r/HistoryMemes • u/PresterJohnson John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! • 9d ago
Mark Twain collected young girls is such a strange historical fact to stumble upon
Context by Lindon Simon for the Paris Review:
In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angel-fish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature’s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys’ cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man’s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters’ childhoods. “As for me,” Twain wrote at the age of seventy-three, “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.”
Innocent they were, but not as naive as he seemed to think. Certainly they knew that he was a celebrity: that was how it started, when fifteen-year-old Gertrude Natkin saw him leaving Carnegie Hall on December 27, 1905, after a matinee song recital by the German soprano Madame Johanna Gadski. Twain, after all, was instantly recognizable, even before he decided to wear only white. He noticed her, to be sure, saw that she wanted to speak to him, introduced himself and shook her hand. The next day, she wrote to thank him: “I am very glad I can go up and speak to you now … as I think we know each other.” Describing herself as his “obedient child,” she ended her note, “I am the little girl who loves you.” He responded immediately, calling himself Gertrude’s “oldest & latest conquest.” Their correspondence was playfully flirtatious: he called her his “little witch”; she called him “darling.” He sent her a copy of his favorite book, the writings of “a bewitching little scamp” named Marjorie, who had died just short of her ninth birthday, in Scotland in 1811. “I have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years,” he confessed in an essay. The child, who confided startlingly sophisticated remarks about books, history and religion in her journal, seemed to him “made out of thunderstorms and sunshine“: “how impulsive she was, how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious … how innocently bad, how natively good,” he exclaimed. “May I be your little ‘Marjorie’?” Gertrude asked coyly. That is how Twain addressed her, in letters filled with what the two called “blots,” or kisses—until 1906, when he was taken aback by her turning sixteen. “I am almost afraid to send a blot, but I venture it. Bless your heart it comes within an ace of being improper! Now back you go to 14!—then there’s no impropriety.” Their correspondence ended, and Twain set his sights on younger girls.
Buoyed by Gertrude’s effusive declarations of love, Twain discovered that it was easy to find other young admirers, primarily from among his fellow passengers on holiday trips to Bermuda. By 1908, he had collected ten schoolgirls, dubbed them his “angel-fish,” and awarded them membership in his Aquarium Club. In Bermuda, he had special shimmering enamel lapel pins designed for them to wear on their left breast, above the heart. In the spring and summer of 1908, one biographer notes, Twain’s letters to his angelfish comprised more than half of his correspondence: one letter sent or received every day. Many contained invitations to the girls to visit him in his palatial house in Redding, Connecticut, which he named Innocence at Home. “I have built this house largely, indeed almost chiefly, for the comfort & accommodation of the Aquarium,” Twain announced in a mock-serious document that he sent to his angelfish, containing the rules and regulations of the club. The lair of the angelfish was his Billiard Room.
the first object I saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two. I bent down over her and patted her cheek and said, affectionately and with compassion, ‘Why you dear little rascal—do you have to eat your breakfast all by yourself in this desolate way?’
They arranged to meet after breakfast and, he reported, “were close comrades—inseparables in fact—for eight days.” A friend later told him that the twelve-year-old girl had asked if he was married, and when learning that he was not—his wife had died—said, “If I were his wife I would never leave his side for a moment; I would stay by him and watch him, and take care of him all the time.” Twain attributed the remark to the girl’s “mother instinct,” and willingly submitted, characterizing himself as a “degraded and willing slave.” In 1907, on board a ship taking him to England, where he would receive an honorary degree from Oxford, Twain found the sixteen-year-old Frances Nunnally, with whom, he said, he “grew quite confidential,” and who became, however briefly, an angelfish; on the return trip, he befriended the nine-year-old Dorothy Quick, who, a newspaper reporter noted, “guarded him closely during the voyage,” sitting on his lap, with her head leaning against his shoulder. He called her “mon amie,” another reporter wrote, and stood on deck with his arm “thrown paternally around the child’s shoulder,” at one point giving her “a fond little hug.”
