The Prince and the Pauper

In the London of 1547, two boys born on the same day meet by chance: Tom Canty, a beggar's son from Offal Court, and Prince Edward, heir to Henry VIII. They swap clothes for fun, the guards throw the real prince out of the palace, and each must survive in the other's world. Edward learns how harsh his father's laws are for the poor, while Tom discovers the absurd rituals of the court.

Published in 1881, it was Mark Twain's first historical novel, and it is often given to young readers, but beneath the comedy is a sharp attack on cruel punishments and inherited privilege. It makes a good companion to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, his other trip into the English past.

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.

He drew on his boyhood for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and on his piloting years for Life on the Mississippi. Late in life he lost his fortune in bad investments and paid his debts with a lecture tour around the world. He was born in a year of Halley's Comet and died when it returned.