University of Virginia Library

Constructing an Old South

Tom Sawyer (1876) was one of the first fictions to depict a slave-owning community nostalgically, although in it slaves are only glimpsed at the narrative margins, and the community is identified as "western" rather than "southern." By the time Huck Finn appeared in the mid-1880's, as Jay Hubbel puts it, "Southern stories were becomingly extraordinarily popular. The Northern magazines were full of them."

Among the magazines most hospitable to sentimental or nostalgic treatments of the days "befo' de war" was The Century, which also published a lot of MT's work, including pre-publication installments of Huck Finn, Connecticut Yankee, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. It was The Century that published "Marse Chan," the first fiction by Thomas Nelson Page. Written in 1881, this story appeared in The Century in April, 1884, just eight months before the magazine published its first excerpt from Huck Finn — chapters 17 and 18, the account of the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud (see Prepublishing Huck). There are great differences between Page's and MT's accounts of the Southern "aristocracy," of course, but Huck himself admires the Grangerfords as much as Sam, Page's reminiscing slave, admires his white masters.

Page's plantation tales remained extremely popular throughout the 1880's and 1890's, both in magazines and when reprinted in collections like In Ole Virginia (1887). How contemporary readers saw MT's accounts of the "Old South" in relation to the works of apologists like Page is not clear. In 1889, for example, MT filled in when Page was unable to deliver a lecture in Baltimore. And E.W. Kemble, the artist MT hired to illustrate Huck Finn, spent the rest of his career illustrating plantation tales (see Representations of Jim). The illustrations below, however, are by W.T. Smedley.