From Mark Twain,"Jim's Investments and King Sollermun."  An excerpt from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, printed in The Century 29 (January 1885): 456-59.
    Figure 1    The President of the Bank; Sollermun and His Wives
    Figure 2    The Story of Sollermun

From James Lane Allen, "Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback."  Harper's New Monthly Magazine 73 (June 1886): 50-66.
    Figure 1    "Blame Me if Them Ain't the Darndest Beans!"
    Figure 2    Native Types
    Figure 3    Mountain Courtship
    Figure 4    A Mountaineer Dame

Edward W. Kemble was a young man when he became a star illustrator, after Mark Twain chose Kemble to illustrate Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  The soon-to-be classic was released as a book, to great acclaim, in January 1885 (copyrighted and released in London, late 1884).

Kemble's illustrations were an important element in the initial popularity of the book.  Kemble's character sketches are often cartoonish depictions of character, in the mode of the American "genre" painting.  [Click here to see Kemble Rethinks Huck, an online gallery at the U of VA e-library, demonstrating how Kemble's Huck Finn illustrations changed over time.]

The same month that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was released in New York--that is, January 1885--The Century magazine (formerly Scribner's) ran a slightly modified 3-page excerpt from the book.  The excerpt showcases Kemble's illustrations.  One is of Jim--captioned "the president of the bank," the joke being that Jim owns stock in himself (see below); another is of "Sollermun and his wives," after a fanciful discussion Jim and Huck have about Kings; the third is of Jim and Huck, relaxing and talking.

The accompanying text is primarily dialect.  Jim's speach makes up fully half the text.  Initially, Jim seems to be announced as a stock character, the superstitious darky.  ("Jim knowed all kinds of signs.")  Yet Jim manages to turn the tables, at least rhetorically, for a moment, when complaining about being broke.

"I's rich now, come to look at it.  I owns myse'f, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars.  But live stock's too resky, Huck ;--  I wisht I had de eight hund'd dollars en somebody else had de nigger."

Kemble's images in Mark Twain have subsequently been subject of considerable critical discussion.  Is Twain making fun of blacks, or does he undermine the stereotypes of his day?  To what extent do Kemble's seemingly racist characterizations agree with, and to what extent are they contradicted by, Twain's text?

In the year 1886, Kemble, in his early twenties, is in great professional demand, on the heels of the Huck Finn success.  The editors of Harper's New Monthly Magazine are in competition with other illustrated magazines.  The editors pay a premium for Kemble's work.  They contract him to illustrate a travel article by James Lane Allen, "Through the Cumberland Gap on Horseback."  Though the article maintains the fiction of an illustrator travelling with the writer, in fact, Kemble remained in New York and illustrated the mountaineers from Allen's text, drawing entirely from his own imagination.

In these sketches, Kemble provides illustrations after Allen's text.  On sketch illustrate an anecdote Allen claims to have heard at the town of Burnside, at a stop on the Cincinnati Southern Railway, "some ninety miles away, where begin the navigable waters of the Cumberland River, and the foot-hills of the Cumberland Mountains."

The story is told of days past, referring to a decade or so earlier, "when the railway was first opened through this region."  With the train comes exotic goods, including fresh fruit.  "A young man established a fruit store at one of the stations, and as part of his stock laid in a bunch of bananas."  The store at the train station carries bananas, from the Carribean.

Soon after the store is opened, an old mountaineer walks into the store and looks at the bananas, puzzled.

"Blame Me if Them Ain't the Darndest Beans!", he mutters to himself.

Another Kemble sketch of mountaineers is labeled "Native Types."  Here is Allen's generalized description of people he meets in the mountains.  This is the text from which Kemble drew his images:

Straight, slim, angular, white bodies; average or even unusual stature, without great muscular robustness; features regular and colorless, unanimated but intelligent, in the men sometimes fierce, and in the women often sad; among the latter occasional beauty of a pure Greek type; a manner shy and deferential, but kind and fearless; eyes with a slow, long look of mild inquiry, or of general listlessness, or of unconscious and unaccountable melancholy; the key of life a low minor strain, losing itself in reverie; voices monotonous in intonation; movements uninformed by nervousness--these are characteristics of the Kentucky mountaineers.  Living to-day as their forefathers lived before them a hundred years ago; hearing little of the world, caring nothing for it; responding feebly to the influences of civilization near the highways of travel in and around the towns, and latterly along the lines of railway communication, but sure to live here, if uninvaded and unaroused, in the same condition for a hundred or more years to come; utterly lacking the spirit of development from within; utterly devoid of any sympathy with that boundless and ungovernable activity which is carrying the Saxon race in America from one state to another, whether better or worse.

Books and Articles

Briden, Earl F.  "Kemble's 'Specialty' and the Pictorial Countertext of Huckleberry Finn."  Mark Twain Journal 26, 2 (Fall 1988): 2-14.

David, Beverly R.  "The Pictorial Huck Finn: Mark Twain and His Illustrator, E. W. Kemble."  American Quarterly 26, 4 (Oct 1974): 331-51.

_____.  "Visions of the South: Joel Chandler Harris and His Illustrators."  American Literary Realism 9,3 (Summer 1976): 189-207.

Hearn, Michael Patrick.  The annotated Huckleberry Finn: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / by Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) ; with an introduction, notes, and bibliography by Michael Patrick Hearn.  New York: Crown, 1981.

Johns, Elizabeth.  American Genre Painting:  The Politics of Everyday Life.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Kemble, Edward W.  "Illustrating Huckleberry Finn."  The Colophon:  A Book Collectors' Quarterly [alt. title: A Quarterly for Booklovers] 1 (February 1930): 45-52.

Online

Cope, Virginia H.  Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: Text, Illustrations, and Early Reviews.  University of Virginia Library, 1995.  <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html>

Cornell University "Making of America" web site: http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/moa_browse.html.  This digital archive is one of two created for the "Making of America" project sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.  The Cornell site is the source for the digital page images and "bookmarkable url's" linked from this page.