Introduction

A man always fascinated by new technologies, Mark Twain found typesetting to be the most interesting heir of the industrial age. In the 1890's, he nearly bankrupted his family yet again by investing heavily and poorly in the doomed Paige Typesetter venture. A journeyman printer in his youth, he was concerned with questions of type and the appearance of his texts in print throughout his life. Indeed, he often expressed rage and ire toward the publications who often bungled a text in transmission. Yet his fervor on this issue seems to abate in his later career, as he recovered for the Paige disater and began to worry seriously about providing a solid financial legacy for his family. In 1899 he contracted with The American Publishing Company to re-release his works, in an "Authorized Uniform Edition." This move was intended to generate quick and substantial cash, rather than to revise and set his works once and for all. In the years around the turn of the century, Twain churned out much writing, many manuscripts left unfinished, most works, fiction or polemical, of poor quality. His biographers take great care to point out his despondency in these years, his commitment to reform, and his desperate anathema to writing at all.

Few typed manuscripts survive from this time, or any earlier period in his career, for that matter. Thus, "How the Chimney-Sweep Got the Ear of the Emperor," which survives not only in typescript but also in autograph manuscript at the University of Virginia Library, offers a rare opportunity to examine Twain's composition habits vis-à-vis one of his insignficant stories-cum-commodities, as well as his use of the relatively new typewriter technology to control the appearance of his texts in print. The story was never published as a discrete work of fiction. It appeared embedded in another story, "The Man With a Message for the Director-General" under the title "Two Little Tales," first in 1901 in the Century Magazine.

The story reflects Twain's disgust with medical professionals, who he believed "killed" his ailing daughter Suzy several years before. It's a rather bittersweet tale, cynical at its core, but illuminated by Twain's classic faith in simple boyhood wisdom, the magic power of watermelon, a favorite southern American delicacy which he missed dearly while he was in Europe.

In the twilight of his life and the waning of his writing career, Twain seems poised on the edge of the new millenium with mixed feelings of frustration, moral disgust, and wonder at the modern world around him. Likewise, my examination of these various texts in the preparation of this edition has revealed the author at his easiest and best with an old-fashioned pen in hand; yet embracing new technology to infiltrate the typesetting process. Alas, when the story does appear in print, we find that publishers took as many liberties setting from a typed manuscript as from a raw hand, both to adjust for cultural conventions which the typewritten manuscript actually highlighted, and to whitewash the very details that distinguish Twain's masterful dialogue in the interest of preserving the common denominator in a journal of mass-circulation.

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