Twain’s “The Invalid’s Story"

Sources

Bellamy, Gladys Carmen, “The Humorist as Technician,” in Mark Twain as a Literary Artist, University of Oklahoma Press, 1950, p. 123.

DeVoto, Bernard, Mark Twain’s America, The Riverside Press, 1951, p. 253.

Emerson, Everett, “A Backward Glance,” in The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984, p. 272.

Horowitz, Floyd R., ‘“The Invalid’s Story’: An Early Mark Twain Commentary on Institutional Christianity,” in Midcontinent American Studies Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1966, pp. 38–40.

Kemper, Steven E., “Poe, Twain, and Limburger Cheese,” in Mark Twain Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Winter 1981–1982, pp. 13–14.

Long, E. Hudson, “Mind and Art,” in Mark Twain Handbook, Hendricks House, 1957, p. 341.

Further Reading

Ambrose, Stephen E., Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869, Simon & Schuster, 2000.

In his book, Ambrose, a noted historian, examines the political and social efforts that helped to build the transcontinental railroad, including Abraham Lincoln’s driving desire to see it built, the government members and brilliant entrepreneurs who invested in it, the Irish and Chinese laborers who did most of the construction work, and the Army soldiers who stood guard, protecting the rail crews from attacks.

Bondeson, Jan, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, W. W. Norton & Co., 2001.

This fascinating study gives a thorough exploration of the factual history of, and urban legends about, premature burial, including the increase of associated tales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also discusses the development of many safeguards such as waiting mortuaries, where corpses were kept until they either started to rot or came back to life. Twain visited one of these in the 1880s.

Budd, Louis, ed., Critical Essays on Mark Twain, 1867–1910, G. K. Hall & Co., 1982.

This collection features a number of the key criticisms of Twain’s works during his lifetime.

Taylor, Mark A., Computerized Shipping Systems: Increasing Profit & Productivity through Technology, Angelico & Taylor, Inc., 1995.

Although Taylor’s book is primarily intended as a guide for businesses, detailing what to look for when buying a new computerized shipping system, it also serves as a primer for anyone interested in learning how modern shipping works. Written in a consumer-friendly style, the book notes the many advantages of a computerized shipping system, including massive savings.

Ward, Geoffrey C., Dayton Duncan, and Ken Burns, Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography, Knopf, 2001.

This biography is a companion to the PBS series that aired in January, 2002. Complete with humorous Twain quotations, selections from his correspondence that reveal his more realistic side, and literary selections from Twain admirers and critics, the book also gives a cohesive overview of current Twain scholarship. The companion film—directed by Burns—is also available on DVD from PBS.

Ziporyn, Terra, Disease in the Popular American Press: The Case of Diphtheria, Typhoid Fever, and Syphilis, 1870–1920, Contributions in Medical Studies, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1988.

Ziporyn’s thoroughly researched study analyzes how three diseases—typhoid fever, diphtheria, and syphilis—were treated in the United States mass media from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. The author finds that typhoid fever was covered in the press more than the other two diseases, which she attributes to the social values associated with each disease.

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Plot Summary

At the beginning of Twain’s “The Invalid’s Story,” the narrator explains that he looks and feels older than he is and that he used to be much healthier than he is now. He attributes his decline in health to the strange events of one winter night, in which he traveled with a box of guns for two hundred miles.

