A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court

MARK TWAIN was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. When Sam was four, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River, where he spent an idyllic boyhood. His father died when he was twelve, and he was apprenticed to a printer, which began his career of reporting and writing entertaining, humorous sketches. But in 1857 he yielded to his boyhood ambition and trained with the great Horace Bixby as a river boat pilot (from which experience he took the name ‘Mark Twain’). The Civil War, however, put an end to the river traffic – and an end to Twain's career as well. After a brief, hilarious war experience (chronicled in ‘The History of a Campaign that Failed’), he turned his hand to silver prospecting, went back to journalism, and finally published his first short story in 1865.

Mark Twain's career was a central, representative one in American letters, making the already established role of humorist into an important post of social observation. His worldwide reputation was based on a gift for mixing the boyish mischief and innocence of a naïve, vernacular vision with a dark, bitter view of man as hypocrite, victim and self-deceiver. His finest works are generally considered to be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Life on the Mississippi (1883), not a novel but a superbly evocative memoir, a brilliant account of pilotage and a criticism of the South; A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889); The American Claimant (1892); Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); and his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), one of the world's great books. Mark Twain died in 1910.

JUSTIN KAPLAN of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the author of Mr Clemens and Mark Twain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mark Twain and His World, Lincoln Steffens and Walt Whitman: A Life. In 1985 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wife is the novelist Anne Bernays.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born on 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri, a backwater settlement about forty miles southwest of Hannibal, the Mississippi River town the Clemens family moved to four years later. The boy was to celebrate Hannibal and its river all his life. His father, an unsuccessful lawyer, died in 1847, and young Clemens was apprenticed to a printer. In 1853 he left home, set out on his travels, and earned a living as an itinerant typesetter. Four years later he became an apprentice pilot and learned the Mississippi: his career as a river pilot was cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861 he served two weeks as a Confederate irregular, deserted along with the rest of his company, and went West by stagecoach with his brother Orion, who held a Federal appointment in the Nevada Territory. For five years, as prospector and journalist, Clemens lived in Nevada and California. In February 1863 he first signed the pseudonym ‘Mark Twain’ to a humorous travel letter; two years later he had his first taste of national fame when his ‘Jumping Frog’ story was published and widely circulated; and he began his career as a lecturer. Early in 1867, hungry for greater challenges and rewards, he arrived in the East, to stay.

Clemens's trip to Europe and the Holy Land that summer and autumn was to be the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and to inaugurate a period during which it often seemed that nothing could go wrong for him. He married Olivia Langdon, a coal heiress from Elmira, New York, who bore him three adored daughters. He settled affluently in Hartford, Connecticut, and through his books, lectures, speeches, random statements, and dazzling personality, he became one of the few American writers of his time to have both a flourishing income and an international reputation. Roughing It (1872), his account of experiences in the West, was followed by a satirical novel, The Gilded Age (1873, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner), Sketches: New and Old (1875), Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn (1885).

With the exceptions of A Connecticut Yankee (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), the fifteen years between 1885 and 1900 proved to be a severe ordeal by failure. Over-invested in both a publishing house and an automatic type-setter, Mark Twain was compelled to close his Hartford house in 1891 and move his family abroad. Three years later he went into bankruptcy. In 1896, just as he arrived in England after completing a round-the-world lecture tour which helped pay off his debts, his favourite daughter, Susy, died of meningitis, and he was nearly unhinged with grief and despair.

By 1900 Clemens's fortunes and psyche were sufficiently mended for him to return to America and to an ovation that went on for the rest of his life. He was as celebrated for his white suits and his mane of white hair as he was for his uncompromising stands against injustice and imperialism and for his invariably quotable comments on any subject under the sun. He believed that the climax of his public career was the honorary doctorate of letters which Oxford University awarded him in 1907. His wife had died in 1904, a second daughter in 1909. On 21 April 1910, Samuel Clemens died in Redding, Connecticut where, largely with the proceeds from his serialized Autobiography, he had built an Italianate villa on a hilltop.

