The Prince and the Pauper

I have never read any Mark Twain other than those mandated by my middle school curriculum until this one. This is another one of the many books I have inherited from my grandmother.  I decided to read it because this version has the subtitle "A Tale for Young People of All Ages" and I really liked that.

The story is sort of a classic tale of two people switching positions, in this case the aforementioned prince and pauper.  Interestingly, unlike a lot of these stories, the two main characters have no contact with each other for the majority of the story.  Also, considering the age of this tale, it probably inspired a lot of the more modern renditions of the switching story.

This book does portray a pretty grim picture of the differences between the upper and lower classes in England in those days.  Also, it shows some issues with medicine at the time and how willing people were to accept the "prince's" drastic change in behavior and knowledge levels.

What was the most interesting part of the book to me was that there were various endnotes that explained various historical implications of the events of the novel including how he felt the events of the young prince's childhood in this story affected his actual reign as king.  They also talk about various laws and historical facts that influenced his decisions about various plot points in the book.

I think that the thing I will remember about this book is the harshness of the laws presented here.  It is easy to think of things like the Salem Witch Trials as a isolated historical incident but it was really just a harsher and more extreme version of the norm at that time.  The fact that people were actually routinely flogged and burned at the stake, even for relatively minor issues, is a troubling part of our world's history.

This copy was originally published in 1944 (I think, check out this website for the interesting history of this particular printing run http://www.twainquotes.com/UniformEds/UniformEdsCh35.html).  Another interesting thing about this version, is that, because it was published during WWII, it has a small picture in the bottom inside of the back of the dust jacket.  I thought that this was pretty interesting as I had never seen anything like it before.

Overall, I would give this book a 86%.