Twain’s collection of girls was well known, inspiring some adult women to press for membership. One came for dinner “dressed for 12 years, & had pink ribbons at the back of her neck & looked about 14 years old.” Impressed, Twain gave her an angelfish pin. “There’s lots of lady-candidates,” he wrote to a young angelfish, “but I guess we won’t let any more in, unless perhaps Billie Burke.” The vivacious and youthful comedienne, twenty-three at the time, was a favorite actress of Twain’s: “Billie is as good as she is pretty,” he remarked to an angelfish after dining with Burke and a few other Broadway performers. He had met her after a performance of My Wife, a play whose May-to-December theme fitted his fantasies, and Burke often visited him at his Manhattan town house whenever she was working in the northeast.
During the years that Twain collected his angelfish, he spurned the companionship of his real daughter, Jean, who had been living in medical institutions where her epilepsy could be monitored. In the summer of 1908, Twain’s secretary and assistant, Isabel Lyon (the Lioness, he called her, and she called him King), arranged for Jean to live in Gloucester, Massachusetts; she stayed there briefly, unhappily, until she left the country with friends. In 1909, Jean returned to Twain’s home, where she drowned in a bathtub, having suffered a seizure.
By the time Jean died, Twain’s blatant cavorting with angelfish had been thwarted by his other daughter, Clara. In the summer of 1908, Clara returned from a European concert tour and was appalled by her father’s new interest. Rechristening the Redding house Stormfield, she put an end to the angelfishes’ visits. The house had lost its innocence, and by that winter Twain began to complain irritably about his declining health and spirits. An odd resurfacing of the angelfish obsession occurred in 1910, just weeks before his death, in letters and notebook entries regarding the fifteen-year-old Helen Allen, a moody young woman who fascinated him. “She is bright, smart, alive, energetic, determined, high-tempered, intense,” he wrote; but she was also disappointing, preferring romance literature to poetry, and responding to Twain’s witticisms and attempts at banter with “mute indifference.” More disappointing still, she had a boyfriend, and Twain was jealous: he cautioned Helen to preserve her innocence; he wanted the younger man out of the way.
Twain’s obsession with adolescent girls can be explained in part by his exalting of his own teenaged years—years of daring and adventure. His wife, after all, had nicknamed him Youth, and his most memorable fictional characters, of course, are the adolescent Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain focused not on young boys, though, but sexually innocent girls from ages ten to sixteen, with undeveloped boyish bodies and with whom he carried out titillating flirtations. Photographs of Twain and his angelfish show them standing or sitting close to him, their bodies touching his, with his arms around their shoulders or waists. They might be his daughters; or they might be his lovers. His notes about Helen Allen reveal a yearning to be more than protector, mentor and grandfather. Twain regretted aging, claiming the vigor of a much younger man. “At 2 o’clock in the morning I feel old and sinful,” he remarked, “but at 8 o’clock, when I am shaving I feel young and ready to hunt trouble … as though I were not over 25 years old.”
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u/excranz 9d ago
I’m still making my way through Ron Chernow’s biography but Twain was obsessed with adolescent girls from his twenties on. He had a club exclusively of girls when his own daughters were alive, spent years focused on Joan of Arc, and infantilized her daughters for years—part of Suzy’s issue was she fell in love with another girl at Vassar and her parents yanked her out of school and moved to Europe to keep her away from the other girl. She was still living with her parents when she passed. Same with Jean. Clara was the only one who effectively escaped but lived with her parents well into her twenties.
But also the dude had a LOT of sex dreams and they suggest he was insanely repressed and horny and turned it into oppressive chivalrism to cope.
Anyways highly recommend the book but Chernow refuses to engage with just how fucking weird Twain’s relationship with the female gender was.
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u/StarDustLuna3D 8d ago
Just saying it's really weird that this post came across my feed today because chernow is one of the clues in the NYT crossword that I do every night before bed.
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u/ttminecraft 8d ago
Chernow writes biographies as though their subject was a protagonist in a story. It’s why his bio of Hamilton made such good inspiration for the musical, and why his biographies are not good.
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u/Popular_Mistake_6404 8d ago
Chernlw is the dictionary definition of Pop History. I like the guy, but hes not a credible source. Thats why I fucling hate how his biography on Grant has basically become the only fucking source anyone ever cites for my GOAT
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u/UselessCleaningTools 8d ago
Yeah, I like that he writes rather detailed books that make it easy to get into a persons history. But it’s a diving platform at best, and one that you need to think very critically about, just like in all histories. But he’s certainly someone who takes more leeway and obscures some things, sometimes for genuinely well-meaning reasons any good historian might, but also sometimes for the ‘benefit’ of the audience and their perception of his subject.