INTRODUCTION

MARK TWAIN, turned fifty, stood at the peak of his life and powers at the end of 1885. As a young admirer had said after studying a list of the living great which also included Tennyson, Longfellow and Thomas Edison, the former pilot, prospector, and journalist now had ‘everything a man could have’. With his family, in their Hartford mansion or summer retreat in upstate New York, Mark Twain lived out a domestic idyll altogether fitting for one whose courtship of the rich and beautiful Olivia Langdon was to be part of the mythology of love in America. He had won Olivia, wealth of his own through books and lectures, fame in England and at home, and, considering the liabilities high culture attached to the calling of humorist, he had even won a degree of status. Samuel Clemens who, years earlier, down and out in San Francisco, put a pistol to his head but thought better of it, had become man of property and man of letters.

In addition to his several business enterprises, among them a type-setting machine and a publishing house which enjoyed a historic success with the memoirs of General Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain was occupied with a new book ‘whose scene’, he said, ‘is laid far back in the twilight of tradition’. This book was A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, in its author's first conception, at any rate, the apparently unvexed comic story of Hank Morgan, Hartford master mechanic and superintendent at the Colt arms factory, who, in the course of a vigorous argument with one of his workmen, is laid out with a blow on the head from a crowbar and awakens near Camelot, in sixth-century England. There, as his creator explained, Morgan privately sets himself ‘the task of introducing the great and beneficent civilization of the nineteenth century, and of peacefully replacing the twin despotisms of royalty and aristocratic privilege with a “Republic on the American plan” when Arthur shall have passed to his rest’.

Several times during the latter part of what should have been his crowning decade, Mark Twain declared that this book was going to be his last. ‘Then he was ready to give up work altogether, die or do anything,’ his daughter Susy believed after a conversation with him in February 1886. ‘He said that he had written more than he ever expected.’ The year before, he had published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After two months of alarms and defeats, during which he foresaw a compounded disaster for himself as author and publisher, the book began to sell despite – or perhaps, as he suspected, even because of – official disapproval and outright ostracism. The guardians of the genteel tradition who had taken Mark Twain to their bosoms for The Prince and the Pauper, an act of cultural fealty which they praised for having the conventional virtues of finish, refinement and delicacy, turned their backs on him for writing a book that sprang from his deepest imperatives.

A turning point in the fortunes of Huckleberry Finn had come when the Public Library Committee of Concord, Massachusetts, expelled the book as ‘trash and suitable only for the slums’. ‘That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure,’ Mark Twain said triumphantly, swallowing his bitterness for the moment. But it had become clear to him through this experience that a unitary culture did not exist in his country and that, as he told the Scottish critic Andrew Lang, he would always have to choose whether to address his books to ‘the Head’ or ‘the Belly and the Members’, ‘the cultivated classes’ or ‘the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath’. A Connecticut Yankee was going to be his ‘swan-song’, his ‘retirement from literature permanently’. He explained to William Dean Howells, his closest literary adviser and his public champion, that he was determined ‘those parties who miscall themselves critics’ were not going to have the chance to ‘paw the book at all’ – ‘I wish to pass to the cemetery unclodded’.

Five years, his longest silence in over two decades as a writer, were to pass between the clodding of Huckleberry Finn and the publication of A Connecticut Yankee. In the writing of this new book he acted out a stage in his own disintegration: for some time after his imaginative energies were scattered and baffled. A Connecticut Yankee is an extravagant, savagely conflictive book, at the same time an entertainment and a dark, anarchic fable, a comic romance and a work of social criticism. Its hilarity, compassion, benign fantasy, and nostalgia for a lost time correspond to an underlying puzzlement, desperation, and anger with the present. Mark Twain invested his story of jousting and spells with the antagonisms of vernacular and genteel culture, laity and clerisy. During the 1870s he had passed through a period of what his friends could only call ‘anglomania’. Now he seemed to be conducting a running battle not only with American guardians of culture but with Matthew Arnold who publicly deplored the lack of ‘distinction’ in America, the lack of ‘what is elevated and beautiful, of what is interesting’, and, much as if he were pointing at Mark Twain, had even gone out of his way to attack Grant's prose style and point to ‘the funny man’ as a ‘national misfortune’. In many respects, Mark Twain's initial conception of story and character proved to be too fragile, too confining, for what he ultimately demanded. A Connecticut Yankee is a lexicon of the concerns of its era and also, as Henry Nash Smith has said, ‘a central document in American intellectual history’. Within the matrix of Hank Morgan's travels in time, Mark Twain responded to events and currents in the world about him, responded also to the stress and lessons of his own concurrent experience. He put to the test many of the hallowed creeds of his century – progress, technology, democracy, free enterprise – and found that they were not altogether as he had believed them to be.

