The American Claimant Decide Now

Mark Twain's 1892 novel THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT is neither notably long nor notably short. It has the "middle-weight" (or at least middle length) feel of a Graham Greene novel. THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT's 25 chapters make it, however, too long to be called a novella. On the other hand, it also lacks the heft of an unhurried whopper by Fenimore Cooper or Sir Walter Scott. As for content: it resembles a zany anticipation of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster, both authors delighting in bird-brained but kind-hearted aristocrats of both England and America.

The Earl of Rossmore has an annual income of 200,000 pounds and only one heir, his flighty, nearly 30 year old son Viscount Berkeley, whose full name is Kirkcudbright Llanover Marjoribanks Sellers. The heir-apparent to the Sellers family name, title and wealth is, alas, influenced by leveling ideas among his smart set. He therefore resolves to renounce his inheritance and go to America, find work and rise to the heights by his own unaided efforts.

But wait: there is an "American claimant" to the English Earl's title. A century and a half ago, a Sellers viscount went off with the noble Fairfaxes (who later befriended the young George Washington) to "the wilds of Virginia, got married, and began to breed savages for the Claimant market" (Ch. 1). Back in England the then viscount was presumed to have died in America and his younger brother quietly assumed the title. But every generation of American Sellerses has since protested the cadet line's usurpation.

The newest American Claimant is the polymath, exuberantly fecund but financially unsuccessful inventor, Colonel Mulberry Sellers. He, his amused, admiring and loyal wife and their beautiful air-headed daughter Sally (recently restyled the Lady Gwendolyn) live in a ramshackle house in Washington, D.C. named Rossmore Towers. Sally/Gwendolyn attends fashionable Rowena-Ivanhoe College. The American Claimant sings that academy's praises to a visiting chum from the Cherokee Strip in Indian Territory:

"Rowena-Ivanhoe College is the selectest and most aristocratic seat of learning for young ladies in our country. Under no circumstances can a girl get in there unless she is either very rich and fashionable or can prove four generations of what may be called American nobility. Castellated college-buildings--towers and turrets and an imitation moat--and everything about the place named out of Sir Walter Scott's books and redolent of royalty and state and style ; and all the richest girls keep phaetons, and coachmen in livery, and riding-horses, with English grooms in plug hats and tight-buttoned coats, and top-boots, and a whip-handle without any whip to it, to ride sixty-three feet behind them-- And they don't learn a blessed thing, Washington Hawkins, not a single blessed thing but showy rubbish and un-American pretentiousness." (Ch. 4)

There are very few additional characters in THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT. Much of your fun in reading this romantic spoof will be to watch their sometimes harum-scarum interactions. What if the Viscount (disguised as commoner Howard Tracy, and taken by Colonel Sellers for an American cowboy bank robber) were to fall in love with Lady Gwendolyn? Their marriage might go a long way to settling the trans-Atlantic family feud. But what if Sally/Gwendolyn indignantly thinks Tracy/Sellers (he keeps his title secret) wants to marry her only for her title? What if the English Earl will not permit the wedding? Read on and enjoy an amusing little yarn.

In other novels Mark Twain also makes use of rich people in disguise (not necessarily freely chosen), mistakenly identified or wanting to pretend to be common: THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER and PUDD'NHEAD WILSON spring to mind. This motif has echoes leading back through Sir Walter Scott to William Shakespeare. -OOO-Get more detail about The American Claimant.