How Mark Twain's description of fingerprinting in "Life on the Mississippi" and "Pudd’nhead Wilson" affected the public opinion of the art/science of fingerprinting
My name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but you might know me better as Mark Twain, which is my pen name. I was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. I would describe myself as an American author, essayist, lecturer and humorist. During my thrilling life I wrote a series of famous books including "Life on the Mississippi" and "Pudd’nhead Wilson", which are my two favorites. My stories were among the first ones that showed the use of fingerprinting as a law enforcement technique. They took much of the mystery out of the procedure and therefore produced a lot of interest. In this way I was also able to show the public that fingerprinting has a solid scientific foundation.
My lovely story "Pudd’nhead Wilson" is about a young lawyer, David Wilson, who has a silly favorite pastime; he loves to collect everyone’s fingerprints on glass slides. With this story I set the stage for mass approval of fingerprinting as evidence, as it was one of the first to show how it was used for law enforcement.
In my other book, "Life on the Mississippi", which was in fact published before "Pudd’nhead Wilson", I wrote about fingerprinting as well. Beside an elaborate history of the Mississippi river itself, this book contains the story of a murderer who was successfully convicted by the use of fingerpint identification. Chapter 31, “A Thumb-print and What Came of It,” shows this method of investigation ten years ahead of its use in real life.
As I was very popular at the time, many people read these books and gave me the chance to show them the scientific foundation of fingerprinting. The concept was, as I depicted it in my books, actually fairly simple and it was easy to understand for all my readers. Stripped from its aura of supernaturality, fingerprinting was at long last accepted by the large public. In fact, Scotland Yard opened its first fingerprint laboratory in 1901. Just one year later, the case of notorious Harry Jackson, the very first criminal convicted by fingerprinting in real life, gave the technique another boost. But that is a different story and shall be told elsewhere.
