Mark Twain on the Brazilian Revolution: A Recovered Essay

On 15 November 1889, less than a month before the formal release of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court on December 12, with advance sheets of the novel already in the hands of some reviewers across the U.S. and Britain, the Brazilian monarchy collapsed in a military coup d’etat. Twain was both elated and alarmed. On the one hand, he celebrated the inauguration of the First Brazilian Republic. On the other hand, however, he feared he would be accused of merely aping incidents in Brazil in the final pages of his novel, where he described a similar uprising in Camelot. Only the month before, in fact, Twain had faced allegations that he had plagiarized the basic plot of A Connecticut Yankee from Max Adeler’s novella The Fortunate Island (1881).¹ To preempt the charge that he had also stolen the ending of his novel from the headlines, he wrote Sylvester Baxter of the Boston Herald on November 20 to deny he had been influenced by current events:

You already have the advance sheets of my forthcoming book in your hands. If you will turn to about the five hundredth page, you will find a state paper of my Connecticut Yankee in which he announces the dissolution of King Arthur’s monarchy and proclaims the English Republic.² Compare it with the state paper which announces the downfall of the Brazilian monarchy and proclaims the Republic of the United States of Brazil, and stand by to defend the Yankee from plagiarism. There is merely a resemblance of ideas, nothing more. The Yankee’s proclamation was already in print a week ago. This is merely one of those odd coincidences which are always turning up. Come, protect the Yank from that cheapest and easiest of all charges—plagiarism. Otherwise, you see, he will have to protect himself by charging approximate and indefinite plagiarism upon the official servants of our majestic twin down yonder, and then there might be war, or some similar annoyance.³

As it happened, Twain’s fears were misplaced. In his notice of the novel, printed in the Boston Herald for December 15, Baxter ignored entirely the similarity between the declaration of Brazilian independence and Hank Morgan’s proclamation.⁴ Only the critic for the Hartford Courant, in the first major review of the novel to be published, so much as mentioned that Hank Morgan’s decree was “a suggestion of the Brazilian proclamation of last week, written a year in advance.”⁵

Twain soon publicly discussed the Brazilian revolution in his own voice in a 1300-word essay in the Boston Herald, a piece hitherto lost to scholarship:

THE BRAZILIAN REPUBLIC⁶

We owe it to Congress that there is a market here in America for a peculiar sort of thing—the disposition to admire monarchical fripperies⁷ and be privately ashamed of the homely and ungilded belongings of republicanism. Through the absence of international copyright, we have been so long and so lavishly fed with foreign literature that Americans would be more than human if their admirations and contempts failed to acquire a European stamp and pattern. American admirations and contempts have acquired the European stamp and pattern, and one unfortunate outcome of this condition of things is this—the overthrow of a throne in Brazil does not gratify them, raises no enthusiasm in them. I judge this to be the case by a certain sign—the absence of American newspaper interest in the recent Brazilian event. Our newspapers watch the public countenance, they know what the public appetite is, and they stand ready to furnish the blood required at all hours and at any cost. Lest an old and entirely useless German Emperor die—a man whose real value was always below the value of the clothes he wore, and who was called “the Victorious,”⁸ because other people won victories for him—and we do not need to starve ourselves with five-line cablegrams about it, taken at second-hand from hearsay; no, our papers are aware that there is an event that...