In February 1886, a week or so before he set to work fulltime on A Connecticut Yankee, Mark Twain organized a company to perfect, manufacture, and market all over the world a type-setting machine that was being built at the Colt arms factory under the supervision of its inventor, James W. Paige. With an operator seated at its keyboard, the machine set entire words at a time; it fed itself from a galley of dead matter, justified each line as it was set, and later distributed its own case. Until he saw it in action, Clemens, a former printer like Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman, had not believed such a machine could exist. Soon after he saw it and fell under Paige's spell, he even began to believe that it was about the only machine of its kind that did exist. In actuality, The Times of London had been experimenting with automatic type-setters for years, and meanwhile Ottmar Mergenthaler, bypassing various human analogies which had misled Paige in his design, was perfecting his Linotype. Mergenthaler's machine, one of the chief technological advances of the century, was soon to sweep the field. Mark Twain, as it turned out, had fully understood the implications of an automatic type-setter. His mistake, which drove him into bankruptcy, was in backing the wrong horse in the right race.

Paige's type-setter, said Mark Twain, was a ‘mechanical marvel’ which made ‘all the other wonderful inventions of the human brain’ – and he cited the telephone, telegraph, locomotive, cotton gin, sewing machine, Babbage calculator, Jacquard loom, perfecting press, and Arkwright frame – ‘sink pretty nearly into commonplace’ and seem ‘mere toys, simplicities’. Now, just as he plunged into A Connecticut Yankee, he took on the entire financial and entrepreneurial burden of the typesetter. The machine was poetry and power, the brass and steel fulfilment of his century, but with its eighteen thousand separate parts it proved to be impossibly delicate and temperamental. Nonetheless, as Howells noted, its inventor and chief backer insisted on bringing it ‘to a perfection so expensive that it was practically impracticable’. The result was a series of breakdowns and delays which grew more ruinous until finally, in 1894, Mark Twain conceded defeat and entered into voluntary bankruptcy proceedings.

The Yankee and the Machine were twinned in his mind. Both were tests of a perfectible world in which, contrary to all his experience, friction and mechanical difficulties were the equivalents of ignorance and superstition. Both expressed a secular religion which went under the name of progress and had as an unexamined article of faith a belief not in life eternal but in perpetual motion. The Yankee's first act in Arthur's England is to start a patent office. ‘I knew that a country without a patent office… was just a crab,’ he says, ‘and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backwards.’ Then the Yankee goes on to hammer away at sixth-century mind shackles by encouraging literacy and starting a newspaper, as much an agent of nineteenth-century meliorism as the patent office.

‘Wait thirty years and then look out over the earth,’ Mark Twain wrote in 1889 on the occasion of Walt Whitman's seventieth birthday. ‘You shall see marvel upon marvels, added to those whose nativity you have witnessed; and conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result – Man at almost his full stature at last ! – and still growing, visibly growing, while you look.’ He was capable of sustaining two moods of belief at the same time. The opposite of this paean to ‘our Great Century’ is A Connecticut Yankee, just as a related meaning of the word ‘entrepreneur’ is ‘undertaker’. The ambivalences, disillusions, and finally homicidal tantrums of the novel were fire drills in Mark Twain's imagination for the actual failure of the machine, machine values, and his dream of a capitalist democracy in which he expected to be a mogul among moguls.

The writer saw omens of disaster long before the promoter, who all his life believed in his good luck. ‘I want to finish the day the machine finishes,’ he kept saying of A Connecticut Yankee, acknowledging an occult kinship between a writer writing words and a machine setting them in type. Yet four years before the promoter conceded that he was beaten, the writer wrote of himself as a victim of his own and the machine's powerful spell, and he made it clear that what was at stake for him was not just a business venture bigger and more promising than most but an entire framework of aspiration, for himself and for his century:

And I watched over one dear project of mine five years, spent a fortune on it, and failed to make it go – and the history of that would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves as in a mirror, and they would testify and say, Verily this is not imagination, this fellow has been there – and after would they cast dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming.

