Mark Twain's Homes and Literary Tourism

My book Mark Twain's Homes and Literary Tourism is out!  You can find the publisher's description of it here.

If you are in the area, I'll be speaking at Elmira College on October 3rd, 2012 on "Mark Twain’s Homes and Haunts: Mark Twain Museums and Public History." As part of their Trouble Begins at Eight series, I'll be at the Quarry Farm Barn, which is part of the farm where Mark Twain spent many summers with his family and writing.  It's the perfect place to think about Mark Twain and Public History.

American Literary Tourism

Nearly three weeks ago now, in New Brunswick, I participated in an outstanding panel at the NeMLA annual conference on American Literary Tourism and its contemporary study. Jennifer Harris from Mount Allison University organized the panel and brought together myself, Jane Wood (Park University), Mara Scanlon (Mary Washington University), and Susan Bishop (All in One Tours) to talk about our research in literary tourism. While I spoke about Mark Twain’s birthplace and the likelihood that it, like many other birthplaces, is a fake or a “replica,” others talked about sites associated with Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Walt Whitman, and the rich history of early American literary guidebooks.

Jane Wood discussed the Cather and O’Connor sites, and their various eccentricities. Mara Scanlon told us about her amazing class on Whitman that she ran in conjunction with 5 other Whitman classes across the world (most at or near historic sites associated with periods in Whitman’s life), the partner-classes made use of the fabulous digital resources on Whitman made available through places like the Walt Whitman Archive, and sought out real places with which to connect with Whitman’s biography and work. Susan Bishop’s overview on the history of literary tourism guidebooks was amazing. Although I thought I had uncovered all the early American guides through my amateur searches of various library catalogs, Susan brought accounts and photographs of her collection of rare books dealing with travel to American literary sites—and she was generous enough to share her sources.

I organized a panel on a similar subject a few years ago at an American Studies Association conference in Philadelphia—and had a great cast of participants—Mary Jenkins—now retired administrator at the NSP’s Poe House, Anne Trubek—before her recent Skeptic’s Guide to Writers' Houses, Lawrence Buell, and Karen Sanchez-Eppler. Between this recent panel and the last, it seems like there’s more than enough interest in scholarship on literary sites and literary tourism to put together a well rounded and interdisciplinary collection on the subject.

If you are interested or intrigued, please visit the Call for Papers for this collection here.

The Baltimore Poe House in Trouble

After hearing that Baltimore's city officials (all of which seem nameless in recent reports) canceled the Baltimore Poe house's city funding, papers across the country have picked up the story and are going with headlines like "Baltimore's Edgar Allan Poe House May Close, Warns Curator." Seth sent me a link to a version of the story yesterday, and it was all over my facebook account this morning as all of the literary houses that I am "friends" with picked up the story and passed it around.

I've kept up the naive belief that while other historic sites were closing or in danger of closing, that literary houses had continued to do well, visitation was up; "staycations," and other incentives kept people close to home and enjoying literary domestications in ways that they did during World War II. Sure some houses have had funding problems--like Edith Wharton's the Mount, but they were in the red before the recession.

During the Great Depression, federal employees through the WPA and the CCC helped maintain and build historic sites. Mark Twain's Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Missouri got a new building and a stone firewall thanks to federal workers, the Missouri state park that celebrates his birth saw huge infrastructure support through the CCC, and even his adult home in Hartford (while it was a branch of the Hartford Public Library) had a WPA worker who visited once a week to help shelve books and catalog items in their Twain collection. I don't doubt that many of literary sites saw the great benefit of federal workers. Above is a HABS photograph (HABS itself is a public works program started in the 1930s) of Mark Twain's Boyhood Home before the federal relief workers tore down the damaged brick house next to it. On the left is an image of the house with a tiny piece of the "new" stone house that they re-built in its place. Today it serves as the giftshop for the museum.

Each of these places exists today because, in part, the relief programs of the 1930s invested in America's historic infrastructure. In the 1930s we put Americans back to work in our state and national parks. Such job programs today might do a world of good.

How We Remember the Dead

Dead writers' bodies--or at least their graves--argues one study, were the way that Westerners first "visited" literary places. Long before tourists lined up to see Shakespeare's birthplace, they were lining up to make rubbings of his grave stone. Early literary tourists wrote elegies (like Wilde's) upon poet's gravestones and true fans sought out Shelley's and Keats' final resting places. Westminster Abbey was a literary tourist mecca long before anyone thought of developing historic sites at the childhood and adult homes of the poets.

I spent time at Twain's grave while I was fellow at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. But I have not made literary grave visits a habit (despite the fact that the highlights for me of two recent trips have been cemeteries--Salem, Ma. and Mystic, Co. have wonderful storied graveyards). Literary graves are less appealing. Maybe it's not just me, I think Americans have gotten out of the habit of remembering writers at their graves (with the great exception of the Poe Toaster).