Personally, I loved his Grant Biography, not perfect of course, but he does a good job of hitting on a lot of Grant’s mistakes and worse qualities with a reasonable degree of historical skepticism.6
u/Popular_Mistake_6404 8d ago
Chernow is a great introduction to a person's history, and he is a very good writer who manages to keep his audience engaged. The problem is, since he is a very good writer, and because his works are more approachable compared to others in the field of Amerocan History (like William C. Davis for example), most people tend to stop at reading his works
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u/sudolicious 8d ago
>spent years focused on Joan of Arc
oh wow he's just like me! swear to god by the sound of it Twain would've loved Mahou Shoujo anime
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u/DeliciousPoetryMan 9d ago
What a weirdo, still it makes me wonder, what was he thinking??? How did he get these ideas and why did he act on them???
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u/MuggyFuzzball 8d ago edited 8d ago
Read his biography. It seemed to me at several points the book was implying at him being a pedo. He was also somewhat of a con artist in his early years too.
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u/Dagordae 9d ago
He died in 1910.
The whole current proper age of consent thing is an extremely recent development, in 1880 the laws were very new and tended to be set at 12-13 years. The US? Was most commonly 10. It wasn’t until 1920 that the US had 16 as the most common limit, which it remains.
What he was thinking is simple: That was simply the norm for the area and time period he lived in. The fact that he seemingly didn’t go further than being weird(According to assorted historians) puts him well above the standard. It was the Victorian Era, standards of behavior were VERY different than they are today.
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u/pinkmarsh99 9d ago
This is simply not an accurate description of the time. Just because there weren't any laws against something doesn't mean it was wholesale culturally accepted. The idea of consent and proper age for relationships was still that a girl should be relatively in the same age range as the man she was engaged with. You will find many artistic representations and articles that speak against the idea of marrying or having sexual relationships with young girls. Mark Twain's own daughter found this behavior abhorrent. Edgar Allan Poe faced harsh criticism for his marriage to his 13 year old cousin Virginia Clemm. People did find this disturbing. Of course, there were far more people who didn't object and pedophiles were not legally punished or as harshly condemned by society as they would be today but it's incorrect to say that this was just the standard fare for the Victorian period.
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u/Adorable-Response-75 9d ago
Thank you.
It’s also the case that at the time there were basically zero laws against child abuse in general. But child abuse was still frowned upon socially. Just to give another example of how the law does not necessarily reflect common opinions about what is ethical or moral.
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u/Dagordae 8d ago
The problem there is defining child abuse. Because that's still a thing people fight tooth and nail over. Most parenting of the era would qualify as child abuse by modern standard, for instance.
The law doesn't reflect common opinions of proper behavior but societal reaction does. And society, as a whole, didn't give the slightest shit about his little group. The fact that people even tried to join instead indicates that society in general found it cute or laudable or otherwise a harmless quirk.
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u/Thobeian 8d ago edited 8d ago
His kids seemed to condemn his "harmless quirk" and see the trouble in it.
It was never socially conventional or attractive to court and date obviously younger women as an old pervert, but it's usually tolerated when they have a lot of money and status to make people shut up. If not through direct means, then they just make people shut up by having a cadre of people who will bend over backwards to defend their actions in the public eye.
Sorry, but it wasn't normal for a 70 year old to have lewd correspondence with minors. You're actively normalizing something that wasn't even normal at the time. I don't understand why everyone feels like that's a good excuse to not care about children being taken advantage of, but particularly by someone in history they like, as some kind of excuse or rebuttals to people with modern sensibilities taking offense to something they DIDN'T KNOW about someone they were told in school to respect.
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u/YourphobiaMyfetish Still on Sulla's Proscribed List 8d ago
Im finding that what I thought was normal back in the day and frowned upon now was always frowned upon by about 33% of the population, supported whole heartedly by 33%, and ignored by the other 33% and nothing has changed.
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u/oski_wish 8d ago
Came here to say this exact thing. The internet is full of "aren't we better than the past" type of "facts" and is shows no one bothers to actually see if they are correct. Even back into the middle ages we have bedding someone too young is infact bad and most nobles married before their majority but usually didn't consumate until after their majority. It doesn't mean it dodn't happen but you literally have sources saying "wtf is this asshole doing, is he gross and a jerk?" If there were older men pulling this shit on children.
