SOURCE: “‘Iron Dudes and White Savages in Camelot’: The Influence of Dime-Novel Sensationalism on Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,” in American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, Vol. 27, No. 1, Fall, 1994, pp. 42-58.

[In the essay below, Pfitzer argues that Twain transformed the formulaic components of dime novels into a masterpiece of literature.]

In the summer of 1884, Mark Twain was enjoying a rare moment of self-satisfaction. Having just finished writing the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after long delays, he was hard at work on a sequel which by contrast seemed to be writing itself—a western novel tentatively entitled Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians.¹ Fulfilling Huck's promise to “light out for the Territory” at the conclusion of Huck Finn, Twain sends his rambunctious hero out West to experience life among “the Injuns.”² In preparation for this relocation of Huck from the soggy riverbanks of the Midwest to dusty prairies of the frontier, Twain devoted the early part of the summer of 1884 to reading every “western adventure” on which he could lay his hands. Part of his strategy was to pester his business agent, Charles Webster, for any books he could find on the subject. “Dear Charley,” Twain wrote in June, “Send to me, right away, a book by Lieut Col Dodge U.S.A., [and] … several other personal narratives of life & adventure out yonder on the Plains & in the Mountains, if you can run across them, especially life among the Indians. … I mean to take Huck Finn out there.”³ By mid-summer the “Injun books” had arrived, and shortly thereafter, according to Walter Blair, the first eight-and-a-half chapters of the novel were completed.⁴ Writing nearly 240 double-spaced manuscript pages in less than two weeks, the normally guarded Twain was confident enough about his progress to announce to his close friend William Dean Howells that a “new story (Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians 40 or 50 years ago)” was well under way.⁵

But then, mysteriously, Twain's “tank” ran dry, and he suddenly stopped work on the western novel. Offering no explanation to either his editor or Howells, he simply abandoned the project altogether, dismissing the season as a complete loss from a literary point of view. “This is the first summer which I have lost,” he wrote dejectedly to Webster in early September. “I haven’t a paragraph to show for my 3-months' working session. And Twain's rejection was complete; he never wrote an additional line of text for the aborted novel. The manuscript remained buried amidst his private papers until it was published merely as a curiosity piece nearly six decades after his death.⁶

What caused this change in attitude on the part of Twain toward Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians? Various theories have been offered through the years to explain the abandonment. His first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, believed that Twain simply lost interest in the story, as he had in the case of dozens of other unfinished works.⁷ Walter Blair argues that Twain may have sensed he was borrowing too liberally from the western sources his agent had supplied and that the attendant loss of originality was too much of a sacrifice for him to make.⁸ And Wayne Kime has recently echoed the contention of others (including Blair) that Twain had painted himself into a literary corner of sorts by allowing themes of adolescent infatuation and love to spill over (indiscreetly by Victorian standards) into a discussion of mature sexual relationships and even sexual violence.⁹ To this list of intrinsic reasons as to why Twain abandoned Among the Indians, we might add yet another more extrinsic cause: Twain's acute understanding of the literary marketplace for western novels in the 1880s. Having spent the summer of 1884 working on his western tale, Twain seems to have sensed, correctly perhaps, that the market for such works was becoming saturated. As late as the early 1870s, when Twain completed his western travelogue Roughing It (1872), it was still possible to say something personal and original about the American West.¹⁰ By the mid-1880s, however, so many Americans had either experienced the West firsthand or absorbed its themes through mass-produced narratives, that it became a nearly insurmountable task to write anything about the region without falling into highly prescribed, formulaic modes of literary expression. Indeed, by the 1880s, the western “motif” had become so conventionalized that it began to parody itself in melodramatic comic operas like Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and in hundreds of quickly written western dime-novels in which “endless repetitions” of plot, themes and stock characters contributed to a perversion of form and function. Originality in the dime-novel market had become increasingly a matter of distortion and sensationalism.¹¹

Examples of the deleterious effects of these tendencies were everywhere available to Twain, but perhaps nowhere more glaringly than in the career of his acquaintance, the dime-novelist Edward S. Ellis. A New Jersey school teacher turned writer, Ellis was one of the most popular novelists of his day; his careful novel Seth Jones (1860) sold over four hundred thousand copies and helped to create the initial demand for western narratives.¹² But steadily over the 1870s and 1880s, Ellis's novels demonstrated not only a certain hurriedness of presentation, but a growing dependence on sensational violence and death as well. Murder, rape, and brutal assault became standard plot devices for Ellis, who seemed to view them as necessary for securing of readers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. In his controversial novel The Huge Hunter; or the Steam Man of the Prairies (1882), for instance, Ellis altered a prosaic earlier story about eastern fortune seekers looking for gold out West by introducing a cast of bizarre characters who act out unusual dramas in a theatre of the grotesque and the absurd. The central hero of the novel is a perverse Natty Bumppo figure named Baldy Bicknell, whose strange appellation derives from his having survived a scalping by the Indians. A horribly disfigured reminder of the savagery of the West, Baldy must wear a hat at all times lest he be exposed to the sweltering western sun or the equally blistering taunts of relentlessly critical western miners. Baldy's sidekick is a young, hunchbacked and fatherless boy, the ingenious inventor Johnny Brainerd, who is incapable of participating in the hard physical work of “winning the West” because of his deformities, but who tries (with mixed results) to lend his technological expertise to the effort. Johnny is the creator of a still more curious travelling companion, an enormous iron robot dubbed the “Steam Man of the Prairies,” who marches across the plains intimidating Indians and expediting the work of mining. In their disturbing travels, these motley adventurers participate in the slaughter of animals, the mutilation of human bodies, and mass death by scalding, all in the pursuit of pecuniary gain.¹³