A Connecticut Yankee was conceived in prophetic circumstances. Rocked out of his accustomed prosperity by the little panic of 1884, one of the systolic events that determined the anxious life rhythms of the Gilded Age, Mark Twain was compelled to repair his fortunes. That autumn and winter, as impresario and senior partner, he undertook a profitable reading tour with the Southern novelist and social critic, George Washington Cable. In a bookstore one night in December, while they were on tour, Cable introduced him to Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d' Arthur. ‘You'll never lay it down until you have read it from cover to cover,’ Cable said. Despite later recriminations that often threatened to turn their relationship into a public scandal, Clemens freely and gratefully acknowledged that Cable was the ‘godfather’ of A Connecticut Yankee.

Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the middle ages. Have the notions and habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can't scratch. Cold in the head – can't blow – can't get at handkerchief, can't use iron sleeve. Iron gets red hot in the sun – leaks in the rain, gets white with frost and freezes me solid in winter. Suffer from lice and fleas. Make disagreeable clatter when I enter church. Can't dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down, can't get up.

During the four years he worked on A Connecticut Yankee, this idea, a burlesque of the sort that came almost by instinct to Mark Twain the humorist, changed its course and veered away from laughter towards an apocalyptic resolution: past and present, Arthur's feudal society and Morgan's industrial republic, destroy each other. It is possible, then, that in addition to its burlesque surface the germ idea may have aspects more consistent with its resolution. The ‘dream of being a knight errant in armor’ may at the same time be a nightmare of being swaddled in iron, confined and helpless, just as Mark Twain was often to feel confined and helpless in his way of life. Symbolic of this uneasiness, he occasionally thought of his Hartford house as a Bastille and joked that what he needed to put him out of his misery was a good incendiary.

The ‘dream’, or nightmare, is also explicitly a form of time travel, a narrative mode peculiarly appropriate to Mark Twain's concerns and those of his contemporaries. ‘You know about transmigration of souls,’ the Yankee says, introducing his strange history. ‘Do you know about transposition of epochs – and bodies?’ Mark Twain himself was almost as dislocated in time as the Yankee: in his lifetime alone, he believed, the human race had made more progress, seen more dramatic changes, than in any five centuries in history. He had been born into a feudal, slave-holding culture, the agrarian South. Industrialism, the railroad, the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, and finally the Civil War changed all that. He saw the passing of the stagecoach, the Pony Express, and the glory of steam-boating on the Mississippi. Now, surrounded by technological wonders like the telephone and the high-speed printing press, he lived in an industrial North fast becoming urbanized and wholly given over to the Yankee values of production and trade. It was no wonder, then, that Mark Twain often felt like the oldest man in the world, a holdover from a remote past.

This vestigial mood was enforced by the vistas of time opened up by evolutionary thought and by ‘the great Darwin’, whom Mark Twain had visited in 1879 (and who was one of his devoted readers). Looking back on his boyhood in Hannibal, Mark Twain felt the same paradox of change and continuity as Henry Adams, an eighteenth-century man born into the nineteenth and surviving well into the twentieth. Adams mused by Wenlock Edge on the eons of time that separated him from, linked him to, the ganoid fish and the horse-shoe crab. Other writers of Mark Twain's time, responding to the same perspectives and ideas, were turning to fables of time travel to express their critical concern with the present and with evolutionary possibility.

Two years before the publication of A Connecticut Yankee, Edward Bellamy brought out Looking Backward and from the imagined vantage point of the year 2000 presented vigorous if ultimately chilling answers to the problems of the 1880s. In Bellamy's analysis contemporary America, a Yankee phenomenon, was as benighted and brutalized as Arthur's England. The American labourer was scarcely better off than the chained slaves, in A Connecticut Yankee, driven to market in London.^* Bellamy compared capitalist society with the Black Hole of Calcutta – ‘its press of maddened men tearing and trampling one another in the struggle to win a place at the breathing holes’. The streets of Bellamy's Boston of 1887 are as dark and fetid as those of Mark Twain's sixth-century London. Half-naked children fight and tumble in the garbage. ‘I have been in Golgotha,’ Bellamy said, ‘I have seen humanity hanging on a cross.’ Mark Twain, who read Bellamy's book after he had finished his own, praised it as ‘the latest and best of all the Bibles’. Bellamy, he said, ‘has made the accepted heaven paltry by inventing a better one on earth’.

In 1894, a nightmare year when four million unemployed walked the streets of America past silent factories and deserted mine pits, William Dean Howells published his utopian critique of capitalism, A Traveler from Altruria. In England the young H. G. Wells published The Time Machine, ‘a fantasy based on the idea of the human species developing along divergent lines’. The Time Machine was the first of Wells's several treatments of a problem posed, he was to write in his autobiography, ‘by an age of material progress and political sterility’.

