“Bessie” or “Becky”: Should We Care about
Text?
Victor Fischer
Several generations of readers familiar with the character Becky
Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) have been
perplexed by the brief appearance of someone Huck Finn calls
“Bessie Thatcher,” whom he sees aboard the ferry-boat searching
for his body in chapter 8 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
Who is that character? Is she Becky’s mother or perhaps her sister?
The text provides no answer. The steam-ferry sails by and Bessie is
not heard from again.
When members of school classes and book groups are not all
reading the same editions of Huckleberry Finn, they sometimes
notice that the titles of their copies of the book are not all the same.
Some say “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and others “The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Moreover, the last words of the
novel often differ: Some editions end with “Aunt Sally she’s going
to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
Others end with six additional words—“the end. yours truly, huck
finn”. Why these differences? How did they come about? Which
versions are correct?
Careful readers have noted other discontinuities or anomalies in
the text of Huckleberry Finn and wondered about them as well but
have had no explanations. Does text matter? This essay argues that
it does very much matter and that certain editions called “critical
editions,” which are tasked with investigating variant readings and
how the text was transmitted, can and do provide those answers and
explanations.
Choosing Editions
In choosing an edition of a classic novel to read or study, some
readers look for the most recent or the least expensive edition
available, presumably reasoning that all editions will essentially be
“Bessie” or “Becky”
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the same and differences among them will be minor and negligible.
Others know that the texts of first editions are likely to be the most
accurate and authoritative and that some scholars consider them the
most historically relevant, since they embody not only the words
the author published, but also the contributions of the typesetters,
editors, artists, binders, and publishers of their time. Such readers
often look for a facsimile copy of a first edition—such as those of
the 1996 Oxford Mark Twain edition—or one that promises to be
closely based on a first edition.
Sometimes, however, it happens that even a first edition
has been compromised by unauthorized editorial interventions,
inadvertent errors, or an author’s inability fully to control the
bookmaking process. One way to determine if that is the case—
and if it is, to learn what the author meant to publish—is to begin
with the earliest extant document containing the text, usually the
manuscript, and trace every step of its transmission into a published
book. Knowing who had the opportunity and motive to make
changes in the text allows one to distinguish between an author’s
changes and unauthorized ones, leading not only to a more accurate
text but to a history of the author’s revision of it. The result is what
is called a “critical edition.”
First American Edition of Huckleberry Finn
The text of the first American edition of Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, published in 1885 by Mark Twain’s own firm, Charles
L. Webster and Co., is problematic. The transmission of the text
from Mark Twain’s handwritten manuscript through typed copies
of it, which were heavily revised by the author and then used for
typesetting, produced a far from perfect text. Mark Twain found
the process of seeing the book through the press infuriating and
sporadically relinquished control of it. His friend and fellow author,
William Dean Howells, read the book before publication. He offered
to have a clean, or “fair-copy,” typescript made of the heavily revised
typescript for the first half of the book. He suggested doing that to
make the typesetters’ work less prone to error, although adding an
extra copying step is actually likely to introduce even more errors.
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Critical Insights
Howells also offered to read the book’s first printed “proof” pages.
Mark Twain responded on August 7, 1884, after his own exasperated
attempts to proofread the early galleys:
I have no doubt I am doing a most criminal & outrageous thing—for
I am sending you these infernal Huck Finn proofs—but the very last
vestige of my patience has gone to the devil, & I cannot bear the sight
of another slip of them. My hair turns white with rage, at sight of the
mere outside of the package; & this time I didn’t even try to glance
inside it, but re-enveloped it at once, & directed it to you. Now you’re
not to read it unless you really don’t mind it—you’re only to re-ship
it to Webster & tell him, from me, to read the remnant of the book
himself, & send no more slips to me, under any circumstances. Will
you?