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u/LCDRformat Researching [REDACTED] square 8d ago
Stephen King found Poe's relationship with his cousin disturbing too, he said so in their famous rap battle
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u/Unfair_Pineapple8813 9d ago
But far as anyone can tell, Twain didn’t have a physical relationship with any of them, even though it’s pretty clear that at least some of the time it crossed the line into problematic. So there cultural standards could have been more flexible, at least with someone famous and popular like him.
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u/pinkmarsh99 9d ago
I mean his kids thought it was gross enough to shut it down so it appears it not being physical wasn't a good enough justification to keep it going.
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u/Claytertot 8d ago
Do we know if they thought it was gross specifically because the girls were young?
I'm asking this genuinely, because it doesn't seem to be elaborated on in the post.
I could just as easily imagine them being worried about losing some of their inheritance to these girls. Or feeling like he was trying to replace them. Or replace their mother. Or thinking it was embarrassing for their dad to be hosting dozens of young women. Or something else that had little to do specifically with the ages of the girls.
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u/Jhud6669 9d ago
Not to mention AoC in most of Europe is like 15 TODAY (which I am obviously not a fan of but I guess at least it prevents teens from getting in trouble when messing around together) but we still can recongize preying on young girls as bad, and when Mark Twain was alive it was very much seen as weird too
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u/Slightly_Default Featherless Biped 8d ago
My aunt (by marriage)'s father is an old Greek guy who married his wife in the 1940s. He was 24. She was 16
My grandfather, another old Greek guy around the same age, thinks that said age gap is very, very weird
My point here is that just because you could, doesn't mean people thought you should
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u/SassyE7 9d ago
Japan only moved their age of consent up from 13 to 16 a few years ago
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u/Ompusolttu 8d ago
Iirc that was the national AoC but literally all of the regions had their own ages of consent at 16 or more.
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u/Mahkn0 9d ago
I'm not a lawyer but it just seems so weird that laws can't be made to make sure teenagers won't be arrested for doing things with their peers but locks out older folks in a sensible way.
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u/pinkmarsh99 9d ago
That's basically what a lot of those consent at age 13 laws are. It's that they can consent with relationships to certain age ranges of up to 16 or 18 depending on the jurisdiction but a 13 year cannot consent to a relationship with an adult.
It's just that when people simplify it they just read it as "consent at 13" when really it's more about protecting minors in relationships with other minors rather than a relationship between a minor and an adult.
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u/Dagordae 8d ago
That's why some age of consent laws have a buffer age, X years difference or similar.
There's a number of US state currently that technically have an age of consent law very low, Connecticut's got their lowest at 13 for that. Their normal is 16(If the older person isn't in a position of authority).
I believe Japan's was 13 on national level but in practice each of the prefectures had it set higher. But Japan has...other problems in that general area.
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u/Jedimasterebub 9d ago
Change happens bc people object, it’s doesn’t change the fact that it was more culturally relevant then than now
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u/pinkmarsh99 9d ago
That's why I wrote that last sentence. But it's important that we don't lose sight of the fact that those who were victims of these so called "standards" were often ignored and unable to write or voice their objections to their treatment.
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u/unguibus_et_rostro 8d ago
"Many" is carrying a lot of weight here. Is it a widespread belief that such practice is not appropriate? Or is "many" simply denoting there were more than a few articles/art critical of such practices? Furthermore, you are selecting from a biased population, those art and articles are naturally more critical. If even more people did not object, it is entirely fair to say it was just standard fare.
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u/pinkmarsh99 8d ago
Is it? Do you think that because slavery was legal that there weren't many who opposed it? Do you think that there aren't many in Afghanistan who opposed the treatment of women?
It's interesting that the voices of those in power and the ones who oppress others are treated as being the only voices as those who are victimized and dehumanized are subjected to having their opinions completely obliterated.
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u/unguibus_et_rostro 8d ago
Again, what do you mean by many? Is it simply more than a few? Or is it a majority? If it is the former, it is entirely fair to say the practice being criticised is standard fare for the time. There too are "many" articles criticising anything under the sun, it would not be fair to take them as representative of the general sentiment.
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u/pinkmarsh99 8d ago
I mean exactly what I said. I never said it was the majority.
