The Gilded Age, Vol. 1: The Authorized Uniform Edition

by Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner

Mark Twain here collaborates with Charles Dudley Warner in a novel which gave its name to the era in which it was written. Here is a definitive dissection of the pretenses of the high Victorian era, its corruption, hypocrisy, and, in Twain's eye, comic absurdities.

Genres: Classics

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1873

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[Christopher Sutch]

I did not read this edition (this is a caveat): there was a Penguin Classics edition of this complete novel, but I see it nowhere on Goodreads (at least, not in the brief search I made for it).

This was Twain's first novel and it seems likely after reading that much of the work of plotting (something Twain often struggles with in his other novels, which tend to be episodic rather than coherent narratives) was done by his co-author Warner. As plots go, it's a fairly mundane one (it reads like a second-rate knock-off of a Dickens novel in places) but it's not bad for a first effort. Some of the best moments are clearly Twain: in particular there is a very sarcastic and very funny picture of Washington, D. C.'s geography and architecture c. 1868 that is priceless and gives a fascinating picture of an area of thee city that is now the Mall but at the time was a vast swampy wasteland (which Twain makes stand in for the corrupt political geography of the city).

The other thing I enjoyed about this book was a certain level of metafiction that Twain and Warner deliberately planned for this work (according to the notes about the novel I read in my edition, the book came to be from several conversations the authors had about their philosophy of fiction). So, for example, when a disaster occurs for one of the characters late in the book, the authors tell of her sad fate...only to turn around and say such events would only happen in fiction and, since this is a history of what actually occurred, the _true_ story was... That's a rather nice little modernist technique about 40 years before modernism started (although it does have antecedents in both American and British literature: I think particularly of _Moby-Dick_ in this regard). They also make a lot out of a sort of mystery plot regarding one of the character's parentage...which ultimately come to nothing and is explained away in an Appendix (this might have just been poor plotting, except that it's almost too neat to have been merely an oversight: I take it as a kind of rebuke to the common mystery plots about heritage and its effects that were common in Victorian fiction).

This is certainly better than many of Twain's other novels and is worth a look if you haven't read it.

[Carol Arce]

This novel, Twain's first, but written in collaboration with his friend Warner, is set in post Civil War America, at a time of burgeoning development, industrialization and entrepreneurship; a time when there are fortunes to be made, which brings out the best: creativity, hard work, determination and the worst: exploitation, corruption, jealousy in society. It ends up being a sort of moral tale: those who worked hard and never quit were ultimately rewarded, but those who did nothing but just hoped to cash in on someone else's work were ultimately disappointed. The novel takes an interesting look at women's roles in this new society, but ultimately concludes what one might expect a novel written in 1873 to conclude, that women are just too weak to do anything much more than marry and have children. The best part of the novel is probably the look it takes at the functioning of the government in Washington D. C., which if it was lifted out of this novel and read out of context, might be believed to have been written about Washington D. C. today. Due to the way they collaborated, Twain would write a few chapters and Warner would write a few, the novel is uneven, with parts that are sharp and witty and other parts that drag on and even loose ends that don't get tied up. Much is made in the novel of Laura's father having survived the steamboat crash where he was assumed to be dead and looking for his lost daughter. The reader expects him to turn up or leave his daughter a fortune or something, but nothing ever happens and so one wonders why this was included. So Twain and Warner added an appendix apologizing for failing to find Laura's father, saying that they assumed because lost persons are so easily found in novels it would not be difficult to locate him, but that it turned out to be impossible. It's not Twain's best work, but in my opinion it's not his worst either and is definitely worth reading.

[Alicia Fox]

Humorous but not what I expected.