Pudd’nhead Wilson

Pudd’nhead Wilson is a short novel by Mark Twain, and is fact the precursor to CSI: Miami. Set in Missouri in the 1830s, PW details an unusual murder case that features identical Italian twins, cross-dressing, and changelings. Pudd’nhead Wilson is the lawyer involved in the case, and doesn’t figure into the story until the conclusion. Before that he’s seen as a failed lawman who’s resorted to accounting to earn money. In his spare time he works on an almanac featuring pithy and fatalistic sayings (“Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.”), and also takes fingerprints.

Not yet widely accepted, fingerprinting only became a legitimate bit of policework in the late 1800s. Pudd’nhead (Christian name of David) Wilson is something of a forerunner in the field, then, and is scorned by the townsfolk of Dawson’s Landing as a result.

But Wilson, the apparent Twain stand-in of the book, is a peripheral character. While he’s the one to tie up the plot with his new science, the moral heart of the book belongs to Roxana the slave, and her son Tom.

Roxy is charged with caring for her son and the son of her master, Mr. Driscoll. After Roxy watches her fellow slaves be sold down the river, she decides to swap her baby for Driscoll’s, since the two look much alike. This is to save her child from being sold down the river, which, in the cosmology of the book, is a fate worse than death.

It’s an interesting notion. Always important in Twain novels, here the river is the Acheron, and downstream means you’re going deeper into the south. This is like descending into a lower circle of hell. Twain’s views on slavery are sometimes ambiguous, but here the reading is clear – the farther down the forty-eight you go, the worse it is.

It’s the ultimate threat. First it drives Roxy to save her child through the swap, and then, when she tells her son of the deception, now she can threaten him with it. And when it comes time for justice to be meted out, Twain decides that instead of death or life imprisonment, being sold down the river is the only fitting punishment.

Aside from this idea of downriver as exile, Twain’s book is also an interesting historical record. He writes dialogue in dialect. As tedious as it can be to read, the sound is just right, and his characters are more credible as a result. Besides the dialogue, there’s also the mores of the day, and Twain approaches these with a recognizably modern sensibility. At one point Tom is kicked by a man named Luigi. He takes him to court and is awarded 5 dollars. Everyone is outraged, not that Tom was so abused, but because he went to court. This is a matter of honor, they believe, and so should be answered in a duel. Twain’s views on the matter are, as always, slippery, but one gets a rather complete picture of the society, considering the book’s brevity.

It’s a quick read, but lacks the heft of Huck Finn’s exploits or the charm of Tom’s. It sets forth some intriguing ideas about identity and slavery, but never really follows through. Not a bad book to read for class, but not one to be sought out for pleasure reading.