Compulsory greatness

A case of mistaken identity is almost as surefire a way of getting laughs as putting a man in a woman's dress, so it may come as a surprise that the great humorist Mark Twain wrote The Prince and the Pauper not as a comic novel but as a mostly serious historical novel, even perhaps a thriller.

Tom Canty is a poor London boy, frequently beaten by both his father and his grandmother when he fails to return from a day of begging with sufficient money. Somehow he meets Edward, the son of King Henry VIII, a boy who looks a lot like him. They decide to see what they look like in each other's clothes. Just then they are interrupted, and Edward is mistaken for a pauper boy and sent away, while Tom is assumed to be the Prince of Wales.

Both boys are frustrated by their new circumstances, but despite their claims about their true identities, both are assumed to have suddenly developed a mental disability. Meanwhile the king dies and Tom is proclaimed the new king, with the power to do just about anything but go home. Even now Tom, who liked to pretend to be royalty when he was a pauper, is unhappy about his "compulsory greatness." Edward struggles to return to the palace in his rags while various forces, including Tom's father, work against him. Both boys, in their new identities, get a useful education about how the other half lives, and Twain gives us a great line about how "kings should go to school to their own laws at times, and so learn mercy."

It's a bit difficult to believe now, but Twain's own family thought this novel to be his best book, and in fact Twain himself was so taken with the idea that he interrupted writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so he could write this much shorter novel. Today the story seems a bit lame, although that probably has much to do with Twain's decision to have his characters speak in Shakespearean English, now even more difficult to wade through than it was 150 years ago.