| Hannibal c1848, by Dave Thomson (with Ed Garbert) CLICK FOR ENLARGEMENT & DETAILS |
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As MT grew older, his fictional representations of Hannibal grew streadily bleaker. In his last great story, for example, the man who corrupts the village of Hadleyburg sarcastically warns someone that if he doesn't reform, he "will die and go to hell or Hadleyburg" -- and adds that hell would be a better place to end up. Indeed, except for Tom Sawyer, MT's fiction is typically anti-nostalgic: through realism, satire, burlesque and occasional invective he repeatedly attacks the hold that idealizations of the past have on the mind of his time, whether that past is embodied in Arthur or Elizabeth's England, Scott or Cooper's historical romances, or the many villages, including St. Petersburg, that Huck Finn keeps running away from. MT's American audiences, on the other hand, have become very attached to the image of Hannibal as Tom's St. Petersburg. In Tom Sawyer generations of readers have found access not just to childhood as a realm of summertime adventures, but to a mythic "once upon a time" in the national past, a place before the disruptions of industrialization, urbanization and immigration that were already beginning to transform the face of America even when MT's novel first appeared. After he ran away from Hannibal in the mid-1850s, Sam Clemens seldom returned. But MT's readers have returned again and again, in spirit and in person, to what in "Old Times on the Mississippi" MT called the "white town drowsing in the sunshine." When they come in person they're called tourists, whose presence turns nostalgia into a marketable commodity. In 1955, according to the National Geographic article below, Hannibal had more annual visitors than Hawaii, putting lots of real people to work in the space of "Tom Sawyer's playground." How America has sought its past in Sam Clemens' childhood home is the story you can explore through the materials below. As you do that, it's important also to keep in mind the sights you won't see in these texts, photos and illustrations. Injun Joe, for example, is barely visible as a figure in the landscape of this earlier America, and the existence of slavery (except for the first description below) has been completely erased. The house where "Becky Thatcher" lived is marked on all the maps, but there are as yet no markers for the haunted house in Dawson's Landing (as Hannibal is called in Pudd'nhead Wilson) to which another of MT's Toms, "Tom Driscoll," snuck out at night to meet with his mulatto mother Roxy. As a shrine, either to MT's achievement or to America's history, "Hannibal," like that famous fence around Aunt Polly's house, has been white-washed. |
Frontispiece (detail): The Boy's Life of Mark Twain |
HANNIBAL'S MARK TWAIN CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION (1935) OTHER EVOCATIONS & LATER RE-PRESENTATIONS
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