Those Extraordinary Twins

1892, in 1986 Penguin Classics edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Mark Twain
Those Extraordinary Twins
Possibly bought new for $2.50
Slightly worn paperback
B


The best part of this short story is Twain's sporking of his own writing, both in the preface and in the interspersed notes.  He was trying to write a farce about two "Siamese" twins (well, Italian but conjoined), and Pudd'nhead Wilson and some other characters kept horning in, till finally he had to extract them and write a comitragedy.  But first he started throwing the original characters in a well.  "I was going to drown some others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway."  I haven't read Pudd'nhead Wilson in awhile (it's from 1894), but just on its own terms, this is a delightfully silly story, with Twain examining how the very different twins (one blond and good, the other dark and sort of bad) deal with everything from food and shelter to politics and religion.  We're not shown how they deal with sex of course, but Angelo (the good twin) has a bit of a romance with "Rowena the lightweight heroine."  Yes, that's probably an Ivanhoe reference, since obviously Twain likes to make fun of other writers besides himself.

As for Mr. Wilson, he defends the twins when they go to court and only one of them is guilty.  He'll keep his profession when he becomes the main character, but the twins will be separate people, rather than "a pair of scissors."