Dollis Hill House
London, England

By Thomas Ruys Smith

It’s the first real day of spring and I’m in Dollis Hill — an unremarkable suburb of North London that sits just inside the North Circular, the multi-lane road system that encircles the centre of the capital and is synonymous with traffic congestion and an entrenched atmosphere of urban decay. Still, in Gladstone Park, the sun is out and so are the local residents: in the ruins of what was once Dollis Hill House, a children’s birthday party is winding down just as a group of women begin an impromptu karaoke session; our miniature schnauzer Winifred is making the acquaintance of a fluffy white pomeranian apparently named Snowflake. This might seem an unlikely location for a ghost-hunt, but that’s why we’re here.

If you wanted to seek for the restless spirit of Mark Twain, there would be worse places to begin, at least according to the man himself. Interviewed in 1907 as he embarked on what he knew would be his final trip across the Atlantic, Twain was clear that he intended to spend his afterlife in the modern Babylon that had often served him as a second home: “I may never go to London again until I come back to this sphere after I am dead,” he told a reporter, “and then I would like to live in London.”

As an academic based in the UK, I’ve spent much of my career exploring Mark Twain’s relationship with the Mississippi River, tracing the way that the river wound its way through his life and work. In surprising ways, that muddy water often washed up at my own front door across the Atlantic: British writers had a surprising influence on the creation of the Mississippi as a powerful global emblem of America. Now, though, I’m reversing that transatlantic equation. It seemed time to pursue the traces of Mark Twain in my own backyard — in London, the city in which he spent roughly three crucial years on numerous trips, from his inaugural visit in 1872 to his final victory lap in 1907. A number of Twain’s London residences still exist, most famously the Langham Hotel which hosted his early visits and the house he rented at 23 Tedworth Square in affluent Chelsea, which bears a blue plaque erected by English Heritage to announce to passers-by that Mark Twain, American writer, had once lived there in 1896-7.

For me, though, there is something especially evocative about Dollis Hill House, occupied by Twain with his wife Olivia and daughter Jean in the summer of 1900. Compared to the glamour of his first trips to London as a literary lion ensconced in the Langham, or the awful gloom of his secluded residence in Tedworth Square after the death of his daughter Susy, there is an appealing softness to Twain’s time in Dollis Hill: after years of personal turmoil, including bankruptcy, the months he spent in the house were a relatively sunny sojourn. By 1900, his fortunes had been largely restored, enough for his family to return to America after a period of financial exile in Europe, and Dollis Hill House was a final hiatus before the end of this odyssey.

Twain’s description of this time exudes a warmth and peace that was rare in his later years: “Dollis Hill House comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I have ever occupied. … It is within a biscuit-toss of solid London; yet it stands solitary on its airy hill, in the centre of six acres of lawn, and garden, and shrubbery, and heavy-foliaged ancient trees.” His only complaint was the lack of a telephone. Today, of course, London has swallowed up Dollis Hill and what had been “country, pure and simple” to Twain is now surrounded by urban sprawl. Even on a warm spring day, “paradise” seems a stretch. However, as Twain himself noted, the land around the house had just been “bought for a park, to be for all time a memorial to Mr. Gladstone” — a frequent visitor to the house during his time as Prime Minister — which meant that, to some extent, the landscape that Twain loved really would “remain as it is.” Unlike hotels or his other residences that still function as private homes, this Twain-imprinted place remains immediately and freely accessible to all.

There’s also something about Dollis Hill House’s ruin that adds a poignancy, and a piquancy, to its association with Twain. A series of fires in the late 1990s left it a derelict shell. Though money was earmarked for its restoration, it became a casualty of austerity when former Prime Minister Boris Johnson canceled the funding during his time as London Mayor. A final fire in 2011 precipitated its demolition. Now, it remains an absent presence in Gladstone Park: a short course of bricks marks out the building’s floorplan and a fragment of one wall remains. People make their own use of this liminal space — like today’s birthday party.

An absent presence is also how I’ve come to think about Mark Twain as I search for him in London. Today, I can’t swear that the park-goers in Dollis Hill are thinking much about its famous former resident, but across the closing decades of the nineteenth century London was infatuated with the writer who seemed to embody their dreams, and sometimes nightmares, about America. In 1907, local newspaper The Hendon and Finchley Times proudly claimed him, “Our friend Mark Twain, who is associated with this district owing to his residence at Dollis Hill House.” Another paper judged that Twain’s connection to Gladstone Park would “add a certain … literary flavour in the public mind to its natural attractions.” These are vivid and hyperlocal examples of what Twain’s some-time associate Ralph Ashcroft declared in 1907: the English — and Londoners in particular — were “part-owners with the American nation of Mark Twain.”