While works such as The Huge Hunter remained popular with audiences throughout the 1880s, their excesses did not go unnoticed. Ellis was one of many dime novelists assailed by parents and various public watchdogs who viewed highly sensationalist works as corrupting to the morals of American youth. A highly publicized court case in which a fourteen-year-old murderer of children blamed his violent nature on reading Beadle's western dime novels, for instance, sparked a campaign by prominent figures against the publisher.¹⁴ In an article entitled “What Our Boys Are Reading,” William Graham Sumner argued that the literary material of dime-novels “is either intensely stupid, or spiced to the highest degree with sensation.” Family values were ignored, while boys were taught to respond only to the “indescribably vulgar” impulses of “physical pain and lack of money.”¹⁵ In Childhood in Literature and Art, Horace Scudder declared that “[a]nyone who has been compelled to make the acquaintance of this literature must have observed how little parents and guardians figure in it, and how completely children are separated from their elders. The most popular books for the young are those which represent boys and girl as seeking their fortune, working out their own schemes, driving railway trains and steamboats it may be. …”¹⁶ And violent western novels remained a particular target of the disgruntled, self-proclaimed moralist Anthony Comstock, who noted in Traps for the Young that adventure stories of the prairies encouraged children to “run away from respectable homes … to seek their fortune[s]” in the West, where they inevitably degenerated into “boy-bandits” and “little villains.”¹⁷

Twain may have felt particularly vulnerable to this line of criticism as he sketched his tale of western adventure in the summer of 1884. Gary Scharnhorst and others have noted that long before the writing of Among the Indians, Twain had been linked in the popular mind to the excesses of writers like Horatio Alger, Jr., with whom he shared a mutual interest in the themes of abandoned or orphaned boys and a common attachment to the cult of sentimentality.¹⁸ Twain's association with so-called “juvenile” writers was strengthened by the publication of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel viewed by those who condemned it in Boston as “no better in tone than the dime novels which flood the blood-and-thunder reading population.”¹⁹ Compounding problems for Twain in this regard was his well-publicized reputation as an avid reader of dime-novels. To the disgust of his wife and others, Twain often entertained his children with recitations from such books and studied their reactions in preparation for the planning of his own works. A process of literary adaptation was evident in 1881, for instance, when Twain asked James Osgood to send him several of his company's dime-novel sea stories, including “Tom Cringle's Log,” “Green Hand,” “Sailor's Sweetheart,” and “The Cruise of the Midge.” Although ostensibly for his children, these “juvenile” novels encouraged Twain to begin writing a never-completed “Tom and Huck” story “concerning an elaborate boys' naval battle on rafts in the river.”²⁰ Additionally, the overstated melodrama of the maritime scenes in many of these nautical dime novels also found a place in completed works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Twain's reliance on sensationalized steamboat accidents caused some critics to wonder at the sophistication of his literary preparation and sourcework.²¹

In the summer of 1884, Twain may well have been reading dime-novels again in preparation for the writing of Among the Indians, since the completed chapters of the partial novel share a great deal in common with the sensationalist novels produced in record numbers throughout the 1880s. Twain's piece begins innocently enough when a hopelessly romantic Tom Sawyer persuades a reluctant Huck and a suspicious Jim to journey in search of “Cooperesque” Indians out on the western plains and to partake in whatever related “adventures” might materialize along the way. The rag-tag trio stumble along the Oregon trail in blissful ignorance of the “rules of the road,” until they meet and befriend the family of Old Man Mills, with whose daughter, Peggy, they fall simultaneously in love. But the tone of Among the Indians suddenly changes in the third chapter when Indians murder all the males in the Mills caravan and take Jim and two of the Mills daughters (including Peggy) as captives to the heart of the Indian territory. The discovery by Huck and Tom of the Mills brothers “laying dead—tomahawked and scalped,” each with as many as “twenty-five arrows sticking in him,” divests them quickly of their preconceptions of Indians as “noble savages,” and the boys spend the remainder of the fast-paced and increasingly violent novel in pursuit of these treacherous kidnappers. In this work, the boys are accompanied by Peggy's fiancé, Brace Johnson, whose arrival on the plains several days after the grizzly murders signals an escalation of the sensational and violent themes to which Huck and Jim are subjected. Brace not only exposes Huck to death by starvation, gunshot wound and drowning, he also introduces the themes of mature love and violent sexuality into the innocent, prepubescent worlds of Huck and Tom. It is Brace, that is, who by definition of his relationship with Peggy, destroys Huck and Tom's adolescent hopes for playful love-making with her; and it is Brace whose insinuations of the possible rape of Peggy by the Indians awakens the boys to the potential of violence and perversity in mature sexual relationships.²²

