★★★☆☆ A more realistic Arthur

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Mark Twain

I think I was a ten-year-old kid when I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for the first time. Like every other American kid who liked to read, I had read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Honestly, I never loved Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn was better. But then I went looking for more works by Mark Twain, and found his England novels The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee.

I think A Connecticut Yankee was probably my favorite Mark Twain work. I was familiar by that time with King Arthur, mostly in the form of T.H. White's The Once and Future King. A Connecticut Yankee was something different -- it confronted Arthurian legend with modernity. Arthur's court as presented in A Connecticut Yankee is a squalid band of ignorant brigands. There is no magic. Characters such as Merlin as charlatans. The only magic, in fact, is the real magic of technology, which the Boss carries in his brain and deploys to bring about something like a miniature Golden Age.

Though a child, I think I appreciated that this was a more realistic and probably more accurate picture of medieval England than those of the legends and fairy tales. To a ten-year-old kid, it was an eye-opener.

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