Mark Twain is cancelled!

Why are you plugging some misleading article from five years ago? If he wasn't having sex with them, I don't really see anything that wrong. Not much different from kids hanging out at a neighborhood old person's house which used to be a common thing. Old people are lonely.

I also think this person is also purposefully applying modern language and context onto interactions from over a century ago. "Romantic" sounding and language was commonly used between friends and relatives of all ages. It's salacious nonsense to make out some pen-pal relationships between a sad old dying fart and some bookish girls into a pedophilia thing. It's like people projecting pedophilia onto the art of Henry Darger - who was a nutty recluse that had a "Catcher in the Rye" type obsession with child abuse, having been abused himself as a young kid.

Meh. Emperor Tiberius had his little fishes.

We’re they having sex or just hanging out?

Michael Jackson had his "doo-doo heads."

Apparently he really was a dirty old man and a lech.

And he was also a great writer.

It doesn't sound like he fucked any of them, so where's the problem? Maybe he was like Joseph Bologna in Rags to Riches.

Even if Twain's feelings weren't entirely friendly, it sounds like he did the girls more good than harm.

Intelligent and bookish girls got dumped on back then, nobody took their intellects seriously or bothered to educate them, they were usually attacked for any interest other than finding a husband. Corresponding with a writer of note may have been the only intellectual stimulation any adult was willing to give them, and if he praised them for being intelligent as well as pretty, then I bet that was more than their parents ever did. In those days, what parents valued was good looks, "virtue", and obedience.

Welcome to my club!

Exhausting.

Decades ago, I read an essay that was a theory that Mark Twain was the real author of “Alice in Wonderland”.

As a conspiracy theory, it was pretty benign. I forget what the “proof” was. Something about the original illustrations held clues. The main thing being that Twain loved a good prank, and he relished the idea of fooling everyone.

And that the truth would be revealed in 2006. I read this in the 1980s, and 2006 seemed like the distant future.

The tone of the Alice books was quite different from his usual style, and used all sorts of British words that were unfamiliar to me as a 20th century American young person.

Anyway, this reminded me.

He had already been cancelled for using the n-word.

Why hasn't Lewis Carroll been canceled? People tend to twist themselves into knots pretending he wasn't a pedophile.