Even The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with its frank treatment of the injustices of slavery and its gruesome handling of the alcohol-induced death of “Pap” Finn, did not come close to matching the macabre sensationalism of these early chapters of Among the Indians. Clearly, by the summer of 1884, Twain was drifting dangerously close to the brutal excesses of Ellis's dime-novel format, and the uncompleted chapters of the narrative demanded some form of violent resolution. Recycled heroes like Huck, Tom and Jim, in short, did not lend themselves very well to this new, more “fatal environment of the West,” and even the resourceful Twain could not protect them from the dreadful implications of the rape of Peggy Mills to which all plot lines in the final written chapter were pointing.²³ And the seeming inevitability of such a barbarous conclusion may explain why, after a summer of work on Among the Indians, Twain abandoned the novel. Concerned about the violent implications of the story he was writing and sensitive to the charges of extremism being raised against western dime-novelists, he wisely repressed the piece. Twain was not afraid to experiment with controversial writing techniques, but he was generally unwilling to publish any but the most conventional of products of these efforts. In this, as in many literary matters, Twain trusted his own good instincts, since too close an association with the potentially insidious influence of the dime-novel tradition almost certainly would have affected his literary reputation in the way it had those of Ellis and others.²⁴

In addition, Twain's notebooks from the mid-1880s indicate that he was being distracted by several new ideas of a less controversial nature. In his journal for 1885, for instance, he described a story “wherein the pantaletted little children talked the stilted big-word sentimental hifalutin of Walter Scott's heroes & other & older novels.”²⁵ Shortly thereafter, he read Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d’Arthur, which inspired him to consider elaborating on his Walter Scott theme: “Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the middle ages,” he wrote in his now much-quoted shorthand. “Have the notions and habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. … Iron gets red hot in the sun—leaks in the rain, gets white with frost and freezes me solid in winter. … Can’t dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down, can’t get up.”²⁶ These comical remarks became the inspiration for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the work that engaged Twain for the next five years and seemingly deflected forever his interest in the Huck and Tom story, Among the Indians.²⁷

Yet to paraphase Twain himself, reports of his novel's death may “have been greatly exaggerated.” Not in the habit of giving up on anything he had written if he could make some literary or monetary use of it, Twain frequently resurrected “dead” fragments, reshaping and recontextualizing them to fit new circumstances. In these matters, alterations were often made by Twain in accordance with the perceived needs of his readers and his own shifting priorities as an author. In the case of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians, Twain made eventual use of his western research and manuscript by dramatically adjusting both the setting and the thematic trajectory of the story. If the market for western adventure stories seemed too saturated for Twain's purposes or if it required too many literary concessions of a sort Twain was unwilling to make, that is, he might nonetheless transfer its hackneyed themes and characters to other, more fertile literary grounds—in this case, the Arthurian England of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. As T. Jackson Lears and others have demonstrated, Twain was an “anti-modernist” in philosophical outlook and was therefore obsessed with the medieval world as a setting for literary speculations about human development. The middle ages served as a point of reference, a lodestone for consideration by disenchanted Victorians of “where it had all gone wrong.”²⁸ For Twain, as for the wizard Merlin in his new novel, travelling backward in time helped clarify America's place on the historical continuum; it highlighted the causal relations between a “golden” past and a jaded present. In this sense, the spirit and even the subject matter of Twain's older, aborted western novel may have informed his new medieval one in highly significant ways. The disturbingly violent qualities of the American West had their roots, Twain believed, in the decline of the human condition since the time of knights and round tables.

On the surface, of course, a novel set in sixth century England would appear to owe little literary debt to a nineteenth-century adventure tale undertaken by Huck, Tom, and Jim in the American West. But as Richard Slotkin and others have pointed out, there are a considerable number of western elements in A Connecticut Yankee.²⁹ When Twain's disoriented time-travelling hero, Hank Morgan, lands in the sixth century, for instance, he describes his surroundings in the only vocabulary available to him for the description of the unusual and the bizarre—that of the American West. Morgan identifies the primitive residents of Camelot as “white Indians” and “modified savages” who hold “powwows” and slink “stealthily” around sabotaging the work of western civilization.³⁰ Men in King Arthur's kingdom are, in Morgan's words, “a sort of polished-up court of Comanches,” while the typical woman is a “squaw” who is “ready at the dropping of a hat to desert to the buck with the biggest string of scalps at his belt” (138). The knights of the round table are depicted as iron-clad “cowboys,” who spend their days “on the trail” in search of adventure and mischief (136). And ultimately these transplanted cowboys and Indians will submit only to the brutally violent and vindictive “law of the West.” Hence, Hank Morgan becomes a lariat-slinging cowhand, Slim Jim, who must lasso knights and gun down dissenters in dramatic “high-noon” fashion in order to maintain his reputation as top gun of Camelot. In addition, he subdues the “red” hordes of the kingdom by using six-shooters and gatling guns in ways strikingly similar to those recorded in the western campaigns against the Indians (357). And, revealingly, the fate of these Arthurian cowboys and Indians is the same as that of their western analogues on the American frontier—they refuse to submit to technologies packaged as tools of “progress,” so they must die pathetically in a desperate and hopeless attack against them.

