The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac
Donnell.

~~~~~

_Mark Twain's Audience: A Critical Analysis of Reader Responses to the
Writings of Mark Twain_. Robert McParland. Lexington Books (Rowman &
Littlefield Publishing Group), 2014. Pp. 229. Hardcover. $90 (hardcover).
$89.99 (ebook). ISBN 978-0-7391-9051-7 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-7391-9052-4
(ebook).


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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by
Kevin Mac Donnell

 Copyright (c) 2015 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


The obvious way to get to know Mark Twain is to pick up one of his books
and start reading. But should it be one of his novels or one of his short
stories? Perhaps one of his burlesque sketches, or maybe his poetry? How
about an essay? But should it be on literature or politics? Can his
lectures or his speeches be neglected, or his many interviews and letters?
It will not be long before all of his autobiography will be in print, and
then readers might know him better. A careful study of the biographical
details of his life and those of his friends will surely yield some
insights. Or could knowing Mark Twain come by merely by gazing at the
hundreds of photographs taken during his lifetime, or reading all of the
quotes and aphorisms attributed to him?


Knowing Mark Twain can take many pathways, and the entire body of scholarly
research on him boils down to explorations of those pathways and the
blazing of new trails. One of the newer trails that might lead to knowing
Mark Twain is knowing his audience. Mark Twain himself was keenly aware of
his audiences and knew how to "fetch" them from the stage or from the page,
as well as keep them at a distance, making sure they only knew as much as
he cared for them to know. Every biographer of Mark Twain, beginning with
Albert Bigelow Paine, has commented on Mark Twain's audiences, and Hamlin
Hill may have been one of the first scholars to actually focus on his
audience when he published "Mark Twain: Audience and Artistry" in _American
Quarterly_ in 1963. Louis J. Budd may have been the first scholar to
recognize that Mark Twain had more than one audience, and his two books,
_Our Mark Twain, the Making of His Public Personality_ (1983) and _Mark
Twain: the Contemporary Reviews_ (1994) were among the first book length
texts to focus on his audiences--at least the book reviewers in the
audience--but William Dean Howells _My Mark Twain_ (1910) included an
appendix of book reviews of his writings and also recorded other reactions
to Mark Twain's writings and personality. More recently, Kent Rasmussen's
_Dear Mark Twain: Letters From His Readers_ (2013) documented what 200 of
Mark Twain's readers wanted to say to the man himself.


What would we want to know about Mark Twain's audience and where would we
look? It would seem reasonable to want to know some demographics--the
audiences's ages, their sex, their races, their geographic distribution,
their nationalities, their religions, their socioeconomic backgrounds, and
what they had to say about Mark Twain. Where would we look? The archive of
roughly 12,000 letters written to Mark Twain at the Mark Twain Project
(MTP) contains more than 1,000 letters from readers, and that seems an
obvious place to start. The few hundred salesman prospectuses for his
various works that survive in many public and private collections certainly
record at least another few thousand people who actually paid their
hard-earned money for a copy of one his books to read themselves or give as
a gift. Many of those buyers can easily be traced through online
genealogical websites and some relevant details of their lives teased out
from census records, newspaper archives, and other public documents. Many
people who read his books, attended his lectures, or who were otherwise
Mark Twain's audiences left behind memoirs, wrote letters to newspapers,
and published comments in magazines, many of which are accessable through
GoogleBooks. Newspaper archives are full of reviews of Mark Twain's books,
lectures, speeches, as wells as gossip.


In _Mark Twain's Audience_, Robert McParland acknowledges previous
scholarship and carefully defines who comprised Mark Twain's audience
during his lifetime and after, both in the United States and abroad, and
explores some of the source material mentioned above. He examines Mark
Twain's early readers, looks at the marketing of his books by subscription,
pays attention to his lecture audiences, looks at his reception among
youthful readers, studies how his works were received in cultural
institutions like schools, libraries, and churches, and takes a sampling of
gender, race, and ethnicity among some readers before concluding with a
look at Mark Twain's global audience and his evolving posthumous reception.


McParland offers thoughtful discussions about Mark Twain audiences
beginning with his introductory chapter, and his comments on particular
works comparing the reactions of contemporary and modern readers are
insightful even if not always original (130). His examination of
African-American readers is especially good, but brief (126-32), and he
makes many other observations worth noting that suggest further study. He
makes a good case that Mark Twain's western readers enjoyed nostalgia
(143), and demonstrates that there was no criticism of _Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn_ in black newspapers (125). He also provides an
interesting example of how one reader's view of Mark Twain changed over
time (113), and his statistics on the differences in how boys and girls
viewed Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn is informative (77-101). He cites a letter
from a Quaker who read _Roughing It_ (84) and points out that illiteracy
among Catholics may have hurt sales of Webster & Company's _Life of the
Pope_, a book Mark Twain was certain would be bought by every Catholic.


