Popular Misconceptions

One of the items in a ‘list of facts’ e-mail I received a while ago contained this lesser-known claim to the history of the four suited kings in a pack of standard playing cards:

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king in history:
Spades - King David
Hearts - Charlemagne
Clubs - Alexander, the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar

As usual, I’ve trawled the internet for existing refutations or confirmations of this supposed truth. It didn’t take too long to realise that the history of playing cards is pretty complicated, and disputed. Probably the best introduction to this subject comes from a essay titled The Introduction of Playing-Cards to Europe, which warns:

The history of playing-cards in Europe has been subject to a good deal of misinformation. You should evaluate all information about this subject cautiously because of this.

That essay, and the Wikipedia entry on Playing Cards, date the origin of playing cards to the 9th Century, in China. Whilst China is fairly geographically opposite from the domains of the kings listed above, playing cards clearly went on to circumvent the globe, getting adapted and changed along the way.

Even though we know that the original origin of the kings on playing cards cannot have represented David, Charlemagne, Alexandar and Ceasar, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of their identities having been assigned later. Looking into it, it’s not too hard to find scans of old cards with the four king’s names printed on them - see the Courts on Playing Cards webpage, for example.

The Wikipedia page on King (playing card) suggests that the David, Charlemagne, Alexandar and Ceasar King combo were the traditionally-assigned personalities for the ‘French deck’, which was subsequently adopted in the UK due to the manufacture of playing cards being illegal in the UK during the Interregnum.

This explanation is the same as the one given on the Snopes.com page on The Four King Truth. On their comprehensive page (last updated 7 February 1999), they summarise that:

The assignation of identities to the kings (as well as the queens and knaves) was a temporary practice unique to French card masters that began around the mid-15th century, was not standardized for some time, and was discontinued at the end of the 18th century.

In conclusion, the Snopes article states that the ‘four kings truth’ is false, and that ‘the royal figures on modern playing cards no more represent specific persons than do the kings and queens in chess sets’.

That falsification didn’t seem quite so strong to me. Whilst the kings, queens and jacks in the picture cards don’t seem to have arisen with any particular historic figures in mind (clearly they’re there for the sake of the game rather than purely for symbolic reference), the connection with kings David, Charlemagne, Alexandar and Ceasar does seem to genuinely go back at least some way.

So perhaps it’s half true then?

One of the tidbits of information on a ‘list of facts’ that I was e-mailed at working is the following claim:

The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer

A few minutes of Googling reveals dozens of web-pages on which this claim is repeated, but dozens more on which it is refuted, and it doesn’t take long to get to what looks like the most likely truth.

Tom Sawyer, or rather The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, to give it its full name, was written in 1876 by Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Having worked as a typesetter, he was apparently a keen collector of new inventions, and thus one of the first to purchase a rudimentary typewriter.

Unusually enough, for a popular misconception, this claim seems to have arisen from the source itself, with Mark Twain having said:

I have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his house for practical purposes. I will now claim - until dispossessed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I wrote the first half of it in ‘72, the rest of it in ‘74. My machinist type-copied a book for me in ‘74, so I concluded it was that one.

That machine was full of caprices, full of defects - devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to-day has virtues.

(Source: [Mark Twain] and the Typewriter).

All of which would seem to be a fairly straightforward claim, although is as quoted in a newspaper advert for a typewriter.

However, it seems that academic opinion is that Mark Twain remembered it wrong. He was the author of the first novel written on a typewriter, it seems, but with Life on the Mississippi instead. (This counter-claim is widely credited to historian Darryl Rehr, who cites ‘careful research by Twain historians’)

Another blogger, David Peterson, summarised the same conclusion
, and also put together this neat timeline:

• 1874 - Clemens purchases his first typewriter for $125. His first two letters are written on December 9th, 1894.
• 1875 - Clemens writes to Remington declaring he is no longer using his typewriter as people keep asking him about it. In another letter he declares it is corrupting his morals because it makes him want to swear. He gives it away twice that year and it is eventually returned both times.
• 1876 - ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ is published.
• 1883 - ‘Life on the Mississippi’ is submitted as a typewritten manuscript. Clemens did not actually type it himself, however. He dictated it based on a hand-written original draft.
• 1904 - Clemens writes in his ‘Unpublished Autobiography’ that he believes ‘Tom Sawyer’ was probably his first typewritten novel, dictated to a typist sometime during 1874.[1]

So there we have it.

Amusingly, when this question was posed at Yahoo! Answers, ‘Tom Sawyer’ was chosen as ‘best answer’, rather than the correct one, which just goes to show the power of a popularly repeated misconception. More amusingly still is this rather pedantic answer by seeinred06:

There was never a novel written on a typewriter. You don’t write on a typewriter, you type on one.