William Golding was born in his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise, Newquay, Cornwall. The house was known as Karenza, the Cornish language word for love, and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father (Alec Golding) was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement), the school the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended. His mother, Mildred (Curnoe), kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and was a campaigner for female suffrage. Golding's mother, who was Cornish and whom he considered "a superstitious Celt", used to tell him old Cornish ghost stories from her own childhood. In 1930 Golding went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English for his final two years. His original tutor was the chemist Thomas Taylor.
In a private journal and in a memoir for his wife, Golding said he
tried to rape a 15-year-old girl when he was 18 and on his first holiday
from Oxford.
Golding took his B.A. degree with Second Class Honours in the summer of 1934, and later that year a book of his Poems was published by Macmillan & Co, with the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.
He was a schoolmaster teaching English and music at Maidstone Grammar School 1938 – 1940, before moving to Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, in April 1940. There he taught English, Philosophy, Greek, and drama until joining the navy on the 18th December 1940, reporting for duty at HMS Raleigh. He returned in 1945 and taught the same subjects until 1961.
Golding kept a personal journal for over 22 years
from 1971 until the night before his death, and which contained
approximately 2.4 million words in total. The journal was initially used
by Golding in order to record his dreams, but over time it gradually
began to function as a record of his life. The journals contained
insights including retrospective thoughts about his novels and memories
from his past. At one point Golding described setting his students up
into two groups to fight each other – an experience he drew on when
writing Lord of the Flies. John Carey,
the emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was
eventually given 'unprecedented access to Golding's unpublished papers
and journals by the Golding estate'. Though Golding had not written the journals specifically so that a biography could be written about him, Carey published William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies in 2009.
Marriage and family
Golding was engaged to Molly Evans, a woman from Marlborough, who was well liked by both of his parents. However, he broke off the engagement and married Ann Brookfield, an analytical chemist, on 30 September 1939. They had two children, David (born September, 1940) and Judith (born July, 1945).
War service
During World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940. He served on a destroyer which was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. Golding participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, commanding a landing craft that fired salvoes of rockets onto the beaches. He was also in action at Walcheren in October and November 1944, during which time 10 out of 27 assault craft that went into the attack were sunk.
"Crisis"
Golding had a troubled relationship with alcohol; Judy Carver notes that her father was "always very open, if rueful, about problems with drink". Golding suggested that his self-described "crisis", of which alcoholism played a major part, had plagued him his entire life. John Carey mentions several instances of binge drinking in his biography, including Golding's experiences in 1963; whilst on holiday in Greece (when he was meant to have been finishing his novel The Spire), after working on his writing in the morning, he would go to his preferred "Kapheneion" to drink at midday. By the evening would move onto ouzo and brandy; he developed a reputation locally for "provoking explosions".
Unfortunately, the eventual publication of The Spire the
following year did not help Golding's developing struggle with alcohol;
it had precisely the opposite effect, with the novel's scathingly
negative reviews in a BBC radio broadcast affecting him severely. Following the publication of The Pyramid in 1967, Golding experienced a severe writer's block: the result of myriad crises (family anxieties, insomnia, and a general sense of dejection).
Golding eventually became unable to deal with what he perceived to be
the intense reality of his life without first drinking copious amounts
of alcohol. Tim Kendall suggests that these experiences manifest in Golding's writing as the character Wilf in The Paper Men; "an ageing novelist whose alcohol-sodden journeys across Europe are bankrolled by the continuing success of his first book".
By the late 1960s, Golding was relying on alcohol – which he referred to as "the old, old anodyne". His first steps towards recovery came from his study of Carl Jung's writings, and in what he called "an admission of discipleship" he travelled to Switzerland in 1971 to see Jung's landscapes for himself.
That same year, he started keeping a journal in which he recorded and
interpreted his dreams; the last entry is from the day before he died,
in 1993, and the volumes-long work came to be thousands of pages long by
this time.
The crisis did inevitably affect Golding's output, and his next novel, Darkness Visible, would be published twelve years after The Pyramid; a far cry from the prolific author that had produced six novels in thirteen years since the start of his career.
But, despite this, the extent of Golding's recovery is evident from the
fact that this was only the first of six further novels that Golding
completed before his death.
Death
In 1985, Golding and his wife moved to a house called Tullimaar in Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall. He died of heart failure eight years later on 19 June 1993. His body was buried in the parish churchyard of Bowerchalke near his former home and the Wiltshire county border with Hampshire and Dorset.
On his death he left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously in 1995.
Whilst still a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth's School, in 1951 Golding began writing a manuscript of the novel initially titled Strangers from Within. In September 1953, after rejections from seven other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber and Faber
and was initially rejected by their reader, Jan Perkins, who labelled
it as "Rubbish & dull. Pointless". His book, however, was championed
by Charles Monteith, a new editor at the firm. Monteith asked for some
changes to the text and the novel was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies.
