"Advice to Youth"
Before being collected in various compendia of Twain’s works, “Advice to Youth” began life as an address to Boston’s Saturday Morning Club in 1882. The entire work can fairly be described as an exercise in irony. The level of irony varies wildly, going from purely humorous wordplay:
“a lark is really the best thing to get up with…and if you get the right kind of lark, and work at him right, you can easily train him to get up at half past nine, every time”
to that of a more pointed and subversive quality of advice:
“Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others.”
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences"
In his almost vitriolic scorn of everything having to do with the writing of James Fenimore Cooper, Twain seems to have been too sincere to bother with much irony. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” does kick off with a doozy, however:
“Cooper’s art has some defects.”
That may not seem like such a dose of irony until you consider what follows immediately afterward: a not insubstantial word count that delineates in detail how Cooper violates 18 of the 19 attributes which Twain declares to be the rules governing the art of romantic fiction. And that’s just in The Deerslayer.
Historical Irony After the Fact
On the subject of Cooper, history has judged Twain’s essays to exhibit irony which was certainly not intended and likely not even conceived. The opposing figure of American letters to Cooper, in Twain’s opinion, was William Dean Howells of whom he asserts:
“has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as the make of it.”
The ironic conclusion delivered by the march of history, of course, is that James Fenimore Cooper is still selling briskly these days while few outside of the halls of academia have ever even heard of Howells. That irony is deepened by the high likelihood that were Twain to have lived long enough, he would probably have found this outcome not ironic, but depressingly predictable.
“To the Person Sitting in Darkness”
This is a political essay in which Twain attacks the rise if imperialism at the close of the 19th century in the form of events ranging from the Boer War to the Boxer Uprising. Twain constructs the essay with a definite eye toward irony by quoting at length from various newspaper articles that forward in precise detail justifications for a number of atrocious behavior committed in the name of democratic ideals before cutting the lofty ideals being expressed to ribbons with a great bit powerful sword of irony:
“By happy luck, we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve — just in time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm.”
"In Defense of Harriet Shelley"
From the essay:
"This [Edward Dowden’s The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley] is perhaps the strangest book that has seen the light since Frankenstein. Indeed, it is a Frankenstein itself; a Frankenstein with the original infirmity supplemented by a new one; a Frankenstein with the reasoning faculty wanting.”
This excerpt is a frenzy of irony located within an essay constructed on a foundation of ironies. Twain’s essay is actually a point by point condemnation of Professor Dowden’s biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley that effectively renders the entire enterprise pointless. The focus of much of Twain’s essay, however, is directed to restoring the tainted reputation Dowden’s book left as the legacy of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet. But in doing so, Twain calls upon the metaphorical power of the most literary figure associated with the poet: the infamous mad scientist created from the imagination of his second wife, Mary. The deft juggling of all this irony is rather extraordinarily handled.
