A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court

Book Cover: I don’t know what Dennis the Menace’s dad did, but Santa is NOT happy about it.

Category: American Literature, post 1865, science fiction

Why I Read It: Because it’s Mark Freaking Twain! You don’t say ‘no’ to Mark Twain! And because I needed to know that Twain could write without delving into vernacular. Turns out he can, thank God, although I don’t think he likes to.

Reading Time Period: August 1, 2010-August 5, 2010.

Book Printing and Condition: Printed in 1964, the second printing of the Reader’s Enrichment Series by Washington Square Press, which means, according to the back of the book, there are SUPPLEMENTS. It almost matches the copy of Huckleberry Finn I bought at the same store.

More SUPPLEMENTS than a hospital pharmacy.

Where I bought it: St. Vincent de Paul in Cheyenne, WY, for fifty cents, a quarter less than it used to sell for back in the day, apparently.

Thoughts: Reading this book gave me a headache, and there was no getting around it. It wasn’t Mark Twain’s fault, and it wasn’t the fault of the book. I really enjoyed it, more than I did Huckleberry Finn (which may be sacrilege to say). My problem was I was being pulled in four different directions and it was hard to keep up.


Obviously, the book is comparing two time periods: the past and the preset. The problem is that the ‘present’ here is 1889, 121 years ago. So almost all of those moments where Hank is supposed to be representing what the reader should be familiar with sailed over my head. Like, on page 11, right in the beginning, within minutes of Hank waking up in the sixth century, he sees tracks from wheels “that apparently had a tire as broad as one’s hand.”

Um, yes? It’s apparent from the ‘apparently’ that Hank think this is odd. What I don’t know, without research, is why he thinks this is odd. Should they be thinner? Thicker? I’m thinking thinner, that he’s thinking of wagon wheels, but again, without research, I don’t know. Today if someone saw tracks like Hank sees they’d be wondering why there are no tread marks before wondering about the width.

This also comes up with the language. Twain is contrasting the old world English with the English of ‘today.’ But I have a hard enough time keeping up with Twain’s language. English is a living language, and whether everyone likes it or not, it is constantly changing. Given that I have a hard enough time understanding some of the phrasing Hank uses – phrasing that’s barely over a hundred years old – I have a hard time believing that Hank would understand anyone in the sixth century, and they him. The fact that Hank continually gets pissed at the people in the sixth century for not understanding his lingo even after he’s been there for over three years cracks me up. In fact, after a cursorily glance at Wikipedia to remind me of what I’ve learned in Brit Lit 1 and History of the English Language, in the time of King Arthur’s court everybody was speaking Old English, aka that gibberish that makes up original copies of Beowulf.

This could be the dirtiest thing you'd ever read in your life and you'd never know it.

Adding to this is the fact that my edition was printed in 1964. Which means that, besides the restored fronts piece from the original work, the illustrations were drawn in 1964. Which means I’m essentially looking at Don Draper wandering around sixth century Britain.

"God, I wish I was wearing a suit right now. And drinking scotch. And smoking a cigarette. And undermining a woman."

"Well, at least I'm smoking now. But where the hell is my scotch?"

 So, I was reading a book written to contrast the sixth century and the present, where the ‘present’ is 121 years old and the illustrations 60 years old. It was more taxing than a good episode of Lost.

He's been trying to figure out "The Constant."

This is probably a sign of the times, but Mark Twain does absolutely nothing to explain how Hank gets to the sixth century in the first place. Not a God damn thing. He falls, he hits his head, and whoops! There is he being attacked by a knight! Oh the insanity! And of course, Hank never really tries to figure out how he got there, either. He just…deals. Which reminds me of this review over on io9.com, specifically this part:

“And really, there is no more fantasy or science fiction in Hollywood. There's only the movie where random shit happens, and we gotta deal with it. Sometimes it's ancient shit, sometimes it's futuristic shit. Sometimes it's space shit. Sometimes it's giant monster shit. Whatever type of shit it is, it's usually computer-generated and unreal, in the purest sense. It's from a dimension of unreality, of fakeness and incongruity. Anyway, the random shit that happens usually stands in, in some inchoate way, for our insecurities — and a lot of those insecurities are, at bottom, about the social transformation that comes out of technological change. So if you really break it down, then yeah — the "random shit happens" movie is always about our relationship to technology, even if it's ostensibly about the supernatural.”

Connecticut Yankee proves that, actually, random shit just happening is not something new, and is actually just a very fine tradition carried on by Hollywood. Of course, Hank is not so much insecure about technology as he is missing it terribly, but we need to remember this was long before the atomic bomb. It was much easier to love technology when it couldn’t kill you and everybody you know and love in a fifty mile radius.

There’s also no real explanation as to how Hank seems to know everything, ever. The man is a walking encyclopedia. He appears to have worked in a factory before tripping into the sixth century, which does explain how he knows so much about engineering and building. But how the hell does the average schmuck from Connecticut know about a total eclipse of the sun in England thirteen hundred years earlier down to the very minute it happened? And he just seems to know everything. How to build a printing press. How to build a bomb. How to build telephone and telegraph wires. And this brings me back to my time problem – I’m too far removed to know if Hank would know all these things. I have to think ‘no,’ but I can’t say for certain because I wasn’t there. It just seems a little farfetched.


This all sounds like a lot of negative dithering, but I did enjoy the book. It was hilarious, and got all the right emotions out of me. I hated Merlin, I liked Sandy, and I couldn’t imagine how Hank’s days didn’t devolve into just constantly punching Arthur in the head.