The narrator recalls how, two years before, he had arrived at his home in Cleveland, Ohio and learned of the recent death of his friend, John B. Hackett. Following Hackett’s last wishes, the narrator leaves for the train station to take Hackett’s body back to his parents in Bethlehem, Wisconsin

The narrator finds a white-pine box at the train station that matches the description of the coffin. He attaches the address card from Hackett’s father, Deacon Levi Hackett, to the white-pine box, and has it loaded into the train on the express car—a method for transporting packages by train that was safer and faster, but more expensive, than normal freight cars

The narrator leaves to get food and cigars, and when he comes back to the area where he had first found the white-pine box, a young man is tacking an address card onto an identical box

The narrator checks to make sure his white-pine box is still in the express car, which it is. At this point, the narrator lets the reader know that the boxes are labeled wrong. The first box, the one in the express car, which the narrator assumes is the corpse of his friend, is actually a box of guns that is meant to go to Peoria, Illinois. Conversely, the second box, which the young man assumes contains the guns, actually contains John Hackett’s corpse

However, the narrator is not aware of this fact at the time that he is taking the train trip. He settles into the express car, where he and the expressman—the man hired by the express company to look after the express packages—settle in for the long, two-hundred-mile journey. Right before the train takes off, a stranger comes into the express car for a moment and places a package of ripe Limburger cheese on top of the white-pine box. Just as neither the narrator nor expressman, a man named Thompson, are aware that the coffin box contains guns, they also don’t realize that the package on top of the box contains ripe cheese. Once again, the narrator tells the reader this fact, but he does not know it at the time of the train trip

As Thompson starts to seal the car against the winter storm that rages outside so that he and the narrator can keep warm, the ripe cheese also starts to get warm, and begins to smell. The narrator notices it first, and mistakes it for Hackett’s corpse, which he believes is starting to rot. Thompson starts a fire to help the two keep warm, which only makes the cheese stink even more. Although he is cheerful at the beginning of the trip, singing happy songs, Thompson eventually becomes aware of the cheese stench, and he stops his singing

Thompson also assumes that the stench is from a rotting corpse, and he and the narrator begin to talk about it. Thompson notes the smell of the corpse and says that he has transported people who were not really dead, only in a trance, but that he can tell by the stench that the narrator’s friend is not one of these

In an effort to get away from the smell, Thompson breaks one of the express car’s window panes and sticks his nose outside to get some fresh air. He and the narrator take turns sniffing at the window, and Thompson asks how long the narrator’s friend has been dead. Thompson does not believe the narrator’s assertion that Hackett died recently, because a corpse could not rot and produce such a pronounced smell in a few days. Thompson admonishes the narrator, saying that Hackett’s body should have been laid to rest long ago. Meanwhile, the smell of the cheese has gotten so bad that the narrator suggests smoking cigars to try to mask the odor

The cigars are the first of many failed attempts to try to tame the smell of the cheese. After the cigars fail, Thompson suggests that they move the box to the other end of the express car. This does not work and the two run outside onto the express car’s platform to get some fresh air, where they discuss their predicament. They can not stay outside or they will freeze to death in the stormy winter weather, but they can not handle the smell either. They end up going back inside the car, once again taking turns getting air at the window

When the train pulls away from the next train station, Thompson comes back into the express car with carbolic acid, a caustic, poisonous chemical commonly used as a disinfectant. He douses the box

and cheese with the acid, but it is no use; the acid only adds a new odor, while magnifying the first one. After they leave the next train station, Thompson tries again, this time by starting a bonfire of chicken feathers, dried apples, sulphur, and other items

The resulting smell is so bad that Thompson and the narrator resolve to spend the rest of the trip out on the platform, even though it will probably mean their death from typhoid fever. An hour later at the next train station, the frozen expressman and narrator are removed, and the narrator is violently ill for three weeks. It is at this point that he finds out about the box of guns and the ripe cheese. At the end of the story, the narrator, once again in the present, explains that the fateful trip sapped his health, and that he is going home to die.

Thompson

Thompson is the ill-fated expressman who, along with the narrator, mistakes the box of guns with ripe Limburger cheese on top for a rotting corpse. At the beginning of the train ride, Thompson, a fifty-year old, sings while he works on insulating the express car from the cold winter weather. His cheery demeanor soon diminishes, however, when he starts to smell the rotting cheese.

