Hello, and welcome to this little bonus episode, following on from the latest episode of America, a history podcast.

Now, we've recently published why was Huck Finn banned?

And I'm joined now by Tom Smith, who's stayed on the line to discuss this just a little bit more.

Tom, thank you for hanging on.

Oh, no, it's a pleasure.

There's a lot to say about Huck Finn, so five to ten more minutes should be doable.

Yeah.

You were saying, actually, before we started recording, just how, like, you were kind of putting this one off for as long as possible because you just didn't know how to cram everything you had to say until, like, 30 minutes.

That's it.

I mean, it's just.

It's a book where once you start talking about some aspects of its history and context, then, you know, that kind of opens up a whole map of american literary culture and critical culture, and just, you have to do justice to all of those parts of its history and its different statuses at different points of its existence.

And it's one of those things where if you spend a lot of time too close to a subject, then it's one of those classic, can you see the wood for the trees?

Issues about what people who have not spent many years thinking about this book might be interested in?

Yeah, and that's an interesting point, actually.

I wonder, what do you think someone reading it today for the first time might think about Huck Finn?

Yeah.

Gosh, that is an interesting one.

I mean, I think what's.

What's really arresting about the book is immediately that use of language.

The fact that Twain hits you immediately with this.

This vernacular dialect America, and that kind of force of voice and personality you have on the first page, I think, is still immediately engaging and immediately arresting.

So I think that would be something that would still excite a reader to encounter, because it doesn't feel like many books that you might engage with still from the 1880s, let's say, you know, there is still something about it that is propulsive in its use of voice.

And, you know, one, you always hesitate to say that anything published in the 19th century is actively funny, but there are still, I think, bits of this book which are.

Which are funny and which are, you know, bleakly funny or, you know, darkly funny, but nonetheless, it's a book that has a lot of humor in it alongside, you know, everything else that's going on in there.

And I, you know, I.

Again, it's, you know, always difficult to say something's funny, but, you know, I think some of that still, still carries over into the 21st century.

Yeah.

And there must be that additional challenge, you know, as a teacher sort of teaching this book in really any book from that far ago that you're not just teaching and reading it as a sort of piece of literature in isolation.

You're also, at the same time, trying to understand the context and the perspectives at the time in which it was produced and published, because that's.

That's so important to just understanding what's being written, right?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I mean, I'm always.

I'm always big on context.

That's if anyone who's been one of my seminars or, in fact, read pretty much anything I've ever written knows that I'm almost obsessively interested in context.

You know, where do these texts come from?

You know, how are they.

How are they received at the time?

Yeah, those things I find endlessly, endlessly interesting.

And with Twain and with Huck Finn, this is a book that really does come out of a lot of interesting places.

You've got all of Twain's youth along the Mississippi river and his time as a steamboat man that's absolutely in there.

And I think that is another thing that contemporary readers might be interested in, is just the setting, the milieu, the environment, that sense of America that's being transmitted through the massive river that cuts down the middle of the continent.

You know, there is something extremely evocative about that still, even though you know that, how come Jim's journey does not take them anywhere that you might necessarily want to go?

There is still something absolutely evocative about some of those scenes on the river.

That sense of isolation, that sense of freedom.

Those things are still captivating.

So, yes, you've got that built in there.

You've got a whole trajectory of american children's literature built in there.

You've got a whole history of american vernacular built in there, history of american comedy built in there.

Just a history of Twain as a celebrity and an author.

And where this book sits in relation to that, you know, all of that's in there.

And he's such a mesmerizing personality, I think, that, you know, you know, he's an easy author to devote a career to, in some senses, just to studying, because, you know, there's so many phases to his life, to his writing, to his career.

He writes in so many different styles over a number of decades.

You know, he's a travel writer, he's a historical writer, he's a comic writer, he's a children's writer.

He's a philosopher.

You know, all of these things are flowing through him.

And at the same time, he's living a life that is just unbelievable.

I mean, at the moment, I'm focusing in on the time that Mark Twain spent in London and just going through his day by day life when he's living in London, first of all, in 1872 and 1873.

It's just extraordinary, the people he's meeting, the place he's going, the way that he's being received as an american celebrity, as an avatar of America, there is nothing like it in the 19th century.

I think, really, I think we forget that, don't we, that celebrities still existed in the 19th century.

They were just a slightly different form than what we understand celebrity to be today.

And actually, there's a really interesting angle to understanding the books that someone writes based on also their life and their career, which you sort of touched on, because we don't read a Harry Potter book in the same way that we did 20 years ago, because now Harry Potter is a whole brand and its own, and JK Rowling is a whole personality in our own right.

So we understand that a lot differently than we would have if we'd read it blind.

And Jacob Allen was an unknown author, right?

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

And, I mean, that's absolutely true.

In the 19th century as well, you know, you can see audience, you know, London audiences, british audiences taking up Twain's work, you know, engaging with him as a celebrity, thinking of him as an american humorist.

And at the moment, I'm writing about the time when, you know, London was in love with Twain and Twain was in love with London.

But over the coming decades, as twain, in a sense, wanted to move out of that pigeonhole that he'd been put into early in his career.

You know, some interesting tensions developed between him and his british audiences.

And, you know, in the 1870s, he's in the early 1870s, he's really an anglophile.

You know, he loves Britain, he loves british people, and, you know, in the 1880s, he really hates Britain, and he hates british critics and he hates british commentators because, you know, firstly, you know, to begin with, he thinks that, you know, it's amazing that he's getting all this respect as an american comedy writer, which he wasn't getting in America.

But then when he wants to kind of pivot to writing different things, he's frustrated that Britains want him to still be what he was in the early 1870s to some extent, and he becomes a symbol of that transatlantic relationship.

It's ebbs and flows, and he's a way to track, in a sense, the sense of transatlantic friendliness through the reception of his celebrity.

I mean, I think there's a whole, a whole new episode there on just Mark Twain.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So I think we've just earmarked a future podcast episode.

We'll need a few episodes, but that would be brilliant.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I'm pencilling that one in, but yeah.

Tom, thank you so much.

I think, you know, I'm sure you could talk about Huck Finn and Mark Twain and all associated topics all day long, but I'm not going to blow the minds of our Patreon sports too much.

Thank you for joining us for this.

And if you could just remind everyone where they can contact you.

Yeah, sure.

Thomasroy Smith.com is probably the best and easiest place to find me.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Tom, for joining me for this and for the main episode as well, which if you haven't listened to yet, please do go and find it and listen to it and follow the show and review us and do all the nice things that would really help other people find it, which would be awesome.

Thank you for continuing to listen and.