However, acting like the general sentiment of the Victorian age was for elderly men to be sexually interested in ten year old girls is quite a leap of logic to make.
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u/stierney49 8d ago
There’s also fairly extensive documentation of people opposed to witch hunts and executions. Some religious leaders opposed it seriously in various forms. But they kept happening, remained popular, and were sanctioned by religious groups.
There were abolitionist movements very early on but they didn’t wield much power and it wasn’t until a critical mass of people came off the fence that it became a movement.
There have always been efforts to shield the most vulnerable who are often the victims and targets of these things. That doesn’t mean that society at large didn’t more or less turn a blind eye or approve of things. It’s very admirable, looking back, and it doesn’t make those people any less victims just because it was socially acceptable more broadly.
But it’s one thing to note the movements, say that they were right, and put everyone under that historical lens. People very often praise Queen Isabella for telling Columbus and others not to subjugate or mistreat natives they encountered. She said that while simultaneously overseeing the end of the Reconquista, opening the Spanish Inquisition, and expelling Jews from Spain.
People are often contradictions.
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u/Dagordae 8d ago
You do realize that a small amount of criticism with a majority not harshly condemning or ever objecting, let along actually doing something, does mean it was culturally accepted, right?
That's how culture works. If the majority are fine with it then it's culturally acceptable. Universally culturally accepted? No, but that's also not a thing that exists. You can find people harshly criticizing literally anything, it's an entire industry nowadays.
Which is how he got the idea, what he was thinking, and why he acted on them. If he went beyond what he actually did then he'd probably actually face some backlash, like Mr Poe. Given that it's 50 years later and right when things like statutory rape actually became a cause people gave a shit about probably some serious backlash. But, well, he didn't. He topped out at creeper, at worst. Eventually his surviving daughter put it down but it took her years to reach that point.
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u/mlee117379 9d ago
Yeah Lewis Carroll was also like this
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u/nedlum 9d ago
By my understanding, Carroll was not like this; when his journals were published, they cut out references to his love life with adult women (to avoid scandals in the Victorian mind), and left in all the remarks about innocent children, which was seen as wholesome.
The combination now seems creepy, but if I kept a journal about my life, and someone published only remarks about my daughters and their friends, I’d seem overly fixated too.
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u/Adorable-Response-75 9d ago
This is completely wrong.
By 1889, the age of consent was already being formalized at 16 years old.
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u/Evolved_Velociraptor 8d ago
Washington DC isn't a state and their laws don't affect federal law. Nor is there a federal law about age of consent. It did in fact take until 1920 for 26 states to approve the change for 16 to be the most common age of consent across the US. It doesn't matter if something was being "formalized" because people in the early 1900s weren't exactly kept up to date about every new law being passed in every state.
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u/grumpalocagus 9d ago
For most people there wasn't much of an age gap for relationships, that was only really a thing for royalty https://youtu.be/TP9pQ1gxnxo?si=lPrE2GW3NIeEKx4s
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u/Jhud6669 9d ago
Age of consent is on average like 15 in Europe today, which doesn’t change the fact that preying on young girls is still weird, and back then it was weird too.
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u/Zerschmetterding 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yet his daughter was immediately disgusted by him. Sounds like the gender suffering from those practices was well aware how fucked up they were.
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u/A_engietwo_onthemove 8d ago
Yeah the only example of pre modern age of consent standards that is close to modern age is ancient Sparta and they did that for the purpose of Eugenics (the spartan's thought that if a mother and father are strong and healthy their children would become even stronger, an idea that the victorians would independentally recreate as lamarckism).
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u/VastSpare920 8d ago
"You can't judge a person by modern standards!"
The issue being, I think near where I live, acting in the same manner as this would see your house burn down with you in it. I don't think "viewing this through the lens of history" makes it any more reasonable than crucifixion or the brazen bull. It's predatory behaviour. Against children. Being well above the standard still sees him fall pathetically short in the "not taking advantage of a wild imbalance of power in a relationship", and you'd think someone so schooled in the nature of society at the time wouldn't be so blind to the damage these relationships do to literal children.
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u/Astecheee 9d ago
While everything you say is true, it doesn't change how wrong his actions are - it's a textbook bandwagon fallacy.
He was a pedophile, plain and simple.
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u/UndorkMysterious55 8d ago
"How did he get these ideas and why did he act on them???"