In turn, Twain himself was infatuated with an urban space that was like no other on the face of the planet. “Everything in this monster city interests me,” Twain announced during his first time in London. And it always did. I would argue that outside of America, there is no other location that meant as much to him, or that had as much influence on his sense of self. Just as this ruined corner of London will always be a little paradise for Twain’s ghost, so London should always be a part of our understanding of this iconically American writer. And for me, there is something particularly significant about having this enigmatic shell on my doorstep, a short drive away from my own home along the grey river of the North Circular. Tracing the outlines of the rooms of Dollis Hill House as my daughters eat an ice cream purchased from the old stable block and modern life buzzes throughout this liminal shell, I can conjure up Twain as a near-neighbour, a fellow suburbanite, a Londoner, available for afternoon calls. In Gladstone Park, the sun is shining, and Mark Twain is lounging in a deckchair beneath the trees, forever.

Thomas Ruys Smith is an academic and writer who specializes in the study of nineteenth-century America. He is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and co-editor of the journals Comparative American Studies and New Area Studies.

“Gladstone Park, at Dollis Hill, to Be Opened on May 25.” The Illustrated London News, 1901.

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Blackburn College
Carlinville, Illinois

By Karen Dillon and Naomi Crummey

As professors in the English department at Blackburn College, we have always been aware of the legacy of the college’s most famed writer, Mary Hunter Austin, who was born in Carlinville and graduated from Blackburn in 1888. Immediately after graduation she pioneered west with her family, and in the landscapes of California and the Southwest she became celebrated for her understanding of nature and unconventional feminism. In Austin’s canonical work of American nature writing from 1903, The Land of Little Rain, she recounts the story of a Paiute woman, Seyavi, who survived a massacre by hiding in caves with her young son. After describing the landscape in which Seyavi struggles to survive, Austin remarks, “That was the time Seyavi learned the sufficiency of mother wit, and how much more easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.” As Seyavi earned the respect of her people by raising her son without a husband, Austin, too, cast off convention to follow her own path. Though Blackburn played only a small and short-lived role in her life, we feel a kinship with Austin and the intellectual and artistic foundation the college laid for her.

Blackburn does not appeal to everyone. It is a tiny, student-managed work college in a small Midwestern town abutted on two sides by farmland; there is plenty of hard work but little glamour. Blackburn can sometimes feel isolating, but as a small, student-centered school, it also, in Austin’s own words from her 1932 autobiography Earth Horizon, provides space for professors and students alike “to walk about in it, making fruitful contacts with [each other], as [we] couldn’t have done in the larger universities.” Austin briefly left Blackburn for a nearby teaching college but despised the “rasping insistence on a regime that violated all the natural motions of her own mind.” Austin’s fiction also emphasizes the desire for natural motions over convention. In the short story “The Walking Woman,” the titular character “had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it…. it was the naked thing the Walking Woman grasped, not dressed and tricked out, for instance, by prejudices in favor of certain occupations.”

Austin returned to Blackburn precisely because it welcomes and nurtures the individual mind; it gave her freedom and space to learn as she was inclined, leaving her, as she wrote in Earth Horizon, “so far as her professional proclivities go, without so much as a thumb-print of predilection; and that I count entirely to the good. I am quite sure she could never have escaped from one of the larger, better regimented institutions with so free an intelligence and so unhampered a use of herself.” The campus newspaper The Blackburnian, for which Austin was a writer and editor, may provide evidence of the intellectual freedom Austin was known for at Blackburn. In the March 1887 edition of the “Peculiar Characteristics” section, a 19th century version of a shout-out column to students’ and professors’ unique talents, quirks, and physical characteristics, Mary Hunter is recognized simply for her “ideas.”

As we pass the bust of Austin that presides over the halls of the science building, we continue to draw inspiration from her free-spirited feminism and artistry. In the college archives, there is a copy of the February 1888 edition of The Blackburnian, which notes, “Miss Mary Hunter has not been attending her classes for the past week. Too busy writing, we suppose.” We like to picture Austin, confident and even a bit arrogant (she switched her studies from English to science because for the former she believed she needed only herself and books, but the latter she felt required a proper teacher), walking through the green spaces of campus, writing and imagining alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Like the seemingly arid spaces Austin’s best-known works so meticulously open for readers, the Blackburn campus offers a path for those who seek a space in which to walk about unhampered and forge meaningful connections.

Karen Dillon has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2011, where she teaches U.S. literature and first year writing. She has published two books since being at Blackburn: The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities (co-edited with Naomi Crummey in 2015) and The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture (2018). She is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Naomi Crummey has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2005, where she teaches writing and literature. Her personal essays have appeared in Prairie Fire, Kudzu House, and Grain, and she co-edited The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities, in which she co-authored a chapter entitled “’They’re not learning for our world; they’re learning for theirs’: Changing the First Year Writing Experience” with Karen Dillon. A Canadian citizen, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

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