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Jane Lampton Clemens

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Jane Lampton Clemens
Born
Jane Lampton

June 18, 1803
Adair County, Kentucky, U.S.
DiedOctober 27, 1890 (aged 87)
Keokuk, Iowa, U.S.
SpouseJohn Marshall Clemens (m. 1823)
Children7, including Orion and Samuel

Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803 – October 27, 1890) was the mother of author Mark Twain.[1] She was the inspiration of the character "Aunt Polly" in Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.[2][3][4] She was regarded as a "cheerful, affectionate, and strong woman" with a "gift for storytelling" and as the person from whom Mark Twain inherited his sense of humor.[5][6][7][8]

Early life and family

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Jane Lampton was born on June 18, 1803, in Adair County, Kentucky,[9] the daughter of Benjamin Lampton and Margaret Casey Lampton. She grew up in Columbia, Kentucky,[10] and was known to be a good horsewoman and dancer.[11]: 10  Her maternal grandfather was Colonel William Casey, an early Kentucky pioneer and the namesake of Casey County, Kentucky.[12] When Colonel Casey became ill, Lampton learned medical skills from her grandfather, but he died when she was sixteen years old.[13] One year later, Lampton's mother (Margaret died).[13]

She married John Marshall Clemens on May 26, 1823,[13] in Columbia, Adair County, Kentucky.[14] She was a religiously conservative Presbyterian, while her husband was an agnostic freethinker who admired Thomas Paine.[15] Together, they had seven children, however four of them died before reaching the age of 20. Three of their children lived into adulthood, including Orion (1825–1897), Pamela (1827–1904), and Samuel (1835–1910).

Later life

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The Clemens family moved to Fentress County, Tennessee, where her husband practiced law, operated a general store, and served as a county commissioner, county clerk, and acting attorney general as a conservative Whig.[16]

The Clemens family owned several enslaved persons, and Twain later reflected on his mother's attitudes towards slavery,[17] writing, "Kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for."[18][19][20]

Photograph of Clemens later in life, circa 1870s

The cabin in which the Clemens family is believed to have lived in Fentress County is displayed as part of the collection of the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee. In 1835, the Clemens family moved to Florida, Missouri, where their son Samuel,[21] who was to become famous as the author Mark Twain, was born on November 30, 1835 (now preserved as the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site)[16]

In 1839, the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Missouri,[22] a port town on the Mississippi River which was to eventually inspire some of Mark Twain's stories. The home in Hannibal is now known as the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum.

In the years following her husband's death in 1847, Clemens moved around living with her surviving children. During the American Civil War in the 1860s, Clemens was supportive of the cause of the Confederacy and was described as a "fierce secessionist."[23][24] After Samuel married in 1870, Clemens went to live with her daughter Pamela, who like Samuel lived in upstate New York.[25]

When she lived in Keokuk, Iowa, in the 1880s, Clemens was a neighbor and friend of feminist and suffragette Ida Hinman.[26] In 1880, Twain named his newborn daughter Jane Lampton "Jean" Clemens after his mother.[27]

Death

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Clemens died on October 27, 1890, in Keokuk at the age of 87. She was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Hannibal, Missouri.[1] After her death, her son Mark Twain wrote, "The greatest difference which I find between her and the rest of the people whom I have known, is this, and it is a remarkable one: those others felt a strong interest in a few things, whereas to the very day of her death she felt a strong interest in the whole world and everything and everybody in it."[28]

Legacy

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Illustration of "Aunt Polly" by True Williams in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876.

The influence of Clemens on her son Mark Twain's writings has been the subject of scholarly debate and analysis.[29][30][31][32][33] She has been described as the person from whom Twain inherited his sense of humor and gift of storytelling.[6][7][34][35]

Twain wrote a memoir to his mother that was published in Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck, and Tom.[36][37] In 1868, he delivered a speech in Washington, D.C., which served as a tribute to his mother and to mothers around the world.[38]

Clemens was the inspiration behind the character of "Aunt Polly" in her son's novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.[2][3][4]

State Historical Marker #128 in Columbia, Kentucky, notes the location of the childhood home of Clemens.[39] Clemens is also the namesake of the Columbia chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.[25][5]

There is a display about the life of Clemens at the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site Museum.[40]

Clemens is portrayed by Kay Johnson in the 1944 film, The Adventures of Mark Twain.[41]

Clemens' story is shared in the 2001 Ken Burns documentary Mark Twain, and she is portrayed by a female voice actor in the series.[42]

