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Literature: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a classic 1889 novel written by Mark Twain, about, well, exactly that. Hank Morgan, a resident of Hartford, Connecticut, suffers a blow to the head and inexplicably awakens to find himself in sixth century Britain. There, he is able to convince King Arthur that he is a powerful wizard and ends up assuming the job of the king's adviser, and attempts to impose modern technology and values onto the society.

The novel is both a satire and a seminal work of time travel science fiction. The story has been adapted many times for film, television, and other forms of media. Surprisingly enough, given the book's popularity, most literary critics rank Connecticut Yankee among the worst of Twain's written works. Although, that's like saying Macbeth is the worst of Shakespeare's tragedies.

It's in public domain; the full text can be downloaded for free at Project Gutenberg.

This Work Contains Examples Of:

  • Affably Evil: When Boss met Morgana, at first he could not belive this charming woman to be a psychopathic serial murderer.
  • Anti-Hero: Hank tells lies, kills people and permits others to kill.
  • Ax-Crazy: Morgan Le Fay. Literally.
  • Art Major Physics: upon contact with the electric fence, the Knights armour should have acted as a sort of Faraday cage, safely earthing the fences current without harming the warrior within. If the plates didn't allow the fence to conduct all the way to the ground, the many insulating (read: leather) parts of the armour (in particular the boots) would have protected the Knight anyway.
  • All Just a Dream: Possibly; Hank might just have been hit on the head too hard and dreamt the whole thing.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Sir Launcelot and 500 knights on bicycles turn up just in time to stop Hank and the King from being hanged. Hank's assistant admits he was deliberately waiting until the last minute in order to make the most dramatic entrance.
  • Blithe Spirit: Hank goes to the middle ages and almost immediately transforms it according to his Industrial Revolution background.
  • Butt Monkey: Merlin, the ultimate exemplar of human ignorance and superstition, a con man who believes his own con. Merlin does get the last laugh on the Yankee though, and, inexplicably, his final spell appears to work.
  • Brick Joke: "Hello, Central."
  • Child Soldiers: Clarence gathers 52 boys, all 14 to 17 years old, and they become Hank's last army. Clarence recruits boys, because older men fear the Church and would obey its Interdict against Hank.
  • Clarke's Third Law: Hank uses this to his advantage, performing many "miracles" with his knowledge of science and engineering.
  • The Coconut Effect: This story originates several Armor Is Useless subtropes, Twain exaggerates how incredibly cumbersome armor is to the point that Knights can barely move in their mobile shells and can't hit anything that isn't similarly slow with their massive swords. Despite this being entirely a gag for physical comedy, the idea of unbelievably heavy armor and weapons remains solidly ingrained in the public mind, and influenced such things as Dungeons & Dragons equipment having extremely unrealistic weights.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Hank, but also the knights — Hank notes when he's charged by three knights simultaneously that there's none of this chivalrous one-against-one stuff.
  • Conservation of Ninjutsu:
    • 52 boys with 19th-century technology vs. 30,000 knights. Guess who wins...
    • Earlier in the story, Hank Morgan takes on 500 knights with just a pair of revolvers and wins. To clarify, it wasn't Gun Fu. After Morgan killed 9 of them in less than a minute, the Knights decided it wasn't worth it. Good thing, because Morgan was counting on them giving up before he ran out of ammo.
  • Convenient Eclipse: one of the most iconic examples and probably the place where this trope is usually drawn from. Hank is about to be burned at the stake when an eclipse happens, convincing the locals that he really is a powerful magician. They promptly set him free according to his demands. In a tragic inside reference for Mark Twain, Hank is sentenced to be burned at the stake on June 21. Mark Twain's brother Henry was fatally burned in a fire on a steamboat, and succumbed to his injuries on June 21. Twain's biographer Ron Powers argues that this was Twain's way of dealing with his brother's death: allowing his Expy to survive death by burning.
  • Corrupt Church: Hank views the Roman Catholic Church this way and he is proven right when the Church suppresses all his technology near the end of the story. Hank opposes any established church, and reckons that the later Church of England is just as bad as the Catholic Church.
  • Curbstomp Battle: Medieval knights can't compete with 19th century military technology...
  • Demythification: The book portrays the magic in the Arthurian legend as fraudsters (including the title character) fooling the ignorant. Also subverted, when said title character falls unconscious for 1500 years so that he can personally deliver the story to Twain.
