Hearn on Huck

Clarkson Potter's series of annotated classics is deservedly well-known. It began with Martin Gardner's superb Annotated Alice and has continued primarily with children's books, although it also includes Thoreau's Walden, Stoker's Dracula (written for adults but read mostly by morbid adolescents), and even an Annotated Shakespeare. The strengths and weaknesses of these books grow out of a policy that has clearly guided each annotator: to provide notes on practically everything from the outrageously obscure to the painfully obvious. One cannot read these books simply for the text, unless he is able to ignore note numbers beside every column of text, dozens of added illustrations, and annotations often much longer than the passages they explain. But if he uses the books to elucidate obscure points or to gratify the antiquarian pleasures of scholarship, he will find them interesting and often valuable.

Michael Hearn's Annotated Huckleberry Finn is one of the best of the series. Hearn's research into published material has been exhaustive; he has even found unreprinted newspaper interviews with Twain. His introduction, which covers Twain's life in outline and the history of the book in detail, is enlightening and judicious; it could have been improved only by a full discussion of the various interpretations of the book, and that would certainly have made the introduction disproportionately long. At only one point do I disagree with Hearn's introduction: on page 24 he says that contemporary reviewers who accepted "local color only reluctantly and only when written by James Russell Lowell found Twain's bad grammar and slang merely coarse and inelegant." If we take this statement literally, it says that those who tolerated dialect only in Lowell (The Biglow Papers?) did not tolerate it in other authors, which is akin to saying, "Those who like this sort of thing will find much here to like." But if we read into it the implication that most critics did not like local color and the attempt to reproduce dialect, I must disagree, for during this period such writers as George Washington Cable, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins, and others used dialect with little critical complaint. Hearn is surely correct that reviewers objected to Twain's use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn, but probably this was because the entire book is in dialect, rather than just scattered conversations. As Hearn points out, Huck must have seemed to superficial readers something like the works of Artemus Ward and his successors and was damned for that reason; the condemnation of Twain's novel was not, however, part of a general rejection of dialect.

The annotations are fascinating; there is little that Hearn does not clarify and there is evidence on practically every page of his extraordinary ability to discover obscure information. The publisher's policy of annotating everything has prevented the editor from developing a single coherent critical theory in his notes, but that is the fault of Potter, not Hearn; series policy has also forced the editor to annotate the obvious, such as a definition of "two bits" and an identification of King Solomon, and occasionally to include information that is interesting but does not help us to understand Twain: the note on "two bits" goes on to explain that this term originated in "the Spanish milled dollar of eight reals, or 'bits,'" an intriguing piece of information that focuses attention away from Twain's "bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store," despite the praiseworthy additional note that tells us what a Barlow knife is.

Hearn's notes on the Duke and the King are especially fine. He surveys the stories about the lost Dauphin and provides a full explanation of the implied obscenity of the King's performance in the "Thrilling Tragedy of THE KING'S CAMELOPARD or THE ROYAL NONESUCH!!!" Throughout the notes, the editor uses comments from Twain's correspondence and interviews. Unlike Hearn, I do not like Kemble's...