At first, he tries to make light of the situation by talking about the other experiences he has had transporting dead bodies that were not really dead, but he soon abandons his light conversation in favor of finding ways to cope with or hide the smell. He breaks one of the express car’s window panes to get some fresh air, but it is not enough. He and the narrator try to move the box but it is too heavy; since they still do not realize it is a box of guns, Thompson attributes their inability to move the box to the corpse’s will to stay where he is

At the next two train stations, Thompson picks up various materials to try to mask the smell. First, he tries carbolic acid, a potent, toxic chemical that was used as a disinfectant. When this only makes the smell worse, Thompson tries a wild, smelly mix of chicken feathers, dried apples, leaf tobacco, rags, old shoes, sulphur, and asafetida—an odiferous type of gum. The resulting smell is so bad that Thompson and the narrator resolve to spend the night outside on the express car’s platform. Although Thompson’s fate is never discussed, the narrator contracts typhoid fever from the night outside, and is dying when he tells the story two years later

During the train trip Thompson speaks in a rustic American dialect, and refers to the corpse in various titles of increasing military and civil rank—Colonel, Gen’rul (an abbreviation of “General,” Commodore, and Governor. He also refers to the narrator informally as Cap, an abbreviated version of “Captain,” another military title

Themes  Mortality

From the very beginning of the story, the narrator draws attention to human mortality when he refers to his health, saying that he is “now but a shadow,” although he “was a hale, hearty man two short years ago.” The rest of the story is filled with references to sickness and death. In fact, the story’s plot is centered around the failed attempt to transport the corpse of the narrator’s friend, John B. Hackett, from Ohio to Wisconsin, where Hackett is to be buried

In the process, the narrator has many conversations with Thompson, the expressman on the train, who ruminates about the inevitability of death itself, saying twice that “‘we’ve all got to go, they ain’t no getting around it.’” Later, after Thompson and the narrator fail to move the box of guns with Limburger cheese on top—which they mistake for Hackett’s corpse—Thompson gets a particularly potent whiff of the cheese. His resulting nausea makes him feel ill, and he proclaims, “‘I’m a-dying; gimme the road!’” as he runs outside to the train’s platform to get some air

Although he does not, in fact, die from the exposure to the cheese, the prolonged exposure to the winter weather on the platform—as a result of the two men’s attempts to get away from the smell—does eventually kill the narrator two years later. “This is my last trip; I am on my way home to die.” Although Thompson’s fate is never clearly stated by the narrator, Thompson’s own words while they are freezing on the platform imply that he and the narrator share similar fates. ‘“It’s our last trip, you can make up your mind to it. Typhoid fever is what’s going to come of this.’”

magination

In the story, Twain explores the power of the human imagination to overcome reason, and the disastrous consequences that can happen as a result. At the beginning of the tale, the narrator notes how Thompson “closed his window down tight, and then went bustling around, here and there and yonder, setting things to rights.” Thompson is concerned only with weatherproofing the train car, and goes to great lengths to make the express car warm for himself and the narrator.

However, after they start to smell the cheese, which their imaginations tell them is the corpse, Thompson “scrambled to his feet and broke a pane and stretched his nose out at it a moment or two.” Not only is this undoing all of his hard work, it also does not make sense. Since Twain says that Thompson shut the window, the expressman could simply open it to get a breath of fresh air. However, in the panic created from the idea that the stench is that of a rotting corpse, he breaks the window. The narrator’s imagination is even more powerful, since he knows for a fact that his friend has only been dead for one day. Still, he does not find it odd when the smell becomes increasingly bad. “By this time the fragrance—if you may call it a fragrance—was just about suffocating, as near as you can come at it.

