric. We always supposed he was an Irishman, but after he got rich he went abroad for a year or two, and when he came back you would have been amused to see how interested he was in a potato. He asked what it was! Now you know that when Providence shapes a mouth especially for the accommodation of a potato you can detect that fact at a glance when that mouth is in repose—foreign travel can never remove that sign.”²⁸ Such mockery, which was all the more tasteless for its playing upon the tragedy of the great Potato Famine, is echoed in a letter written a few years later in which Twain rejects the first sketch that Edward Windsor Kemble, the original edition's illustrator, had submitted to serve as the cover portrait for Huckleberry Finn, giving as his grounds his finding that in its rendering of Huck “the boy's mouth is a trifle more Irishy than necessary.”²⁹

The physical features, social habits and personality traits that were ethnic stereotypes in the America of Twain's time had served as staples of nativist political mockery for decades before the novel was conceived. By splitting many of the most distinctive of the alleged Irish characteristics between the Finns, assigning the negative traits to Pap and investing his son with features readers would secretly find endearing even as they felt they were to be scorned, Twain succeeded in favoring Huck with a personality that the book's early readership would have straightaway recognized as suspect. The traits that marked Huck and his Pap off as different from and unacceptable to the settled American culture were conspicuously those of “the wild Irish.” What is manifest in the mature condition of his father is latent in Huck, whose personality is heavy with the latent pathology of his people. No matter how engaging his manner, the boy bears within him what the dominant American society saw as his inherited shadow-self. His unruliness, his small deceits, his pipe-smoking and preference for lazing about—these were clues to what he would someday become; the boy would prove father to the man.

In Huckleberry Finn Twain exploits the currency of the nativist stereotype by playing upon just those traits that set the lower-class Irish Finns apart from the Anglo-Saxon “better families” of St. Petersburg and the Lower Mississippi Valley. Pap Finn—lazy, dirty, brutal, swinish, superstitious, bigoted, lying, illiterate, antireligious, foul-mouthed, financially irresponsible and destructive of himself and others in his craving for alcohol—embodies all the worst features of the “squatter.” True to type, he is a constitutional malcontent, a social recluse who, after more than a year's stay “away down the river” and temporary residence in the local tanyard (HF 10, 14, 25), has retreated into isolation in the woods three miles up the Illinois side of the Mississippi (HF 29). There he makes a home for himself and his son in just the sort of old cabin that both the author and the illustrator of the novel's first edition tellingly identify as being a “shanty” (HF 38, 52). Pap denounces Huck for having taken on “considerable many frills” (HF 24, 25) during the time he has been away in his down-river wanderings; the boy has taken to wearing clean, well-starched clothes as he has been transformed by the Widow Douglas into a “sweet-scented dandy” (HF 24). His father's further charge is that Huck has willingly acquired the beginnings of an education, such as none of his illiterate forebears had known—“Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn't, before they died. I can't” (HF 24). In Pap's angry indictment may be read the double indictment that Huck seems bent upon repudiating the mores of his ethnic stock as much as leaving behind the condition of his lineal family; this arraignment rings with the larger accusation that, having imbibed the ambitions of society, he would now abandon the folkways of his people.

Huck's ragtaggle dress and unkempt appearance, which are unfailing testimony to the Finn family's reprehensible manner of living and the grounds for the son's having been taken in by the Widow Douglas, had been assigned him years prior to the publication of his own Adventures. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck had been introduced to readers in an admiring third-person realistic description, the principal elements of which would have clearly signalled his being shanty Irish. He was already “the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle, and lawless, and vulgar and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him.” Twain goes on to detail the “gaudy outcast condition” and unbridled freedom that had made him the envy of Tom and “the rest of the reputable boys” of St. Petersburg:

Huckleberry was always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags. His hat was a vast ruin with a wide crescent lopped out of its brim; his coat, when he wore one, hung nearly to his heels and had the rearward buttons far down the back; but one suspender supported his trousers; the seat of the trousers bagged low and contained nothing; the fringed legs dragged in the dirt when not rolled up.

Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious, that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.³⁰

This epitome of the feisty ragamuffin unsocialized by school or church is a cliché representation of what nineteenth-century America saw as the socially pernicious spawn of Irish households.

Whatever little Huck experienced of his natural nuclear family in his earlier years is learned from Tom Sawyer. By the time of that book's action, the mother is already dead. In Huck's single recollection of the years when he lived with both parents, they are remembered as stereotypes, painful images retained by a son raised amidst the brawling hatred commonly said to characterize an Irish household: “Look at pap and my mother. Fight? Why they used to fight all the time. I remember, mighty well.”³¹ To Ben Rogers and the others of Tom Sawyer's gang in Huckleberry Finn, Huck “hadn't got no family”—or rather, “he's got a father, but you can't never find him, these days” (HF 10). Given this history, it is hardly surprising that, when Huck first learns that his father may be dead, he experiences a sense of relief rather than loss: “that was comfortable for me; I didn't want to see him no more” (HF 14). When he shortly thereafter concludes that the corpse discovered floating in the Mississippi that has been reported to be his father's is that of a woman, his mood changes: “I was uncomfortable again. I judged the old man would turn up again by and by, though I wished he wouldn't” (HF 14). At the book's end, after Jim tells him of his own discovery of the father's corpse and the conditions of the old man's death become clear, Huck—who fears Pap has seized the more than six thousand dollars being held by Judge Thatcher (HF 361)—says nothing. This brutal, drunken Irish father is a person he cannot bring himself to feel sorry he is now without. He does not so much as lament the circumstances of that death. Pap Finn has died as he had lived. The room of the drifting frame house in which Jim recognizes his corpse is an environment of squalor that surpasses even the miserable condition of the Finns' shanty. The floating ruin's unspeakable graffiti, whiskey bottles and greasy playing cards together with the telltale evidence of murderous violence perpetrated by masked gunmen and the clear suggestion of sexual debauchery represent the moral milieu and physical habitat that the established social classes saw as indicating the kind of life that the wastrel Irish-Americans would substitute for the settled culture of life on the shore (HF 60-62, 361-62). Huck's familiar pipe (HF 41, 42, 47, 48; illustrations at 30 and 43), which in Kemble's sketches closely resembles the clay pipes that were the familiar insignia of the Irish-American Paddy portrayed by political cartoonists, including Twain's friend Thomas Nast, marks him as Irish and foreshadows the layabout life of destructive self-indulgence attributed to adult Celts that it might be thought sure he would grow into.

When Huck's Irish ways are read against the sociopolitical fears widespread among nineteenth-century Americans, they are seen to resonate with broader, interracial fears. Many of the features that make Huck suspect for refusing to adopt prescribed customs would have been read by the novel's early readers as proof of the innate antipathy to socialization that the Irish were said to share with Blacks. So, in its portrayal of the psychological kinship that joins Huck and Jim, Twain's novel gives literary form to a central concern of nativist social ideology, the fear of what immigration and Reconstruction together portended for the accustomed American way of life.

Following the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, practitioners of the popular pseudo-science of craniology had recourse to evolutionary arguments to support their claims to being able to distinguish racial traits on the basis of skull formations. Such bigotry was a standard feature of the cartoon commentary on political and social questions that Nast, Joseph Keppler, and Frederick B. Opper had for years published in such popular New York periodicals as Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper's Weekly, and Puck. In these caricatures, males of Irish stock were regularly shown as dirty, lazy, drunken and violent; their many children were represented as the care of their drudge-like wives. Very often Irish-American men were presented as hulking brutes whose physical strength embodied their social menace. Sometimes, like the revolutionary Fenians portrayed in the contemporary English press, they were pictured carrying dynamite. Invariably they were assigned a protruding jaw and receding forehead plainly meant to suggest a close link with humanity's newly-identified simian ancestors. Craniology gave way to measurement of such features of the physiognomy as a prominent jaw and a pronounced angle of the forehead; these were indices of mental inferiority. In Cesare Lombroso's influential study L'Uomo delinquente (1876), such marks were claimed to be evidence of the peasant class and the criminal mind—assassins, political radicals and other suspect types. Extrapolations were made to derive a taxonomy of races and to argue that Slavs, gypsies, and Jews transmitted their supposed deficiencies (and their social menace) genetically. In England and America, the lowest branches of the human morphological tree had already been assigned to blacks and the Irish, the so-called “white Negroes”; they were found to resemble orangutans and suffer from severely retarded evolutionary development.³²

