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Huckleberries and Humans: On the Naming of Huckleberry Finn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

James L. Colwell*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder

Abstract

Mark Twain's choice of Huckleberry Finn as the name (or nickname) of his best-loved character has been virtually unexamined, yet its uniqueness and effectiveness make that choice worthy of further thought. A suggestive precedent was his use of Mulberry Sellers, but Twain knew the huckleberry only by hearsay until he encountered it in Hartford in 1868. An American word, “huckleberry” originated about 1670 and appeared in some common expressions with connotations of insignificance and rusticity, both qualities appropriate for Huck. The real-life model for Huck was Twain's boyhood friend, Tom Blankenship, like Huck the son of the Town Drunkard. “Finn” came from another Hannibal alcoholic, and was suitable both phonetically and because it was Irish. The appropriateness of huckleberry is underlined by a quality of the berry itself. As Thoreau and others tell us, it does not submit to cultivation and tastes best when picked wild. Twain's Huckleberry, too, resisted domestication.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 1 , January 1971 , pp. 70 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 75 One possible exception can be found in Oliver Blear-sides, “Mark Twain Characters Come from Real People,” Mark Twain Quarterly, 4 (Summer-Fall 1941), 16, which states that when a Captain Huck Finn died and “the newspapers all blandly declared him to have been the original Huckleberry Finn of the book, Clemens flatly denied it and went on to state that the honor belonged to Tom Blankenship, the town drunkard's son who although ‘ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed,‘ had as good a heart as any boy ever had.” Blankenship is discussed below. As to the Captain's name, one can assume that he became “Huck” Finn after the fact and inevitably, as is true of today's “Snuffy” Smith or “Buck” Rogers. It does occur as a surname, e.g., Alan Wright Huckleberry, author (with Edward S. Strother) of Speech Education for the Elementary Teacher (Boston, 1966).

Note 2 in page 75 Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1962), p. 12. Blair also discusses its significance, briefly but accurately.

Note 3 in page 75 Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, eds., Mark Twain—Howe/Is Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872–1910 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), i, 92. The first edition is most readily available reprinted in Hamlin Hill and Walter Blair, eds., The Art of Hucklebery Finn (San Francisco, 1962).

Note 4 in page 75 I am indebted to Frederick Anderson, editor of the Mark Twain Papers, for pointing this out to me, and for other assistance. For the Sellers episode, see Justin Kaplan. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York, 1966), p. 163 and Charles Neider, ed., The Autobiography of Mark Twain (New York, 1959), pp. 19–20.

Note 5 in page 75 “Studies in the Ericales: A Review of the North American Gaylussaciae; with Remarks on the Origin and Migration of the Group,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 68 (Nov. 1941), 531–51.

Note 6 in page 75 Published 6 Sept. 1868 and reprinted in The Twainian, 7 (Nov.-Dec. 1948), 7.

Note 7 in page 75 Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, p. 64.

Note 8 in page 75 Robert L. Ramsay and Frances Guthrie Emberson, A Mark Twain Lexicon, University of Missouri Studies, 13 (Jan. 1938), 115; Harold Wentworth and Stuart B. Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang (New York, 1960), p. 276; Mitford M. Mathews, éd., A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (Chicago, 1951), I, 846. Apparently “my huckleberry friend” of the recent popular song is a modern combination of both the first and the third usages.

Note 9 in page 75 Mathews, p. 846. During the decade of the publication of Huckleberry Finn, children in southern Iowa and northern Missouri jumped rope to the following jingle: “Do, do, Huckleberry, do; / Do be careful what you do do.” Whether this predates Twain's inspiration or grew out of it is not clear. Personal interview with ninety-three-year-old Charles H. Haines, Boulder, Colo., 13 Oct. 1968.

Note 10 in page 75 Ramsay and Emberson, p. 115.

Note 11 in page 75 See entries for “huckleberry,” “hurtleberry,” and “whortleberry” in OED and Webster's International, 2nd ed.

Note 12 in page 75 Although Mathews cites a single source that regards it as a Buckinghamshire term brought to the U. S. by the original settlers of Woburn, Mass., in the mid-1600's. Since Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English . . . and Such Americanisms as Have Been Naturalized, 5th ed. (London, 1961), does not find the word in England today, its claim to Americanness can remain uncontested for the present.

Note 13 in page 75 Sir William A. Craigie and James R. Hulbert, A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, m (Chicago, 1942), 1,289. But OED gives 1670 as the first usage (q.v.).

Note 14 in page 75 Albert Bigelow Paine, éd., Mark Twain's Autobiography (New York, 1924), ir, 174, quoted in Hill and Blair, p. 389. In his preface to Tom Sawyer, Twain states that Huck is “drawn from life,” while Tom, a combination of three actual boys, is of the “composite order of architecture.” Obviously, Tom owes both a nominal and a character debt to young Blankenship. For more, much more, on Tom's name see William G. Barrett, “On the Naming of Tom Sawyer,” Psychoanalytical Quarterly, 24 (Summer 1955), 424–36. I, too, owe a nominal debt.