  • Disguised in Drag: After the Battle of the Sand-belt, Merlin disguises himself as a peasant woman. In this disguise, he approaches Hank's last army.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Morgan le Fay stabs a servant for bumping her, and has a man thrown into the dungeon (with a view of his own home, where she stages fake funerals to make him think that all but one of his family have died so he'll torment himself trying to guess who the Sole Survivor is) for saying her hair is red (it's actually auburn). And in the Hypocritical Humor typical of the protagonist, Hank Morgan hangs bad musicians and knights who tell jokes that have passed their use-by date.
  • Downer Ending: Arthur has died, his kingdom fallen, and the reactionary forces of chivalry are rallying to exterminate our remaining heroes. Hank manages to survive by sleeping back to his natural time, but all his works are undone and he never sees his wife, daughter, or any of his friends again.
  • Dumbass Has a Point: When incredibly dumb Sandy stops Morgana from executing the mother of the boy Morgana has meaninglessly killed before.
  • Emperor Scientist: Since "The Boss" leaves Arthur and his court in charge as harmless figureheads and relies more on inventions than science, he's more of a Shogun Engineer.
  • Evil Sorcerer: Averted. Merlin isn't really evil, he's just a Jerk Ass.
  • Flat Earth Atheist: For a man who wakes up centuries in the past, Hank is surprisingly reluctant to believe that maybe magic exists.
  • Gatling Good: Hank's last army use Gatling guns to defend their position.
  • Genre Deconstruction: The book is a deconstruction of the King Arthur mythos, which a lot of Brits took offense to. (It was compared, at one point, to defecating on a national treasure.)
  • Gentleman Snarker: Hank is this way with almost everyone, but especially the nobility. It usually goes right over their heads.
  • Giving Radio to the Romans: Hank gives many modern devices such as the telephone to medieval Britain, although most of them don't seem to be able to grasp the concept of how these things actually work.
  • God Test: Done memorably when a charlatan claims to be able to tell people whatever is happening anywhere in the world. After listening to various plausible tales of the doings of foreign potentates, Hank takes his turn: "Tell me what I'm doing with my hands behind my back right now."
  • Guns Akimbo: Hank with his Colt Dragoons during his duel with the knights.
  • Hand Wave: There's no explanation for how Hank got to Camelot in the first place. Similarly, the paradoxical implications of existing in two places at once while he sleeps for 13 centuries are also never addressed. There's a reference to "transmigration of souls" but that doesn't explain how Hank's body (and clothes) change centuries either.
  • Hand Cannon: It's interesting that no-one refers to Hank's revolvers as this. However, the Colt Dragoon was one of the most powerful handguns of its day.
  • The Hero Dies: After the Downer Ending, Hank returns to his own time and gives his manuscript to Mark Twain, but then he loses his mind and dies in bed.
  • Historical In-Joke: Hank is the source of the idiom "paying the shot". He introduced metal balls, or shot, as money. He invented the miller-gun, which is no weapon, but uses a spring to dispense shot for payment. The Church suppressed all of Hank's technology, but the phrase "paying the shot" survived into modern English, though all forget its origin.
  • Humans Are Flawed: The thesis of the book seems to be that it's not the time period, the society, or the level of technology and infrastructure that make people do evil things, it's just basic human nature. This being a Twain book, however, there a few stubborn kernels of optimism that refuse to be stamped out in the book.
  • Jerkass: Medieval society is arranged to specifically encourage and reward this sort of behavior on the part of the nobility and clergy. It is, in effect, the Empire of the Jerkass.
  • King Arthur: Along with Queen Guenever, Sir Launcelot, Merlin, and other legendary characters. Mark Twain took much from Le Morte Darthur by Thomas Mallory.
  • King Incognito: Arthur does this at one point while journeying with Hank, who wants to show him first hand what life is like for his people.
  • Knight Errant: Hank reluctantly becomes one, and the knights of the round table also qualify.
  • Lawful Stupid: The denizens of Camelot always put the rules before good sense or basic human compassion.
  • The Munchausen: All the Knights of the Round Table — no-one ever questions another knights' tale of adventure, no matter how ridiculous.
  • Medieval Morons: At least, in Hank's eyes. There's also that situation with Sandy and the pigs...
  • Mood Whiplash: The story starts as an amusing fish-out-of-water story and a satire of Arthurian legend, but by the end it's a rather grim lampoon of modern England and America that saddles us with a real downer ending.
  • More Dakka: The final charge of the knights vs. Gatling guns.
  • Mundane Luxury: Hank Morgan misses the conveniences of his own time. From chapter VII "Merlin's Tower",
