The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [2]
Our quotations are set in a vast number of tongues; this is done for the reason that very few foreign nations among whom the book will circulate can read in any language but their own; whereas we do not write for a particular class or sect or nation, but to take in the whole world.
We do not object to criticism; and we do not expect that the critic will read the book before writing a notice of it. We do not even expect the reviewer of the book will say that he has not read it. No, we have no anticipations of anything unusual in this age of criticism. But if the Jupiter, who passes his opinion on the novel, ever happens to peruse it in some weary moment of his subsequent life, we hope that he will not be the victim of a remorse bitter but too late.
One word more. This is—what it pretends to be—a joint production, in the conception of the story, the exposition of the characters, and in its literal composition. There is scarcely a chapter that does not bear the marks of the two writers of the book.
S.L.C.
C.D.W.
INTRODUCTION
Ron Powers
The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day is far from the greatest novel about Washington ever written. It fails to reach the genre standard set, say, by Gore Vidal in Washington, D.C. That said, The Gilded Age is a fascinating and rewarding read: fascinating especially to lovers of its famous co-author.
In the spring of 1873, the thirty-six-year-old Samuel Clemens was already celebrated as the journalist, humorist, and lecturer Mark Twain. Here, the reader can watch him make his first uncertain foray into the novel form, clinging to the arm of his co-writer, Charles Dudley Warner. Scarcely conscious yet of his prodigious literary gifts, Mark Twain is feeling his way toward them by instinct: he’s assembled the tools and techniques of his popular sketches, and is refitting them into the machinery of fiction. These tools—largely disdained by “literary” novelists of the time—include a richly suggestive personal memory; a near-photographic attention to endless varieties of people as they perform their labor, or professions, or varieties of scam and duplicity; and an infallible ear for the ways in which people speak—and, in their speech, reveal themselves.
His instincts are as inspired as they are unconventional: construction of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer via these same appliances is little more than a year away, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will follow.
This “dress rehearsal” of Mark Twain’s great fictional career is reason enough to recommend The Gilded Age. As a bonus, the novel rewards anyone curious to discover how backroom deals, sexual intrigue, and high-powered deception differed between the Washington of 130 years ago and the Washington of today. (Quick hint: not much.)
Influential as a cultural artifact well beyond its literary merits—it supplied the nickname for the era of wealth, greed, scandal, and corruption symbolized by the figure of Boss Tweed, and it served to invent the Washington-novel genre—The Gilded Age happened almost by accident. It sprang into being out of an impulsive hearthside challenge in the Christmas season of 1872.
On this evening, Sam and Olivia Clemens were entertaining their next-door neighbors at Nook Farm, near Hartford, Charles Warner and his wife, Susan. The after-dinner talk had turned to the novels the two women were currently reading. The menfolk could not resist needling them over the quality of their choices. One of the wives adroitly froze those literary smirks with the suggestion that perhaps the gentlemen thought they could write a better novel? A friend of Warner’s who heard the tale later wrote, “Thereupon both Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Warner began to twit Mark Twain; they made all manner of good-natured fun of [The Innocents Abroad], called it an accidental hit, and finally defying him to write another like it.” 1
Clemens and Warner vowed to write a novel together, each man handing the manuscript back to the other