This week, on Wednesday, April 21, many will remember Mark Twain, now dead exactly 100 years. The Hartford Courant ran the very same obituary it did 100 years ago, the New York Times ran a piece on Mark Twain's Library and marginalia, even our local paper the Philadelphia Inquirer did a piece on Twain's time in Philadelphia as a typesetter.

Elmira, New York will stage a reenactment of his funeral and its procession from Park Church to Woodlawn Cemetery. Residents and visitors are invited to look on and carry umbrellas, as the original funeral was on a sober and rainy April day. Many will gather at Woodlawn and think about Mark Twain/Sam Clemens and his legacy and participate in the most ancient kind of literary tourism.

Literary Birthplaces

A recent piece in the New York Times about George Orwell's birthplace posed a question that I have been asking myself the last several years: why do we visit literary birthplaces? What interest do the cradles of our literary heroes and heroines hold for readers? What can any birthplace tell you about the historical person born there?

I'm working on a chapter on spurious history of Mark Twain's birthplace in Florida, Missouri for a collection on birthplaces, and I have been thinking about Abraham Lincoln's birthplace--or rather as the National Park calls it, his "symbolic birthplace cabin." It ends up that a number of famous literary and historical birthplaces are fakes (or if you want to split hairs, symbolic reproductions, reconstructions, or other types of creative commemorations that have little to do with the real historic structures where these figures were born). Abe Lincoln's birthplace at Sinking Spring Farm, Kentucky has the added distinction of possibly being constructed from the logs of Jefferson Davis's birthplace cabin. Both cabins traveled across country, often reconstructed side by side, and were stored in the same cargo holds and warehouses until no one knew for sure which logs were which. Many had long suspected that none really came from the "authentic" birth-cabin of Lincoln. (see Pichathley)

But Lincoln's birthplace is amazing (and sits inside the giant memorial building at the left). It is a site that exists because some Americans, like Mark Twain, believed in its crucial contribution to the narrative that connects the stories of "great men" to the soil of the United States. In a 1907 plea in the New York Times, Twain argued that the Lincoln cabin was a "birthplace worth saving." In a promotional broadside he elaborated:

"Some people make pilgrimages to the town whose streets were once trodden by Shakespeare...But in most cases the connection between the great man or great event and the relic we revere is accidental. Shakespeare might have lived in any town as well as Stratford..."

He goes on: "But it was no accident that planted Lincoln on a Kentucky farm...the association there had substance to it. Lincoln belonged just where he was put. If the Union was to be saved, it had to be a man of such origin that should save it."

Each of these places, as a successful historic site, has to argue that there is substance to the connection between adult writer and infant locale, but is there? Or do we just read this intention backwards onto these historic sites?


Twain's own birthplace has as fraught a history as Lincoln's (though as far as I know wasn't built out of logs from Davis's birthplace). More on it in an up-coming post.

See former National Park Service Chief Historian, Dwight Pitcaithley, “Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace Cabin: The Making of an American Icon,” Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape, ed. Paul A. Shackel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

F.G. Fisher's Stratford Models at the Rosenbach

I've been spending part of a day each week at one particular literary museum in Philadelphia, The Rosenbach. I first visited the museum in September. I went to see the Marianne Moore room, where the museum has recreated Marianne Moore's living room item-by -item in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the Rosenbach house. I was so interested in what I found in the museum, aside from the Marianne Moore Collection—which I can’t rave about enough, that I joined their docent class this fall.

As part of the class we wrote about three objects in the collection. My favorite objects this week are a set of models that Dr. Rosenbach collected in 1916. A portion of what follows is from my research for the class.

Dr. Rosenbach loved Shakespeare and collected a number of important editions of early collections of Shakespeare’s plays, some of which ended up in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare collecting has long been in fashion and may have well been the first literary collecting where collectors saw objects associated with an author with a pseudo-religious fascination.

The famous Shakespeare Mulberry is a great example. Supposedly, Shakespeare planted the tree when he retired to “the New Place,” his final home in Stratford. The mulberry tree he planted inspired so many on-lookers that the last owner of the New Place, Reverend Francis Gastrell ripped the tree out and destroyed the house shortly thereafter. The legend goes that the townspeople were so angry that he had removed the tree, that they lobbed stones through the windows of the house. Gastrell eventually razed the house after the damage. Apparently, some locals thought to salvage the tree and make mementos out of the wood. These mementos were such a craze that "true" relics and fakes were often sold to unsuspecting, or even suspecting tourists. When Washington Irving traveled to Stratford he was offered such a relic from a man who claimed to have helped remove the tree. Irving declined, but procured his own “relic,”--a sprig from a tree in the courtyard where Shakespeare was buried (see The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. New York G. P. Putnam's sons, 1888, p. 354). Even Mark Twain and his wife, after visiting the birthplace in 1874, brought back a sapling that was a descendant of the Shakespeare Mulberry to plant in their yard in Hartford, CT. (Twain writes a hilarious account of the tree’s troubled life in a letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post, which you can find here).

