Mark Twain wrote during the reign of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria (1819-1901). Sensibilities considered “Victorian” were also revered by Americans who considered themselves cultured. They included prudishness toward sex and bodily functions, rigid concepts of identity and class, a sentimental view of mortality, and an occasionally hypocritical view of institutional Christianity.

“The Invalid’s Story” pokes fun at Victorian prudishness, especially toward odors. Professor and Twain scholar John H. Davis points out that “this tale of a smell may be a subtle satire about perceptions or judgments of others and of suitable subjects for literature” (Davis, John H. “The Scent of a Satire: Validating ‘The Invalid’s Story.’” The Mark Twain Annual, no. 10, 2012, pp. 71-90). Twain had written before about smells, particularly in an essay called “About Smells,” making fun of a clergyman who complained about having to share the church with “common” working people who would bring bad odors inside. Twain pointed out in the essay that the apostles of Jesus dealt with unclean people daily and probably had a rather fishy smell themselves. In an 1876 piece, “1601: Conversation, as It Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors,” Twain presented a discussion of royals and artists discussing flatulence. In “The Invalid’s Story,” a bad smell is not only more powerful than the humans that encounter it, but also the topic that comes to dominate their dialogue and actions.

The body in the story is not, as the narrator reveals from the start, the source of the offensive smell. However, through The Power of the Imagination, the body is perceived as the source, forcing the characters to abandon all sentimentality they have toward the corpse. In another blow to Victorian sensibility, the entire story is rife with Christian symbolism, from its journey with a body dead “two or three days” toward Bethlehem to its quoting of both the holy scripture and the hymn “Sweet By and By” (about the afterlife). Now, however, the “body” is really a box full of guns, and the experience of death is not sentimental, but offensive—and even deadly.