Ghosts in the Page
by Emily Maemura | INF2331 | April 4, 2014
This prototype for reading annotated text employs XML using the Text Encoding Initiative DTD, retrieved from the Mark Twain Project Online.
page 301
Dec.2, 1906
Dictated
Dec. 2, 1906.
‘Dictated Dec. 2, 1906.’underscored
Dictated
Dictated December 2, 1906.]
(Copied from Mr. Clemens’s notes). [¶] Mr. Clemens’s early experiments in mesmerism, continued. ‘out’written in the margin in ink
In 1847 we were living in a 1847
but isn’t large now, although it hasn’t lost a plank; I saw it a year ago and noticed that shrinkage. My father died in it in March of the year mentioned, but our family did not move out of it until some months
Mr. Clemens’s experiments in mesmerism, continued] Like the previous day’s text, this one and the next are in fact 1903 manuscripts inserted in 1906.
large white house on the corner of Hill and Main . . . Dr. Grant’s] The Clemens family moved in with Dr. Orville R. Grant (1815–?54) and his family in 1846, occupying the flat above his drugstore. AutoMT1, 62–63, 454). John Marshall Clemens died several months later, in March 1847. Grant was born in Kentucky, received his Doctor of Medicinex201C;on the Modus Operandi of Medicines” at the Louisville Medical Institute in March 1838, and evidently spent time in Virginia before setting up shop in Hannibal, where he served as a physician, surgeon, and pharmacist for nearly a decade (Yandell 1838). In 1845 he attended the dying Sam Smarr, who had been shot in the street in front of the drugstore by William Owsley—an incident that Clemens used in chapter 21 of Huckleberry Finn. And Clemens remembered, in 1867, that when Jimmy Finn, one of the town’s drunkards, died the same year, “his body went to Dr. Grant” (SLC 1867b). Clemens had seen the house when he was last in Hannibal, from 29 May to 3 June 1902, a year before writing this manuscript (Wecter 1952, 133; Inds, 318–19, 339–40; Kanawha Census 1850, 954:101A).
Dr. Grant and Dr. Reyburn argued a matter on the street with sword-canes] In August 1845, a report on the incident appeared in the newspaper exchanges, which named another assailant: North American, 26 Aug 1845, 1).
Mrs. Crawford, Mrs. Grant’s mother] Orville Grant married Miriam M. McFarland (1820–53) in 1837 in Charleston, West Virginia.
the Richmond theatre burned down thirty-six years before . . . that memorable tragedy] On the night of 26 December 1811, during a pantomime after-piece entitled “Raymond and Agness, or the Bleeding Nun,” fire engulfed the Richmond Theatre “with electric velocity,” spreading from a chandelier onstage to the entire building in only ten minutes.
Source documents.North American Review184 (4 January 1907), 9–14: ‘December . . . 1906 (301title); ‘In 1847 . . . ages ago.’ (301.2–304.4).