Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: From Farce to Satire: The Unrecorded Contributions of Elizabeth E. and Edward P. Evans

None other than Mark Twain himself gave the first account of the history of composition of his novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, suggesting (in 1894, after its first publication in England) that his procedure had been that of a jack-leg novelist, allowing what had begun as a farce to develop into a tragedy and eventually leaving him with two stories in one rather than a unified work. A "kind of literary Cæsarean operation" was needed to separate the two and thus produce The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and The Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins. These two distinct works are often printed together and linked up again by means of the very text in which the author explains his procedure and then has the explanatory text run into the second work by calling it "The Suppressed Farce" and referring back to an event "in Chapter I of the original extravaganza."¹ Mark Twain has nothing to say in this account about what it was that induced him to proceed from farce to tragedy and allow new characters to intrude and gain prominence while forcing out the original team. As early as july 1893, when he had sent the typescript of the full version of the text to Fred hall of Charles L. Webster & Company in New York, however, he had identified Francis Galton's Finger Prints, published in London in 1892, as an important influence,² an assessment that he repeated in a private letter of 1897.³ Galton's book figures prominently in Anne P. Wigger's "The Composition of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins: Chronology and Development,"⁴ and to this day it is the only work credited with having had a major impact on the genesis of Mark Twain's novel. But Mark Twain's mention of Galton's book may well have given it an undue prominence, for its impact on the development of the plot of Pudd'nhead Wilson notwithstanding, it can hardly be conceived to have contributed to the actual metamorphosis from farce to tragedy, and indirectly at best to the development of the thematic concerns that have given the work its status as a classic discussion of race in American literature.

It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate that such fundamental shift was the result of Mark Twain's encounter with another book, The Story of Kaspar Hauser from Authentic Records by Elizabeth E. Evans, likewise published in England in 1892. Neither the names of Elizabeth Evans nor her husband Edward Evans nor the title of her book have found any mention whatever in Mark Twain's writings or in Mark Twain scholarship. I shall draw on internal as well as external evidence and also engage in some speculation to establish the relevance of these two people and their work in terms of Mark Twain biography as well as the critical debate over Pudd'nhead Wilson. My discovery of this new material and its relevance is in part due to the kindness and the assistance of a number of friends and colleagues. It also owes much to simple good fortune and a great deal of patience over a period of thirty-five years. These circumstances have turned my research into a kind of jack-leg complement to Mark Twain's compositional procedure. It would seem appropriate, therefore, to present as well as validate what is the predominantly external evidence for my case in terms of an account similar to the author's own retrospect, though somewhat more circumstantial. In a subsequent section I shall review my findings in their relevance for a revised account of the course of composition of Pudd'nhead Wilson and a re-assessment of the novel as well as of Mark Twain's achievement in writing it.

The initial incident of my account occurred in the course of what by now has become a lifetime of mutual international visits and scholarly debate between two veteran Fulbright grantees of the 1950s from different sides of the...