But in the penultimate paragraph of his 228 page text, just before the
endnotes and bibliography and index, McParland admits that Mark Twain
"remains a somewhat elusive figure" and expresses the hope that his study
"has provided a resource that other researchers may build upon" (201).
Almost admitting defeat, he goes on to say that "one searches the geography
for signposts of the audience and yes, there are trees but few paths have
been carved out in the wilderness" and he expresses hopes for "future
research on his readers." It would have been helpful if McParland had
admitted these limitations at the beginning of his book instead of toward
the end after the reader has begun to draw the same conclusions.


While the conception of this book is excellent, the execution falls short
of that conception. If, by the last page of his text, McParland notices few
paths have been carved out, it's only because he failed to carve them when
he had the chance. The most obvious example is his heavy reliance on the
letters published in _Dear Mark Twain_. By this reviewer's count, he quotes
from a total of at least 93 letters to Mark Twain, and 83 of those quoted
letters--several quoted in their entirety--come from the roughly 200
letters published in _Dear Mark Twain_. He correctly attributes 76 of those
letters to _Dear Mark Twain_, and cites three other letters from MTP that
are not in _Dear Mark Twain_, and includes seven letters from other
sources, but this seems an absurdly heavy reliance on Rasmussen's work. He
says he tracked down descendants of those letter-writers himself, but this
reviewer could not find a clear example of that. However, that kind of
difficult leg-work is everywhere evident and foot-noted in _Dear Mark
Twain_ for the simple reason that not all of those letters to Mark Twain
are in the public domain, something that should give pause to anyone
copying those letters without permission or without doing some leg-work of
their own.


If McParland relies too heavily on the 200 letters in _Dear Mark Twain_,
what about the more than 800 other letters from readers at MTP? That would
seem like a path begging to be "carved out in the wilderness." McParland
cites only three of them. Although McParland praises the MTP and describes
their research and their holdings, there is no evidence in this book that
he ever did more than browse their website. If the "object of this study is
to begin to investigate the responses of these readers to Twain's writings"
(4) what better source could there be than those other 800 letters? This is
a baffling oversight.


Other evidence upon which his conclusions draw seem likewise scant. Relying
only on two prospectuses readily available at Steve Railton's excellent
website (_Mark Twain in His Times_), McParland, tracks down some
biographical details on some of the listed subscribers, but no other
prospectuses seem to have been consulted (49). This seems all the more
surprising given that a few pages earlier the statement is made that "it is
difficult to find the actual individuals who bought Mark Twain's books"
(44). OCLC (WorldCat) lists prospectuses for all of Mark Twain's
subscription books, and anyone who has ever handled a Mark Twain first
edition or reprint knows that his readers frequently inscribed their names
and towns in their copies of his books. Many of these thousands of people
whose names are scribbled in Mark Twain's books or listed in the
prospectuses of his books can be found at ancestry.com or genealogybank.com.


It seems that McParland prefers much smaller samplings, and relies on data
from a previous study in Missouri, some readers in a small town in
Michigan, and a reading club in Brooklyn (132). We are told the titles of
some of the works read by people in those places, and that they laughed,
but not much more (139-141). We are also told of a young man who read an
essay about "the Characters of Mark Twain" for a school program and that he
came from a wealthy family, and we are then treated to the details of the
wedding attire of the woman he later married (142), but what does that tell
us about Mark Twain or his audience?  This is hardly the scope one would
expect in a book-length study of Mark Twain's audiences. Likewise,
McParland cites some memoirs, diaries, journals, oral histories, and
newspapers, and although these provide revealing information, they comprise
only a fraction of the mass of materials that are readily available in
online newspaper and book databases.


There are the usual typographical errors and factual glitches that creep
into many books on Mark Twain, and a few deserve notice. _The Innocents
Abroad_ is cited as his first book; it was not (25). Mark Twain is said to
have used a ballpoint pen (166); although patented in 1888 and a crude
prototype was able to mark leather goods, ballpoint _pens_ were not
manufactured until decades after Mark Twain's death. The African-American
staffs of the Clemens and Crane households are conflated (132), and this
reviewer has never before heard the claim that George Washington Cable was
a _mulatto_ (70).


McParland's own conclusion about his work is accurate: he has "provided a
resource that other researchers may build upon" (201). He defines who Mark
Twain's readers are and suggests most if not all of the places where these
readers are to be found. But he doesn't seem to have looked very hard for
them himself, with the result that future researchers have a lot of
building left to do. In the meantime, readers of this book may not know
Mark Twain or his readers much better than they did before they read this
book.