The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [1]
Warner’s next collection of essays, Backlog Studies (1873), consisted of articles he had published in Scribner’s Magazine. This book perhaps best represents the brand of social and literary criticism Warner would become known for in the late nineteenth century. The topics he covers in this volume include the breakdown of the family, the blurring of cultural distinctions between men and women, the problem of sensational fiction, and the proper role of the literary critic. In 1881, he made perhaps his most significant contribution to literary criticism as an author in the distinguished American Men of Letters Series. Warner’s biography of Washington Irving was the first volume published in the series and it helped set a standard for the critical evaluation of American authors that would last for years.
During the 1880s and ’90s Warner traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe and documented those journeys in numerous travel books such as Our Roundabout Journey (1883); On Horseback: A Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, with Notes on Travel in Mexico and California (1888); and Our Italy: Southern California (1891). Reflecting to a certain extent his growing reputation as a literary critic, Warner was invited to join the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine in 1884. Eight years later, in 1892, Warner took over the responsibility of contributing essays to the magazine’s celebrated “The Editor’s Study,” an editorial column made internationally famous by William Dean Howells in the 1880s.
Throughout his adult life Warner thought deeply and wrote sensitively about late-nineteenth-century American culture. But his attention extended far beyond a general concern for the material excesses of the “Gilded Age” that he criticized in his best fiction. He also participated actively in many of the social movements of his day, including prison reform, civic improvement, and various interests for the public good. In addition, Warner served as the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was involved in a handful of other national societies and organizations. Charles Dudley Warner died on October 20, 1900, at the age of seventy-one, at his home in Hartford.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS
In this Modern Library Paperback Classic edition of The Gilded Age, the text by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, and the selected illustrations by Augustus Hoppin, Henry Louis Stephens, and True Williams are based on the first American edition, published by the American Publishing Company in 1873.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
For a translation of the Chinese epigraph on the facing page as well as
translations of the chapter-head mottoes.
PREFACE
This book was not written for private circulation among friends; it was not written to cheer and instruct a diseased relative of the author’s; it was not thrown off during intervals of wearing labor to amuse an idle hour. It was not written for any of these reasons, and therefore it is submitted without the usual apologies.
It will be seen that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been the want of illustrative examples. In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed out of an ideal commonwealth.
No apology is needed for following the learned custom of placing attractive scraps of literature at the heads of our chapters. It has been truly observed by Wagner that such headings, with their vague suggestions of the matter which is to follow them, pleasantly inflame the reader