Read in this fashion, the last scene of A Connecticut Yankee is particularly significant, since it becomes a kind of Custer's Last Stand in which the Indian nation achieves a temporary victory but is ultimately defeated.³¹ As Hank Morgan is surrounded by massive numbers of knight-cowboys and peasant-Indians, he receives the fatal news that “there would be no reinforcements” and instantly understands that “this is the last stand of the chivalry of England” (396). In an impassioned speech paraphrasing General Sherman's remarks regarding good Indians and dead Indians, Morgan tells his small circle of supporters that the impending war “will be brief—the briefest in history. Also the most destructive to life, considered from the standpoint of proportion of casualties to numbers engaged.” In this war of absolute attrition, Morgan proclaims: “We know what is before us. While one of these men remains alive, our task is not finished, the war is not ended. We will kill them all” (396). Substitute Indian nation for English nation, and you have a neat paraphrase of the U.S. Army attitude toward the Indians of the American West. In this final symbolic standoff, Hank Morgan manages to kill many of the sixth-century Indians who encircle him, but ultimately he becomes the ironic victim of his own genocidal successes. Surrounded by lifeless warriors, he has no means of escape; like Custer, he is entombed behind a “solid wall of dead” (403).

If A Connecticut Yankee is a variant of the westernized adventure tale, then it should not be surprising to find in its pages the violence and sensationalism of the dime-novel format as well. By the 1880s, the American West may have become too stale and predictable a locale for the meaningful presentation of extraordinary themes; but medieval England provided new, fresh ground for such literary demonstrations. While genteel Americans like Sumner, Scudder and Comstock preferred to think of the American West as a region capable of reform, that is, nearly everyone was willing to believe that the medieval world was a shockingly crude and inescapably brutal place.³² Hence for Twain it was an easy transition from the dime-novel massacre and rape scenes in Among the Indians to the scenes of torture and death in A Connecticut Yankee, especially those involving enslavement, persecution in dungeons, and death by “the rack” at the hands of “white savages.” Huck and Hank, alliterative counterparts, share a similar revulsion for the excesses of the savage people they seek to control, and both try to employ superstition and melodramatic suspense to accomplish their goals. Both novels adopt standard literary devices common to conventionalized western novels as well, including frontier romances, horse stealing, picaresque journeying, and “codes” of proper behavior. And for Twain, the transition from the American West to Arthurian England was made easier by the prodigious research notes he had accumulated in the process of writing Among the Indians. Transposing western themes onto medieval landscapes may have been as simple a matter as shifting one stack of notes on his crowded desk over to another and shuffling the two together.³³

Among the pieces Twain may have resurrected from his pile of western material was Ellis's The Huge Hunter. There is a good deal of evidence internal to both Ellis's novel and Twain's A Connecticut Yankee to suggest at least a shared community of ideas between the two authors, if not a direct literary relationship. One obvious parallel is the central theme common to both works—the transplanting of advanced technology from one era into the anachronistic time frame of another. The Steam Man is described by Ellis as “a singular apparition,” a “gigantic man” of such “colossal proportions” that it could “scarcely” be “dreamed of at that day, by the most imaginative philosophers” (108). The closest analogy nineteenth-century viewers of this giant “Titan” can employ to describe the Steam Man is the railroad, a symbol with powerful metaphoric significance for the culture. Spouting “a black volume of smoke” and cinders from its head and shrieking “with the sharp screech of the locomotive whistle” (108) as it moved, the Steam Man was “a sort of peregrinating locomotive,” Ellis writes, which could carry a wagon behind it “as smoothly as if running upon a railroad” (109). The robot has anthropomorphic qualities as well: a face of iron painted black with “a pair of fearful eyes, and a tremendous grinning mouth”; a chest of “aldermanic proportions” with a large knapsack arrangement over the shoulders and back for the transfer of energy from the “bowels” and “capacious abdomen of the giant”; and a reserve chamber for the build up of excess steam, which gave him a “seething” appearance, as if “ready to explode with the tremendous power pent up in its vitals” (113 …).