After moving in 1958 from Salisbury to nearby Bowerchalke, he met his fellow villager and walking companion James Lovelock. The two discussed Lovelock's hypothesis,
that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a single
organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the personification of the Earth in Greek mythology, and mother of the Titans.
His publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his
teaching post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1961, and he spent that
academic year in the United States as writer-in-residence at Hollins College (now Hollins University), near Roanoke, Virginia.
In 1988 Golding was appointed a Knight Bachelor.
In September 1993, only a few months after his unexpected death, the
First International William Golding Conference was held in France, where
Golding's presence had been promised and was eagerly expected.
Fiction
His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990; play, adapted by Nigel Williams,
1995), describes a group of boys stranded on a tropical island
descending into a lawless and increasingly wild existence before being
rescued. The Inheritors (1955) shows "new people" (generally identified with Homo sapiens sapiens), triumphing over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) by deceit and violence. His 1956 novel Pincher Martin records the thoughts of a drowning sailor. Free Fall
(1959) explores the issue of freedom of choice. The novel's narrator, a
World War Two soldier in a German POW Camp, endures interrogation and
solitary confinement. After these events and while recollecting the
experiences, he looks back over the choices he has made, trying to trace
precisely where he lost the freedom to make his own decisions. The Spire
(1964) follows the construction (and near collapse) of an impossibly
large spire on the top of a medieval cathedral (generally assumed to be Salisbury Cathedral).
The novel explores ideas of sexual lust, religious fervour and
delusion, and the power of the Church in Medieval England, with the
titular spire symbolizing both spiritual aspiration and worldly vanity.
Golding's 1967 novel The Pyramid
consists of three linked stories with a shared setting in a small
English town based partly on Marlborough where Golding grew up. The Scorpion God
(1971) contains three novellas, the first set in an ancient Egyptian
court ('The Scorpion God'); the second describing a prehistoric African
hunter-gatherer group ('Clonk, Clonk'); and the third in the court of a
Roman emperor ('Envoy Extraordinary'). The last of these, originally
published in 1956, was reworked by Golding into a play, The Brass Butterfly, in 1958. From 1971 to 1979 Golding published no novels. After this period he published Darkness Visible (1979): a story involving terrorism, paedophilia, and a mysterious figure who survives a fire in the Blitz, and appears to have supernatural powers. In 1980, Golding published Rites of Passage, the first of his novels about a voyage to Australia in the early nineteenth century. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1980 and Golding followed this success with Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989) to complete his 'sea trilogy', later published as one volume entitled To the Ends of the Earth. The three stories were later adapted into a mini-series for the BBC, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. In 1984 he published The Paper Men: an account of the struggles between a novelist and his would-be biographer.
The novel Lord of the Flies is arguably Golding's most famous book. Considered a modern classic, the book is read in schools around the world today.
Seahorse
was written in 1948. It is a biographical account of sailing on the
south coast of England in the summer of 1947 and contains a short
passage about being in training for D-Day.
Circle Under the Sea is an adventure novel about a writer who sails to discover archaeological treasures off the coast of the Scilly Isles.
Short Measure is a novel set in a British school akin to Bishop Wordsworth's.
Audiobooks
2005: Lord of the Flies (read by the author), Listening Library, ISBN978-0-307-28170-8
Lord of the Flies is a 1954 debut novel by Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality.
The novel has been generally well received. It was named in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 41 on the editor's list, and 25 on the reader's list. In 2003 it was listed at number 70 on the BBC's The Big Read poll, and in 2005 Time magazine named it as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Time
also included the novel in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books
of All Time. Popular reading in schools, especially in the
English-speaking world, a 2016 UK poll saw Lord of the Flies ranked third in the nation's favourite books from school.
Background
Published in 1954, Lord of the Flies was Golding's first
novel. The idea came about after Golding read what he deemed to be an
unrealistic depiction of stranded children in youth novels like The Coral Island: a Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) by R. M. Ballantyne,
and asked his wife, Ann, if it would "be a good idea if I wrote a book
about children on an island, children who behave in the way children
really would behave?" As a result, the novel contains various references to The Coral Island,
such as the rescuing naval officer's description of the boys' initial
attempts at civilised cooperation as "a jolly good show, like the Coral
Island". Golding's three central characters (Ralph, Piggy, and Jack) have also been interpreted as caricatures of Ballantyne's Coral Island protagonists.
The manuscript was rejected by many publishers before finally being accepted by London-based Faber & Faber;
an initial rejection by the "professional reader" at Faber labelled the
book an "Absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an
atomic bomb on the colonies and a group of children who land in the
jungle near New Guinea. Rubbish and dull. Pointless". However, Charles Monteith decided to take on the manuscript
and worked with Golding to complete several fairly major edits,
including the removal of the entire first section of the novel, which
had previously described an evacuation from nuclear war.
