SOURCE: Krauth, Leland. “Mark Twain: The Victorian of Southwestern Humor.” American Literature 54, no. 3 (October 1982): 368-84.

In the following essay, Krauth analyzes the literary influence of New England Victorianism on Mark Twain's Southwestern humor stories.

When Mark Twain moved into the New England culture, first in 1870 to its edge at Buffalo, and then in 1871 to one of its centers at Hartford's Nook Farm, he came doubly disguised. Truly from the South, he came to New England as a man from the West, and even his Western identity was itself partially concealed by his fame as the all-American traveler of The Innocents Abroad. While it is hyperbolic to say, as Van Wyck Brooks once did, that the New England Twain entered was “emasculated by the Civil War,” the war, together with Westward migration, had reduced the male population of the region, changing somewhat its cultural tone.¹ Many of the remaining...