Set in an extended moment of the past, some forty years before the book’s publication, Huck’s raft is a pastoral asylum surrounded by a world in which barbarism is rampant, violence and crime are daily facts of life, and slavery is protected by the laws of the land. It is, moreover, a world seldom disturbed by steamboat or other traffic, this in a time when the river would have been crowded with all manner of vessels. The steamboat, when it does appear, is either a distant prospect or a fearful apparition, whether the ghostly Gothic wreck of the Walter Scott or the dragonlike craft that tears apart the floating idyll of Huck and Jim.

Admittedly, this anachronistic emphasis has a rhetorical purpose, for Mark Twain beheld the 1840s as through Reconstructionist spectacles—darkly—but the result is a book that seems antithetical to Life on the Mississippi, which not only limits that “life” to Mark Twain’s own experiences aboard riverboats, past and present, but concentrates on the dramatic differences between steamboat life on the river before and after the Civil War. Technology is the dominant subject matter, whether it is the detailed knowledge that the antebellum pilot had to master in order to master the river or the improvements in navigational aids made since the war, which have acted to diminish the pilot’s former heroism and grandeur. How different from the drowsing Huck floating down the river on his prelapsarian raft!

There is also detectable in Life on the Mississippi a materialistic emphasis virtually absent from Huckleberry Finn. Money for Huck is at best a necessary evil and those characters in the novel who pursue it are characterized as fools and knaves. But in Life it is an essential quantity, not only supporting the pilot’s luxurious habits but permeating all aspects of riverboating, most often personified as Progress, seen mainly as speed, that glamourous and exciting manifestation of the cash nexus. The steamboat is the vehicle of acceleration, the pilot its most prominent agent, and drifting rafts and raftsmen figure as anachronisms and impediments to steam-powered craft: the pilots of the latter are not averse to “borrowing an oar” from a hapless raftsman or flatboat man in order to cut a tight corner for the sake of greater speed.

The desire for speed manifested itself in every boat owner and captain, a desire that enriched those pilots like Horace Bixby who could develop the skills necessary to perform great feats of navigational daring, and who were assigned the fastest and fanciest boats on the river, but that also led to disastrous maneuvers, resulting in burst boilers and collisions. We are never told, however, why it was that such speed was desirable, nor are we ever—despite all the statistics—told just what it was that those boats were carrying at such great risk. Cotton, of course, was one of the main commodities, but human beings—slaves—were another. Commerce it was that dictated such daring and often destructive feats of navigation, as it was commerce that gave the railroad eventual precedence over the riverboat. Perhaps Twain made no mention of commercial considerations for the sake of avoiding the obvious, but the result was also to avoid a few painful facts concerning the specifics of commerce on the Mississippi before the war.

Thus, in Twain’s account of his education as a pilot, a massive blank space is concealed, suggesting that the pilothouse was indeed located at a remove from the steamboat, perched high on the superstructure called the “Texas” because of its being a detached part of the whole—a situation evoking the status of the independent republic of Texas before it jointed the Union. The pilothouse was constructed to give great visibility of the river ahead but it also acted to shut off those who worked there from certain realities of life along and on that river, the commerce to which Twain in the second half of the book (the postbellum half, as it were) is so very much alive. Only when he leaves the pilothouse for the world of commercial exchange, a world now sanitized of slavery and its attendant sins, does Mark Twain bring himself (and us) into direct confrontation with the realities of river life. The situation evoked in the first part of the book, in which the young Sam Clemens seeks to become part of that brotherhood who possessed the “right stuff,” gives a contemporary validity to the title of “pilot,” being those warriors who fly so high as to be strategically removed from the targets on which their bombs fall.

It needs to be said that the emphasis on commerce that distinguishes the second part of Twain’s river book is undoubtedly a subtexual counterpart to the autobiographical element of the first part. By 1885, Sam Clemens was often overextended in his business dealings, leading to his eventual financial ruin, but for whatever reason Life is fairly afloat on the facts of finance, extending even to figures of speech. Thus we read that the shifting channel of the river has caused entire islands to “retire from business” and towns and plantations to “retire to the country”; Mark Twain, drawing humorous and exaggerated conclusions from scientific data, “gets wholesale returns of conjecture out of . . . trifling investments of fact”; the steamboat he boards upon his return to the river is so dirty it is “taxable as real estate”; the Mississippi when about to erode away an island is said to have “a mortgage” on which it is about to “foreclose”; and an anonymous author is said to have published a book with “no brand given.” The consistent parade of commercial figures of speech reveals the author’s attitude toward his materials, that “trifling investment of fact” from which he hopes to receive a “wholesale return.”

Uniting these commercial elements is the underlying theme of loss, not only of the steamboat’s hegemony but the heroic status of the river pilots after the war. In effect, Twain’s book is about a “Mississippi Bubble” unimagined by John Law, in which the profitability of steamboat commerce is deflated by the rise in importance of the railroad. Here is another theme painfully relevant to modern Americans, for what Twain expresses in this book is the kind of commercial spirit, enterprise floated by debt, that Americans continue to espouse at great risk. Life on the Mississippi is an important cultural artifact, anachronistic perhaps, but, like the Mississippi steamboat itself, it presents a palatial, gilded exterior that hides a few grim and grimy facts, standing as Henry Clay early noted for the most optimistic aspects of nineteenth-century life as well as for a number of those aspects that Clay’s analogy did not accommodate. And if Davy Crockett was celebrated as a hero, it was as a champion of Western expansion, with the concomitant extension of chattel slavery in the same direction, which is the shadowy part of that great diagram to which the Mississippi River was central.

—John Seelye

Selected Bibliography

WORKS BY MARK TWAIN

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867)

The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869)

Eye Openers (1871)

Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871) Roughing It (1872)

Screamers (1872)

Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1873)

The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day [with Charles Dudley Warner] (1873)

Mark Twain’s Sketches (1874)

Sketches, Old and New (1875)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

Ah Sin [with Bret Harte] (1877)

A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (1877)

Punch, Brothers, Punch! And Other Sketches (1878)

A Tramp Aboard (1880)

“1601” or Conversation at the Social Fireside as It Was in the Time of the Tudors (1880)

The Prince and the Pauper (1882)

The Stolen White Elephant, Etc. (1882)

Life on the Mississippi (1883)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1890)

The American Claimant (1892)

Merry Tales (1892)

The £1,000,000 Bank-note and Other New Stories (1893)

The Niagra Book (1893)

Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894)

Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)

Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer Detective, and Other Stories (1896)

How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897)

Following the Equator (1897)

More Tramps Abroad (1898)

The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches (1899)

Literary Essays (1899)

English as She Is Taught (1900)

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900)

To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)

A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902)

My Debut as a Literary Person with Other Essays and Stories (1903)

The Jumping Frog in English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient Unremunerated Toil (1903)

Extracts from Adam’s Diary, Translated from the Original MS. (1904)

A Dog’s Tale (1904)

King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Cargo Rule (1905)

Eve’s Diary, Translated from the Original MS. (1906)

What Is Man? (1906)

The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906)

Christian Science (1907)

Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909)

Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography (1909)

Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924)

Letters from the Earth (1962)

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain. New York: Dutton, 1920. Revised edition, 1933.

Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910.

Kaplan, Fred. The Singular Mark Twain. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Kaplan, Justin. Mr.