As well as this, the character of Simon was heavily redacted by
Monteith, including the removal of his interaction with a mysterious
lone figure who is never identified but implied to be God.
Monteith himself was concerned about these changes, completing
"tentative emendations", and warning against "turning Simon into a
prig".
Ultimately, Golding made all of Monteith's recommended edits and wrote
back in his final letter to his editor that "I've lost any kind of
objectivity I ever had over this novel and can hardly bear to look at
it." These manuscripts and typescripts are now available from the Special Collections Archives at the University of Exeter library for further study and research. The collection includes the original 1952 "Manuscript Notebook" (originally a Bishop Wordsworth's School notebook) containing copious edits and strikethroughs.
With the changes made by Monteith and despite the initial slow
rate of sale (about three thousand copies of the first print sold
slowly), the book soon went on to become a best-seller, with more than
ten million copies sold as of 2015. It has been adapted to film twice in English, in 1963 by Peter Brook and 1990 by Harry Hook, and once in Filipino by Lupita A. Concio (1975).
The book begins with the boys' arrival on the island after their
plane has been shot down during what seems to be part of a nuclear World
War III.
Some of the marooned characters are ordinary students, while others
arrive as a musical choir under an established leader. With the
exception of Sam, Eric, and the choirboys, they appear never to have
encountered each other before. The book portrays their descent into
savagery; left to themselves on a paradisiacal island, far from modern
civilization, the well-educated boys regress to a primitive state.
Plot
In the midst of a wartime evacuation, a British aeroplane
crashes on or near an isolated island in a remote region of the Pacific
Ocean. The only survivors are boys in their middle childhood or preadolescence. Two boys—the fair-haired Ralph and an overweight, bespectacled boy nicknamed "Piggy"—find a conch,
which Ralph uses as a horn to convene all the survivors to one area.
Ralph is optimistic, believing that grownups will come to rescue them
but Piggy realises the need to organise ("put first things first and act
proper"). Because Ralph appears responsible for bringing all the
survivors together, he immediately commands some authority over the
other boys and is quickly elected their "chief". He does not receive the
votes of the members of a boys' choir,
led by the red-headed Jack Merridew, although he allows the choir boys
to form a separate clique of hunters. Ralph establishes three primary
policies: to have fun, to survive, and to constantly maintain a smoke signal
that could alert passing ships to their presence on the island and thus
rescue them. The boys establish a form of democracy by declaring that
whoever holds the conch shall also be able to speak at their formal
gatherings and receive the attentive silence of the larger group.
Jack organises his choir into a hunting party responsible for
discovering a food source. Ralph, Jack, and a quiet, dreamy boy named
Simon soon form a loose triumvirate of leaders with Ralph as the ultimate authority. Upon inspection of the island, the three determine that it has fruit and wild pigs
for food. The boys also use Piggy's glasses to create a fire. Although
he is Ralph's only real confidant, Piggy is quickly made into an outcast
by his fellow "biguns" (older boys) and becomes the butt of the other
boys' jokes. Simon, in addition to supervising the project of
constructing shelters, feels an instinctive need to protect the
"littluns" (younger boys).
The semblance of order quickly deteriorates as the majority of
the boys turn idle; they give little aid in building shelters, spend
their time having fun and begin to develop paranoias
about the island. The central paranoia refers to a supposed monster
they call the "beast", which they all slowly begin to believe exists on
the island. Ralph insists that no such beast exists, but Jack, who has
started a power struggle with Ralph, gains a level of control over the
group by boldly promising to kill the creature. At one point, Jack
summons all of his hunters to hunt down a wild pig, drawing away those
assigned to maintain the signal fire. A ship travels by the island, but
without the boys' smoke signal to alert the ship's crew, the vessel
continues without stopping. Ralph angrily confronts Jack about his
failure to maintain the signal; in frustration Jack assaults Piggy,
breaking one of the lenses of his glasses. The boys subsequently enjoy
their first feast. Angered by the failure of the boys to attract
potential rescuers, Ralph considers relinquishing his position as
leader, but is persuaded not to do so by Piggy, who both understands
Ralph's importance and fears what will become of him should Jack take
total control.
One night, an aerial battle occurs near the island while the boys sleep, during which a fighter pilot
ejects from his plane and dies in the descent. His body drifts down to
the island in his parachute; both get tangled in a tree near the top of
the mountain. Later on, while Jack continues to scheme against Ralph,
the twins Sam and Eric, now assigned to the maintenance of the signal
fire, see the corpse of the fighter pilot and his parachute in the dark.