This precise mechanical description of the Steam Man reflected Ellis's awareness of the technological maturity of his readers and suggested his recognition of their interests in the dynamics of machine operation. Twain was intrigued by mechanical matters as well; indeed, his tastes in this regard were perhaps more grandiose and farfetched than even Ellis's. In the case of A Connecticut Yankee, technological achievement was both cause and effect, serving as both the central thematic inspiration for the novel and its intended method of production. In this connection, the well-known story of Twain's disastrous involvement with the Paige typesetting machine during the writing of A Connecticut Yankee is significant.³⁴ Having invested over two hundred thousand dollars on Paige's machine during the late 1880s—a machine being built in the same Colt Arms factory where Twain's fictional “Connecticut Yankee” is employed—Twain intended to conflate the progress of his novel with that of Paige's invention. “I want to finish the day the machine finishes,” Twain wrote, once again too hopefully. After an unsuccessful attempt to typeset (of all pieces!) the unfinished manuscript of Among the Indians, Twain grew despondent about the machine's success. The typesetter ultimately proved “impossibly delicate and temperamental,” Justin Kaplan wrote, “having been conceived … as an organism rather than a machine.” A “magnificent creature” with a “gargantuan appetite,” Paige's “creature,” like Ellis's Steam Man, occasionally worked “with all the ease and celerity that it could have done if really human” (112); but it was also at times a “cunning devil,” as Twain put it, which evinced uncontrollable and corrupting power.³⁵ The Paige typesetter was a real equivalent to Ellis's “demon of the darkness,” “a divil, broke loose” (108), whose “ear-splitting” screech was “hideous enough to set a man crazy” (112).

The theme of technology run amuck is central to A Connecticut Yankee, and Twain derived considerable comedic effect from depicting the sometimes silly human reactions to machine failures. The same playfulness is evident in Ellis's descriptions of the impact of technology on Irishman Mickey McSquizzle, a hypersensitive miner who is filled with “superstitious awe” when he first sees the Steam Man. Wondering aloud whether he is “shlaping or dhraming” and shying instinctively away from the machine “as the timid steed does at first sight of the locomotive,” Mickey declares: “I’m so frightened entirely that I don’t know who I am myself” (108). As a representative of the natural over the mechanistic, Mickey has but one feeble defense against the obdurate machine—ridicule. Adopting this old-fashioned and sentimental (even medieval) attitude toward machinery, Mickey shares much in common both with Ellis's “red savages” and Boss Morgan's “white savages,” groups that respond with initial but shortlived contempt to the new technologies introduced into their “natural” landscapes. “The savages sat as motionless as statues upon their horses,” Ellis notes of their first encounter with the Steam Man, until, recognizing too late the machine's awesome power, they were forced to run “as though all the legions of darkness were after them.” With Twain-like wit, Ellis muses that it was just a matter of time before these savages “would have tumbled off their horses and died, for they were bearing almost all the fright, terror and horror that can possibly be concentrated into a single person” (113).

This terrifying side of technology had its obvious advantages to the harbingers of machinery—the “Connecticut Yankees” in both works—who are able to use this fear as leverage for what they want. Ellis's Connecticut Yankee, Ethan, is the first to be shaken from the superstitious fears associated with the Steam Man. When he and his companion Mickey first hear the terrifying shriek of the robot, which “like some agonized giant came home to them across the plains,” they “both looked around, as if about to flee in terror.” But in the case of Ethan, “the curiosity of the Yankee restrained him. His practical eye saw that whatever it might be, it was a human contrivance, and there could be nothing supernatural about it.” As the machine approached still closer, “Mickey sprung a half dozen feet backward, and would have run off at full speed down the ravine, had not Ethan Hopkins caught his arm.” Immediately familiarizing himself with the internal mechanisms of the creation, Ethan reveals that he had dreamed of manufacturing just such a steam man himself once, inspired by the engineering achievements of the inventors at none other than “the Colt's pistol factory” in Hartford, Boss Morgan's employer at the outset of A Connecticut Yankee (108). It is Ethan who immediately recognizes how useful such a machine could be in the West, and who insists that it remain “terra incognita” to the Indians—“clothed with a terror such as no array of enemies could wear” and such that they would “keep at a goodly distance from it entirely” (113). Boss Morgan also understands the powerful force of technology on his subjects in Camelot. This “Yankee of Yankees,” who is a self-described pragmatist (“nearly barren of sentiment”), determines to “boss” the sixth century, where he will be “the best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years” (50).