By the time of Twain's most famous novel, the Irish-American immigrants who had fled the Potato Famine and their children had acquired a new dimension, for their multiplying numbers gave them increased political force and reenergized fears of their threat to the established way of life. In an especially offensive Harper's Weekly cartoon of December 1876, “The Ignorant Vote—Honors Are Easy,” Nast portrayed an Irish-American type (representative of the burgeoning white vote of the Northern cities) and a barefoot black (symbolizing the emancipated slaves of the Reconstruction South) as comparable incarnations of ignorance whose easily bought ballots threatened to undermine the national interest.³³

By the time he was writing Huckleberry Finn, Twain was regularly enjoying Nast's social company in New York. The nativist prejudices that Twain and Nast shared can be seen in the similarity of their derisive treatments of the Irish. It is just this supposed equivalency that Twain plays upon in the elder Finn's scurrilous diatribe against the Ohio free black whom he had encountered exercising his right to vote—”a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything” (HF 33-34). The humor of the episode in which Pap, who is almost anyone's inferior, vents his outrage at any black man's rising above the condition to which society conspired to confine him rested upon an implicit comparison—in fact, an equation—that was a commonplace among many of the book's first readers. Pap's amazement that such another could improve himself would have registered with a populace which saw blacks and Irish as closely related racial types; they were both unlikely to improve themselves, and their supposed resolute ignorance and openness to bribery was felt to pose a national political peril as election days neared.³⁴

The Finns' family situation oddly mirrors that of Jim's. Jim has been separated from his wife and children by society's slave market; Pap absents himself from Huck for a year at a time and, upon his return, confines him in semi-slave conditions while attempting to deprive him of his money. Jim is the father who wishes money in order that he may purchase his family's freedom; Pap seeks out his son in order to gain money for his selfish, dissolute ends. Jim becomes Huck's moral tutor, taking on what becomes in many ways the role of the wished-for father that the famously “lonesome” son has never known and finding in Huck a substitute for the sons he has never had.

Besides excluding him from the dominant society and making him the fugitive slave's spiritual boon companion, Huck's racial otherness becomes an enabling life condition that, in his coming to terms with it, enables him to accept Jim. He comes to see that he and the slave share a deeper likeness in their affinities as racial outsiders, members of ostracized ethnic groups that the dominant class sees as being essentially alike. Huck's warning cry to Jim, “They're after us!” (HF 75), tells of more than the fitness of their becoming companion-runaways, for their journey down the Mississippi is a metaphor of the lot that history has assigned to both their peoples. Their flight together represents the common plight of the American underclass. It is significant that the Kemble illustrations represent Huck and Jim's sharing what is so much the same condition by showing them dressed alike: the single-strap trousers, tow-linen shirt, high-top shoes, and broad-brimmed straw hat that Huck wears in the frontispiece and most of the portrayals of him that accompany the text match the shabby attire in which the slave is regularly shown. Readers of Huck's own novel who understand his raft-journey with Jim to be his first sustained familiarity with a black overlook his prior life history. In Tom Sawyer, Huck speaks of the sense of humanity that has survived slavery that he has learned from earlier life with another St. Petersburg black. When Tom asks where he has been staying, Huck identifies his temporary quarters and tells of his having conducted himself on terms of equality with the Rogers family's household slave. However, he concludes his answer with the same temerity he will later show in granting Jim full recognition on the raft as he requests that Tom treat his behavior as a secret, for he feels the need to attempt to exculpate himself:

