A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Twain in Paris, reading about the Terror

Twain spent the spring of 1879 in Paris with his family, arriving on 28 February and settling at the Hotel Normandy on the rue de l'Échelle. Rain fell nearly every day. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine says Twain took a dislike to France that he never lost. Paine also says Twain spent part of that spring rereading Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, a book he was never long without. The whole party read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and when the weather allowed they went to see the places where the Reign of Terror had happened.

His opinion of the Revolution changed over the next few years. In his Paris notebook he wrote that the Terror showed that the people were savages. In 1887, between spells of work on the Yankee, he told his friend William Dean Howells that he read Carlyle's book differently every time. When he first finished it in 1871, he wrote, he had sided with the moderate Girondins. Now he found he was a Sansculotte, one of the radical Paris crowd. He added that he was no mild one. He was a Marat, after Jean-Paul Marat, the fiercest of the revolutionary journalists.

Hank Morgan takes the same side in Chapter XIII. Watching free farmers work three days without pay on their bishop's road, he is reminded of France before what he calls the ever memorable and blessed Revolution. There were two Reigns of Terror, he says. One killed ten thousand people in a few months. The other had lasted a thousand years and killed a hundred million with hunger, cold and cruelty. Seven chapters later he decides that the people of Arthur's England need a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and that he is the wrong man to give them one.

France itself appears in the book only at the edges. Twain's preface jokes about the Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, as a problem for the theory that God chooses kings. Hank sends Sandy and the baby to the French coast, and in his last delirium he tells Sandy he dreamed she was in Gaul and could not get home. The earliest French translation held by the national library in Paris is Yankee à la cour du roi Arthur, by Odette Ferry and Jacques de Plunkett, published in Paris in 1949.

The same cruelties as The Prince and the Pauper, told angrier

Eight years earlier Twain had sent a boy king, Edward VI, out among his own subjects in The Prince and the Pauper. He uses the same plan here. King Arthur travels in disguise, gets sold as a slave, and learns what his laws do to the people under them. Paine singled out this journey as the most powerful part of the Yankee, with its picture of a king learning mercy through his own fall.

Some of the scenes are nearly the same. In The Prince and the Pauper, Twain added notes quoting J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False. One says that stealing woollen cloth from a weaver was a hanging crime in England. In Chapter XXXV of the Yankee, a young mother whose husband has been seized for the navy steals a piece of linen cloth worth a quarter of a cent, hoping to sell it and feed her baby. She is hanged just outside the walls of London while Hank and the king watch, chained in the slave gang. On the same journey the slave driver burns a woman accused of witchcraft and uses the fire to warm his freezing slaves.

Twain tied the slavery chapters to recent American history. In Chapter XXX, Hank stays with a poor charcoal burner who has helped his lord hang his own neighbours. Hank compares him to the poor whites of the American South, who were despised by the slave-owners and still fought for them. In Chapter XXV he writes that an aristocracy is only a band of slaveholders under another name.

A book written for England, and England hated it

Chatto & Windus, Twain's London publishers, wanted to soften the text for British readers. Twain refused. He wrote that he had already revised the book twice, that his wife Olivia had made him cut or soften many passages, and that he wanted to say a Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy. He added that the book had not been written for America. He had written it for England. Chatto & Windus printed it as he sent it, under the title A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.

Most British reviewers were furious. Paine records that the book was called a lamentable failure and an audacious sacrilege, and that the attacks spread to Twain's earlier books. The Daily Telegraph gave it a long and more careful review. In America, William Dean Howells read the manuscript and wrote to Twain that it was a mighty great book that made his heart burn with wrath. Twain told Howells it was his swan song and his retirement from literature.

Dan Beard's pictures

Twain chose Daniel Carter Beard after seeing his drawings for a Chinese story in the Cosmopolitan magazine. When the two men met at the Webster & Co. office, Twain asked Beard to read the book before drawing it, and Beard said he had already read it twice. Twain described Hank to him as a perfect ignoramus who could still build a locomotive or run a telegraph line. A few days later he wrote to his office that Beard should draw whatever he saw in his mind, funny or serious.

Paine says Beard shared the book's socialist leanings and called the drawings the best work of Beard's life. When they were finished, Twain wrote to Beard that he had gone netting for lightning-bugs and caught a meteor. The University of California Press edition of 2011 reprints Beard's drawings, 222 illustrations in all.