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  • The Historian's Huck Finn: Reading Mark Twain's Masterpiece as Social and Economic History ed. by Ranjit S. Dighe
  • James S. Leonard (bio)
The Historian's Huck Finn: Reading Mark Twain's Masterpiece as Social and Economic History Edited and annotated by Ranjit S. Dighe. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016. 352 pp. $58.00, cloth.

Ranjit S. Dighe's The Historian's Huck Finn: Reading Mark Twain's Masterpiece as Social and Economic History is part of Praeger's "The Historian's Annotated Classics" series, of which Dighe, a SUNY Oswego professor of [End Page 238] economics, is the series editor. His treatment of "Twain's masterpiece" begins with a predominantly pedagogical preface featuring three lesson plans for teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: one keyed (by textbook chapter intersections with Huckleberry Finn chapters) to a history book (Rice University's free online OpenStax U.S. History), a second keyed to an economics text (Walton and Rockoff's History of the American Economy), and a third, which he calls an "economic history lesson plan," that keys Huck Finn chapter ranges to specific historical, economic, and moral themes without connecting to specific secondary sources. All this is thoughtfully and knowledgably accomplished and looks useful both for pedagogy and for research—good for focusing reflections on Twain's novel and its relation to a rich spectrum of considerations within the nineteenth-century American context. This is followed by another useful reference item: a chronology displaying "Key Events in American History" side by side with "Key Events in Mark Twain's Life."

Dighe next offers a section on "Samuel Clemens in His Times" that follows Twain's biography while describing the historical and economic context and connecting it specifically to Clemens family locations, activities, and economic conditions. This section contains a rather startling faux pas (the only one I noticed in the book): he identifies William Dean Howells as Twain's coauthor for The Gilded Age. That's enough to shake one's confidence—momentarily, at least—in the whole enterprise, but I noticed that he correctly identifies Charles Dudley Warner as the coauthor in a footnote later in the book and again gets it right in his bibliography, so we can assume that it was just a moment's carelessness that then somehow managed to slip through the editorial process. On the more positive side he does well at tracking the fortunes of John Marshall Clemens, placing Sam's life in the context of the financial ups and downs of the nineteenth-century United States, and tracing both his financial well-being and his social/economic/political opinions over the course of his seventy-four-plus years. Of particular interest, of course, are the discussions of Sam's childhood contacts and associations with slaves, Dighe's putting-into-perspective of slavery in pre–Civil War Missouri, and the apparent course of Sam's evolving attitudes toward slavery and racial discrimination as he moved through childhood and into maturity.

The perspective widens in a chapter titled "The Raging, Tearing, Booming Nineteenth Century," in which he surveys the political, social, and economic climate of the United States during the "long nineteenth century" (1789–1914). Dighe gives us a picture of pre-Revolutionary colonial America as notably prosperous—with, as he puts it, "one of the highest standards of living in the [End Page 239] world," thanks to its rich abundance of natural resources and protection provided by the British, but somewhat deficient in skilled labor. After the momentary disruption of the American Revolution, the prosperity continued, based mainly in a Jeffersonian agrarian economic model but evolving more and more through the nineteenth century toward the Hamiltonian model of urbanism and industrial development. Sam Clemens, growing up in agrarian Missouri and then living as an adult in the industrial North, moved through an interesting cross-section of the changing socioeconomic milieu—progressing from modest early circumstances to become one of the wealthy and influential, and a larger-than-life associate of other powerful American (and European) men. Beginning in a typical American fashion by working as a printer's apprentice, then as a traveling "jour printer," he eventually found means of constructing an economically...

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