The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg Themes

Many of the characters in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” trick themselves into believing they’re honest and moral. They’re able to delude themselves into thinking this because they’ve been told their entire lives that they belong to an “unsmirched” community renowned for its “incorruptible” honesty. Despite the high esteem in which they hold their morality, though, their integrity has never actually been tested—everybody simply takes it for granted that they posses an unimpeachable sense of…

Having suffered a grave injustice in Hadleyburg (the details of which Twain never reveals), Howard Stephenson is determined to take revenge on the citizens of this supposedly upstanding town. To this end, he decides to expose the dishonesty of Hadleyburg’s nineteen most well-respected citizens (the Nineteeners) and their wives. For a town that defines itself based on its reputation as an honest, virtuous place, revealing immorality in the community wounds Hadleyburg and its sense of…

The town of Hadleyburg is insular and uninterested in accommodating foreigners, an attitude that makes enemies out of strangers. Because the townspeople believe Hadleyburg is “sufficient unto itself,” they are blissfully unaware of how outsiders like Howard Stephenson view them. They even celebrate the various cultural aspects they think make them different from other American towns. According to these citizens, they live in a veritable utopia, and they don’t “give a rap” about the world…