By the early part of 1886, when he was writing the first three chapters of A Connecticut Yankee, Mark Twain's ‘dream of being a knight errant in armor’ had already taken on sombre overtones. At the same time that he planned for Hank Morgan to do comic battle armed with a hay fork instead of a lance, Mark Twain planned a conflict with the supreme medieval authority. ‘Country placed under an interdict,’ he noted, anticipating his account of a desolate and muted England (strikingly like depression America in 1894) which had been punished by the Church for subscribing to Morgan's capitalist and democratic heresies. And from the very start, the dream about knight errantry had been joined in Mark Twain's mind by another idea:

Have a battle between modern army with gatling guns – (automatic) 600 shots a minute, with one pulling of the trigger, torpedos, balloons, 100-ton cannon, ironclad fleet &c & Prince de Joinville's Middle Age Crusaders.

Among this array of ‘labour-saving machinery’, the Gatling gun, like the Yankee himself and to an extent Paige's type-setter, was a product of Colt's Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company of Hartford.

In other early notes for the book, the Yankee, like Mark Twain yearning for Hannibal as he remembered it to have been in his boyhood, yearns for an Arcadian past which ‘exists’ only in his dream, a pre-Boss Camelot (purified, for the moment, of poverty and slavery) which is as drowsing and idyllic – ‘sleeping in a valley by a winding river’ – as that other fictive town, the ‘St Petersburg’ of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And the Yankee, even as first conceived, has already lost the power and desire to escape from this dream. ‘He mourns his lost land – has come to England and revisited it, but it is all so changed and become old, so old – and it was so fresh and new, so virgin before.’ So Mark Twain outlined the frame story surrounding Morgan's yellowed palimpsest, and he supplied the only possible ending: ‘He has lost all interest in life – is found dead next morning – suicide.’

The implications were too unpleasant to face up to directly, and neither Mark Twain (at first) nor those on whom he tested the idea acknowledged that it might lead to something other than a splendidly funny book. ‘That notion of yours about the Hartford man waking up in King Arthur's time is capital,’ Howells said in January 1886, after he had heard the story talked to him, and even in 1908, when he was reading A Connecticut Yankee for at least the second time, Howells still refused to go beyond the pleasure principle. He called it ‘the most delightful, truest, most humane, sweetest fancy that ever was’, a judgement almost bizarrely unresponsive to the fact that the book ends with a massacre. By November 1886, when Mark Twain gave a public reading of the first three chapters and outlined the rest, this massacre had reached at least the tadpole stage. Under contract from King Arthur, the Yankee undertakes to kill off fifteen kings and acres of hostile knights. Squadron by squadron they gallop to the attack, while from behind an electrified barbed-wire fence, he exterminates them with the inevitable Gatling gun. Having done this, knocked the ogres out of commission, and abolished courtly love and armour, the Yankee puts the kingdom on a strictly business basis. Arthur's knights set themselves up as a stock exchange and the going rate for a seat at the Round Table reaches thirty thousand dollars.

Just as reluctant as Howells to acknowledge the pain and havoc implicit in the story, Clemens was fearful chiefly of committing some crime of cultural lese-majesty against King Arthur and the body of Arthurian legend and association hallowed by time, Thomas Malory, and, more recently, the Poet Laureate's Idylls of the King. And so he was willing to declare, somewhat defensively, that ‘the story isn't a satire peculiarly’ but ‘more especially a contrast’ of daily life in the sixth and nineteenth centuries. He had no intention of smirching or belittling any of Malory's ‘great and beautiful characters’, he explained a few days after his public reading. Galahad was still to gallop through ‘the mists and twilights of Dreamland’, Arthur was still to keep his ‘sweetness and purity’, and Launcelot still to be the sternest of enemies and the kindest of friends. He was determined, he said, that the dissolution of the Round Table and the final battle – ‘the Battle of the Broken Hearts, it might be called’ – should lose none of their ‘pathos and tears’ through his retelling.

