Labor and Revolt in Mark Twain and William Morris

Abstract

While Mark Twain enjoyed reading William Morris’s poem “Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast” and Morris was labeled by George Bernard Shaw “an incurable Huckfinomaniac,” these men, when their names are mentioned together, are presented in opposition to one another primarily on account of Twain’s seeming distaste for Arthurian England (perhaps Morris’s favorite era) as presented in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). This essay, however, looks closely at Connecticut Yankee and Morris’s A Dream of John Ball (published serially 1886-1887) as well as Twain’s speech “The New Dynasty” and some of Morris’s essays in Commonweal to argue that these two men shared much in their thoughts regarding labor. Twain’s using “The New Dynasty” as a subtext for Chapter 13 of Connecticut Yankee resembles Morris’s own putting into A Dream of John Ball the ideas expressed in his non-fiction essays in Commonweal on labor under capitalism. Morris and Twain, then, address a similar issue in a similar way at a similar time. In their fiction they expose the exploitive tendency of consumerism, thus complementing ideas expressed in their non-fiction speeches and essays. The two novels diverge sharply in the end, however. Morris’s dreamer is renewed and cautiously optimistic about the future. Twain’s Hank Morgan dies after annihilating 25,000 knights. These conclusions, however, are not necessarily contradictory. Instead, Twain depicts through Hank the frightening ease with which a laborer himself becomes the oppressor. In this light, Connecticut Yankee is a novel far more sympathetic than antagonistic to Morris’s ideas.