Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture ed. by Henry B. Wonham and Lawrence Howe (review)

Confession: when Mark Twain and Money dropped through the mail slot and onto my front hall, I regretted having said I would review it. I had a long list of other commitments, and Twain's financial life wasn't one of the areas I was working on. I thought the project was going to be a waste of my precious time.

Boy, was I wrong. Far from a waste of time, the collection has already begun reshaping my understanding of the Author about whom I've been writing for the last thirty years. My "read-two-essays-a-day-until-you're-finished" schedule became a task I looked forward to rather than a chore.

Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture takes part in a general re-visioning of Twain that I've been sensing in the scholarly community over the last few years. While popular books like Alan Pell Crawford's How NOT to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain (2017)^* garner media attention by recycling old stories based on even older sources, serious researchers have been quietly digging through new sources and beginning to construct very different narratives. Up to now the new approaches have focused primarily on race and gender. Now money joins the lineup. Mark Twain and Money insists that we jettison everything we thought we knew about the author's financial dealings, look at the cold facts, and reconstruct the story from the ground up. By bringing a sophisticated arsenal of economic theories and business history to bear on Twain's financial career, and by taking advantage of primary sources that have only recently become available, these essays overturn the narrative of Twain's business incompetence.

Sam Clemens, we learn, was actually a pretty good businessman. He certainly understood modern advertising. Both Judith Yaross Lee in "Brand Management: Samuel Clemens, Trademarks, and the Mark Twain Enterprise" and Mark Schiebe in "Society's Very Choicest Brands: Hank Morgan's Brand Magic in Camelot" make clear that Clemens really understood how to fashion a brand and embed it culturally. Not only did Clemens construct himself as "a self, a product, and a brand," Lee tells us, "through the constructivist logic that perception creates reality the merger of Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain exploited the very principles behind twenty-first-century branding." While Lee shows us precisely how Clemens built his brand, Schiebe reminds us that Mark Twain broadcast the process in his fiction. Reading Hank Morgan's attempt to reconstruct Arthurian England through the economic theories floating around the turn-into-the-twentieth-century U.S., Schiebe discusses Hank's "manufacturing of consumer demand," from soap to stove polish, as a strategy to undermine medieval culture. The two essays fit together brilliantly; the editors, Lawrence Howe and Henry Wonham, have done a good job of arranging the collection's sequencing.

Still demonstrating Twain's business acumen, Joseph Csicsila's "'These Hideous Times': Mark Twain's Bankruptcy and the Panic of 1893" zeroes in on the famous bankruptcy and the failure of the Paige typesetter, the events out of which the story of Twain's incompetence originated. Contrary to the narrative, Twain's overall career as a publisher was a success, including his history with Webster & Co., the experiment in publishing house ownership that supposedly took him down. Rather than incompetence, Csicsila argues, it was the Panic of 1893—an event whose repercussions rivaled the 1929 stock market crash—that ruined Webster & Co. One of the results of the 1893 crash was that banks stopped making loans, and individuals stopped buying anything that wasn't a necessity. In a "perfect storm" of adverse circumstances, the publishing house, highly successful only a few years before, was unable to borrow enough capital to finish the Library of American Literature, a project that had launched with a bright future. The economy, not Twain...