They could not know that the pledge would not last long: Within a year he was teaching Livy “to drink a bottle of beer a night.”

Far from being the prim prude she was thought to be, Mrs. Sam Clemens was a great help to her husband, a sounding board for ideas, a secretary, and a first editor. Twain relied heavily on his wife and valued her opinions highly. It was due to this great love and regard that her posthumous reputation developed. Although her health had never been strong, Olivia had lived through four pregnancies and the trauma of a Clemens family bankruptcy (Twain lost a great deal of his formidable income on ill-advised ventures in the stock market and on the promotion of various inventions, which swallowed enormous amounts of money for development and never returned a penny), but in 1902 she suffered a cataclysmic collapse in her health. A doctor advised a change to a warmer climate, and so in 1903 the Twains moved to Florence, Italy. She died there in 1904. Twain was devastated. It was his own posthumous tributes to his wife that made her reputation as moral paragon and hence a brake on Twain’s more earthy side.

When The Prince and the Pauper was published in 1882, reviews were, in the main, positive, though some, to put it mildly, were not. A number of prominent critics expressed disappointment that Twain had turned to writing a historical novel to secure his reputation, rather than continuing in a modern American idiom—a sign, perhaps, that they were already taking Twain more seriously as a writer than he realized.

Joseph T. Goodman, an early mentor of Twain’s and the first person to hire him to write full time—as a reporter on Goodman’s Virginia City, Nevada-based newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise—was particularly unhappy with The Prince and the Pauper and did not sugarcoat his criticism. He wrote to Twain: “What could have sent you groping among the Deluge for a topic when you would have been so much more at home in the wash of today?” (Camfield, p. 443.) Twain’s reply in defense, if there was one, is not recorded. Other annoyed critics, who were British, did not take kindly to an American’s criticism of their history, law, and institutions. To these disgruntled Brits Twain did have a reply—he noted that British reviewers “would not praise the Holy Scriptures were it discovered that they had, in fact, been written by an American.” (LeMaster, J.R., ed. The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993, p. 592.) More recent critics have not been kind to The Prince and the Pauper either, placing it in the second rank of Twain’s fiction, far behind Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Van Wyck Brooks used The Prince and the Pauper as ammunition to attack Olivia Clemens, claiming to see her preference for the book as symptomatic of her censorial and repressive influence on her husband’s work. As we know, she did not function in that manner; we can only assume that she liked the book for the same reasons her daughters did.

But for the most part reviews of the book were good, though just behind the praise one could read a certain bewilderment. John T. Goodman was not the only person to think it odd that the most American of writers should write a historical novel about a foreign country. The era in which the novel takes place, the language in which it is written, and the style of the writing itself gave readers and reviewers the sense that The Prince and the Pauper was not a “Mark Twain” at all. In fact, Twain had foreseen this very problem and had briefly considered publishing the book anonymously or under a pseudonym.

There are, of course, touches of the familiar Mark Twain. The book is about boys and their adventures, a theme Twain readers had come to expect, given that The Prince and the Pauper was published just a few years after his signal success with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). (Twain continued this theme with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published three years later.) Twain even indicated his intentions with the subtitle of the book: “A Tale for Young People of All Ages.”

So, why the confusion on the part of the literary world? Well, for one thing, The Prince and the Pauper was a historical novel, set in a world known to no one at first hand: that of Tudor England in the erratic last days of King Henry VIII. Also, in order to write the book, Twain made a close study of the most famous historical novelist of the day, Sir Walter Scott. Yet Twain was on record making fun of the late-Victorian taste for medievalism and historical novels in general. In the book Sketches New and Old (1875) Twain makes his dislike of the genre plain, if not blunt, by titling one story “An Awful——Terrible Medieval Romance.” The omitted word can be easily guessed.

The story itself—the swapping of identities between Edward Tudor, heir to the throne of England, and one of his lowliest subjects, a certain Tom Canty of Offal Court, London—was a neat conceit and one that no one would have doubted Twain would have immense fun spinning out. However, while there are moments in the book of what the critics called Twain’s “burlesque,” this apparently simple story delves deeply into the baseness of the human condition—and examines it closely at both ends of the social spectrum. It is not difficult to imagine wanton cruelty and pain meted out in the slums and low dens of Tudor London. But Twain did not spare the aristocracy; he accused them of cupidity, treachery, and outright violence.