In addition, Boss Morgan bears a remarkable physical as well as symbolic resemblance to the Steam Man. Donning a suit of armor in accordance with the impractical dress code of the ruling elite in Camelot, Morgan is hideously uncomfortable as an “iron dude” of the realm (119). But he continues to wear the torturous outfit, because, like Ellis's Steam Man, it gives him a certain stature and intimidating presence. Lighting his pipe in an effort to distract the bugs that fly mercilessly about his helmet (with tobacco of the sort “the Indians use” we are told), Morgan startles those around him in the same manner as Ellis's iron terror of the prairies. “When the first blast of smoke shot out through the bars of my helmet, all those people broke for the woods,” Morgan records, and one, like Ellis's Indians, “went over backwards and struck the ground with a dull thud” (131-32). Instantly recognizing that his constituents are filled with superstitions about this “fire-belching dragon,” Morgan gains an advantage by telling them it “was only a bit of enchantment which would do harm to none but my enemies” (131). When he is attacked subsequently by a large group of threatened but headstrong knights and squires, he imitates the Steam Man by spouting “a column of white smoke through the bars” of his helmet, compelling them to “go to pieces and scatter!” (133). And this superstitious air must be preserved, Morgan recognizes, even if it means creating a sideshow atmosphere. Reflecting some of the sensationalism of the dime-novel format, Twain's Morgan becomes a ringmaster of a circus of freaks and misfits whom he manipulates for his own private gain. In this way, he is reminiscent of Ellis's Baldy Bicknell, who urges Johnny Brainerd to make money with the Steam Man by marketing him as “Barnum … did … his Woolly Horse” (113).

That Twain made use of Ellis's themes seems even more clear when we consider the common moral message that emerges from the two pieces. Boss Morgan's effort to push technology in the sixth century leads to disaster, since the people are not ready for his innovations. Power, especially technological power, still clearly corrupts. Having developed a railroad, a telephone, a telegraph, and a line of steamboats that puff up and down the Thames, Morgan is discouraged to find that they are viewed consistently as objects of fear. In Ellis's fictional world, the nineteenth century seems no better prepared to embrace new inventions than Twain's savages, despite a smug public belief to the contrary. Noting that Robert Fulton's steamboat created “a consternation and terror” when it first ascended the Hudson (“many believing that it was the harbinger of the final destruction of the world”), Ellis editorialized: “Of course, at this late day, no such excitement can be created by any human invention.” Yet Johnny Brainerd's Steam Man was too futuristic even for a nation of self-proclaimed tinkerers to accept. “[T]he sight of a creature speeding over the country, impelled by steam, and bearing a grotesque resemblance to a gigantic man, could not but startle all who should see it for the first time,” (112) Ellis wrote. And such suspicions were held not merely by the Mickey McSquizzles or by the Plains Indians, but by men of the western world like Baldy Bicknell as well. Like the discouraged Twain, jaded by the failure of his Paige typesetter, Baldy anticipates the tragic disappointment of machine technologies. “[T]hese new-fangled things generally do well at first,” Bicknell notes, “and then, afore yer know it, they bu'st all to blazes” (112).

Machines are dangerous, both Twain and Ellis imply, because they lead to false feelings of security and power. In A Connecticut Yankee, Boss Morgan is certain that his sixth-century subjects need only have exposure to technology in order to be converted to its benefits. Throughout the novel he daydreams about the empire he will establish by putting operations like mining “on a scientific basis” (102), training “iron and steel missionaries” (101), and establishing himself as President. Comforting as these visions of a machine metropolis are, however, they distract Hank Morgan from the real dangers swirling all around him. Toward the end of A Connecticut Yankee, as he and his compatriots are being surrounded by enemies of the realm, the Boss sees “a row of black dots” appear along a ridge and correctly speculates that they are “human heads.” But Morgan quickly rejects the image (with disastrous consequences), arguing that “it mightn’t be anything at all” since “you can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus” (401). Johnny Brainerd of The Huge Hunter also has delusionary empire-building visions and experiences the dangers of overindulgence in this regard. While riding atop the Steam Man and imagining the creation of a “steam” animal world, with steam horses, steam birds and other animal contraptions, Johnny is thrown “with violence” from his invention, “falling directly between the legs of the monster, which seemed to stand perfectly motionless like the intelligent elephant that is fearful of stirring a limb, lest he might crush his master lying beneath him” (112). The fatalistic aspects of flirtations with creationism of this circus variety appear again, when, in the midst of another technological reverie, Johnny endangers his companions by failing to notice a band of Indians that has surrounded them. Like the whalers in Melville's Moby-Dick who allow themselves to descend into “Cartesian vortices” while daydreaming at sea, Johnny slips into “a reverie” and becomes “totally oblivious to whatever was passing around him.” As “a drowsiness began stealing over him,” Johnny imagines he sees “the black shadows of wolves” (which are actually encircling Indians); but like Hank Morgan, he discounts the vision because “he was sure it was only a phantom of his brain” (120). It is the hubris and negligence of both Johnny and Hank that ultimately leads to the downfall of their respective technological kingdoms.