The First Critical Edition
I had the singular privilege of editing a critical edition of
Huckleberry Finn twice, the first time with coeditor Walter Blair,
best known for his pioneering work on Huckleberry Finn, especially
his book Mark Twain & Huck Finn (1960), and his American humor
studies. At that time, only the second half of Mark Twain’s original
manuscript was known to exist. The first half was presumed forever
lost. Not long after publication of our critical edition, the “lost”
first half of the manuscript was discovered in a Hollywood attic,
astonishing the world (and causing Walter, then ninety years old, to
tell the Chicago Tribune that it was “a scholar’s worst nightmare”).
Having access to the full manuscript meant our critical edition
work would need to be redone, which is why we produced a second
critical edition—this time with coeditor Lin Salamo, my colleague
at the Mark Twain Project in Berkeley, California. These editions
provided the fullest possible record of just how and how much the
novel’s first edition had departed from the text that Mark Twain had
written. It also led to the discovery of how subsequent editions in
his lifetime and afterward continued to stray even further from his
original text, as new errors were introduced and reprinted.
To produce a critical edition, it is necessary to determine just
what documents and documentary evidence bearing on the text
“Bessie” or “Becky”
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survive or can be reconstructed. During the 1980s, the only part
of the Huckleberry Finn manuscript known to survive had been
written in 1883 (what became chapters 22-43), plus an interpolation
into the missing first half (what became chapters 12½-14). Mark
Twain’s extensive literary “working notes” and many of the original
illustrations by Edward W. Kemble also still survived. These
materials revealed some page numbers of the otherwise lost part
of the manuscript and of the lost typescript copies that Mark Twain
had revised extensively and submitted to the printers as copy from
which to typeset the book. There were also a selection of proof sheets
marked by Mark Twain and printer’s proofreader; a publisher’s
prospectus; and extensive but far from complete correspondence
among the author, publisher, illustrator, and others.
To reconstruct the journey of Mark Twain’s text from his
manuscript to first printed edition, we—as editors—drew on all
these documents. Close comparison of the manuscript with the
first edition revealed extensive revisions to the text that could only
have been made by Mark Twain himself. That same journey from
manuscript to printed page, however, also had many opportunities
for errors and mistranscriptions, and for non-authorial spellings
and punctuation (that is, alterations made by persons other than
Mark Twain). This was because the text was copied and recopied
in three successive typescripts, two of them heavily revised by the
author and one that he most likely never saw. All those typescripts,
unfortunately, are now lost.
A comparison of the 1883 manuscript, surviving proof sheets,
and the first edition revealed that the greater part of authorial
revision must have taken place on the lost typescripts that served as
printer’s copy. It also became clear in comparing another, unrelated,
1883 Mark Twain manuscript, “1,002. An Oriental Tale,” with a
typescript made of it by the same typists who copied the Huckleberry
Finn manuscript, that they were prone to eye-skips. Eye-skips occur
when typists momentarily look away from the documents they are
transcribing, marking their places by holding in mind the last words
typed, and then return to those same words, not where they left off
but further down in the text, thereby “skipping” over the intervening
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Critical Insights
words. The result is that those intervening words are accidentally
omitted from the typewritten copies, without the authors’ or typists’
knowledge. An example of an apparent eye-skip occurs in chapter
12 of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck describes the criminals lurking
in the wrecked steamboat Walter Scott. Mark Twain wrote:
I couldn’t see them but I could tell where they was, and how close
they was, by the whisky they’d been having.
In the first edition of the book, that same passage reads:
I couldn’t see them but I could tell where they was, by the whisky
they’d been having.
The words “and how close they was” were probably omitted when
the typist’s eye skipped from the first to the second occurrence of
“they was.”
In chapter 13, the first edition created an unintended “jump
cut”—the term for an abrupt transition that makes the subject appear
to jump from one spot to the other, without continuity—resulting in
Huck’s going from rowing a skiff to pacing the deck of a ferryboat
while searching for someone to help the thieves he and Jim had left
on the Walter Scott. The first edition omitted two entire sentences
from the account as Mark Twain had originally written it. Here is
how the passage reads in the book’s first and later editions:
I closed in above the shore-light, and laid on my oars and floated.
