The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College announced the schedule for the 2026 Park Church Summer Lecture Series, which takes place on Wednesdays throughout July at the historic Park Church. Located at 208 West Grey Street (Elmira), the lectures are free and open to the public. They begin at 7:00 p.m. and will be held on July 8, July 15, and July 22.
Kicking off the lecture series is a talk by Benjamin Bascom, Assistant Professor at West Virginia University and author of Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (Oxford UP, 2024)
In May of 1868, the body of Cornelius Holmes was found bludgeoned to death in some woods nearby Plymouth, MA; the accused Samuel M. Andrews counterclaimed that his one-time friend had sexually assaulted him, leading Andrews to bash stones into Holmes’s face, killing him. The sudden onslaught of Andrews’s violence seemed to evince what the trial record assessed as his “temporary insanity,” or Mania Transitoria. This diagnosis became suggestive as Andrews apparently had no memory of the events though he did, through the course of the trial, accuse the deceased of having made previous unwanted advances. Disparities in age and class frame this story, with Holmes a wealthy bachelor in his 50s and Andrews a married day laborer in his 30s. These men had often traveled together, and the older fellow presented gifts and monetary necessities throughout their 16-year acquaintance that became something like a relationship. Circulating within the news and gossip of this tragedy are references to a will that Holmes left for Andrews, shortly before the murder, which bequeathed to the younger man an abundant inheritance. This temporal coincidence suggested a motivation for murder. After six months of trial, however, Andrews was found guilty only of manslaughter and sent to the state prison for 19 years, with his family’s history of mental illness used as evidence to support the decision. What this unusual trial brings forward are questions of inheritance and the multiple valences of will, where the term means both a legally binding document and a personal drive or inclination.
“Make the Finger-Prints That Will Hang You.”
Illustration by E.W. Kemble from Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins. Édition de Luxe. American Publishing Company (1899) 220.
Wills, of course, abound in nineteenth-century American literature, most prominently in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893), where Tom Driscoll is written in and out of inheritance, and he seemingly can’t help but self-sabotage over and over again. There is something compulsive to how this character unravels: he is represented as perpetually breaking and ruining his social and familial bonds, led inevitably to repeat self-destructive behavior. When the botched attempt to rob his uncle leads to murder, the “natal autograph” intervenes in the story and asserts Tom’s bodily legibility as superseding his agency—as speaking forth a truth that he (and Roxy) would rather have buried. The details in this novel become particularly suggestive when put into relation to the earlier legal case of Samuel Andrews’s conviction. Indeed, what juxtaposing this novel with the previous legal case provides is a way to think about the interrelation between desire and will, and the extremities of both that signal stepping beyond bounds—and into the category called insane. I argue that these conjoined stories suggest the intricate relation between sex and insanity to imagine what constitutes the will.
Ben Bascom is Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University and teaches and researches early and nineteenth-century American literatures and contemporary LGBTQIA+ cultures. The research and writing for his first book, Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (Oxford UP, 2024), was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and tells an alternative account about the early US through focusing on outsiders who desired to belong but faced a series of exclusions that rendered their lives queer. He is working on a second book project that considers the relationship between what today gets called “mental health” and sexuality. Additionally, he co-edits with Christopher Hanlon ALH Review.
Additional 2026 Park Church Summer Lectures:
- 7:00 p.m., Wed., July 15: “Brockway’s Paddle: Institutional Violence and Press Protection at the Elmira Reformatory” Mary Lemak, University at Buffalo Law School
- 7:00 p.m., Wed., July 22: “Mark Twain’s History of the Novel” Emily Gowen, University of Notre Dame
About The Park Church
Founded in 1846 by a group of abolitionists, including Jervis Langdon, Mark Twain’s father-in-law, The Park Church has been a strong presence in Elmira’s history. Some of its congregation were close friends and family members to Mark Twain, including Susan Crane, who donated flowers from Quarry Farm every Sunday. Known for its striking architectural features, The Park Church contained Elmira’s first public library and has a long history of charitable service to the Elmira community. Thomas K. Beecher, brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe and friend of Mark Twain, was the first minister at the Park Church and presided over its construction. Before its demolition in 1939, the Langdon Mansion was located directly across from the Park Church.
About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series
In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.