“In Defence of Harriet Shelley,” by Mark Twain

Mark Twain. Photo: Library of Congress

For example, he [William Godwin] was opposed to marriage. He was not aware that his preachings from this text were but theory and wind; he supposed he was in earnest in imploring people to live together without marrying, until Shelley furnished him a working model of his scheme and a practical example to analyze, but applying the principle in his own family; the matter took a different and surprising aspect then.

A few days back I posted a link to an article on the shameful domestic behavior of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. One of our commenters, “Habakkuk 21,” pointed me to Mark Twain’s essay, In Defence of Harriet Shelley. I downloaded it for my Kindle, and it made interesting reading.

As I’ve said before, I have ambivalent feelings about Mark Twain. I yield to no one in my admiration for his gifts as a novelist and humorist. He was one of the greats, and he’s given me plenty of good laughs. I like him less as a man, and when he gets on his Skeptical hobbyhorse he irritates me. On top of that, many of my generation saw Hal Holbrook (at least on TV) doing his Mark Twain show, in which he cherrypicked Twain’s writings to give the impression that he was essentially a man of the ’70s—the 1970s—born before his time.

But in In Defence of Harriet Shelley we see another Mark Twain—the Victorian middle class gentleman, the devoted husband and father, for whom nothing could be more vile than a man who abandoned his family. I expected a little more wit in this essay than is actually to be found here. The primary tone is withering scorn. It appears that Twain had little intention of entertaining the reader in this piece. He was morally outraged, and it’s the outrage that comes through.

I like Mark Twain a little better as a man, after reading A Defence of Harriet Shelley. It’s hardly a classic of Twain’s work, but it’s kind of nice having him as an ally for a change.

0 thoughts on ““In Defence of Harriet Shelley,” by Mark Twain”

  1. I always felt there was a kinship between Mark Twain and his even more skeptical, practical, atheistic, and American forbear, Ben Franklin. But I always suspected that the author of Huckleberry Finn had more potential for legitimate moral commitment and outrage than Franklin, who bragged of charting his sexual sins on a blackboard (the easier to erase them).

    It’s good to see that more honest Twain slip out.

  2. Big Mark Twain Fans here!!!I’ve read a great deal of his works and nearly paessd out from laughing so hard when my friend Carlton and I went to France with some other people and had to share a room together. We were in the south of France and there was little to do after dinner talking and drinks so we all went to bed. Carton asked me to read to me what I was reading which was Mark Twain’s autobiography. We nearly suffocated trying to keep our laughter down as the walls seemed to be made of rice paper. It was the scene where Mark Twain was stuck in the printing office as a boy and dropped a watermelon rind on the head of his brother walking bellow the window of the printing office. I’m not sure what struck us so funny but we couldn’t breath for laughing so hard. Read the passage again some years later and it wasn’t nearly as funny, but still good. I suppose it’s a matter of timing as well.

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