Abstract
As early as 1868 mark twain decided to write a story of a balloon trip, as indicated by this note in his journal: “Trip of a man in a balloon from Paris over India, China, Pacific Ocean, the plains to a prairie in Illinois.”1 Soon after the idea came to him he started writing the story, and Paine published a part of it in Mark Twain’s Notebook, summarizing the unpublished portions.2 An emaciated, foreign-looking man dressed in cap, shirt, and pantaloons of grayish striped cloth was found one January day lying, insensible, on the snow on an Illinois prairie. How he got there was a mystery since no snow had fallen in two days and there were no marks in the snow except the place where he had fallen and rolled over once. After he had been restored to consciousness and the local schoolmaster had been brought to serve as interpreter, the stranger gave a brief account of his life. He was a French convict who had escaped from Paris in a stolen balloon a week earlier. No details of the trip to Illinois are given, the story stopping abruptly when the balloon had gained an elevation of a thousand feet over Paris. Twain wrote this explanation of the abrupt stop: “While this was being written, Jules Verne’s ‘Five Weeks in a Balloon’ came out and consequently this sketch wasn’t finished.”3
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References
Mark Twain’s Notebook, ed. by A. B. Paine (New York and London, 1935), p. 118.
Pp. 119-122.
Ibid., pp. 118-119. For five years Verne’s Cinq Semaines en Ballon had been popular in Paris, but, so far as I know, an English translation was not published in the United States before 1869. The Balloon Travels of Robert Merry and His Young Friends Over Various Countries in Europe, by Peter Parley (S. G. Goodrich), had appeared in New York in 1855. In this story, Robert Merry took six young children, three girls and three boys, on a balloon trip from Boston over the Atlantic, Ireland, England, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, the Tyrolese Alps, Greece, Turkey, and Sebastopol (then under siege by the British and French). If Twain read it, he probably did not care for the large doses of history and legend, Greek and Roman mythology, and especially the “passages of moral instruction … imparting sound morals and good manners” (Preface, p. iv). When he wrote that statement, possibly Twain had merely heard of Verne’s story.4 If he had read it, he may have concluded that it was more ambitious than his own sketch. At any rate, the two have nothing in common except the general idea of a long trip in a balloon. Over twenty years later he wrote a story about the same general idea.
When he was planning Tom Sawyer, Twain heard of or remembered Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy and considered abandoning his own project. Aldrich convinced him, however, that their stories would not conflict. See A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York and London, 1912), III, 1456-1457.
Written in 1892 at Bad Nauheim and Florence; published serially in St. Nicholas from November, 1893, to April, 1894, and in book form by Webster & Go. in April, 1894. See A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, II, 949, 957; III, 1680-1681.
Five Weeks in a Balloon; or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen. Compiled in French by Jules Verne, from the Original Notes of Dr. Ferguson; and Done into English by “William Lackland,” Expressly for D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1869. All my references to Verne are to this translation. In Verne’s story three men—Dr. Samuel Ferguson of London, his friend Dick Kennedy of Leith, and his faithful servant Joe—crossed central Africa from east to west in a balloon, leaving Zanzibar on April 19, 1862, and reaching the Cataracts of Gouina in Senegal on May 24 after thirty-six days of exciting adventures, explorations, and dangers.
Tom Sawyey Abroad (Author’s National Edition), pp. 38-41, 76, 124.
Pp. 64-72.
Pp. 176, 189-223.
Pp. 48-50.
P. 90.
P. 92.
P. 94.
Pp. 86-87, 110-111, 158-159, 217-218, 237, 241-243, 263, 266-269, 287, 299.
Pp. 217-218.
P. 269.
Verne had explained that a caravan’s being swallowed up in the desert and that the presence of wild beasts in oases—driven thither by hunger or thirst—were not unusual (pp. 271, 225.).
Pp. 22, 36, 38, 43, 46, 57, 62, 122.
P. 28.
Pp. 29, 38, 54, 86, 92-94, 132, 235.
Pp. 51-52.
P. 109.
Pp. 168-176.
Pp. 285-288.
Pp. 50-51. It was after the robbers sounded a retreat that one of them carried off the child which Tom, Huck, and Jim rescued by knocking the bandit from his saddle with their balloon.
P. 162.
P. 163.
P. 62.
Pp. 63, 92.
P. 206.
pP. 33-36
Pp. 125-130.
pp. 44-45.
Pp. 70-75.
Pp. 124-125.
p. 160.
p. 105.
pp. 231-232.
p. 140.
p. 103.
Pp. 100-101, 124-126, 143, 220-221, 247-249, 262, and passim.
P. 73.
Pp. 100-104, 139, 140, 235.
P. 100.
P. 89.
Pp. 96-97.
137.
Pp. 186-191, 2l8, 227, 256.
P. 34.
P. 176.
P. 13.
p. 19.
p. 24.
pp. 25, 26.
P. 75.
Pp. 89, 97, 111, 143, 165, and passim.
P. 58.
P. 93. See also pp. 84, 246.
P. 71.
P. 256.
P. 203. See also pp. 144-145, 156.
Pp. 106-107.
P. 106.
P. 75.
P. 144.
p. 297.
P. 62.
Bernard DeVoto, “Introduction” to The Portable Mark Twain (New York, 1946), pp. 31–32.
P. 310.
p. 39.
P. 22.
P. 255.
Pp. 126, 144.
p. 123.
pp. 79, 116, 164, 313.
p. 163.
p. 42.
p. 184.
p. 213.
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© 1958 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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McKeithan, D.M. (1958). Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad and Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon. In: Court Trials in Mark Twain and other Essays. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8921-7_13
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