In the final scene of A Connecticut Yankee already alluded to, the catastrophic nature of rushed technology becomes painfully evident. Trapped in a cave by “white Indians” and “cowboy knights,” Morgan and a small gang of supporters imagine themselves safe. “They won’t drop any rocks down on us,” (388) Morgan notes naively from within the comforting walls of his symbolic maternal womb. But shortly thereafter, Morgan is forced to blow up his “noble civilisation-factories” and to precipitate the “Gatling gun” mass destruction of his kingdom's knights. In the process, once living, breathing and easily manipulated human beings are fused into an inhuman, anonymous and impenetrable steel barrier. “Of course, we could not count the dead,” Morgan notes, “because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogeneous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons” (396). In an early scene in Ellis's dime-novel, the heroes are also trapped in a cave by Indians and remain “penned up for the better part of two days, by which time they had slain so many of their enemies that the remaining ones were glad to withdraw” (117). They manage to escape, only to be trapped again by the same Indians, who entomb them in a valley by sealing off the only entrance with a wall of boulders. So “thoroughly imprisoned that no human aid could ever extricate him,” the Steam Man must be sacrificed. Johnny, who has gotten his fellows in this mess, conceives a plan to stoke the Steam Man full of logs and to rush him at the wall the Indians have created. In a scene of destruction hauntingly anticipatory of Twain's Battle of the Sand-Belt, Ellis describes the gruesome clash of technological and savage worlds. “The next moment it [the Steam Man] struck the bowlders with a terrific crash, … among the thunderstruck Indians [and] exploded its boiler! The shock of the explosion was like the bursting of an immense bomb-shell, the steam man being thrown into thousands of fragments, that scattered death and destruction in every direction. Falling in the very center of the crouching Indians, it could but make a terrible destruction of life, while those who escaped unharmed, were besides themselves with consternation” (120).

In the end, Ellis's story is slightly more hopeful than Twain's. Baldy, Ethan, Mickey and Johnny do escape the Indians and do get to keep the gold that the Steam man has helped them procure. Twain's Boss Morgan escapes in a manner of speaking, too, since he wakes up again in the nineteenth century in time to tell his tale of medieval woe, but he remains a man out of step with his culture by virtue of his time-travelling exploits. To the extent that both works are morality plays, The Huge Hunter and A Connecticut Yankee convey similar anti-modernist messages as well: namely, that the world is not really ready for technology, especially technology used for monetary gain; that Nature, whether described in the cloudy, romantic atmosphere of medieval Camelot or the dusty, frolicsome climate of the American West, must prevail over would-be technological conquerors; and that the premature introduction of machinery is always disastrous. While in production, Johnny's Steam Man must be hidden from view to avoid attracting attention, and it is transported to the West in a crate that serves as a metaphoric womb for the unlucky and unlovable creature. “Stripped of all its bandages” and placed in the fetal position for the purposes of packaging, the Steam man “had a grotesque and fearful look … in all its naked majesty” (112). Liberated prematurely from this protective encasing, the Steam Man, like some misunderstood Frankenstein monster, is unable to gain acceptance in the western world and must be destroyed. In A Connecticut Yankee, the iron-suited, technologically-driven Hank Morgan also finds it impossible to function in a pre-industrial age. Characterizing himself as “a creature out of a remote unborn age” (409), the Boss admits to being an anachronism, an ill-fated technological prophet born too soon to be appreciated by pre-technological societies.

So what do these equivalences between Twain and Ellis imply about Twain's scholarship in the 1880s? In the first place, they suggest that Twain had not completely abandoned his partial novel Among the Indians in the summer of 1884, but rather reworked it in the service of a larger and more impressive piece of fiction. Read as an example of literary cross-fertilization, A Connecticut Yankee calls attention to Twain's astute awareness of the vicissitudes of the literary marketplace both in America and abroad and to his keen abilities to restretch used and fatigued ideas over new frames to create lively and impressive narratives. In the second place, these overlaps suggest that Twain had not completely rejected the tropes, character-types and emplotments of the dime-novel format. In the process of writing A Connecticut Yankee, that is, Twain created a literary masterpiece by reviving hackneyed western dime-novel formulas and employing them in a new and richly complex historical setting. And in the third and most important place, these equivalences demonstrate Twain's ability to turn frustrations over disappointments in his own life (in this case about the Paige typesetting machine) into literary successes. At the time of its publication, Twain feared that A Connecticut Yankee would be attacked as too sensational by the critics who had dismantled the works of Ellis and others, and he downplayed his expectations for the novel.³⁶ But after re-reading the text years later, Twain was struck by the value of the project. “Yesterday I read ‘A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court’ for the first time in more than 30 years,” he wrote his daughter Clara in the spring of 1910, and “I am prodigiously pleased with it. …”³⁷ The same sentiment has been expressed by thousands of readers over the last century who have found in its pages indications of a sophisticated and creatively satiric literary mind struggling to control (but not to kill) its preoccupations with scandalously theatrical and potentially corrupting western dime-novel influences.

Notes

1. Mark Twain, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians, in Walter Blair, ed., Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck & Tom (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 92-140.

2. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. by Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 362.