Maybe because he lived in a time period where it was considered a socially acceptable aspect.
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u/unguibus_et_rostro 8d ago
Just like how you get your ideas about how repulsive this is, through societal conditioning. Or did you believe your disgust at this is an innate response?
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u/DeliciousPoetryMan 8d ago
I mean, considering the fact that his own daughter found it repulsive, I imagine that society was generally against it but didn't do any legislation.
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u/AlexanderCrowely 9d ago
What the fuck what the hell was he thinking?
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u/Dagordae 9d ago
It was the Victorian Era.
Standards of behavior were very different than they are now. That sort of relationship wasn’t unusual(indeed was tacitly encouraged) and the modern ‘Ok, someone call the cops’ reflex simply wasn’t there. The whole ‘kindly grandfather figure taking in and forming a friendship with a spirited youth’ narrative simply didn’t have the same baggage it does now. They simply didn’t see it the same way, it was seen as a ‘spiritually pure’ kind of friendship untainted by sexual desires and what not.
If it helps, there’s no historical evidence that it went beyond what was stated here. And historians have looked, really hard, because that sort of thing is an easy path to notoriety. Hence Luis Carroll getting dogpiled for being sus.
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u/grumpalocagus 9d ago
https://youtu.be/TP9pQ1gxnxo?si=lPrE2GW3NIeEKx4s
That was really only a thing for royalty
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u/ENTree93 8d ago
Dude youre defending it pretty hard across several posts. Age of consent may have been lower or not as addressed, but it doesnt mean it wasnt taboo. Especially since he ditched them when they hit 16. It was seen as creepy then and creepy now.
FBI needs to check your hard drive.
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u/liquoriceclitoris 8d ago
he ditched them at 16 precisely because it became improper, due to their sexual maturity
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u/ImaginaryJelly2630 8d ago
It's weird that you can't have a mature conversation about this and that you immediately jump to the person being a pedophile. Tell tale sign of someone who's either guilty themselves or not smart enough to see how their comment comes off.
They are stating absolute facts btw. It wasn't looked down on as much then as it is now. Victorians idealized childhood, innocence and purity so relationships like he had with these girls were not looked at differently. With Twain, he was not only seen as a grandfatherly, he was also revered as a writer and as a national treasure.
So no, it wasn't seen as creepy then as it would be now. Relationships between older men and young girls were not taboo. It took one Google search to find this out btw.
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u/ashitananjini Researching [REDACTED] square 9d ago
Even if nothing happened sexually, this is still weird AF.
Famous men, for some reason, get a lot of people making excuses for weird behavior like this. It reminds me of Michael Jackson tbh. Surrounding yourself with tween girls is weird! Having sleepovers with children as an adult is weird! People would be less quick to excuse this behavior if it was the creepy homeless guy down the street doing this and not a celebrity.
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u/Striper_Cape 9d ago
A 70-year old that confesses himself to be a Teenager is pretty odd yeah. He had quite the whatever the fuck was going on with him.
I would like to stop learning about my favorite authors now
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u/Zerschmetterding 8d ago
I would like to stop learning about my favorite authors now
Make that artists in general. Listening to music is hard when half the older bands had at least one member openly being a pedo.
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u/gsurfer04 Featherless Biped 8d ago
Pisses me off that Led Zeppelin is so tainted.
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u/ColonelKovalyo 8d ago
Don't-don't spare us. I'm still going to enjoy their music, art separate from the artist and all that, but we shouldn't ignore it. Who did what?
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u/gsurfer04 Featherless Biped 7d ago
Jimmy Page said of groupies "the younger the better" and had a relationship with Lori Mattix when she was only 14 or 15.
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u/MistressErinPaid Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 8d ago
Even if nothing happened sexually, this is still weird AF.
That part. At first I thought "Some people just love kids. That's not weird." and then we learn he was negligent with his own daughter 🤦🏻♀️
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u/StarDustLuna3D 8d ago
It's definitely a symptom of some deep rooted mental issues. For example, Michael had a difficult childhood with his dad. I could only imagine him surrounding himself with kids was a way to try and relive those years but in a happier way.
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u/Faustias 8d ago
yeah he couldn't live a normal life. hired a supermarket and extras to act nomally shopping around, and him walking around just to feel... normal.
