Reading for Humor or Realism: W. D. Howells and Mark Twain’s Early Reception in the U.S. Public Sphere

In his May 1880 review of A Tramp Abroad in the Atlantic Monthly, for which he was then serving as editor-in-chief, William Dean Howells responded to what was, at the time, Mark Twain’s newest book by offering remarks that had the apparent tone of a corrective. Howells admitted that while the public’s conception of Twain was as a writer primarily, if not exclusively, of comic literature, Twain’s books were something much more. To be sure, wrote Howells, “you must laugh with him, but if you enter into the very spirit of his humor,” you sense that his is not merely comedy for its own sake. Rather, it stems “from a deep feeling” and a “personal hatred for some humbug or pretension,” which, “if he could set . . . right there would be very little laughing.”¹ Several Twain scholars have pointed to this review, and to Howells’ response to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer four years earlier, as a turning point in Twain’s reception in the U.S. in the 1870s and early 1880s, marking the first recognition that Twain’s writing was much more than the effusion of a funny man and implicitly taking to task other, previous reviews for their failure to understand and appreciate Twain’s artistry.² And, indeed, these two Howells reviews seem to validate such a reading. In the review of A Tramp Abroad, Howells emphasizes that Twain repeatedly addresses “matters that are . . . unfair or unnecessarily ignoble, and cry out to his love of justice.” “At the bottom of his heart,” claims Howells, Twain is “often . . . a reformer” engaged in the serious work of telling the truth about quotidian reality and social problems. Howells had actually begun this revisionist projection of Twain in his review of Tom Sawyer, in which Howells stressed that Twain’s first sole venture into novel writing was marked by a “fidelity to circumstance” that makes it “realistic in the highest degree.” In that two-page review, Howells repeatedly employed the words artist and artistic to characterize what he saw as that novel’s strongest characteristic: its true-to-life seriousness, verisimilitude, and accuracy of representation.³

Other reviewers quickly followed suit in echoing Howells’ responses. In fact, since Howells’ review of Tom Sawyer was one of the first to appear for that novel, we might be inclined to conclude that Howells set the tone for the public reception of that novel and for a reoriented conception of Twain in the public sphere, and this role as bellwether is a point I will come back to later.⁴ Certainly, a number of reviewers responded to the novel, as Howells did, by emphasizing its fidelity to reality. The book’s “beauty,” asserted the Hartford Times, “consists in its truth to life,” while the San Francisco Evening Bulletin concluded that “Tom Sawyer is too vividly realistic to be entirely a creation of fancy.” Striking an analogous point while alluding to Twain’s prefatorial remark that Tom “is a combination of characteristics of three boys whom I knew,” the review in the Hartford Christian Secretary observed that “the boy hero and the other children are so lifelike that the reader hardly needs the author’s assurance that real boys . . . are in the book.” The reviewer in the New York Evening Post even went so far as to identify the novel’s realism in terms of its specific historical fidelity as regionalist representation, calling Tom Sawyer “as graphic and realistic a picture of the life of the western river towns a generation ago as has been produced anywhere.” Indeed, warned the Christian Secretary review, in an almost Howellsian gesture, “those who regard Mark Twain as only ‘a funny man,’ greatly underestimate his power.” Similar responses characterized the public reception of A Tramp Abroad.⁵

What is noteworthy, however, is that Howells’ response to Twain’s two newest books was itself not exactly new. To be sure, reviewers had regularly pointed to and praised Twain’s writing as comically entertaining and called Twain, in the...