[As part of a special Christmas issue, the New York
World featured a page of scenes from Mark Twain's
best-known books, as depicted by various artists. The paper
made a point of boasting that it had hired Kemble, "the
original illustrator," to do these three new pictures
from Huck Finn. The pictures Kemble drew clearly
reflect his career as a cartoonist -- the re-presentations
of Jim are even more grotesquely comic than the pictures he
drew in 1884. The scene at the bottom left, showing two
whites expressing horror at "Jim's" appearance, is
particularly unpleasant. It isn't based on anything that
actually happens in the novel, but is extrapolated from the
idea the Duke comes up with to allow Jim to stay on the
raft without being tied up. In other words, this scene only
"occurs" in Kemble's imagination, though it also seemed
"real" enough to the people who admired his drawings. By
clicking onto the image map below, you can see enlargements
of the three drawings -- or a transcription of the brief
but very telling synopsis of the novel supplied by the
paper.]
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