ABSTRACT
The fact that Huckleberry Finn elicited only the scantest notice among the critics of its day is a commonplace of Mark Twain scholarship. The reasons for the neglect of Clemens’s masterpiece are at best suppositional. 1 Whatever these reasons might be, the fact remains that the novel did not enjoy the critical attention which it might have been expected to call forth. Among the few reviews, one, which seems to have gone undetected by investigators of Clemens’s contemporaneous reputation, appeared in the comic magazine Life on February 26, 1885 (V, 119), and is reproduced herewith entire.