At the Rosenbach you can see a whole set of papier maché models of the buildings in Stratford, including Shakespeare's birthplace and a rendition of the Mulberry tree. These were made by F.G. Fisher, a librarian and amateur actor (and the father of the famous actress, Clara Fisher). Made in 1830, they speak to how crazy the Shakespeare commemoration bonanza has been for more than two hundred years now. Scholars have argued that until 1769, most people interested in an author visited an author’s grave. Many even made rubbings of Shakespeare’s gravestone. But in 1769, the actor David Garrick brought a booming industry to Stratford to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday in an elaborate “Jubilee.” The celebration focused not on his grave, but on the other historical sites that were associated with him, especially his birthplace.

Garrick hung a banner depicting the rising sun in the window of the room where he believed that Shakespeare was born. By the time that Fisher created his model, the birthplace may well have been recognizable to most Shakespeare enthusiasts. The story of Shakespeare’s banishment from Stratford had already become popular legend akin to Washington and the cherry tree in the U.S. By 1830, Stratford was a site of national pilgrimage. The models were just in time for the second great celebration of Shakespeare in Stratford—the Second Royal Gala Festival. If a Shakespeare enthusiast could not make the trip to Stratford, perhaps he or she could have seen Fisher’s models on display in London.

The Rosenbach collection of Fisher’s models is fascinating and they aren’t even close to the most exciting thing that the museum has to offer.

See J. Jarvis, A Descriptive Account of the Second Royal Gala Festival, at Stratford-Upon-Avon...April 23, 1830...In Commemoration of the Natal Day of Skakspeare. London: R. Lapworth, 1830. See also for a brief biographical description of Frederick George Fisher the reprint of his daughter’s 1897 autobiography, Clara Fisher and Douglas Taylor, Autobiography of Clara Fisher Maeder (New York,: B. Franklin, 1970). Here, he is described as an "amateur actor and Shakespearean scholar of repute" (xii) and as a “gentleman of fine literary taste, [who] was at one time, proprietor of a noted library at Brighton, and afterward an active auctioneer in London." (Appendix 134).

See Nicola Watson’s work on graveside literary tourism in chapter one of Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007).

Shakespeare’s gravestone was so well known to even Americans that some travel accounts of visits to Stratford omitted its description for fear of boring readers. See "The Birthplace of Shakespeare," The New York Times 15 Aug 1860.

House Cats

At Bartram’s Garden, where Seth and I went for an afternoon out on Thursday when we needed a break from the city, we saw one of the caretakers sweet-talking and feeding a cat part of her salmon salad lunch. Later, along one of the nature trails through the wetlands along the Schuylkill River we found a little dead, contorted mouse body. I had to wonder if these two events might be related.

Cats at historic places have even been the subject of a recent debate on a small historic house museum list-serve that I subscribe to. About half the respondents claimed nothing is better for a historic house than a living, mousing cat, and the other half exclaimed “liability, liability!” After all, cat could cause a serious allergic reaction in a visitor, who would undoubtedly hold the museum liable.

As early as the 1540s, tourism to authors’ graves occasionally began to transfer to the houses where they had lived nearby. At Petrarch’s house in Arquà, visitors could see Pertarch’s stuffed, dead cat along with the chair where the poet sat and bed where the poet laid his weary head. Apparently, the cat inspired many a visitor to write an elegiac or even satiric poem. At sites today, I’ve often seen a “stuffed animal”-cat, but never a real feline once owned by the author. And I’ve never been moved to write a poem about them (but apparently a blog entry in another issue entirely).

However, cats at historic sites can have real appeal. The cats at Hemmingway’s Key West house have become almost as much a draw for tourists as Hemmingway himself. I wonder how many have been spirited away by Hemmingway fans.

A former caretaker at Mark Twain’s summerhouse, Quarry Farm, once declared to me that his elderly cat was a direct descendant of the cats that sat in Mark Twain’s lap while he wrote his most famous works, holed up in his famous octagonal study in Elmira, NY. He also implied that other descendents still keep the farm’s barns mouse free.

Cats at museums don’t worry me a bit, especially when compared to the damage that mice can do to historic sites. But I’d rather not see the taxidermy.