Kemble's African Americans

In his essay on "Illustrating Huck Finn," Kemble says that he'd never drawn "negroes" before his work on MT's novel -- just nine paragraphs after he mentions the illustrations he had already made for "The Thompson Street Poker Club." Sketches about the comic doings of the Club, by Henry Guy Carlton, were a regular feature of Life magazine in the Spring of 1884, while MT was looking about for an illustrator. Perhaps Kemble was making a distinction between the free urban blacks whose antics are chronicled in the "Poker Club" sketches, and the enslaved southern blacks he first drew for MT's novel. In any case, Kemble had drawn many "negroes" before MT contacted him. And since MT found Kemble through his work in Life, it seems likely that, as Earl F. Briden has suggested, he was familiar with Kemble's "stylistic approach to blacks" when told his publisher to hire Kemble for the novel. Below are examples of Kemble's pre-Huck representations of blacks in Life, as scanned from their re-publication in Carlton's book The Thompson Street Poker Club (New York: Mitchell & Miller, 1884):

Click on any detail to see whole illustration.

1884 KEMBLE ILLUSTRATION       1884 KEMBLE ILLUSTRATION       1884 KEMBLE ILLUSTRATION

1884 KEMBLE ILLUSTRATION       1884 KEMBLE ILLUSTRATION       1884 KEMBLE ILLUSTRATION


Homepage MT IN HIS TIMES Bibliography