Jessica Gordon
11/2/00

The Dan Beard Illustrations

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In the latter years of the 19^th Century, there were no Waldenbooks bookstores, and Barnes and Nobles was not even a seed in the heart of a dreamer. Yet the people still read–literature simply came into their hands differently. Authors had to sell their wares, so to speak, directly to the public. Publishers' employees would go door-to-door talking up the newest literary sensations, racking up as many subscriptions as they could, because a book could not be published until it had enough people subscribed to it. The people subscribed in blind trust because, unlike browsing in a bookstore today, the people could not see what they were going to get before they consented to order it. However, they knew what they were getting because they'd seen it all before. Generally speaking, books published by subscription during this era were ornately heavy picture books that happened to include a story. People were not willing to spend their earnings on mere words, so, "to justify the relatively high price and to reassure buyers that they were getting their money's worth, books published by subscription had to offer sensational volume and apparent substance" (David 17). This "apparent substance" included a thick, gold-embossed cover, foil pages liberally interspersed, illustrations on almost every page of print, and several full-page illustrations. Good publishers were said to add "a pound of book for every fifty cents" (David 18). Such was the time in which the great American author Mark Twain wrote. Therefore, it is no surprise that when Twain neared completion of A Connecticut Yankee, he began his search for the perfect illustrator. He found Daniel Carter Beard.

Dan Beard was born into a family of prominent American writers. His father, James Henry Beard, was a well-known portrait painter whose four sons were all involved in some way in the art of illustrating. In particular, Dan and his brother Harry shared a studio and sometimes collaborated on projects. After illustrating A Connecticut Yankee, Beard decided to try writing and illustrating his own novel. The result of this effort was a volume containing two short novels, Moonlight and Six Feet of Romance. Both were copied after the style of Yankee, and were Beard's own critical commentaries on the society and politics of the day. Besides his illustrations, Beard is known for establishing the Boy Scouts in 1910 (Inge). In fact, it seems that more has been written about his connection with this organization than about any of his illustrations (David 2).

At the time when Twain found Dan Beard, the latter was illustrating a Chinese historical novel in the Cosmopolitan magazine. Twain sent Beard the first thirty or forty pages of his manuscript and asked him to submit a sample drawing. The drawing that Beard came up with is what has become the well-known frontispiece, depicting Hank Morgan up a tree trying to escape the lance of an earnest errant knight while an armor helmet grins devilishly from the side. Needless to say, Beard got the job, and thus began the collaborative relationship between the two artists in their development of the story (Inge).

One critic, M. Thomas Inge, divides Beard's drawings into four basic categories. The first two are fairly simple and straight-forward: (1) All illustrations used to depict "specific scenes, characters, and events described by Twain in the text" (2) All designs and decorations whose subjects are people, places or things appropriate to the Medieval time (Inge 180). Even in these simplest of illustrations, Beard greatly influences the way in which we will read the story. Most readers find themselves drawn to, or at least sympathetic with, Hank Morgan, our faithful? narrator. In large part this must be due to Beard's portrayal of him in his illustrations. It is true that Twain calls Morgan a "perfect ignoramus," but only in the most loving of manners. Critic Everett Carter says, "The context of this expression is a description of the protagonist in so favorable a light that Beard made his portraits of the Yankee uniformly sympathetic, although obviously Beard's Yankee is far from refined" (Carter 420). Thus, through his illustrations, Beard influences our reading of the story.

The last two categories are a bit more complicated, dealing with subject matter not exactly mentioned in the text. The third category is: interpretive illustrations including subjects not directly mentioned by the text, but which are reasonable to use in explaining ideas explicitly mentioned in the text. The fourth and final category, which brings Dan Beard's drawings into the controversy of whether or not his illustrations go beyond what Twain wanted to say, is: illustrations representing Beard's own beliefs on the issues touched on in the text but without any exact textual reference to support them (Inge 180). Beard has often been under attack for these drawings because it is speculated that in them he goes beyond Twain's intentions for the meaning of the story. Before discussing whether or not Beard goes too far, it first must be understood that Beard's illustrations are more than just pictures–they are a part of the work, absolutely necessary for its understanding.

After having looked at a copy of the original version of A Connecticut Yankee illustrated by Dan Beard, it is amazing to leaf through the copy used for class and not encounter a single picture for over twenty or thirty pages. In the original copy, there is an illustration at least every other page. Beard prepared 400 pictures for the book. Out of these, 220 were chosen (Inge 180). Having seen all of those illustrations, it is hard to go back to the text without them. Not only do Beard's illustrations help the reader visualize the physical appearances of the characters, they are also invaluable in discerning Twain's exact criticisms of the Medieval society, and, as some critics believe, by extension his criticisms of 19^th Century American society. Critic Thomas Inge calls the work "a collaboration between artist and author" (Inge 217). This collaboration is evident on two levels. The first, superficial level is that in the original text, the drawings literally go with the words. On the page in the original version where Morgan is telling the story of the court humorist and his exploits in tying empty vessels to the dogs' tails, Beard has drawn dogs racing down the page from top to bottom (click here to see image). Furthermore, at the beginning of each chapter, there is a picture of one of the relevant characters somehow entwined with the beginning letter of the first word on that page. Pictures and words physically go around one another, so that in looking at the page, one cannot visually separate the picture and the text, one from the other. Thus, Yankee becomes "a work in which picture and text not only complement each other but are to be viewed as an integral whole" (Inge 222). In short, it is physically difficult for the reader to disentangle his/her eyes from either the text or the illustrations; the two must be viewed as a whole.

