MS TS1 NAR

Source documents.

Manuscript, leaves numbered 15–28, from a manuscript of thirty-eight leaves written in 1903. Typescript, leaves numbered 1465–74, made from the MS and revised. Typescript carbon, leaves numbered 1465–74, revised. Galley proofs of NAR 9, typeset from the revised TS1 carbon (the same extent as NAR 9), ViU. North American Review 184 (4 January 1907), 9–14: ‘December . . . 1906 (301 title); ‘In 1847 . . . ages ago.’ (301.2–304.4).

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

December 2, 1906 December 2, 1906 Dec. 2, 1906 circled Dictated Dec. 2, 1906. ‘Dictated Dec. 2, 1906.’ underscored Dictated Dec. 2, 1906. [Dictated December 2, 1906.]

Mr. Clemens’s experiments in mesmerism, continued. [¶] Mr. Clemens’s experiments in mesmerism, continued. not in (Copied from Mr. Clemens’s notes). [¶] Mr. Clemens’s experiments in mesmerism, continued. (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 large white house on the corner of Hill and Main streets—a house that still stands, 1847 1847 not in (1847) typed in the margin (1847.) inset 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 afterward. afterward. afterward. b afterward. Ours was not the only family in the house, there was another—Dr. Grant’s. One day Dr. Grant and Dr. Reyburn argued a matter on the street with sword-canes, and Grant was brought home multifariously punctured. punctured. wounded. punctured. punctured. Old Dr. Peake calked the leaks, and came every day for a while, to look after him. The Grants were Virginians, like Peake, and one day when Grant was getting well enough to be on his feet and sit around in the parlor and talk, the conversation fell upon Virginia and old times. I was present, but the group were probably quite unconscious of me, I being only a lad and a negligeable quantity. Two of the group—Dr. Peake and Mrs. Crawford, Mrs. Mrs. Dr Mrs. Mrs. Grant’s mother—had been of the audience when the Richmond theatre burned down thirty-six years before, and they talked over the frightful details of that memorable tragedy. These were eye-witnesses, and with their eyes I saw it all with an intolerable vividness: I saw the black smoke rolling and tumbling toward the sky, I saw the flames burst through it and turn it red, I heard the shrieks of the despairing, I glimpsed their faces at the windows, caught fitfully through the veiling smoke, I saw them jump to their death, or to mutilation worse than death. The picture is before me yet, and can never fade.

301.1 301.2-6 301.6-7 301.13 301.14-15

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. They boarded the Grant family in exchange for their lodging, after it became clear that all of the Clemens property would be sold to pay a debt (see 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: “An affray took place in Hannibal on last Friday week, in which a man by the name of Railey stabbed Dr. Orville R. Grant through the left lung, with a spear attached to his cane” (“Affray at Hannibal, Mo.,” Philadelphia 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. Her mother, Lethe Reynolds McFarland(1800–1882), was the first of her father’s four wives. No confirmation has been found that she ever took the name Crawford (Little 1893, 149–50; Atkinson 1876, 273).

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. Despite all efforts to rescue those who were trapped inside, fifty-four women and eighteen men died out of an audience of six hundred (Richmond Then and Now 2011).