by Mark Twain, 1889
A Colt Arms foreman in 1800’s Connecticut gets knocked silly and ends up in 6th Century England with a knight in armor. He goes from being about to be burned at the stake to being The Boss, supplanting Merlin as the greatest magician, because he made the sun disappear (he knew there was a total eclipse on the day he was to be burned at the stake, so predicted that if they went through with his execution, the sun would disappear).
He becomes King Arthur’s manager of the kingdom. He adopts Clarence as his right-hand man and together they institute schools, newspapers, soap, toothbrushes & toothpowder, telegraphs, telephones, Gatling guns, dynamite, baseball, mapping the countryside.
It’s hilarious! He has the Knights become traveling salesman for soap and toothpaste – they wore sandwich boards or banners to advertise their wares. He wanted them to all learn to bathe – they were terrified of bathing.
He has to put on armour himself and go on an adventure with “Sandy” (Alisande), a princess who comes to Camelot with a tale of ogres keeping 45 princesses in a castle. He goes with “Sandy” who talks non-stop – he wished for a cork for her – and rescues the 45 princesses who turn out to be hogs – but Sandy doesn’t see them as hogs.
Then they go to the Valley of Holiness and he repairs the Holy Fountain (by magic) and is even able to institute bathing there. The one thing he wasn’t really able to do is make social justice – eliminate the caste system and the evils of the Church. In the end, it’s very violent and sad. He kills 30,000 knights with an electric fence. He and Clarence go out to check for wounded and one of the knights stabs him. He is getting better but Merlin, disguised as an old hag, comes to cook for them in their cave, and puts a spell on him to sleep 13 centuries.
Before this, he has fallen in love with Sandy, married her, and they had a baby girl. Sandy named her “Hello-Central” because that is the name he often called out in his sleep and she knew it was special to him.
Some quotes from the book:
“Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been in our American blood, too–I know that; but when I left America it had disappeared–at least to all intents and purposes. The remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses. When a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly be said to be out of the system.”
When he and Sandy come across some poor people mending the road:
“By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small “independent” farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy; and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation, and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a 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…”
“You couldn’t think, where Sandy was. She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in a city. If she had had a cork she would have been a comfort. But you can’t cork that kind; they would die.”
“So I was pleased when I saw in the distance a horseman making the bottom turn of the road that wound down from the castle. As we approached each other, I saw that he wore a plumed helmet, and seemed to be otherwise clothed in steel, but bore a curious addition also–a stiff square garment like a herald’s tabard. However, I had to smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer and read this sign on his tabard:
“Persimmon’s Soap–All the Prime-Donne Use It.” That was a little idea of my own, and had several wholesome purposes in view toward the civilizing and uplifting of this nation. In the first place, it was a furtive, underhand blow at this nonsense of knight-errantry, though nobody suspected that but me. I had started a number of these people out–the bravest knights I could get – each sandwiched between bulletin-boards bearing one device or another, and I judged that by and by when they got to be numerous enough they would begin to look ridiculous, and then, even the steel-clad ass that hadn’t any board would himself begin to look ridiculous because he was out of the fashion.
“Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from them it would work down to the people, if the priests could be kept quiet. This would undermine the Church. I mean would be a step toward that. Next, education–next, freedoms–and then she would begin to crumble. 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 in any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it.”
“When my missionaries overcame a knight errant on the road they washed him, and when he got well they swore him to go and get a bulletin-board and disseminate soap and civilization the rest of his days. As a consequence the workers in the field were increasing by degrees, and the reform was steadily spreading. My soap factory felt the strain early. At first I had only two hands; but before I left home I was already employing fifteen, and running night and day; and the atmospheric result was getting so pronounced that the king went sort of fainting and gasping around and said he did not believe he could stand it much longer, and Sir Launcelot got so he did hardly anything but walk up and down the roof and swear…”
“I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl: for nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die.”
In the chapter called, “Drilling the King:”
“And so on, and so on. I drilled him as representing in turn, all sorts of people out of luck and suffering dire privations and misfortunes. but lord it was only just words, words–they meant nothing in the world to him, I might just as well have whistled. Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe. There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about “the working classes,” and satisfy themselves that a day’s hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day’s hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven’t tried the other. But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn’t money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pick-axe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down–and I will be satisfied, too.
“Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him–why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it’s a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair –but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also. And it’s also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship.”
Towards the end he introduces Baseball and knights are the players: “Of course I couldn’t get these people to leave off their armor; they wouldn’t do that when they bathed. They consented to differentiate the armor so that a body could tell one team from the other, but that was the most they would do. So, one of the teams wore chain-mail ulsters, and the other wore plate-armor made of my new Bessemer Steel. Their practice in the field was the most fantastic thing I ever saw. Being ball-proof, they never skipped out of the way, but stood still and took the result; when a Bessemer was at the bat and a ball hit him, it would bound a hundred and fifty yards, sometimes. And when a man was running, and threw himself on his stomach to slide to his base, it was like an iron-clad coming into port.”
He marries Sandy: “Now I didn’t know I was drawing a prize, yet that was what I did draw. Within the twelvemonth I became her worshiper; and ours was the dearest and perfectest comradeship that ever was. People talk about beautiful friendships between 2 persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same? There is no place for comparison between the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.”
When their little girl, “Hello-Central” is sick: “Well, during the two weeks and a half we watched by the crib, and in our deep solicitude we were unconscious of any world outside of that sick-room. Then our reward came: the centre of the universe turned the corner and began to mend. Grateful? It isn’t the term. There isn’t any term for it. You know that, yourself, if you’ve watched your child through the Valley of the Shadow and seen it come back to life and sweep night out of the earth with one all-illuminating smile that you could cover with your hand.”
We own this book. It taught Wayne about the nature of poverty, taxes and injustice; the nature of man in general; all while poking great fun at American ingenuity.