The second reason that the illustrations are integral to the text is that they make clear the story's main criticisms of Medieval society and establish the connections between the 6^th and 19^th centuries to which Twain alludes. Of course, this statement is controversial in and of itself because there has been much debate as to whether or not the story has anything to do with the 19^th Century at all. Twain himself "accepted all but one picture of Beard's for publication and consequently stood by the pictures as perfectly illustrating what he wanted to say" (Inge 197). In short, "Twain assumed collaborative responsibility for [Beard's illustrations]" (Inge 197). Since Twain understood exactly what ideas were being conveyed through the pictures, and not only accepted them, but praised them as extraordinary, it can be deduced that the messages of Dan Beard's illustrations followed Twain's intent for the story. Critic M. Thomas Inge writes, "Beard, as collaborative illustrator, seems most often to have championed the side that Twain in his remarks about the novel most frequently denied (or simply avoided): A Connecticut Yankee as a critique of 19^th Century American society" (Inge 222). Any reader can grasp, from the text alone, that Twain is making some sort of social commentary about his own time as well as of the Middle Ages. However, what he says is undercover of the story, and so is innocent, or at least subtle. On the other hand, Beard's illustrations are naked save for their intent. Drawings speak in a different language than words, and Beard's pictures, "instead of subtly expressing the implications of the book, voiced a clear and unambiguous appeal" (David 26). Therefore, whereas Twain can demure and say that Yankee is but a simple story of the injustices of the Middle Ages, where any similarity between the problems of Medieval society and current American life are simple coincidences, Beard has no such escape from the meaning of his drawings.

One of the main issues discussed in Yankee is the slave-like relationship between King and commoner (or villein), titled man and "freeman." Twain goes on to describe a few scenes of Medieval slavery in which what he is really describing is slavery in America in the pre Civil War days. One of the most famous illustrations in the book is Beard's depiction of the slave driver. For his model, he used Jay Gould, a financier and Robber Baron of the day. Although Beard never revealed publicly the identity of the slave driver, Twain did not deny his identity when questioned, and it is known that he thought Gould a "swindler and stock manipulator" (Inge 190; click here to see image). Thus, a cruel, rich man of the 19^th Century becomes the slave driver of the 6^th Century. Clearly, Beard is connecting Twain's criticism of 6^th Century slavery with the same type of oppression in the 19^th Century, where the rich are the slave drivers, and the poor the downtrodden slaves.

Another illustration on this topic shows a series of three unequal power relationships progressively through the ages. The first is of a King and a peasant, the second of a master and slave, and the third is obviously a 19^th Century depiction of rich man and common laborer (click here to see image). Certainly, the text says nothing of the 19^th Century, nor of the disparity between the rich man and the laborer of the 19^th Century, but it does at least suggest a connection between the two. Beard simply takes that hint of connection and makes it concrete through his visual depiction. One critic says, "Beard expanded and elaborated on Twain's ideas in many cases, frequently investing his drawings with fiercer rhetoric than Twain employed in the text" (David 23). However, no matter if Beard drew a bit outside Twain's actual words, it must be remembered that Twain stood whole-heartedly behind all of his illustrator's pictures. Critic Beverly David writes, "Twain thoroughly approved of all the drawings in the book, even those which departed freely from the text" (Inge 217). It has also been suggested that, "Twain's apparently genuine enthusiasm may be an unspoken endorsement of that critique [of 19^th Century American society] and a recognition of its crucial involvement in Yankee" (Inge 222). Even if Twain never directly stated the ideas Beard so clearly illustrated in his drawings, he did approve of every picture in the book, and never made any negative comments on any of the drawings that appeared there. From this evidence it can be inferred that if Twain did not necessarily endorse all of the ideas presented by Beard through his illustrations, he at least supported those ideas by his enthusiasm for Beard's pictures.

Works Cited

Carter, Everett. "The Meaning of A Connecticut Yankee." American Literature 50.3 (1978): 418-440.

David, Beverly R. and Ray Sapirstein. "Illustrators and Illustrations in Mark Twain's First American Editions." A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Mark Twain. Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 17-19.

David, Beverly R. and Ray Sapirstein. "Reading the Illustration in A Connecticut Yankee." A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Mark Twain.  Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 21-27.

Inge, M. Thomas. "Mark Twain and Dan Beard's Collaborative Connecticut Yankee."  In Leonard, James S., et al, eds. Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1994. 169-227.

Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Oxford & New York:  Oxford UP, 1996.