“In Ben Rogers's hayloft. He lets me, and so does his pap's nigger man, Uncle Jake. I tote water for Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and any time I ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he can spare it. That's a mighty good nigger, Tom. He likes me, becuz I don't ever act as if I was above him. Sometimes I've set right down and eat with him. But you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady thing.”³⁵

That it is Ben Rogers who in Huckleberry Finn says that Pap “used to lay drunk wth the hogs in the tanyard, but he hadn't been seen in these parts for a year or more”’ (HF 10) is revealing. The member of Tom Sawyer's gang who shows himself best informed concerning the elder Finn's accustomed home can be thought to have known that his own father has formerly permitted Huck to share housing with the Rogers family's “nigger man, Uncle Jake.”

Reflecting upon Huckleberry Finn for his lecture-readings a decade after its publication, Twain said the book illustrated “the proposition that in a crucial moral emergency a sound heart is a safer guide than an ill-trained conscience.” Huck enacts the struggle between the innocence of the West and the prescribed values of the East; the book has at its center a conflict “where a sound heart & a deformed conscience come into a collision & conscience suffers a defeat.”³⁶ In this vindication of natural goodness, the frontier son of a no-account father is designated a social outcast by more than his youth, his lack of approved lineage and the dissolute ways of his Pap. In drawing upon widely shared “scientific” concepts of shared ethnic features and their genetic transmission that he had made his own, Twain stigmatized the Finns as Irish-Americans and made what would be perceived as Huck's racial legacy a means of identifying him with the black. Ironically, the process of moral growth that ends in his coming to appreciate his common humanity with Jim has its beginning in society's and Twain's at least subconscious belief in the two fugitives sharing negative hereditary racial similarities.

Notes

1. It is perhaps worth noting that Joyce makes several references to Huckleberry Finn in Finnegans Wake. See Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of “Finnegans Wake” (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), p. 92.

2. James L. Colwell, “Huckleberries and Humans: On the Naming of Huckleberry Finn,” PMLA, 86 (Jan. 1971), 70-76. The quotation is from page 72.

3. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 6, 50. Subsequent citations to this edition are given parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation HF.

4. Huckleberry Finn, p. 124. On American slave custom's following Egyptian practice, see The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, ed. Michael Patrick Hearn (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1981), p. 156n.

5. Staunch Caledonian nationalists may insist that Douglas is a Scots name.

6. Beaver, Huckleberry Finn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 80, 81.

7. Fishkin, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African American Voices (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993) pp. 13-14, 16-19, 21-27, 40-49.

8. John Lauber, The Inventions of Mark Twain (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), p. 115. On the dialects of the novel, see David Carkeet, “The Dialects in Huckleberry Finn,” American Literature, 51 (1979), 315-32; Lee A. Pederson, “Negro Speech in The Adventures Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain Journal, 13 (1965), 1-4; and Curt M. Rulon, “Geographical Delimitation of the Dialect Areas in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain Journal, 14 (Winter 1967-68), 9-12.

9. See the essays collected in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993). Sheila T. Cavanagh's essay “‘The fatal destiny of that land’: Elizabethan Views of Ireland,” pp. 116-31, treats the views of Spenser, Camion, and Davies.

10. Nicholas Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 30 (1973), 575-98; The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565-76 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976); Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 103-33; William Christie MacLeod, “Celt and Indian: Britain's Old World Frontier in Relation to the New” in Beyond the Frontier: Social Process and Cultural Change, ed. Paul Bohannan and Fred Plog (Garden City: Natural History Press, 1967), pp. 25-41; Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World (New York: Viking, 1964), pp. 167-73.