Note 15 in page 75 Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York, 1912), I, 63. For Twain's notes on the Blankenships, see Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston, 1952), pp. 147–48, quoted in Hill and Blair, p. 390, and Walter Blair, ed., Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck & Tom (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 31, 344, 345.

Note 16 in page 75 Hill and Blair, p. 389. “The Originals of Some of Mark Twain's Characters,” The American Review of Reviews, 42 (Aug. 1910), 228–30, however, quotes a Homer Croy as identifying Huck's original as B. C. M. “Barney” Farthing, son of a hard-working Hannibal citizen who was neither drunkard nor fisherman. Croy is quoted (p. 229) as asserting that Twain “took all his [Farthing's] exploits and then pieced them out with the adventures of other boys around the town until they made a wonderful and laughable whole.”

Note 17 in page 75 Hill and Blair, p. 389. Once the elder Clemens had tried to reform Finn, with a spectacular lack of success. But that is another story. See Wecter, p. 150.

Note 18 in page 75 But, as Joseph Angell has pointed out to me, with a total syllable count remaining virtually identical.

Note 19 in page 75 Hill and Blair, p. 389, but F. W. Lorch, “A Note on Tom Blankenship (Huckleberry Finn),” AL, 12 (Nov. 1940), 351–53, found that as a young man Blankenship had a record of such frequent arrests that the Hannibal Daily Messenger in 1861 openly suspected him of subsisting by larceny. Lorch concludes that as late as that year, Blankenship “was still unregenerate, . . . had not yet cultivated a respect for law and order, . . . [and] his company was still a matter of reproach to the good citizens of Hannibal.” On the other hand, reform may be possible—the elder Blankenship for example, was quite fond of swearing off. Also, early day law officers, like some of their later successors, had a tendency to be found on both sides of the law at various times.

Note 20 in page 75 Hamlin Hill, ed., Mark Twain's Letters to his Publishers, 1867–1894 (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1967), p. 174. Twain to Charles L. Webster, 7 May 1884: “All right and good, and will answer; although the boy's mouth is a trifle more Irishy than necessary.” I am indebted to William M. Gibson for reminding me of this incident.

Note 21 in page 76 William M. Cox and Melvin Landsberg have pointed this out to me. Mr. Cox also set me straight on Huck's literacy (see below).

Note 22 in page 76 Blair, p. 54.

Note 23 in page 76 Twain, however, was chary of the word “creation,” once saying, “I don't believe an author . . . ever lived who created a character. It was always drawn from his recollection . . . Even when he is making no attempt to draw his character from life . . ., he is yet unconsciously drawing from memory” (Hill and Blair, p. 12).

Note 24 in page 76 Love and Death in the American Novel (Cleveland, Ohio, 1960), p. 554. This sentence is unfortunately omitted from the 1966 revision.

Note 25 in page 76 Among the most incisive of such scholarship is Paul J. Carter, Jr., “Olivia Clemens Edits Following the Equator,” AL, 30 (May 1958), 194–209.

Note 26 in page 76 The Ordeal of Mark Twain, rev. ed. (New York, 1955), pp. 190–91.

Note 27 in page 76 Blair, p. 296. See also Donald Smalley, ed., Domestic Manners of the Americans, by Mrs. Frances Trollope (New York, 1949), pp. v, 21–22, n. 1; and Helen Heineman, “Frances Trollope in the New World : Domestic Manners of the Americans,” AQ, 21 (Fall 1969), 545.

Note 28 in page 76 James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, N. J., 1966). See also Pascal Covici, Jr., Mark Twain's Humor: The Image of a World (Dallas, Texas, 1962).

Note 29 in page 76 See Barrett.

Note 30 in page 76 José Barchilon and Joel S. Kovel, “Huckleberry Finn: A Psychoanalytical Study,” Journal of the American Psy-coanalytic Association, 14 (Oct. 1966), 775–814. Despite my inability to swallow completely its version of “Pap,” I find this a fascinating study and am indebted to my colleague, Jacques Barchilon, for calling my attention to it.

Note 31 in page 76 Tak Sioui (pseud, of John Hakac), Huckleberry Finn: More Molecules (Pecos, Texas, 1962), reprints the offending drawings and gives their remarkable story. As to Huck's sexual connotations, this possibility was suggested to me by alleged friends and was not initially my idea.

Note 32 in page 76 Notebook 17 (May 1883—Aug. [Sept. ?] 1884), pp. 3637, and Notebook 18 (24 Oct. 1884—4 April 1885), pp. 3639, originals in the Mark Twain Papers, University of California (Berkeley) Library. Portions quoted Copyright © 1971 by The Mark Twain Company.

Note 33 in page 76 In A Literary History of America, quoted by Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain's America (Boston, 1932), p. 300.

Note 34 in page 76 Philadelphia, 1913, pp. 107 and 109.

Note 35 in page 76 The Literature of the United States, 3rd ed. (London, 1967) p. 102.

Note 36 in page 76 Ch. ix, “The Ponds.”

Note 37 in page 76 An earlier version of this paper was read at the Rocky Mountain MLA meeting, 11 Oct. 1968, at the U. S. Air Force Academy.