Topics for Further Study

• During Twain’s lifetime, the fastest way to send a package was to ship it by an express car on a train. Research the ways that express shipping companies during this time period identified and shipped their customers’ packages, and compare this to the methods used by modern express shipping companies. Then, using a map, plot out the steps a package would take when being shipped from Ohio to Wisconsin in both the 1870s and 2000s.
• In the nineteenth century, many people were buried in plain crates, a fact that leads to the case of mistaken identities in the story. Trace the development of coffins as far back as you can. Write a one-page report about the history of coffins, and create a timeline that includes at least five significant events in coffin development.
• In the story, a box of guns is supposed to be shipped to Peoria, Illinois. Research the history of gunmaking, and propose a theory as to why you think Twain chose to put guns in the box, instead of something else. Using your theory and research, write a sample Peoria newspaper article about the misplaced guns and their intended purpose.
• The expressman in the story refers to the narrator’s deceased friend by a number of titles denoting military or civil rank. Research the meaning of these ranks and give a one-paragraph description for each one. For each rank, find a person from the Civil War era who held this rank, and write a short biography about him.
• Making cheese is a huge industry both in the United States and abroad. Research the history of five different cheeses. Write a short paper discussing how, when, and where these cheeses were introduced to the world.
• The narrator in the story catches a debilitating disease—which the expressman assumes is typhoid—while on his train trip. Research the history and symptoms of typhoid fever, and write a two-page report on when and where the spread of typhoid fever reached epidemic status.

cheese on the top of the white-pine box, even though the narrator noted earlier that somebody had placed it there. Even when Thompson slips and falls “with his nose on the cheese,” where the smell is noticeably stronger, he does not think to check inside the package. The narrator notes at the end, after he had found out that the smelly corpse was really a gunbox with cheese on top, that “the news was too late to save me; imagination had done its work, and my health was permanently shattered.”

Proper Burials

Another concept that Twain explores in the story is the proper way to bury a person. When Thompson asks the narrator how long his friend has been dead, the narrator lies, saying ‘“Two or three days’”—in an attempt to explain the stench. Thompson, however, thinks the narrator is lying, and says, ‘“Two or three years, you mean.’” At this point, the narrator notes how Thompson “gave his views at considerable length upon the unwisdom of putting off burials too long,” finally stating that ‘“Twould ‘a’ ben a dum sight better, all around, if they’d started him along last summer.’”

humor

Thompson’s contradictory language is also funny when it is combined with actions. The two men’s first attempt to mask the smell in the train car consists of smoking cigars, which Thompson feels will be a good idea: ‘“Likely it’ll modify him some.’” However, although the two men “puffed gingerly along for a while,” it is no use. Pretty soon, “both cigars were quietly dropped,” and Thompson notes that they didn’t ‘“modify him worth a cent. Fact is, it makes him worse, becuz it appears to stir up his ambition.’” By using a piece of dialogue to set up the expectation that the cigars will mask the smell, the silent actions of dropping the cigars becomes a funny act. The humor is increased with Thompson’s admission that the cigars didn’t help mask the smell, but instead helped to make it more potent

As with other cases of personification, the gunbox and cheese take on a life of their own. Says the narrator, when he first begins to notice the odor of the cheese and mistakes it for his friend: “There was something infinitely saddening about his calling himself to my remembrance in this dumb, pathetic way, so it was hard to keep the tears back.” The narrator makes it seem that Hackett is willingly producing this smell in a nostalgic way, something that a corpse—or a gunbox and cheese for that matter—can not do

Throughout the story, both the narrator and Thompson attribute other human qualities to the guns and cheese, most notably stubbornness. Thompson notes the futility of their attempts to mask the smell after the carbolic acid only makes it worse. ‘“He just utilizes everything we put up to modify him with, and gives it his own flavor and plays it back on us.’” Ultimately, the “corpse”—which Thompson calls by a number of civil and military ranks, another human aspect—wins out, and Thompson notes that they can not beat him, and that they will have to stay outside the train all night. ‘“The Governor wants to travel alone, and he’s fixed so he can out-vote us.’

