Fetching the Jingle Along: Mark Twain's Slovenly Peter

"Poetry is a sandy road to travel, and the only way to pull through at all is to lay your grammar down and take hold with both hands."

—Mark Twain

Der Struwwelpeter, which has been variously translated as Slovenly Peter, Shock-headed Peter, and Tousle-Headed Peter, is a collection of eleven children's poems written by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann in 1844. In its assorted translations, Struwwelpeter is arguably the best-known children's book of the nineteenth century. Few nurseries in Europe or North America were without a tattered copy of it, although the work was not originally intended for a public audience. Indeed, Hoffmann was always somewhat embarrassed by its great success: "Those bad boys got further around the world than I did. . . They learned all kinds of languages that even I don't understand. . . it is quite natural that one would reprint them with enthusiasm in North America," he wrote.¹ As a doctor who frequently had to make house calls on children, Hoffmann created a repertoire of rhymes and pictures to distract them during his visits. One Christmas, discouraged by the selection of children's books available to him, he wrote out his own verses as a gift for his young son. At the urging of friends, Hoffmann published 1,500 copies of his Christmas book under the title Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder (Jolly Tales and Funny Pictures), although it soon became known simply by the name of its most famous character. Within four weeks the first edition was completely sold out. Hundreds of authorized and unauthorized versions began to appear around the world, and the success of Struwwelpeter was born.

Nearly fifty years later, in 1891, these morbidly humorous poems caught the attention of America's foremost humorist, Mark Twain, who translated the collection as Slovenly Peter while visiting Germany with his family. Some investments having recently failed, the family was short of funds, and translating Struwwelpeter may have seemed an excellent way to earn money fast. These hopes were reasonable, for despite his financial ups and downs, Twain's name was renowned throughout Europe and the United States. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) had been a great success, and Twain had become well known as a children's writer. Combining his name with Struwwelpeter must have sounded like a sure thing. On 27 October 1891 Twain wrote to his publisher, "I have worked myself to death the last 3 days and nights translating. . . the most celebrated child's book in Europe" (Letters 287). He had hoped to publish Slovenly Peter in time for the Christmas shopping season, but was quickly frustrated by copyright problems. Twain's Slovenly Peter was not published until it appeared in a limited edition in 1935, twenty-five years after his death.

Commercial considerations aside, Twain's interest in Struwwelpeter is not surprising. Hoffmann's poems focus upon and perhaps even glamorize bad children, a theme that had a lifelong fascination for Twain. Hence Twain highlighted aspects of Struwwelpeter that had gone unremarked in earlier English-language versions, added some of his own embellishments, and succeeded in creating a work of energy and wit that may have better reflected the tenor of the original Hoffmann poems than did many of the more widely published translations.

Full of graphic illustrations and grim humor, Hoffmann's poems are cautionary tales with a twist. Unlike the standard Sunday School morality so commonly found in nineteenth-century American children's works, Struwwelpeter features violence and gore in conjunction with what might be termed black humor. Moreover, Hoffmann's illustrations gave Struwwelpeter a surreal, even loony, quality. Occasionally categorized as nonsense and sometimes placed in the realm of cautionary tales, Struwwelpeter has consistently been hard to define. Even so, it has been repeatedly hailed as Germany's greatest contribution to children's literature since the Brothers Grimm (Huürlimann 62). In her exhaustive analysis of Struwwelpeter, critic Marie-Luise Könneker addresses the debate surrounding the effect of this book on German culture; some have argued that because of the large number of people who had...