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When you consider its age, Dreams, this really is something of a ground-breaker. Other atheists, agnostics and deists of the time who had the courage to write openly about what they didn't believe, tended to be 'professional' skeptics. Twain had always put himself forward as something of an 'everyman' author (if always a tad eccentric in his social outlook), so the book must really have shocked many folks.
I'm in a Mark Twain frame of mind lately: Recently re-read his brilliant *Joan of Arc* and *Connecticutt Yankee* and have just started a re-read of *Prince and the Pauper* (written for his children). Each of this trio of books is set in a different era and his historical scholarship and the ability to use it to water-colour his work rather than burden it with look-what-I-know detail is admirable.
My enthusiasm for Twain, by the way, has nothing at all to do with the fact that he was a fellow pipe-smoker ... honest! It's pure coincidence that many of my favourite authors of that period were brothers of the briar.
Another was JM Barrie (Peter Pan) who wrote perhaps the most hilarious collection of short stories I've ever read, *My Lady Nicotine*. Twain's daughter said he was 'the smokiest man I've ever known'. She had obviously never met Barrie (a fellow-Scot).
Ol' JM -- described as 'the most eccentric man in London' by friends -- was never seen without a disreputable pipe between his teeth. It is believed to have been the *real* reason for the break-up of his marriage and was certainly why the fussy George Bernard Shaw broke off his friendship and refused to visit JM's smoke-flled home.
Of course, bowing to current PoCo, there wasn't the suggestion of a pipe in Johnny Depp's depiction of the great man in *Neverland*. Only Dustin Hoffman (a life-long non-smoker) was seen to smoke a cigar in the movie.
I'm in danger of imposing an information overload here ...
Cheers. Neil
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