Twain also employs foreshadowing in more subtle ways. Although the narrator reveals in the beginning that he is not healthy, and that he lost his health from the “box of guns,” he does not say that he is dying until the end of the story. However, he gives clues throughout the narrative that hint at the narrator’s demise. For example, when the narrator and Thompson are trying to move the box of guns, the narrator notes that Thompson “bent over that deadly cheese.” By calling the cheese “deadly,” the narrator is referring to the fact that it eventually kills him

On a similar note, after this moving attempt fails, the two men go outside on the train’s platform to get away from the smell. The narrator notes that “we couldn’t stay out there in that mad storm; we should have frozen to death.” Once again, this language helps to foreshadow the actual events at the end of the story, when the two men do stay outside in the storm. Later on, the narrator—and one assumes Thompson—die from their exposure to this freezing weather

In the 1860s, a number of railroad developments came into being. In 1869, four years after the Civil War ended, the Union Pacific railroad line was connected to the Central Pacific line and the world’s longest railroad—1,776 miles of steel track—was completed. The transcontinental railroad line, which was subsidized by government funds from the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, had taken years to finish. The project involved an extensive amount of tearing down forests, tunneling through earth, and constructing bridges to complete, but once it was done, it changed the face of transportation.

Eight years later, in 1877 when Twain wrote “The Invalid’s Story,” railroads in the United States were in their Golden Age and trains were the dominant mode of transportation for both people and goods. Originally, this included only nonperishable items. In the early 1870s, however, Gustavus Franklin Swift, founder of the meat-packing firm, Swift & Company, began work on a refrigerated train car. He believed it would be a more cost-effective way to ship fresh meat than the current method, which entailed shipping live cattle to other areas of the country, to be slaughtered at their destination. In 1877, however, Swift made the first successful shipment of a carload of fresh meat from Chicago to the Eastern United States, and more people began to ship perishable items to other areas of the country.

With the ability to ship fresh food, people were less likely to catch a food-related illness. However, the nineteenth century was still a time of little medical progress. Doctors in the nineteenth century were not regulated in their education, so a person’s survival chances often depended upon the luck or guesswork of their individual doctor, or upon the strength of their body to defend itself. In the story, the narrator is taken with a fever for three weeks, but it does not mention that the doctors are able to do anything. In the end, the narrator’s immune system fends off his ailment for two years, but the disease—which is caused from being outside in the cold for about an hour—takes his life. It was a common tale in the nineteenth century

In addition to transporting cargo by train, the mid-to-late nineteenth century also saw the development of rapid means to send messages across country. In the story, the narrator receives word that his friend has died the day before. Since the message travels from Wisconsin to Ohio in less than a day, one assumes that it has been sent by telegraph, one of the major inventions of the nineteenth century. The first telegraph message was sent in 1843 but it wasn’t until the completion of the transcontinental telegraph system that the telegraph came into widespread use in the United States

From 1860 to 1861, before this transcontinental telegraph system was completed, people relied briefly on the Pony Express to transmit messages along a route from the Eastern United States (Missouri) to the Western United States (California). Although it was short-lived, the Pony Express is famous for some of its famous riders, including William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Along with his colleagues, Cody would transport mail by horse, very quickly, between one of the more than 150 stations along the route. As each rider reached a station, a new rider and refreshed horse would take the mail and ride very fast to the next station. In this way, mail could travel continuously, at a much more rapid pace than by using one rider, who would have to rest himself and his horse at some point.

1870s: Medicine is largely undeveloped and shortsighted, and medical education is not yet regulated. As a result, people must take precautions against getting sick. This includes staying out of the cold as much as possible, for even an hour out in the elements is enough to contract an illness that may eventually prove fatal.

