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The American Claimant

Chapter 4: EXPLANATORY
By Mark Twain
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About This Book

The narrative follows Colonel Mulberry Sellers and a convoluted claim to an English earldom, setting off identity swaps, impersonations, and transatlantic confusion involving a viscount, a claimant, family members, and assorted comic figures. Episodes include domestic scheming, a hotel fire, stolen goods, misdirected funerary remains, courtships, and a culminating marriage, all rendered in farce and satirical observation. The structure is episodic and anecdotal, alternating humorous set pieces with pointed mockery of social pretensions, commercial opportunism, and the clash of manners. Sellers’ inventiveness and hopeful scheming anchor the action while repeated misunderstandings produce ironic reversals and public spectacle.

EXPLANATORY

The Colonel Mulberry Sellers here re-introduced to the public is the same person who appeared as Eschol Sellers in the first edition of the tale entitled “The Gilded Age,” years ago, and as Beriah Sellers in the subsequent editions of the same book, and finally as Mulberry Sellers in the drama played afterward by John T. Raymond.

The name was changed from Eschol to Beriah to accommodate an Eschol Sellers who rose up out of the vasty deeps of uncharted space and preferred his request—backed by threat of a libel suit—then went his way appeased, and came no more. In the play Beriah had to be dropped to satisfy another member of the race, and Mulberry was substituted in the hope that the objectors would be tired by that time and let it pass unchallenged. So far it has occupied the field in peace; therefore we chance it again, feeling reasonably safe, this time, under shelter of the statute of limitations.

MARK TWAIN.

Hartford, 1891.