My first impression after reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court through was this: Mark Twain must have read about the Satsuma rebellion in the news and become absolutely drunk with the idea. The image of self-important nobility charging to their deaths under the guns of lowly but industrious commoners really lit his fire, I thought, so he switched King Arthur’s Britain in for 19th century Japan, and we got this book. The book jacket, which said that it was an “illustration of the fallacy of two ideals”, is just slop—Twain loved industrialism and hated chivalry. He could not even think of a good way to kill off his industrialized Camelot without Deus Ex Machina in the form of the Catholic Church.
Had Twain lived to see either of the World Wars, he might have grasped one flaw of industrialism—that all those mass-produced bombs and weapons might one day be used on somebody, and the cause might not be so noble. Twain’s Yankee is the foreman of a Connecticut gun factory, mysteriously transported back in time, who makes it his mission to shake England from the slumber of the Dark Ages. As a character he is all hero, with human weaknesses but no dark side.
But the thing to really understand about A Connecticut Yankee, which I did not see at first, is that the author’s premise is not really industry versus feudalism as much as North versus South, i.e. the American Civil War. The book was published about twenty years after the war’s end, when the voices of Southern apologists were growing louder. Twain’s story attacks Southern legitimacy from two angles—his vivid descriptions of brutality under the feudal system are an allegory for Southern slavery, and he portrays the knights of Camelot, the shining ideals of the antebellum aristocracy, as ignorant, laughable boors. In this context, his portrayal of a scheming, malicious Catholic Church rounds out a consistent picture: Twain was simply channeling the pro-industrial anti-Southern anti-Catholic sentiments felt by many Northerners and Westerners of his day.
The tale is quite entertaining as a tale, and contains enlightening and educational anecdotes on the state of things under feudalism and the nature of the human soul. But as a relic of a bygone era of American thought the book is priceless. This was a time when people like Mark Twain still believed that the machinery of war could wreak good and noble work in the world; a time when a pacifist intellectual could fantasize gleefully about the violent extermination of an entire segment of society. Bolder times than now for sure.
Title reviewed: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Author: Mark Twain
Year published: 1889
Availability: Your local library