    There was no soap, no matches, no looking-glass—except a metal one, about as powerful as a pail of water. And not a chromo [a color picture].... There was no gas, there were no candles.... There were no books, pens, paper or ink, and no glass in the openings they believed to be windows.... But perhaps the worst of all as, that there wasn't any sugar, coffee, tea or tobacco.
  • No Endor Holocaust: Averted. After the final battle in which tens of thousands of knights are killed, Hank Morgan's hand-picked band start getting ill from all the decomposing bodies. It's implied that these people died because Morgan was the only one who could have negotiated a truce, enabling them to escape the cave they were in.
  • One-Man Industrial Revolution: Hank introduces nineteenth-century technology to sixth-century England. Hank develops bicycles, gunpowder, and even electricity, enriching the lives of the medieval peasants (until the Church declares Hank a heretic and abolishes his inventions).
  • Polymath: In the beginning of the novel, Hank mentions his skills and knowledge in medicine, multiple disciplines of engineering, and experience of running a weapons factory staffed by two thousand violent cutthroats.
  • Princess Classic: Also deconstructed, as the ladies of the time are as rude as anyone else.
  • Red Baron: Hank Morgan's title is "The Boss"
  • Real After All: After being systematically defeated and shown to be a fraud for the entire book, Merlin uses his magic to send Hank home.
  • Reality Subtext: Mark Twain's life was seriously affected by family death at the time. Twain was in a "Rage Against the Heavens" mode.
  • The Resenter: Merlin, after Hank out-magics him. Of course he brought it on himself by trying to kill Hank essentially at first sight.
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: Justified. Revolvers were the only handguns in Hank's native time and Hank is the only gunslinger in a world full of sword-wielding knights.
  • Ridiculous Future Inflation: In anticipation of which, medieval Britain's new decimal currency is the cent, composed of 100 milrays.
  • Rip Van Winkle: Merlin's last spell (the only one that works) puts Hank Morgan to sleep for thirteen centuries, thus returning him to his home time.
  • Rock Beats Laser - Subverted: During a joust Merlin steals Hank Morgan's lasso which he's been using to rope one knight after another. Everyone thinks The Boss is finished... only for him to draw a Colt Dragoon and gun down his charging opponent. Morgan then challenges anyone who thinks he didn't fight fair to attack him then and there — and has an Oh Crap moment when several hundred knights charge him at once. Fortunately they break and run before he runs out of bullets.
  • Snipe Hunt: Averted. Everyone but the Yankee actually expects the harebrained quest they send him on to turn out to be genuine.
  • Spanner in the Works: Discussed. "The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't know the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him."
  • Stable Time Loop: Though averted in one animated adaptation — the hero wakes up in the present-day hospital and immediately goes to an encyclopedia to look up King Arthur...and bursts out laughing when he finds a picture of the king straddling a motorcycle.
  • Stranded With Edison: Hank is impressively knowledgable about the details of 19th-century technology, even leaving aside the part where he's apparently memorized a 6th-century almanac.
  • Tearjerker: Frequently, particularly when the Yankee takes the King out incognito to see what peasant life is really like.
  • Talkative Loon: Sandy, though Hank realises she's not actually crazy; she just lives in a world where people seriously believe that enchantments can turn princesses into pigs. Although she goes on and on driving him to distraction, Hank starts warming to Sandy once her quick talking gets him out of a sticky situation.
  • This Is My Boomstick: Hank manages to be quite impressive with a few homemade explosives.
  • Timeline-Altering MacGuffin: The inventor himself.
  • Time Travel: To go backwards: a head injury knocks out Hank, who wakes up in wakes up 13 centuries ago, in the time of King Arthur. To go forwards: Merlin puts Hank to sleep for 13 centuries.
  • The Tourney: Hank Morgan uses a lasso.
  • Trapped in the Past: Hank Morgan gets whacked over the head with a crowbar and finds himself in Arthurian England.
  • The World Is Not Ready: Hank does try his best to modernize the medieval era, but it's obvious too many of the locals are too entrenched in their old ways to accept the change. This leads to the fall of the kingdom and a full blown war.
  • Values Dissonance/Deliberate Values Dissonance: In-Universe,between the Yankee and the Arthurian Britons. The reader may also feel some disassociation from the Yankee's worldview, which is probably intentional.

The Adventures of Tom SawyerCreator/Mark TwainFenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
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alternative title(s): Connecticut Yankee; A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthurs Court
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