The South was impoverished, the North was industrialising, and ever more Americans were migrating to the West. The picture of paddle steamers innocently travelling up and down between the North and the South had rather faded anyway. Steamboats had been battered by gunfire during the American Civil War and their passengers had decamped to the railroads. These twenty-five years were a period of unprecedented dynamism that would not only render the paddle steamer largely obsolete – or sweep away many more than had ever sunk in the Mississippi – but transform the lives of many millions of people and showcase the USA’s exceptionalism. It was not a regular current of history that had run between the memoir and the travelogue but a spectacular, dizzying torrent. Nevertheless it is important not to de-historicise Twain’s nostalgia. Anybody in their late forties would become a little wistful if they revisited a location where they had worked as a twenty-one-year-old. The second time around it was 1882 and Twain was snooping along the river again in search of fresh material.Ĭlearly the divide that runs through this book leaves the memoir and the modern-day travelogue looking like they are stranded on opposite riverbanks.

The memoir commences in 1857, when Twain had entered into his apprenticeship with the veteran pilot Horace Bixby on the steamboat Paul Jones. It proceeds firstly as a memoir of Twain’s experiences as a “cub” or apprentice pilot and secondly as the type of journalistic travelogue that would be familiar to his readers from his literary breakthrough The Innocents Abroad (1869).

But this narrative is not fixed in time and one cannot just dip in anywhere, as they would with a journal. As with any nineteenth-century literary magazine, Life on the Mississippi is packed with short stories, anecdotes, gossip about famous people, humorous sketches and, of course, in its original edition, illustrations.

Despite following his well-turned-out novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi(1883) reneges on this format and it returns to the miscellaneous writing that had generally characterised his earlier career.

Life on the mississippi 1883