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Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:10:46 -0500
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Barbara Gail Ladd <[log in to unmask]>
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Alex and Lawrence

I think that the earliest draft of the story has Driscoll as Tom's
father, but I don't have a source for that at hand.

Henry Nash Smith conjectures that Judge Driscoll is "from the
standpoint of imaginative coherence" the father and adds that "Mark
Twain places the unmentionable fact of sexual intercourse between
master and slave at two removes from the actual story--first by making
Roxy, Tom's mother, the slave of a shadowy brother of Judge Driscoll at
the time of Tom's birth;and then by the further precaution of creating
an even more shadowy figure, Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, to be his
biological father."

Barbara


--
Barbara Ladd
Emory University

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