{"id":12948,"date":"2022-07-11T01:54:11","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T01:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/pl\/?post_type=product&p=12948"},"modified":"2022-07-11T02:12:08","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T02:12:08","slug":"moonblight-and-six-feet-of-romance-dan-carter-beards-foray-into-fiction","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/pl\/moonblight-and-six-feet-of-romance-dan-carter-beards-foray-into-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance Dan Carter Beard\u2019s Foray into Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

An esoteric disease which reveals things in their true light; three pairs of disembodied feet galavanting about the countryside – Abigail Walthausen explores the brief but strange literary career of Daniel Carter Beard, illustrator for Mark Twain and a founding father of the Boy Scouts of America.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Although Daniel Carter Beard i<\/a>s best known as one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, he was also a well-known illustrator and a literary man. The latter is evident in a definite flair for titling apparent at all points in his career, from the alliterative titles of his illustrated woodcrafts manuals (among them\u00a0Shelters Shacks and Shanties<\/em>,\u00a0Bugs Butterflies and Beetles<\/em>, and\u00a0Signs, Symbols and Signals<\/em>) to his ominous autobiographical\u00a0Hardly a Man is Now Alive<\/em>. But the most memorable monikers amongst his books come from a pair of novellas that he wrote early in his career and promptly tried to forget:\u00a0Moonblight<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Six Feet of Romance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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These novellas, published in 1892, were written during a period in Beard\u2019s life when he was enduring backlash for the illustrations he had done for Mark Twain\u2019s\u00a0A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court<\/em>. He was blacklisted by magazines and publishers alike not just because of his association with the controversial anti-church, anti-industrialist, anti-imperialist content of Twain\u2019s work, but because in many instances Beard\u2019s illustrations for the novel were more inflammatory than the text itself. Although Twain was pleased with Beard\u2019s work, saying, \u201cDan Beard is the only man who can correctly illustrate my writings for he not only illustrates the text, but he also illustrates my thoughts,\u201d the illustrations often diverged from the story\u2019s literal plot and sometimes even from its explicit message. In several of his most notable revisions, Beard inserted the faces of contemporary figures into his work. As a great follower of Henry George\u2019s politics, Beard also worked in a number of illustrations that use Georgist language to promote the \u201csingle tax\u201d theory. In both cases, Beard was working to ensure that Twain\u2019s anachronisms<\/a> would be read as explicit critiques of 19th century society, a mission he would continue in his work on\u00a0Moonblight<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Six Feet of Romance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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In\u00a0Moonblight<\/em>, a labor movement novel, Beard develops the politics that he began in his\u00a0Yankee<\/em>\u00a0illustrations. The story\u2019s nameless protagonist is an owner of a mining company who discovers a medieval manuscript while staying the night at a tavern in the room of a stranger. The book details the condition of \u201cmoonblight,\u201d an esoteric disease which allows people to \u201csee things as they really are.\u201d After said fascination has set in, crews of coal miners with blackened faces become antebellum slaves before our protagonist\u2019s eyes. When he attends a meeting of mine-owners he sees that their faces take on the likenesses of a fox, a wolf, and a rattlesnake.<\/p>\n

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Later, \u201cwhen a question of agreeing upon a form of lease that would evade the eviction laws for the protection of the miners was broached,\u201d the narrator becomes disgusted and sees \u201cnot an assemblage of gentlemen, but a lot of parasitic insects, covering the body of a miner, and sucking his blood.\u201d But all lessons do not come from his altered vision;, mentors are just as important in demonstrating not just social injustice and treachery, but the explicit doctrine of Henry George. Sam, a barkeeper, insists that all landless men like himself are slaves, and that the solution to this problem for each man alike is to \u201cJes charge him fer der rent of der land he uses.\u201d Professor Follium, a geologist, dilates on the rights of man to land ownership as he explains:<\/p>\n

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A baby is born. It has ears: that means it was intended to hear. It has a mouth to receive nourishment: that means that nourishment is provided for it. It has neither wings nor fins, but feet: that means that it must walk, and is a land animal, and must have land to walk on. All these things will teach you that it has an inherent right to light, air, water, and food; to procure the latter it has hands to transform the products of the earth to a suitable form by labor. I have already said that Nature has provided untold wealth for the babe, yet we will not allow it to use its hands, unless it does so for us.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Despite incredible similarities in the way that Beard illustrated\u00a0A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Moonblight<\/em>, his writing inverts a number of paradigms and motifs from\u00a0Yankee<\/em>. In case readers were not entirely sure that Twain was criticising the 19th century and not just the 6th, Beard reverses the time travel and brings Medieval superstition into the 19th century in order to educate a naive industrialist. In both books, the moon has uncanny power over people: while Twain\u2019s Hank uses it to wrest power from the masses that populate his adopted medieval life, Beard\u2019s narrator channels the moon to show universal human truths. He muses, \u201cFreedom is health: slavery is disease\u2026 The old white-faced moon saw this \u2014 saw the disease grow until it proved almost fatal; and the silver light from the sky shone over many a bloody field where Labor laid on the altar of Freedom thousands of her sons.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"