References

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  1. ^ a b Varble, Rachel (McBrayer) (1964). Jane Clemens: The Story of Mark Twain's Mother. Doubleday.
  2. ^ a b "Mark Twain Project – Biographies – Clemens, Jane Lampton". www.marktwainproject.org. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  3. ^ a b Youngstown Vindicator. Youngstown Vindicator.
  4. ^ a b Kentucky New Era. Kentucky New Era.
  5. ^ a b "Jane Lampton Chapter". www.kentuckydar.org. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  6. ^ a b "Jane Lampton Clemens". twain.lib.virginia.edu. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  7. ^ a b Watts, Aretta (5 February 1928). "Mark Twain's Gay Mother: 'Becky Thatcher' Describes the Woman From Whom He Inherited His Sense of Humor". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 December 2022.
  8. ^ Lyon County Reporter. Lyon County Reporter.
  9. ^ Kleber, John E. (2014-10-17). The Kentucky Encyclopedia. University Press of Kentucky. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-8131-5901-0.
  10. ^ "The myth regarding Mark Twain's mother". Winchester Sun. 2017-11-10. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  11. ^ Trombley, Laura E. Skandera (1997). Mark Twain in the Company of Women. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-1619-6.
  12. ^ Lewis Collins (1877). History of Kentucky. Library Reprints, Incorporated. p. 124. ISBN 9780722249208.
  13. ^ a b c McMillen, Margot (Fall 2020). "Jane Clemens, Slavery, and Abolitionists in Missouri". Mark Twain Journal. 58 (2): 98–121.
  14. ^ "Kentucky, County Marriages, 1797–1954," database with images, FamilySearch.org
  15. ^ Harold K. Bush, Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (2007) pp. 30–36.
  16. ^ a b Oliver and Goldena Howard (1993), The Mark Twain encyclopedia, Taylor & Francis, pp. 153–4, ISBN 9780824072124
  17. ^ Tharp, Angela; Sloane, David E. E. (2014-11-01). "An Analysis of Mark Twain's Use of Racial Terms When Describing African Americans". The Mark Twain Annual. 12 (1): 83–93. doi:10.5325/marktwaij.12.1.0083. ISSN 1553-0981. S2CID 144351913.
  18. ^ Paine, Albert Bigelow. "Mark Twain, a Biography". www.gutenberg.org. Retrieved 2022-12-29.
  19. ^ Twain, Mark (2001). Annotated Huckleberry Finn. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 353. ISBN 978-0-393-02039-7.
  20. ^ McFarland, Philip (2014-01-16). Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel L. Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 168. ISBN 978-1-4422-1227-5.
  21. ^ Andrew Hoffmann (April 27, 1997). "Inventing Mark Twain". New York Times.
  22. ^ "Mark Twain, American Author and Humorist". Retrieved 2009-03-12.
  23. ^ Hutchison, Coleman (2015-12-01). A History of American Civil War Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-316-43241-9.
  24. ^ Pettit, Arthur G. (2021-05-11). Mark Twain And The South. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-8276-6.
  25. ^ a b Talbott, Tim. "Jane Lampton House". ExploreKYHistory. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  26. ^ "January 3, 1904". Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan: 23. 1904. Retrieved 14 August 2017.
  27. ^ Potsdam, New York. Arcadia Publishing. 2004. p. 153. ISBN 978-0-7385-3650-7.
  28. ^ "Mark Twain quotations – mother – Jane Lampton Clemens". www.twainquotes.com. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  29. ^ Parsons, Coleman O. (1947). "The Devil and Samuel Clemens". The Virginia Quarterly Review. 23 (4): 582–606. ISSN 0042-675X. JSTOR 26439648.
  30. ^ Kisis, Michael J. (2012). "Because He Had Daughters". The Mark Twain Annual (10): 24–34. ISSN 1553-0981. JSTOR 41693896.
  31. ^ Scharnhorst, Gary (2010). Smith, Harriet Elinor (ed.). "Mark Twain and His Discontents". Resources for American Literary Study. 35: 345–351. doi:10.2307/26367284. ISSN 0048-7384. JSTOR 26367284.
  32. ^ Rasmussen, R. Kent (2014-05-14). Critical Companion to Mark Twain: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4381-0852-0.
  33. ^ Clemens, Cyril (1953). "Mark Twain and Dwight D. Eisenhower". Mark Twain Quarterly. 9 (3): 1–4. ISSN 1080-7330. JSTOR 42657950.
  34. ^ Maranzani, Barbara (8 September 2020). "How Mark Twain's Childhood Influenced His Literary Works". Biography. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  35. ^ Malin, Irving (1965). Psychoanalysis and American Fiction. Dutton.
  36. ^ Twain, Mark (1969). Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck & Tom. Walter Blair. Berkeley: University of Calif. Press. ISBN 0-520-01501-0. OCLC 3841.
  37. ^ SARGENT, MARK L. (1986). "A Connecticut Yankee in Jane Lampton's South: Mark Twain and the Regicide". The Mississippi Quarterly. 40 (1): 21–31. ISSN 0026-637X. JSTOR 26475051.
  38. ^ "1868 Toast to Woman". twain.lib.virginia.edu. Retrieved 2022-12-29.
  39. ^ "Jane Lampton Home Historical Marker". www.hmdb.org. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  40. ^ Lowe, Hilary Iris (2012-07-20). Mark Twain's Homes and Literary Tourism. University of Missouri Press. ISBN 978-0-8262-7278-2.
  41. ^ The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) - IMDb, retrieved 2022-12-31
  42. ^ "Episode One". Mark Twain | Ken Burns | PBS. Retrieved 2022-12-28.

Further reading

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