Mark Twain, A National Treasure

Me posing next to a statue of Mark Twain inside the Visitor's Center.
Yours truly posing alongside a statue of Mark Twain inside the Visitor's Center.
By Chaz Selph

If you ever find yourself in Connecticut, I highly recommend your itinerary include a visit to a particular National Historic Landmark—the once home of prolific American writer Mark Twain. Before I delve into the memory of my visit there, let me provide some context for why I went.

I have been on a Twain bender since February. It began with a re-read of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and then its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These are of course his most famous works, evidenced by the many film and television adaptations they've inspired, as well as the latter winning enough public acclaim to become required reading in American high schools.

My curiosity wandered to his lesser-known works, and over the spring I chanced to read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. At the outset, dear reader, let me say that I have never before laughed out loud as much while reading a book as I did with this goldmine of satire. (I should note, however, that many of the jokes stand on references to Le Mort d'Arthur, and so they will escape the reader who is unacquainted with Thomas Malory's 15th century Middle English prose.)

For those unfamiliar with the plot, the year is 1887 and the titular character—an arms factory manager—gets into a verbal altercation with a subordinate. The argument escalates into a scuffle, which ends with the Yankee taking a blow to the head. When he regains consciousness, a series of events transpire which force him to reckon with a new reality: that he's somehow entered the world of King Arthur's Court in 6th century Britain. Thus this is a story of time travel, and represents one of the earliest examples of the genre, preceding H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine by 6 years.

Being a practical man separated by 13 centuries from his own time, the Yankee sets out to modernize and enlighten the old world and its peoples. He introduces electricity, telegraph lines, newspapers, munitions, and even free trade. This project to remake medieval society provides fodder for Twain to critique institutions he considered backward or repressive, such as the monarchy, Catholic Church, and slavery.

Indeed this social commentary, along with the juxiposition of modern trappings in an age of antiquity, provides much of the book’s humor. For instance, one of the more memorable and picturesque moments is when the Yankee and King Arthur are about to be hanged but are saved by Launcelot and a procession of 500 knights arriving not on horseback, but on bicycles.

Sir Lancelot rides a bicycle.
An illustration taken from A Connecticut Yankee which depicts Sir Launcelot riding a bicycle.

The climax of the novel occurs when the Yankee and 52 of his pupils confront the entire Chivalric order (some 30,000 men), seeking to destroy it entirely by force and supplant it with a new order centered on the values of the Enlightenment, namely rationalism, science, and humanism.

Since completing A Connecticut Yankee my interest in exploring Twain's catalog has mushroomed and is still yet to be satisfied. I went on to read many of his 60 short stories, the most thought-provoking of which was the tale of a magical young man named Satan (yes, that one) titled The Mysterious Stranger.

In it, an adolescent Satan befriends a group of boys in Austria, entertaining them with tricks and instantaneous trips across the world. At the story's conclusion Satan turns solipsistic, revealing to the protagonist:

“Life itself is only a vision, a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”
Exterior of Mark Twain's home.
Satan reveals a shocking truth to the protagonist of The Mysterious Stranger.

In each of the works I've mentioned, Twain's sense of humor, choice of words, and artful turns of phrase combine to produce sentences which flow gracefully from page to page. On top of this breezy method of storytelling, Twain adds weight with deep and meaningful insights on the human condition.

In Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee, he gives expression to the human condition under slavery. Over the course of the novels, both Huckleberry Finn and King Arthur come to renounce its practice. In The Mysterious Stranger, Twain questions what human existence means if life itself is futile. The results are literary expressions which are both stylistically elegant and thematically engrossing.

Now that you have gained a sense of my fondness for Twain, I'll return to where I began. As summer came to a close over Labor Day weekend, Anysja and I took a roadtrip from Virginia to Maine for a wedding on Orrs Island. Our route passed through Connecticut, and so, being at the apex of my Twain binge, I insisted we pitstop in Hartford to tour the author's old stomping grounds.

Exterior of Mark Twain's home.
The exterior of the Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut.

The visit did not disappoint. The three-story structure sits on a hill west of downtown in the neighborhood of Nook Farm. The home is 11‚500 square feet with 25 rooms.2 The architecture is in the Gothic revival style and—thanks to restoration— remains a beautiful sight to see, both inside and out. Whimsical patterns of brick adorn the home's exterior and eccentric wallpapers decorate the walls inside.

No amenity was spared. The house was equipped with central heating, burglar alarms, speaking tubes (to allow communication throughout the house), and an early iteration of the telephone.

When the family moved to Nook Farm, they joined a community of largely educated, well-off, and politically active residents. A sizable portion of the area's writers, ministers, and lawyers were involved in the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, including the family's most immediate neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The home served Twain well, providing space for the most productive writing period of his life. During the span of years in which the family lived in Hartford—1874 through 1891—Twain would walk up the stairs to the billiard room on the third floor and write what would become treasures of American literature—Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee (1889).

A composition of Twain using legos.
The billiard room on the third floor which served as Twain's private writing quarters.

The billiard room doubled as Twain’s office, study, and private domain. The pool table would often be covered with fanned-out manuscripts under review. During this point in the tour, I grew spellbound looking to the desk in the corner, imagining Twain at work all those years ago.

After touring the house, Anysja and I visited the gift shop to pick up souveniers. One of these was a collection of Twain's short stories, and among the collection is a story I want to leave you with, dear reader—The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.

It is the story of a Connecticut man who comes face-to-face with an anthropomorphized form of his own conscience. The narrator considers his conscience to be his most 'pitiless enemy,' and a conversation ensues between the two which is as hilarious as it is weighty with meaning.

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