Yet for all his professed loyalty to ‘the mists and twilights of Dreamland’, Mark Twain ('the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew,’ Howells said) explored a number of savage parallels between Arthur's England and the American South: slavery; illiteracy and ignorance of trade and industry; an agrarian economy in hopeless conflict with an industrial economy; a chivalric code which, Mark Twain said, had kept the South mawkish, adolescent, verbose, and addicted to second-hand imitations of Sir Walter Scott and leather-headed anachronisms like duels and tournaments. In both frameworks a civil war destroys the old order; there is even a certain similarity between the Battle of the Sand-Belt (Chapter 43) and General Grant's unsuccessful assault on Petersburg, Virginia in 1864. In the course of writing A Connecticut Yankee, Mark Twain compelled his original matrix (not a stable one to begin with) to accept and contain a remarkable range of conflict and concern. Finally the matrix burst. He pronounced a curse on both parts of the ‘contrast’ and ended his battle of ancients and moderns with a double defeat.

Writing a book which, as far as it preaches anything, preaches irreverence, the guillotine, a reign of terror, and a kind of generalized despair, Mark Twain still managed to convince himself from time to time that he was writing a blameless ‘literary’ tale along the lines of The Prince and the Pauper. Some of the same indecisiveness applies to the central character of Hank Morgan, who is, to a great extent, Mark Twain himself. Both are torn between rebellion and conformity, new culture and old: Morgan's style is ‘loud and boisterous’, as James M. Cox has noted, but in the final analysis his ‘vernacular is rather conventional language masquerading as rough, burly talk’. Both Mark Twain and Morgan are showmen; the Yankee's dying act is to get up one last ‘effect’. But this, as Mark Twain said in criticism of a stage version of the Yankee, is only Morgan's ‘rude animal side, his circus side’. For the Yankee, like Mark Twain, is also ‘a natural gentleman’, with a ‘good heart’ and ‘high intent’. Both are dedicated to shrewd practicality and profit, motives generally associated with Benjamin Franklin, whom Carlyle called ‘the Father of all the Yankees’ and for whom, nonetheless, Mark Twain had a well-advertised contempt. And so, possibly with Franklin's narrowest range in mind, Mark Twain could also describe Morgan as ‘a perfect ignoramus’. ‘He is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a Colt's revolver, he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he's an ignoramus, nevertheless.’

The sixteen chapters of A Connecticut Yankee that Mark Twain wrote during the summer of 1887 trace a pattern of mounting anxiety and bitterness. All his experience, his business involvements as well as his reading of history, pointed to a single conclusion and a single mood. At the beginning of July he had been too occupied with the type-setter to write. Later in the month, just as he hit his stride again, he had to stop for a week to wrestle with the problems of his publishing house as well as those of the machine. He had become tense and nervous. Unable to sleep at night, he sat up late, smoking and thinking – ‘not pleasantly’. ‘I want relief of mind,’ he complained to his nephew after one of these bad nights. ‘The fun, which was abounding in the Yankee at Arthur's Court up to three days ago, has slumped into funereal sadness, and this will not do – it will not answer at all. The very title of the book requires fun, and it must be furnished. But it can't be done, I see, while this cloud hangs over the workshop.’ Mired deeper and deeper in business, he took up the manuscript again the following summer too late, as he told Andrew Chatto, his London publisher, to finish even in 1888; and it was largely his need for money made especially urgent by the type-setter's delays and failures that drove him to finish by May of 1889.

During these two years the abounding ‘fun’ never returned. A Connecticut Yankee contains some of Mark Twain's most richly comic and satiric writing, but it also contains episodes which are more and more frequently, finally compulsively, presented in terms of havoc. It was apparent to Mark Twain himself that he was passing through some crisis of ebbing faith in the Great Century, a ‘negative conversion’ that he could hardly help but dramatize in the final chapters of his book. ‘The change,’ he declared to Howells in a flash of self-illumination, ‘is in me – in my vision of the evidences.’

He had just been re-reading Carlyle's French Revolution. Now he recognized that ‘life and environment’ had made him ‘a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat’ – calling for the destruction of all ancient forms of authority: monarchy, aristocracy, the Catholic Church. None of these posed much of a threat to him or to America in the 1880s. Like Arthur's England, their remoteness made them permissible scapegoats for an anger whose real objects were much closer to home.

