Mark Twain for Dog Lovers ed. by R. Kent Rasmussen, and: Mark Twain for Cat Lovers by Mark Dawidziak (review)

It is obvious to any reader of Mark Twain’s fiction that he was a lover of animals, both domesticated and wild. Like so many Americans, he regarded pets as beloved members of his family. Twain’s writings on animals offer a unique, highly relatable angle of insight into the man and his mind, and it was for this reason that the curatorial staff at Hartford’s Mark Twain House & Museum decided to focus its 2018 exhibition on “Tails of Twain: How Animals Shaped the Man and his Work.”

In preparing the exhibition, we turned to R. Kent Rasmussen’s and Mark Dawidziak’s volumes Mark Twain for Dog Lovers and Cat Lovers. Their research guided our development of topics to focus on and offered ideas for photographs and illustrations to accompany them. These works succeed the first major publication on the subject of the writer’s fascination with animals, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Mark Twain’s Book of Animals. While Fishkin’s anthology covers the wide world of critters that Twain interacted with— from camels to “cayotes” and dolphins to dung beetles—Rasmussen and Dawidziak do a deep dive into the author’s relationship with, and observation of, dogs and cats.

Mark Twain for Dog Lovers is a collection of Twain’s writings about man’s best friend. Rasmussen traces the history of dogs in Clemens’s life using forty-six extracts from his writings, organized into six parts: “Mark Twain in the Company of Dogs,” “Uncommon Canines,” “Put-Upon Pooches,” “Party Animals,” “Dogs with Foreign Accents,” and “Lessons We Can Learn from Dogs.” Rasmussen gives a brief introduction before each section as well as each story or excerpt that informs and orients the reader, but he mostly allows Twain and his keen observations of the canine species to shine. Rasmussen does remind us, however, that we cannot always take Twain at his word. He had a penchant for tall tales, or “stretchers,” such as claiming that his uncle’s dog was descended from one on the Ark, but overall Rasmussen invites the reader just to enjoy the stories.

Although Twain is known for his endless love of cats, he also admired the canine breed, writing to William D. Howells in 1899 that “the dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s.” Rasmussen does, however, recognize that Twain was not the primary dog-lover of the family; this role belonged to his youngest daughter, Jean. Her love for animals and activism regarding cruelty against them likely influenced his work, especially later in life. Twain’s participation in the animal welfare movement can be traced to his admiration for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, an organization that Jean is believed to have help found local chapters of and to which she often donated. In fact, Rasmussen dedicates Dog Lovers “to the memory of Jean Clemens who deeply loved both dogs and Mark Twain.”

The selection of works, both in full and as excerpts, covers Twain’s own pets, those he met during his travels, and those that are larger than life. Most are meant to entertain, such as the bull-pup Andrew Jackson, who makes an appearance in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”; the poodle who gets into a scrape with a “pinch-bug” in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; and the unusual dachshund that he believed assisted with elephant hunting in Following the Equator. As a young journalist in San Francisco, Twain eulogized the city’s two beloved rat-killers, Bummer and Lazarus.

Twain writes to his mother in 1887 that a new dog simply cannot leave the cats alone, and so “they have spent the most of the time in the trees, swearing...