A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain — Bibliomancer edition cover
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Fiction · 1889

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Mark Twain

Reading time
about 8.5 h
Length
118,192 words · 226 pages
Structure
44 chapters · 1 front-matter section
Language
English
Era
Victorian

A Hartford mechanic, knocked on the head, wakes in Camelot in the year 528, takes over the kingdom by predicting an eclipse, and sets about industrialising the sixth century. Mark Twain published the book in 1889; it is at once a comedy, a satire of chivalry and of his own century, and, in its last chapters, something much darker.

Hank Morgan calls himself the Boss, installs telephones, newspapers and a stock exchange in the sixth century, and is certain throughout that he is improving it. Twain lets him be funny for three hundred pages and then follows the logic to the end, where the machinery Hank has built is turned on the knights and the book stops being a comedy at all.

Twain’s preface and the forty-four chapters are given complete.

Contents

  1. Preface
  2. Chapter I — Camelot
  3. Chapter II — King Arthur’s Court
  4. Chapter III — Knights of the Table Round
  5. Chapter IV — Sir Dinadan the Humorist
  6. Chapter V — An Inspiration
  7. Chapter VI — The Eclipse
  8. Chapter VII — Merlin’s Tower
  9. Chapter VIII — The Boss
  10. Chapter IX — The Tournament
  11. Chapter X — Beginnings of Civilization
  12. Chapter XI — The Yankee in Search of Adventures
  13. Chapter XII — Slow Torture
  14. Chapter XIII — Freemen
  15. Chapter XIV — “Defend Thee, Lord”
  16. Chapter XV — Sandy’s Tale
  17. Chapter XVI — Morgan Le Fay
  18. Chapter XVII — A Royal Banquet
  19. Chapter XVIII — In the Queen’s Dungeons
  20. Chapter XIX — Knight-Errantry as a Trade
  21. Chapter XX — The Ogre’s Castle
  22. Chapter XXI — The Pilgrims
  23. Chapter XXII — The Holy Fountain
  24. Chapter XXIII — Restoration of the Fountain
  25. Chapter XXIV — A Rival Magician
  26. Chapter XXV — A Competitive Examination
  27. Chapter XXVI — The First Newspaper
  28. Chapter XXVII — The Yankee and the King Travel Incognito
  29. Chapter XXVIII — Drilling the King
  30. Chapter XXIX — The Smallpox Hut
  31. Chapter XXX — The Tragedy of the Manor-House
  32. Chapter XXXI — Marco
  33. Chapter XXXII — Dowley’s Humiliation
  34. Chapter XXXIII — Sixth Century Political Economy
  35. Chapter XXXIV — The Yankee and the King Sold as Slaves
  36. Chapter XXXV — A Pitiful Incident
  37. Chapter XXXVI — An Encounter in the Dark
  38. Chapter XXXVII — An Awful Predicament
  39. Chapter XXXVIII — Sir Launcelot and Knights to the Rescue
  40. Chapter XXXIX — The Yankee’s Fight with the Knights
  41. Chapter XL — Three Years Later
  42. Chapter XLI — The Interdict
  43. Chapter XLII — War!
  44. Chapter XLIII — The Battle of the Sand Belt
  45. Chapter XLIV — A Postscript by Clarence

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Part of American Literature.

Source mind

About the author

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · Victorian

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), born in Florida, Missouri, and raised in Hannibal on the Mississippi. He was a printer, a river pilot, a prospector and a journalist in Nevada and California before The Celebrated Jumping Frog (1865) and The Innocents Abroad (1869) made his name. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee (1889) followed. He lectured around the world to recover from bankruptcy in the 1890s and died in Connecticut.

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