3. Samuel C. Webster, ed., Mark Twain, Business Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), pp. 264-65.

4. Blair's contention that the manuscript was completed by the summer of 1884 has been challenged by some scholars who argue that portions of the fragment were composed as late as 1889. For a complete review of this debate, see “Appendix B,” in Hannibal, Huck & Tom, pp. 372-74. See also, Maria Ornella Marotti, The Duplicating Imagination: Twain and the Twain Papers (Penn State Univ. Press, 1990) and Howard G. Baetzhold, “The Course of Composition of A Connecticut Yankee: A Reinterpretation,” American Literature, 33 (May 1961), 195-214.

5. Henry N. Smith and William M. Gibson, eds., Mark Twain-Howells Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), II, 496.

6. Mark Twain to Charles Webster, 1 Sept 1884, in Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers, 1867-1894, ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 179.

7. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1912), pp. 899, 1680.

8. Walter Blair, “The Reasons Mark Twain Did Not Finish his Story,” Life (20 December 1968), p. 50A.

9. Wayne R. Kime, “Huck Among the Indians: Mark Twain and Richard Irving Dodge's The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants,” Western American Literature, 24 (1990), 321-33.

10. Twain himself was known to have read and admired such works as Keim's Sheridan's Troopers on the Borders (1870), Custer's My Life on the Plains (1874), and Richard Irving Dodge's The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants (1877).

11. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 92, 119. See also Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Dial Press, 1970), pp. 200-215.

12. For more on Ellis and his place in the western dime-novel tradition, see Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1950), II, 93-96.

13. Edward S. Ellis, The Huge Hunter; or the Steam Man of the Prairies (New York: Beadle and Adams, 1868; 1882 half-dime edition). Although first published in the late 1860s, the work did not become nationally popular until mass-produced in the tens of thousands by Beadle and Adams in the “half-dime” edition of 1882 cited in this paper. All subsequent references to this text will be given in parentheses.

14. J. N. Makris, Boston Murders (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1948), pp. 8-9, as cited in Albert Stone, Jr., The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination (Archon Books, 1970), p. 101.

15. William Graham Sumner, “What Our Boys Are Reading,” Scribner's Monthly (March 1878), as cited in Stone, The Innocent Eye, pp. 103-04.

16. Horace Elisha Scudder, Childhood in Literature and Art (1895) as cited in Stone, The Innocent Eye, pp. 105-08.

17. Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 32-33.

18. Gary Scharnhorst with Jack Bales, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 106-118.

19. Arthur L. Vogelback, “The Publication and Reception of Huckleberry Finn in America,” American Literature, 11 (Nov. 1939), 260-272. See also “The Banning of Huckleberry Finn,” in Critics on Mark Twain: Readings in Literary Criticism, ed. by David B. Kesterson (Coral Gables, Florida: Univ. of Miami Press, 1973), p. 17.

20. Mark Twain to James R. Osgood, 23 May 1881 in the Mark Twain Papers, as cited in Stone, The Innocent Eye, p. 161.

21. Many critics believe Twain intended Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Among the Indians as nothing more than extended dime-novels, “fast-paced narrative[s] meant mostly for boys”; see Stone, The Innocent Eye, p. 177.

22. Stone refers to Brace Johnson as “pure dime-novel stereotype” in ibid, p. 125. See also Blair, Hannibal, Huck & Tom, pp. 84-7.

23. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum Press, 1985), p. 521.

24. Blair concurs; see Hannibal, Huck & Tom, p. 84.

25. Notebook 18, pp. 21, 31 in The Mark Twain Papers, as cited in Stone, The Innocent Eye, p. 162.

26. Notebook 18, The Mark Twain Papers, p. 11.

27. Walter Blair, “An Unpublished Tale by Mark Twain,” Life (20 December 1968); insert, n.p.

28. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), pp. 164-166, 168.

29. Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, pp. 516-30. See also Kirsten Powell, “Cowboy Knights and Prairie Madonnas: American Illustrations of the Plains and Pre-Raphaelite Art,” Great Plains Quarterly 5 (Winter 1985), pp. 41, 42-43, 50-52.

30. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (New York: Penguin Books, paperback edition, 1984), pp. 53, 125, 317, 402. All subsequent references to this text will be given in parentheses.

31. Justin Kaplan, “Introduction,” in ibid, p. 22.

32. Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. xv-xx.

33. For more on Twain's chaotic filing system and unique working habits, see William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1910).

34. For Twain's own version of these events, see “The Machine Episode,” in Mark Twain's Autobiography, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1924), II, 70-78.

35. Justin Kaplan, Mark Twain and His World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 141, 148. See also “The Yankee and the Machine,” in Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), pp. 280-311.

36. In some instances, particularly in the British press, such attacks did occur. See especially “Mark Twain's Camelot,” Spectator, 64 (5 April 1890), p. 484; and James Ashcroft Noble, “Review of Connecticut Yankee,” Academy (London), 37 (22 February 1890), 130.

37. Clara Clemens, My Father Mark Twain (New York, 1931), p. 289, as cited in John B. Hoben, “Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee: A Genetic Study,” American Literature, 18 (1946), 197.