• 1870s: Gustavus Franklin Swift makes his first successful shipment of fresh meat in a refrigerated railroad car that his company has developed. The refrigerated car—which works by circulating air over ice to cool it—revolutionizes the food industry, which can now ship perishable items across the country, where they arrive fresh for the consumer.
• that was released in four parts in the Atlantic Monthly in the same year—“The Invalid’s Story” was passed over for publication both here and in A Tramp Abroad (1880), until the tale was finally included five years later in 1882’s The Stolen White Elephant, Etc....
• In his 1966 article in Midcontinent American Studies Journal, critic Floyd R. Horowitz notes the reason why the story was removed from its initial publication, saying that it had been withheld, perhaps, “for fear of piercing the reader’s sensibility.” This is mild compared to some critics’ negative assessments of the story and its dark humor. In his The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens, Everett Emerson refers to “The Invalid’s Story” as one of the “disasters” that Twain has created in his short fiction, and calls the story’s humor “unspeakable.”
• Some critics note, as Bernard DeVoto did in his Mark Twain’s America, that the story was “grotesquely awful in its insistence on smells.” In her book, Mark Twain as a Literary Artist, Gladys Carmen Bellamy surmises that Twain’s story has more than humorous intentions, and that “by emphasizing the stench of corpses, Mark Twain seems also to emphasize the indignity of human life.”
• Horowitz notes the story “appears to contain, or at least give evidence of a rather closely worked Christian symbolic level,” which he believes is “quite in keeping with Twain’s later feeling about institutionalized religion.” Looked at this way, Horowitz says, many aspects become symbols, such as the corpse, which “is very suggestive of Christ,” and the express car, which “is like the Church
• Steven E. Kemper, in his article “Poe, Twain, and Limburger Cheese,” notes the parallels in
  structure between the story and the Gothic fiction of Twain’s predecessor, Edgar Allan Poe, and suggests that the story is a parody: “By burlesquing many of Poe’s techniques, themes, and character types, Twain punctures the pretensions of Gothicism.”
  Still, some positive notes have been made about the story. For example, DeVoto says that while “the sketch is not describable as lovely ... it is immensely true to one kind of humor of the frontier and of Mark Twain.” And Kemper notes that while the tale is “preposterous” and “outrageous,” it is, “of course, hilarious.
• The relative lack of critical studies on “The Invalid’s Story”—compared to Twain’s other works—points to the fact that most Twain critics have simply ignored the story. Of course, even though many critics have found it distasteful, Horowitz notes that “The Invalid’s Story” has survived the test of time, while “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion”—the larger work that originally contained it—has not. “Contemporary editors tend to agree with this abridgment, perhaps because the literary merit of the formal story has triumphed over the anecdotal narrative of a rambleThe relative lack of critical studies on “The Invalid’s Story”—compared to Twain’s other works—points to the fact that most Twain critics have simply ignored the story. Of course, even though many critics have found it distasteful, Horowitz notes that “The Invalid’s Story” has survived the test of time, while “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion”—the larger work that originally contained it—has not. “Contemporary editors tend to agree with this abridgment, perhaps because the literary merit of the formal story has triumphed over the anecdotal narrative of a ramble
• The Bible according to Mark Twain: Irreverent Writings on Eden, Heaven, and the Flood by America’s Master Satirist, published in 1996, collects a number of Twain’s irreverent views on institutionalized religion. However, even though they are staged in a humorous context, Twain’s parodies of religion pose some serious, thought-provoking questions, and reveal Twain’s intimate knowledge of the Bible.
• Although Twain’s dark side normally manifested itself through his biting humor, sometimes the author was just plain dark. In The Devil’s Racetrack: Mark Twain’s Great Dark Writings, published in 1981, the author explores the less pleasant aspects of humanity, such as disease and death, in a realistic fashion—without the humor that normally made these topics palatable to his readers.
• Some of Twain’s short stories were not well-received by the critics because of their raucous and bawdy content, which sometimes broke social taboos. In fact, Twain was noted for misbehaving in real life, a fact that showed up in his writings. Mark Twain’s Book for Bad Boys and Girls, published in 1995, collects many of Twain’s essays, sketches, and stories that exalt misbehaving.