11. On the much-disputed name for immigrants from Ulster of Scottish stock, see Malkdwyn A. Jones, “The Scotch-Irish in British America,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 284-85.

12. The phrase describing the father's demeanor is Twain's own, several of which are cited by Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 67. On John Marshall Clemens' birth and the earlier history of the family, see Raymond Martin Bell, The Ancestry of Samuel Clemens, Grandfather of Mark Twain (Washington, Pa.: privately printed, 1984), pp. 7, 26-27.

13. In a remarkable show of boldness, Jim plays upon the term's social content. When Huck lies to mock the slave's readiness to interpret dreams, Jim replies by chastizing him. In answer to Huck's challenge that he tell the symbolic meaning of rubbish heaped on the raft, Jim takes the literal form as the point of departure for applying to Huck the social-moral metaphor that white society would have used in describing the Finns: “Dat truck is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes ‘em ashamed” (HF 105).

14. Blair, Mark Twain & Huck Finn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960), pp. 10-11, 55, 103, 107-108; Wecter, p. 150; Mark Twain's Autobiography, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper, 1924), II, 174-75.

15. Clemens, Letter of April 16, 1867, San Francisco Alta California, May 26, 1867, p. 1, as printed in Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown, ed. Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane (New York: Knopf, 1940), p. 144.

16. Clemens, Life on the Mississippi, The Writings of Mark Twain, Japan Edition (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1899), IX, 144; Wecter, p. 150; Mark Twain's Letters to Will Bowen (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1941), pp. 38-39.

17. Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom, ed. Walter Blair (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p. 245.

18. The anti-Catholicism evident in A Connecticut Yankee is therefore beside the point here.

19. It hardly needs to be noted that, at a time when Irish-American priests would likely have insisted that only a saint's name was appropriate at baptism, his sacramental sponsors would have had to acknowledge that there is no St. Huckleberry of record. Walter Blair thought that Huck's familiar name was no more than a nickname. It is not clear whether Twain, who did not see or taste huckleberries until he visited Hartford in 1868, knew the term's slang connotation of backward or rural (Blair 12; Colwell 71).

20. George E. Ryan, “Shanties and Shiftlessness: Immigrant Irish of Henry Thoreau,” Eire-Ireland, 13 (1978), 54-78.

21. Edwin McDowell, “From Twain, a Letter on Debt to the Blacks,” New York Times, 14 March 1985, I, p. 16; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Twain, in '85,” New York Times, 15 Feb. 1985, p. A 17.

22. Edgar Marques Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 36, 37-38.

23. Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 4, 15, 33; Mark Twain's Letters 1853-1866, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 11. See also Branch, p. 36.

24. Blair, p. 398n. It deserves noting that Twain's notes for his intended book refer to what seems another religious reclamation effort as “Reform Jimmy Finn (secretly).” Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques, ed. Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), pp. 152, 154.

25. Life on the Mississippi, p. 188.

26. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day, The Writings of Mark Twain, Japan Edition, (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1899), II, 20-34.

27. The secondary literature on comic aspects of the Irish stereotype is summarized by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, “National Stereotypes in English Literature: A Review of Research,” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 1 (1982), 101-06.

28. The Gilded Age, II, 27-28. The sketch appears in The Gilded Age (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1874), p. 306

29. Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers, 1867-1894, ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 174.

30. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ed. John C. Gerber et al. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), pp. 73-74.

31. Adventures of Tom Sawyer, p. 177.

32. L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1971), especially pp. 16-22, 58-64; Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 105-15, 174-77.

33. Curtis, pp. 58-60.

34. A list of the negative traits commonly attributed to both the Irish and blacks is given in John J. Appel, “From Shanties to Lace Curtains: The Irish Image in Puck, 1876-1910,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13 (1971), 368-69.

35. Tom Sawyer, p. 193.

36. Mark Twain Papers, Univ. of California Library, Berkeley, Notebook 28a [I], typescript, p. 35, quoted in Huckleberry Finn, pp. 806-07.