True, the Old World offered him few evidences that it was any better than it had been in the darkest ages. European morals, as he read over and over again in W. E. H. Lecky's History, had scarcely improved with material progress. One had only to listen to the traveller and lecturer George Kennan as he described the savagery of contemporary life in Russia under Alexander III. Kennan's accounts of Siberian slave labour were a major source for A Connecticut Yankee, and they shed in contrast a wanly charitable light on slavery even as it had been in the United States. ‘If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite,’ Mark Twain exclaimed after one of Kennan's lectures, ‘then thank God for dynamite.’ Attempts on the Tsar's life were among several other evidences that ancient forms of authority were about to be toppled. The 1880s in America saw the rise of the trade unions: the Knights of Labor reached a membership of 700,000, the American Federation of Labor was founded. ‘In the Unions,’ Mark Twain believed, ‘was the working-man's only present hope of standing up like a man against money and the power of it… the sole present help of the weak against the strong.’ And when, at the end of 1889, the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, was overthrown, Mark Twain rejoiced. ‘These are immense days! Republics and rumors of republics, from everywhere in the earth,’ he said, and in advance of the publication of A Connecticut Yankee he proposed to publish extracts from the book ‘that have in them this new breath of republics’.

Yet what the Yankee dynamites is not only the old chivalric and autocratic order – Europe, symbolically – but also all the apparatus of the ‘new deal’ that he tried to impose on what he bitterly acknowledges is ‘human muck’. ‘All our noble civilisation-factories went up in the air and disappeared…,’ he says. ‘We could not afford to let the enemy turn our own weapons against us.’ It becomes clear that the apparatus of enlightenment and progress introduced by the Yankee is indeed a ‘weapon’ which destroys its masters as well as its enemies. The busy factories hidden all over England, the Yankee says, are like a ‘serene volcano, standing innocent with its motionless summit in the blue sky and giving no hint of the rising hell in its bowels’. Throughout the book there are similar metaphors which suggest that Mark Twain, despite his expressions of enthusiasm for what he called ‘machine culture’, also nursed the covert belief that the machine was a destructive force. For him, as for many of his contemporaries, the most familiar epitome of the two-facedness of the machine was the steam locomotive tearing and shrieking its way through the heart of the American Eden. His concurrent experience with Paige's type-setter confirmed his worst fears – he was now owned by the machine. The very names the Yankee gives to his institutions – ‘civilisation-factories’ and, a dehumanizing pun, ‘Man-factories’ – suggest not the fervent brotherhood of Walt Whitman's utopian democracy but instead a bleak collectivism characterized by Marx's ‘alienated labour’ and by Carlyle's ‘destruction of moral force’. In Marxian terms, material progress had so far outstripped the political and economic means to cope with it that industrialism represented a kind of retrogression, a new dark ages.

Working through a crisis of belief, Mark Twain found himself unable to accept fully the historical alternatives that lay on either side of his pastoral, drowsing Hannibal. Out of desperation and bafflement he chose the way of the anarch in A Connecticut Yankee. The final battle, more a massacre like General Custer's at Little Bighorn than a ‘Battle of the Broken Hearts’, is, at best, a gruesome practical joke. Henry Nash Smith calls it ‘one of the most distressing passages in American literature’. Virtuoso by now of dynamite, electricity, hydraulics, and machine guns, the Yankee surveys his twenty-five thousand victims lying on the field of battle. ‘Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England!’ But the Yankee is the victim of Merlin as well as of his own victory. Unconscious and apparently dying, he can only be moved in one direction, backward, into the cave, as if regressing to the earliest stages of human life. Having rejected all the values and both the ‘contrasts’ of the story, the Yankee makes one final withdrawal, into the dream.

‘Last night I started on your book, and it sank naturally into my dream,’ Howells wrote in September 1889. As adviser and sometimes rooter-out of coarseness and heterodoxy in his friend's work, he had been asked to oversee the proofs. ‘It's charming, original, wonderful – good in fancy, and sound to the core in morals.’ For once, despite their remarkable understanding of each other and their books, Mark Twain and Howells might have been talking to each other across the Grand Canyon. ‘Well, my book is written – let it go,’ Mark Twain answered from Hartford a few days later. He had weathered his crisis, but he sensed that in the course of writing the Yankee his demons had been loosed and could never be kennelled again. “But if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can't ever be said. And besides, they would require a library – and a pen warmed up in hell.’

* In this connection it is worth noting that when Daniel Beard, the illustrator of A Connecticut Yankee, portrayed ‘the slave driver’ (page 333), he used as his model, clearly recognizable to many contemporary readers, the railroad buccaneer, stock manipulator, and quintessential capitalist, Jay Gould.

CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Preface

Contents

A Word of Explanation