• James D. Wilson

  In the following essay, Wilson explores the origin of “The Invalid’s Story” and its relationship to other works by Twain.
• Mark Twain’s Roughing It, published in 1872, is one of his many semi-autobiographical accounts that he wrote about his travels. In this case, Twain writes about his journey to and daily life in the developing American West. The book displays the rustic, Western style of humor that would characterize many of Twain’s later stories.

• Circumstances of Composition, Sources, and Influences

  “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” a fictionalized account of Mark Twain’s travel to Bermuda with Joe Twichell in May 1877, was originally published as a four-part serial in the Atlantic Monthly beginning October 1877, and in book form, An Idle Excursion and Other Papers, by London publishers Chatto and Windus in 1878. A study of the manuscript paper and ink suggests that “The Invalid’s Story” was written in the late 1870s, probably 1877; Emerson contends that Mark Twain heard the story from Twichell during their Bermuda travels. The scholarly assumption, supported by Mark Twain-Howells correspondence, is that it was intended to be part of “An Idle Excursion” but was excised because William Dean Howells thought the piece to be indelicate.Manuscript evidence further indicates that Mark Twain had requested the story be inserted “at page 90” of Punch, Brothers, Punch! (1878), and later intended to include it as a separate chapter in A Tramp Abroad (1880); in both instances, however, the story was deleted prior to publication, again probably as a result of Howells’s objections. Evidently Mark Twain liked the story and was anxious to have it published; at the same time, it is equally evident that he valued highly the critical judgment of his good friend Howells, whose achievements as editor and author had made him for Mark Twain a representative of the genteel literary tastes and standards the western author believed he must satisfy.
• DeVoto and Blair report that “The Invalid’s Story” may have been based on an antebellum sketch by the southwestern humorist J. M. Field, “A Resurrectionist and His Freight.” Field’s sketch appeared in the Saint Louis Reveille (9 March 1846), was reprinted in The Spirit of the Times (21 March 1846), and appeared in books of 1847 and 1858. A similar story is printed in the 13 July 1865 issue of the Carson, Nevada, Daily Appeal. A more likely source is Artemus Ward, who included a variant of the story as part of his lecture program sometime between 1862 and 1864. Austin conjectures that Mark Twain heard Ward tell it during the “Babes in the Wood” lectures Mark Twain attended in Virginia City, Nevada, in December 1863, and that Ward’s oral rendition was “evidently the ‘germ’ of Twain’s” story written some fourteen years later.
• The Gothic fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, specifically “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” is offered by Kemper as an influence on “The Invalid’s Story.” An “elaborate spoof” of Poe’s fictional themes and characteristic techniques, Mark Twain’s story takes “the Gothic tuck out of his predecessor”
• “The Invalid’s Story” is among Mark Twain’s “scatological” pieces, “immensely true,” De Voto writes, “to one kind of humor of the frontier and of Mark Twain.” Gibson links it to “1601,” though he claims that more notorious piece is “formless and even mild” when read juxtaposed to “The Invalid’s Story.” Additional parallels might be drawn to “Cannibalism in the Cars” (1868) and “The Great Prize Fight” (1863), sketches that depend for their effect on what Bellamy calls “the primitive humor of cruelty.” Horowitz sees in the story a preview of the cynicism characteristic of Mark Twain’s later writings on institutionalized religion. The indelicate—some would say offensive—subject and tone of the story, written in 1877, should give pause to those who emphasize Mark Twain’s overzealous desire to placate his wife’s genteel tastes or his surrender to her heavy editorial hand in the decade following their marriage
• Source: James D. Wilson, ‘“The Invalid’s Story,’” in A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Mark Twain, G. K. Hall and Co., 1987, pp. 147–52.
• Source: Steven E. Kemper, “Poe, Twain, and Limburger Cheese,” in Mark Twain Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Winter 1981–1982, pp. 13–14.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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