Finn, James (Jimmy) (d. 1845), as Clemens notes in his autobiography, was “Town Drunkard, an exceedingly well defined and unofficial office” in Hannibal in the 1840s. The position was first held by “General” Gaines, then by Woodson Blankenship, who for a time was the “sole and only incumbent of the office; but afterward Jimmy Finn proved competency and disputed the place with him, so we had two town drunkards at one time” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:174). In [begin page 319] 1867 Mark Twain recalled that the temperance people tried to reform Finn, but “in an evil hour temptation came upon him, and he sold his body to a doctor for a quart of whiskey, and that ended all his earthly troubles. He drank it all at one sitting, and his soul went to its long account and his body went to Dr. Grant” (SLC 1867 [bib21404], 1). Chapter 23 of A Tramp Abroad (1880) contains a similar story in which Finn, lying sick in the tanyard, agrees to sell his skeleton to the doctor. In Life on the Mississippi (1883) Mark Twain wrote that he died “a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion” (chapter 56). James McDaniel, a Hannibal contemporary of Clemens’s, confirmed that Finn “was found dead in Jim Craig’s tan-yard” (Abbott, 16). Court records of 6 November 1845 show that Marion County reimbursed Joseph Craig (father of Clemens’s schoolmate Joe Craig) for boarding and nursing Finn when he was ill, and assumed the cost of “making a coffin, furnishing shroud and burying James Finn a pauper” (Marion County 1845). Finn was the primary model for Huck’s father (“pap Finn”) in Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885), although Blankenship (father of Tom Blankenship, the acknowledged model for Huck) and Gaines may have contributed to his characterization. Finn also may have influenced the characterization of Jimmy Grimes in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (136). He is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (20).
