I have written of my admiration for Mark Twain at my
Freedom Writing blog.
Actually, my fondness for Twain's works goes back a long way. Among my readers are people with whom I grew up, and most of them certainly could tell you of times when I urged them to read Twain.
I read a lot of Twain when I was in high school and college. Sometimes it was an assignment. Sometimes it was something I did on my own. But, whether I was assigned to do it or I did it on my own initiative, I can't think of anything I ever read by Twain that I haven't (a) quoted directly, (b) mentioned generally in a conversation, (c) recommended to people, (d) cited in an article or term paper or (e) some or all of the above.
One book that I continue to recommend to people many years after reading it for the first time — even though, in recent years, it has been sacrificed in many places to the gods of political correctness — is
"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."If you're a writer, you have probably dreamed of writing the Great American Novel. In my experience, the Great American Novel almost never comes along. But
"Huckleberry Finn" is an exception to that rule. It has been called the Great American Novel by many people — and with good reason.
"Huckleberry Finn" was first published 125 years ago last month. But, as good as it is and as deserving of some attention, today I want to turn my attention to one of Twain's novels that was published a few years earlier, was decidedly
not an American tale and may have been recreated in movies and recordings or served as the inspiration for other people's works as much as — if not more than — anything else Twain ever wrote.
I am speaking of
"The Prince and the Pauper," which was, as nearly as I can tell, Twain's first foray into historical fiction. It dealt with two boys who were almost identical in spite of the fact that they had different parents. One of the boys was named Edward, and he happened to be the prince of Wales. The other boy was named Tom, and he was from a poor family.
The boys were born the same day but never knew of each other's existence until just before Edward's father, King Henry VIII, died, when fate brought them together. In the book, the two agreed to switch places temporarily, and, in the process, they discovered the pitfalls in each other's lives.
It was truly a daring subject for Twain to tackle in his first real attempt to write historical fiction. Much of the time, when one reads historical fiction, the characters are fictional, too. They may combine qualities of real people, but you seldom read historical novels in which a main character was a real person from history.
But that was what set
"The Prince and the Pauper" apart from other works of historical fiction because this story dealt with an actual figure from more than three centuries earlier — Edward VI. And the historical record tells us that he became king of England on Jan. 28, 1547. His father had just died, and Edward was 9 years old. Nearly a month would pass before he was crowned at Westminster Abbey, which was not unusual, but, for all intents and purposes, he became king 463 years ago tomorrow.
Always a sickly boy, Edward died less than 6½ years after becoming king and was succeeded by his older sisters, Lady Jane Grey and Mary I. That is the historical record.
In the book, Twain wrote that Edward's experiences living in poverty and suffering at the hand of Tom's abusive father affected him. He pledged to govern wisely when restored to his rightful place, but that can be classified as literary speculation. Edward died before reaching the age of maturity; he was king in name, but in actual deed his reign was overseen by executors who had been named in his father's will.
We will never know if he would have ruled more mercifully than his predecessors, including his father, because — to my knowledge — he was never allowed to make any royal decisions.
Twain was always finding ways to work his real–world interests into his fictional works. He had a genuine fascination with science, and he combined that with his desire to write historical fiction when he wrote about time travel in
"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" several years later.
"The Prince and the Pauper" is a classic, and it has led to not only more than half a dozen film and TV adaptations but also countless stories that must have been inspired by Twain's original tale.
It seems like such an obvious theme, doesn't it? How many times have you seen a movie or an episode of a TV show where the story was based on the notion that two people looked alike? Perhaps someone wrote such a story before Twain came along, but I have to think he originated it. Even if the stories that served as the foundation for some movies or TV shows are said to have been inspired by something else, I still have to think that Twain played a role.
"The Parent Trap," for example, was based on a book that was published nearly 40 years after Twain died. In that story, the two people who looked the same were twins who went with a different biological parent when their parents divorced. I can't help wondering if Erich Kästner, the author of the book that inspired that movie, wasn't, in turn, influenced by Twain, who wrote
"The Prince and the Pauper" nearly 20 years before Kästner was born.
Likewise, I wonder if Twain was at the heart of the inspiration for the movie
"Dave," in which Kevin Kline plays both the president and a man who earns some money impersonating him. When the president is incapacitated, his unscrupulous chief of staff gets the impersonator to step in and pretend to be the president, giving the chief of staff the opportunity to wield the actual power from behind the scenes.
That story, it was said, was inspired by Anthony Hope's
"The Prisoner of Zenda." Hope was closer to Twain's age. He was born about 28 years after Twain, and he wrote his book about 13 years after Twain wrote
"The Prince and the Pauper."It seems plausible to me that Hope's tale of a political decoy could have been inspired by Twain's story. But I have seen nothing to confirm that.
I don't know if either of those books were influenced by
"The Prince and the Pauper." But it makes sense, doesn't it?
Even if the authors didn't realize it themselves, it makes sense.
He was an enigma to many and for good reason.