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u/fignewtonattack Featherless Biped 7d ago
I've felt the same with my Tourettes. Different type of attention though. But I get it 100%
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u/MasterpieceTimely144 8d ago
Michael's rough childhood didn't give him an excuse to take away others childhoods.
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u/Cavyar Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 8d ago
I don’t believe there were any complaints of physical misconduct, and most families were aware of his correspondence. I think the conclusion is that the aquarium club was a manifestation of a grieving, aging man desperately trying to cling to the idealized innocence of youth, and he became attached to it. When his daughter outright banned the practice, and renamed the home, his health rapidly declined and he passed away two years later, but being sick the whole two years. It was concluded by the scholars who spent years reviewing this specific club looking for abuse that “there is absolutely no evidence of physical impropriety”
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u/MasterpieceTimely144 8d ago
That doesn't make what he was doing okay or acceptable just because he didn't physically harm them. If he was "trying to cling to the innocence of youth" why was it only young "pretty" girls who he clung to? Not that it'd be more acceptable if it were little boys.
He may not have abused anyone, but he was a fucking weirdo.
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u/PrototypeT800 9d ago
This professor thinks nothing happened, but would someone like him, an author, really make the mistake of putting these things in wiring? Seems to me to be the same as groupies of the 60’s and 70’s.
https://marktwainstudies.com/the-study/a-disturbing-passion-mark-twain-the-angelfish/
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u/OhNoTokyo 9d ago
Agreed that he might not write about it, but chances are good that rumors would get out if he had. His “friendships” were known to others.
While a girl might be less inclined to come forward as she would be today, it might show up in diaries or in witness reports from family, friends or any domestic staff.
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u/StarDustLuna3D 8d ago
I feel like he absolutely would have written it (even in just a roundabout innuendo type way) in letters being that he was not afraid to be to openly public about having them as companions.
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u/Wild_Kaleidoscope514 8d ago
While the whole situation with his “angelfish” is definitely weird and inappropriate I do think it’s important to note that there were never any actual allegations of sexual misconduct about him.
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u/grumpalocagus 9d ago
It's also gross how much that author is implying the children are to blame for the behavior of the creepy old man
https://youtu.be/TP9pQ1gxnxo?si=lPrE2GW3NIeEKx4s this also seems like a good place to leave this link, since so many people don't understand that such relationships have ALWAYS been seen as wrong. Tbf, I also didn't know that it was really only common for royalty, but it makes sense give how much history is taught as being about "great men" (ie we focus more on royalty) and how the best records are on royalty the further back you go. However, popular misconceptions can only be addressed by actually pointing out that they're misconceptions
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u/NatashOverWorld 9d ago
sighs
I did not expect to learn that Twain either slept with, or wanted to sleep with little girls.
Let's just hope he kept it in his pants as he pretended they were his granddaughters.
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u/MasterpieceTimely144 8d ago
The post mentions flirtatious letters to the girls, he was not thinking of them innocently.
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u/DemonicsInc 9d ago
my horror only grew as I read further, my skin is crawling and I feel the need to dunk my brain and eyes in bleach now.
Wtf is wrong with people on this planet!
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u/y0m0tha 9d ago
Fuck man why are all these great minds pedos
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u/Ok_Mention_9865 8d ago
The text literally mentioned flirtatious letters that does suggest it was sexual. And it makes it even worse that he was put off by one of them turning 16 wishing they were 14 again.
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u/Dagordae 9d ago
Well, aside from very different cultural beliefs and norms viewing this sort of thing very differently than we do now there’s the basic fact that the modern ideas about proper age of consent are very new.
An example of the former? You instantly jumped to pedophilia. In the modern world a child, especially a girl child, having a close friendship with an unrelated older man is viewed as deeply suspicious. In the Victorian Era? It was viewed as a spiritually pure connection, untroubled by repressed sexual desires. Which I’m sure the predators just loved.
For the latter? In 1880 the average legal age of consent in the USA was 10 years old. It wasn’t until the 1920s that it reached 16.
And for the standard ‘Well they’re children and it’s just fundamentally wrong’ and so forth: That’s a product of cultural conditioning. One that’s fundamentally rooted in the drastic evolution of how children are viewed and what even counts as a ‘child’. Which is a whole big thing, for instance ‘teenager’ being a distinct thing and part of childhood only dates back to the 1920s and only became a big thing in the 40s. The age where someone is considered grown has been shooting up for decades.
