"A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain

An engineer from 1890s Connecticut is transported back to Camelot in the mid-6th century. Appalled by the feudalism and the monarchism (as an American he is a staunch republican), he sets about to defeat superstitious magic with the aid of science (mostly by dynamiting Merlin's tower) and to develop the economy using engineering, newspapers and advertising. It is a paean to the virtues of the nineteenth century.

But it is a small conceit for such a long novel and I found the joke wearing very thin at times. In addition, it left a rather bad taste in my mouth. Twain seems utterly blind to the possible evils of his own society. In the middle of the book, the narrator (known as The Boss) takes King Arthur in disguise to learn about the condition of the common people (shades of Twain's The Prince and the Pauper here). The poverty and sickness and cruelty of the master to the serf and the wickedness of slavery are highlighted, but in the end one gets the feeling that the narrator doesn't actually care whether poor people are lynched or starve to death or are burned alive ... providing it's not him. For example, when The Boss and The King have been enslaved and are on a scaffold waiting to be hanged for slave rebellion, he watches the first two slaves hanged with equanimity and only starts worrying when the noose is around the King's neck. 

And towards the end, when The Boss is battling the knights, he kills at first one, then dozens and later tens of thousands using guns, electrocution and explosives. If anything, he is proud of the body count. It reminded me of the jingoistic exultation of Victorian Britons when their soldiers, armed with guns, slaughtered soldiers armed with spears and swords and called their opponents 'savages'.

If course it is possible that Twain intended the book as a satire against colonialist capitalism. I think the Introduction of the Penguin edition is trying to make this point.  ... but I certainly didn't get that sense.

Selected quotes:

• "By his look he was good-natured; by his gait , he was self-satisfied." (Ch 2)
• "As is the way with humourists of his breed, he was still laughing ... after everybody else had got through." (Ch 4) I think this remark could apply to this book, if Twain had any sense of how he himself appeared.
• "It is no use to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn't ripe yet." (Ch 4)
• “It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their King and Church and nobility: as if they had any more occasion to love and honour King and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honour the stranger who kicks him!” (Ch 8)
• “It is enough to make a body ashamed ... to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always been figured as its aristocracies - a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.” (Ch 8)
• “The nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before King and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation, that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world.” (Ch 8)
• “Human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at.” (Ch 8)
• "Spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose colour and shape and size most rightly accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it." (Ch 10)
• "She was as welcome as a corpse is to a coroner." (Ch 11)
• "King, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world." (Ch 13)
• "There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if we would but remember it ... the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons' the other upon a hundred millions." (Ch 13)
• "He believed that if you were to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he couldn't tell the King from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel clerk." (Ch 18)
• "When red-headed people are above a certain social grade, their hair is auburn." (Ch 18)
• "The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name." (Ch 25)
• "His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once." (Ch 28)
• "A royal family of cats would answer every other purpose, They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up to shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house." (Ch 40)

September 2022; 410 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God