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Newcomb, Mary Ann (1809–94), was one of Clemens’s schoolteachers. Born in Vermont and educated in the East, she traveled west to join the faculty of Marion College, near Palmyra, Missouri, but settled in Florida instead. She ran a school there and became acquainted with the Clemens family. In 1839 she moved to Hannibal. Apparently Mary Newcomb’s Select School was Clemens’s second school, after Elizabeth Horr’s. Class was conducted in the basement of the Presbyterian church on Fourth Street, between Bird and Hill streets. Advanced students were taught in half of the room by Miss Newcomb, younger students in the other half by Miss Torrey. Miss Newcomb became a boarder in the Clemens house, taking her noon meal and sometimes her evening meal there. Her two granddaughters claimed that when Clemens visited Hannibal in 1902 he said “I owe a great deal to Mary Newcomb, she compelled me to learn to read.” Their grandmother “often commented on Mark Twain’s drawl” and recalled the Clemens family as “delightful”:

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Mark Twain’s mother, Mrs. Jane Clemens, was an intellectual woman, blessed with abounding good humor and a ready wit which her son Sam, inherited. His father, John M. Clemens, was a courteous, well-educated gentleman, Miss Newcomb said. Never a practical man, but an energetic dreamer, he was a good conversationalist. Although the family was usually in less than moderate circumstances, she never heard any grumbling when she visited them. (“Former Florida Neighbor of Clemens Family Head of School Attended Here by Mark Twain,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 12B)

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In the late 1840s Miss Newcomb married widower John Davis. Mark Twain’s working notes for “Autobiography of a Damned Fool,” an unfinished story written in 1877, indicate she was the model for Mrs. Bangs, “a very thin, tall, Yankee person, who came west when she was thirty, taught school nine years in our town, and then married Mr. Bangs. . . . She had ringlets, and a long sharp nose, and thin, colorless lips, and you could not tell her breast from her back if she had her head up a stovepipe hole looking for something in the attic” (S&B, 140, 163). Miss Newcomb was the prototype for Miss Watson, the widow Douglas’s stern spinster sister, who is characterized in chapter one of Huckleberry Finn and mentioned in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33) and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134, 187, 201, 208). Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) indicate that she was the model for Miss Pomeroy (237). In “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and “Villagers” [begin page 339] (95, 95, 96), Clemens refers to her by name and as “Miss N.” (Marion Census 1850, 320–21; Gregory 1965, 31).