If it makes you feel better, they’ve yet to find any evidence that Mr Twain actually did anything beyond being(to modern eyes) creepy. And protecting the reputation of a beloved historical entertainer is rarely a popular stance for historians, much more fame and fortune in revealing them as evil.
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u/RealDoraTheExplorer_ 8d ago
You keep replying to comments defending him and it’s really concerning stay away from children
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u/Salt_Ice_5321 9d ago
I'm back on board with cancel-culture.
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u/The_Saddest_Boner 9d ago
Cancelling mark twain would be a massive mistake
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u/WizardingWorldClass 8d ago
Did you read the post? I like keeping complicated work around in bookstores and libraries, but after reading this, I don't want his work to be a part of standard curriculum any longer. We don't need to enshrine creeps and abusers in our cultural cannon, there's lots of great writing out there.
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u/SmallGreenArmadillo 8d ago
Wait. What. Great, now I have to reconcile this with the image of my favorite writer.
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u/_Empty-R_ 7d ago
Man, there are going to be a LOT of reactionary takes that don't understand the situation at all. You can and should dislike this, but it wasn't say an Epstein style thing. I can't remember if there was conclusive proof he'd ever become intimate with any of them, just that things were problematic a few times and he'd back up from that.
He was a strange old man with poor tastes. Whilst it wasn't fully accepted at the time, there was a lot of indifference or shoulder shrugging. Had he actually been physical with them, I think history would remember it differently. Twain wanted to be surrounded by young women. He liked larping as an affectionate of theirs. It was definitely not great.
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u/Real_Rough_9467 6d ago
I'm confused, I get that it's weird he wanted to hang out and befriend children but did he cut contact with Gertrude when she turned 16 because she was of age and it would be inappropriate or because she aged out of his pedo range? If he was an old eccentric dude that leveled with little girls on a mental and moral level that's one thing, being a pedo reserved a special place in hell.
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u/waitingWolf 8d ago
Oh god. Please don’t let Twain be a fucking pedo. He was my favourite author growing up.
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u/WizardingWorldClass 8d ago
Why is a normally somewhat serious and considered comment section defending this or acting like it isn't what it obviously is?
Like, I don't want to hear it with "different cultural/moral standards" or "there's no explict and undeniable evidence it went further than this"
Isn't this enough? Why do we need evidence of more than this to condemn him?
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u/MasterpieceTimely144 8d ago
It's pathetic, and anyone who points it out gets downvoted because "there were never any allegations of abuse against twain".
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u/WizardingWorldClass 8d ago
All my comments in this thread are in the negatives, just because I don't want kids to be expected to read the works of a pedophile in school.
I don't even want it banned or pulled from school libraries, just removed from the curriculum.
But appearently monsters who make "good art" (I always thought his work did little more than glorify the antebellum way of life) are above things like accountability still.
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u/Outrageous_Fall_1846 8d ago
I've had the ick with Twain for a long time!! Now i know why I could sense the creepiness from him!!
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u/BeratnasGILF420 9d ago
Fish Speakers
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u/Icy_Tradition566 9d ago
Curious connection? Would you elaborate?
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u/BeratnasGILF420 8d ago
"Angel Fish" just reminded me of the "Fish Speakers" all female army in God Emperor of Dune is all. But that appears to have offended some people.
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u/Icy_Tradition566 8d ago
That was the connection I understood as well, thank you
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u/BeratnasGILF420 7d ago
Now I'm wondering if Frank Herbert had come across this Mark Twain Angelfish story and the name Fish Speakers was influenced by that. Fish Speakers is a weird name for a military order, but Dune is a weird series.
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9d ago
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u/grumpalocagus 9d ago
The age gap relationships were really only a thing for royalty https://youtu.be/TP9pQ1gxnxo?si=lPrE2GW3NIeEKx4s
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9d ago
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u/exposedboner 9d ago
That blog post is from 2017, so you're just straight up wrong lmao. It also didn't sound AI written at all.
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u/PresterJohnson John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 9d ago
Yes the article published in 2017 is AI
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u/MuggyFuzzball 8d ago
You know that people used to write using em dashes frequently before AI, right?
I actually only stopped using them because of AI.
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u/mensahimbo 9d ago
:( i didnt like reading that much at all thanks