Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880-1905

3. Loeb and Twain: Returning to the Illustrated Scene of the Crime

3 Loeb andTwain returning to the illustrated scene of the crime severalartists,includingKemble,illustratedtwain’sTheTragedyofPudd’nhead Wilson, but louis loeb was the novel’s first illustrator, and photography was its first form of illustration.1 The novel first appeared sixty pages into Century Magazine’s 1893 christmas issue, and each of its subsequent monthly installments included either a photograph of twain or a graphic illustration from loeb, one of Century’s staff of artists. each episode appeared in the magazine surrounded by such varied fare as portraits of President Grant writing his memoir, sketches of railroad vagabonds, and illustrations of Century’s annual christmas sermon. Though we read the novel in much different formats today , when it first appeared, it was interspersed with others’ work, meted out for monthly consumption, interrupted by visual media. Though we often return to twain’s descriptions of the murder of Judge driscoll, the novel’s central criminal deed, we seldom re-create Century Magazine’s original illustrated scene of the crime. as twain’s story line works out what forms of visual proof like fingerprints and photographs can do for the people of dawson’s landing, the venue that the novel appears in works out what these forms of visual proof can do for the magazine. While the initial left-hand page that Century devoted to the serial bore twain’s photograph (figure 3.1), “a Whisper to the reader,” on the corresponding right-hand page, joked that “a person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen” (1). twain’s story commences by coupling a photograph with a joking claim for “photographic” accuracy. twain, as pictured , leans against the birch-bark support of a front porch, shows his casual stance, starched garb, mustache, and chewed cheroot.2 not only had twain, as louis J. Budd points out, “stated his firm intention to sign the book with his trademark-name rather than toying with anonymity, as he soon did with Joan loeb and twain 87 of Arc” (“mark twain’s Fingerprints” 172), but also he had appeared alongside his narrative’s magazine debut. “‘mark twain’ was himself a performance, a series of enactments,” railton cautions; “born of samuel clemens’s desires to be somebody, ‘mark twain’ existed only on the stage defined by the intersection of clemens’s ambitions and his audience’s expectations” (“The tragedy of mark twain” 543). a well-traveled cosmopolite, twain appears in the picture in a barren, rural setting. The owner of an opulent Hartford home, he appears on a sparse, unfurnished porch. a popular lecture-circuit raconteur, he appears here with no audience other than the viewer. clemens performs twain, and anticipates readers’ expectations, even before they buy his book, as they flip through Century Magazine. The illustrated magazine in turn complicates the author’s performance: it captionstheimage “samuel l.clemens (mark twain).” Century suppliesname and pseudonym, indicates private identity and authorial persona, and foreshadows the scare quotes that accompany many characters’ assumed names: Pudd’nhead the dunce is revealed to be the shrewd sleuth david Wilson. ma3 .1. twain, as depicted on the magazine pages that commenced Pudd’nhead Wilson’s serialization in Century Magazine. Century Magazine, courtesy of cleveland state university libraries, cleveland, Ohio. 88 chapter 3 tronly roxana is also seen as the sly and wily thief roxy. The man taken to be “tom” is roxana’s biological son Valet de chambre. in the novel’s first visual image, fittingly, the man performing mark twain is “really” samuel l. clemens. expressing confidence in photography’s capacity to record truth, Century lets the author’s photograph endorse his text. showing clemens enact a role that the caption marks parenthetically, “(mark twain),” this Century serial is already doubly, complexly photographic. a novel that will debate the nature of visual “proof” thereby commences in a magazine already engaged in that very debate. Century Magazine and its photographs and illustrations rarely come up in critical conversations that concentrate on Pudd’nhead Wilson’s complicated textual history, its status as both separate and conjoined to Those Extraordinary Twins, its 1894 and 1899 illustrated-book editions.3 its engagement with discourses of fingerprinting, race, and hybridity often attracts critical attention to its social context but seldom to its original, periodical paratext.4 “up front,” Budd reminds us, twain “had always counted on serializing the...