As I went by, I see it was a lantern hanging on the jackstaff of a
double-hull ferry-boat. [omitted sentences] I skimmed around for the
watchman, a-wondering whereabouts he slept; and by-and-by I found
him roosting on the bitts, forward, with his head down between his
knees. I give his shoulder two or three little shoves, and begun to cry.
If one rereads the above passage, inserting the following sentences
where their omission is marked above, the passage makes greater
sense:
“Bessie” or “Becky”
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Everything was dead still, nobody stirring. I floated in under the
stern, made fast, and clumb aboard.
The omission was most likely the result of a typist’s eye-skip from
“I floated” to “I skimmed.”
Errors like these were made in ways that eluded Mark Twain’s
control, but some errors were caused by his own inattention. For
example, even though he had begun writing Huckleberry Finn in
1876, just on the heels of reading the proofs of The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer, he apparently forgot Becky Thatcher’s first name and
called her “Bessie Thatcher” in her sole appearance in chapter 8. In
1883, when he reviewed the typescript of the first part of the book
before beginning to write the second half, he was bothered by that
name. Three times he wrote notes to himself, such as “‘Bessie’ or
Becky?” He clearly intended to correct the name but never did. As a
result, the name in chapter 8 has remained “Bessie” in well over one
hundred different editions that have been examined. His manifest
intention to fix it was noted and the name was corrected in all the
Mark Twain Project critical editions, along with an explanation of
how the mistake came about.
The Second Critical Edition
In late 1990, the long-missing first half of the manuscript of
Huckleberry Finn was discovered in a Hollywood attic. For the first
time in more than a century, it was possible to see how Mark Twain
himself had originally written chapters 1-12½ and 15-18½ in 1876
and chapters 18½-21 in 1880. When the discovery was announced
in February 1991, it was greeted with extraordinary public interest
worldwide. Although the manuscript was essentially a first draft,
what it contained was so revealing that it seemed incumbent on
the Mark Twain Project editors to include as much information as
possible about it in the introduction, notes, and appendixes when we
set out to edit the novel for the second time.
Among the biggest surprises the newly found manuscript
contained were passages Mark Twain decided to leave out of his
book. Among them was a story narrated by Jim that we have called
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Critical Insights
“Jim’s ‘Ghost’ Story.” Dropped from chapter 9, it was first published
as “Jim and the Dead Man” in The New Yorker magazine in 1995.
The manuscript also showed the author at work with extraordinary
care and purpose as he revised his first draft of Huck’s struggles
with his conscience in chapter 16 and in other famous passages
that he revised and transformed. Among them was the opening
passage of chapter 19, in which Huck describes the sunrise on the
Mississippi, a famous and beloved example of vernacular writing
and of “showing” not “telling,” often used in the classroom. In 1957,
Leo Marx said of it,
Much of the superior power of Huckleberry Finn must be ascribed to
the sound of the voice we hear. It is the voice of the boy experiencing
the event. Of course no one ever spoke such concentrated poetry, but
the illusion that we are hearing the spoken word is an important part
of the total illusion of reality. . . . [T]he vernacular method liberated
Sam Clemens. When he looked at the river through Huck’s eyes he
was suddenly free of certain arid notions of what a writer should
write (Marx 140).
An analysis of the manuscript alterations and those made on a
lost typescript before the first edition was set made clear just how
much of the style was achieved by Mark Twain’s careful revision
on the typescript, which, though lost, could now be editorially
reconstructed. The evidence of his disciplined self-revision seemed
a gift worthy of study, by general readers as well as by students
and professors. Here is a small sample of the original manuscript
reading followed by Mark Twain’s revised reading:
Manuscript:
sometimes you could hear the screak of a sweep, or jumbled sounds
of voices, it was so still, & sounds traveled so far; now you could
begin to see the ruffled streak on the water that the current breaking
past a snag makes; next, you would see the lightest & whitest mist
curling up from the water; pretty soon the east reddens up, then the
river reddens, & maybe you make out a little log cabin in the edge of
the forest, away yonder on the bank on t’other side of the river; then
“Bessie” or “Becky”
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