HUCKSTERED TWAIN
Paraphernalia illustrates exploitation of famed author’s characters
GRANVILLE, Ohio — In the late 1980s, Thomas Wortham encountered characters from the fiction of Mark Twain in a surprising setting — not a library or a bookshop but the department store Neiman Marcus.
While shopping at a branch of the store in Beverly Hills, California, Wortham — who retired in 2008 as chairman of the English Department at the University of California-Los Angeles — spotted a display featuring Cabbage Patch Kids outfitted to resemble characters created by Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens): Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.
“I saw the three dolls, and I started laughing,” said Wortham, 73, now living at Buckeye Lake. “Because it is hilarious: Huckleberry Finn in Neiman Marcus.”
Wortham, whose writings on Twain include an introduction to the William Dean Howells memoir “My Mark Twain,” purchased the dolls.
In the ensuing years, the scholar acquired a panoply of Twain-related paraphernalia, including figurines, toys, comic and coloring books, and even sheet music. Many pieces depict Huck, the title character of the novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Featured in an exhibit at the Robbins Hunter Museum in Granville are highlights from Wortham’s collection (representing less than a fourth of the 1,000-plus items).
As Wortham sees it, however, the objects don’t accurately reflect Huck.
“He was a son of a drunk, an abused child who most of the novel is ‘a-wishin’ I was dead,’” Wortham said. “Child psychologists have used that character ... as an example of the predicament of the child.”
By contrast, the ephemera in the exhibit evoke a devil-may-care version of the character that doesn’t square with the novel.
Among the dozens of pieces housed in a glass case, figurines show a plucky boy bedecked in a straw hat or with a sack swung over his shoulder. The pieces are lovingly crafted but do not reflect the complexity of the character.
Other objects reflect the use of Huck for commercial purposes.
For example, an advertisement for John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. includes an illustration of Huck and Tom lollygagging on a raft; the image is beautifully painted, and the caption rather evocative (“Their boyhood was made in America”), but one wonders whether characters from great fiction should be exploited by corporations.
More in keeping with the spirit of Twain is a Huck Finn Sportsman Slingshot, advertised as “a real ‘humdinger,’” and a box A collection of Twain paraphernalia
containing sticks of Tom Sawyer Dustless Chalk.
Further proving Huck’s popularity are a nutcracker and a teddy bear dressed as the character. The singlemost-incongruous item in the exhibit, however, might be a comic book called The New Adventures of Huck Finn, in which the character encounters a mummy — presumably a long, long way from the Mississippi River.
Twain himself is represented in a succession of figurines and busts — a reminder that the author allowed his name to appear in connection with products. On the wall of the museum is an empty bag of Mark Twain Flour; on the center of the bag, framed by strands of wheat, is an image of Twain.
“Clemens needed money desperately,” Wortham said. “He had daughters — one daughter, especially — with very expensive taste. He had expensive taste.”
Wortham plans to write a book that draws on his collection — “a public biography of Huckleberry Finn,” he said — but, for the most part, he no longer seeks additional items.
“I have enough,” he said.