Review: Chatto and Twain

Mark Twain In England by Dennis Welland

This book is not quite as it’s billed, as the author freely acknowledges in admitting that the title is “deliberately ambiguous” - but it is no less revealing for that. It is a detailed history of Twain’s relations with his English publishers, in particular with Andrew Chatto of Chatto and Windus. In passing, the wider picture of Twain’s reputation in England and his thoughts about the country become evident but the main interest is in providing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Twain the businessman and Twain the struggling writer - struggling both with the need to produce an uninterrupted stream of commercially successful books and with his sometimes desperate finances, caused not through lack of income but through excessive spending. Welland is full of sympathy for Chatto as he offers Twain relatively generous percentages on book sales, remains polite and professional whenever Twain or his American publishers disrupt his planned publishing schedule through carelessness or worse and in dealing with the Clemens family’s endless small domestic requests whenever they are in Britain or Europe. For instance, Chatto’s son is tasked with procuring two bicycles for Clemens’ daughters to ride in London. With revealing quotations from contemporary reviews, Welland provides a detailed account of how Twain graduated from his reputation as a humorous writer to one who deserved wider recognition as a true literary figure - even if this transition was in danger of being derailed by more serious works like The Gilded Age which was not well received. Even Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, for all their brilliance, could confuse attempts at categorisation: were they for children or adults? In the end, the public understood that Twain was a writer to be considered alongside the best and his British sales were sometimes greater than those in America.

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