A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

While I was at the Mark Twain House in Hartford in January I picked up a copy of one his books that I didn't have: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I got around to reading it just now and was surprised on a few different levels. I didn't know much about it--just that a man from contemporary times (for Twain at least) goes back in time to King Arthur's court. I thought it might be a book for children, and in fact, some describe it as such. Believe me, this book is not for children.

Instead, it is a sometimes vicious satire. Edmund Reiss, in the afterword of the Signet Classics edition, puts it better than I could: "Connecticut Yankee demands to be regarded as one of the greatest satires in American literature as well as probably the most sustained and deliberate piece of invective to come from the pen of Mark Twain. Nevertheless, the novel is in many ways baffling, and generations of readers have regarded it as a great attempt but not necessarily as a great finished work of literature."

The book was published in 1889, at the same time Twain was attempting to strike it rich with a new typesetting machine that ended up bankrupting him. The story concerns Hank Morgan, a munitions manufacturer who gets whacked on the head with a crowbar and awakens under an oak tree in England, the year 536. Because of his funny clothes and strange manner he is sentenced to burn at the stake, but his encyclopedic knowledge of total eclipses saves his bacon, and earns him an enemy in Merlin. He then goes further, and with a basic understanding of technology, is able to convince everyone he is a great magician, recalling the quote by the recently deceased Arthur C. Clarke that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Over the course of the book, Twain sends up romantic novels about medieval times, painting knights and noblemen as idiots. He also, by way of commenting on the sixth century, wields a poison pen against his own time, mostly by attacking any institution that would withhold freedom, namely religion and the aristocracy. Consider this quote from Morgan: "It being my conviction that any established Church is an established crime, an established slave pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it." Morgan travels around, doing good deeds such as urging the release of those imprisoned for no good reason, and introducing modern ideas such as one-man, one-vote, and various advancements ranging from the telephone to a stock exchange to baseball.

But Morgan is not a hero, nor is he a mouthpiece for Twain. He revolutionizes Arthurian Britain, but does he improve it? He wants to replace the monarchy with a republic, but admits that he would like to be the first president. He also relishes his position as "The Boss," a kind of demi-god. Finally, when his dreams of a utopia vanish and he is at war with the nobility, he thinks nothing of killing 25,000 knights with an electric fence, and is imprisoned by the wall of dead around him.

At times this book can be a slog to read. Several chapters are uninteresting discussions of economics, such as a three or four page argument Morgan has with a local about the concept of the cost of living versus wages. At other times it brims with comedy, such as the notion of knights riding around the countryside wearing advertisements.

Twain has a large and glorious body of work, and this book is one of his lesser efforts, but occasionally fascinating nonetheless. It's a must for those who want to experience the complete Twain, but casual readers might due better to stick to his masterworks such as Huckleberry Finn.