Mistaking the corpse for the beast, they run to the cluster of shelters
that Ralph and Simon have erected, to warn the others. This unexpected
meeting again raises tensions between Jack and Ralph. Shortly
thereafter, Jack decides to lead a party to the other side of the
island, where a mountain of stones, later called Castle Rock, forms a
place where he claims the beast resides. Only Ralph and a quiet
suspicious boy, Roger, Jack's closest supporter, agree to go; Ralph
turns back shortly before the other two boys but eventually all three
see the parachutist, whose head rises via the wind. They then flee, now
believing the beast is real. When they arrive at the shelters, Jack
calls an assembly and tries to turn the others against Ralph, asking
them to remove Ralph from his position. Receiving no support, Jack
storms off alone to form his own tribe. Roger immediately sneaks off to
join Jack, and slowly an increasing number of older boys abandon Ralph
to join Jack's tribe. Jack's tribe continues to lure recruits from the
main group by promising feasts of cooked pig. The members begin to paint
their faces and enact bizarre rites, including sacrifices to the beast.
One night, Ralph and Piggy decide to go to one of Jack's feasts.
Simon, who faints frequently and is probably an epileptic,
has a secret hideaway where he goes to be alone. One day while he is
there, Jack and his followers erect an offering to the beast nearby: a
pig's head, mounted on a sharpened stick and soon swarming with
scavenging flies. Simon conducts an imaginary dialogue with the head, which he dubs the "Lord of the Flies".
The head mocks Simon's notion that the beast is a real entity,
"something you could hunt and kill", and reveals the truth: they, the
boys, are the beast; it is inside them all. The Lord of the Flies also
warns Simon that he is in danger, because he represents the soul of man,
and predicts that the others will kill him. Simon climbs the mountain
alone and discovers that the "beast" is the dead parachutist. He rushes
down to tell the other boys, who are engaged in a ritual dance. The
frenzied boys mistake Simon for the beast, attack him, and beat him to
death. Both Ralph and Piggy participate in the melee, and they become
deeply disturbed by their actions after returning from Castle Rock.
Jack and his rebel band decide that the real symbol of power on
the island is not the conch, but Piggy's glasses—the only means the boys
have of starting a fire. They raid Ralph's camp, confiscate the
glasses, and return to their abode on Castle Rock. Ralph, now deserted
by most of his supporters, journeys to Castle Rock to confront Jack and
secure the glasses. Taking the conch and accompanied only by Piggy, Sam,
and Eric, Ralph finds the tribe and demands that they return the
valuable object. Confirming their total rejection of Ralph's authority,
the tribe capture and bind the twins under Jack's command. Ralph and
Jack engage in a fight which neither wins before Piggy tries once more
to address the tribe. Any sense of order or safety is permanently eroded
when Roger, now sadistic, deliberately drops a boulder from his vantage
point above, killing Piggy and shattering the conch. Ralph manages to
escape, but Sam and Eric are tortured by Roger until they agree to join
Jack's tribe.
Ralph secretly confronts Sam and Eric, who warn him that Jack and
Roger hate him and that Roger has sharpened a stick at both ends,
intimating that the tribe intends to hunt him like a pig and behead him.
The following morning, Jack orders his tribe to begin a hunt for Ralph.
Jack's savages set fire to the forest while Ralph desperately weighs
his options for survival. Following a long chase, most of the island is
consumed in flames. With the hunters closely behind him, Ralph trips and
falls. He looks up at a uniformed adult—a British naval officer whose
party has landed from a passing cruiser to investigate the fire. Ralph
bursts into tears over the death of Piggy and the "end of innocence".
Jack and the other boys, filthy and unkempt, also revert to their true
ages and erupt into sobs. The officer expresses his disappointment at
seeing British boys exhibiting such feral, warlike behaviour before
turning to stare awkwardly at his own warship.
Themes
At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting human impulses toward civilisation and social organisation—living by rules, peacefully and in harmony—and toward the will to power. Themes include the tension between groupthink
and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and
between morality and immorality. How these play out and how different
people feel their influence form a major subtext of Lord of the Flies, with the central themes addressed in an essay by American literary critic Harold Bloom. The name "Lord of the Flies" is a literal translation of Beelzebub, from 2 Kings 1:2–3, 6, 16.
Reception
The book, originally entitled Strangers from Within, was initially rejected by an in-house reader, Miss Perkins, at London based publishers Faber and Faber as "Rubbish & dull. Pointless". The title was considered "too abstract and too explicit". Following a further review, the book was eventually published as Lord of the Flies.
A turning point occurred when E. M. Forster chose Lord of the Flies as his "outstanding novel of the year." Other reviews described it as "not only a first-rate adventure but a parable of our times". In February 1960, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction rated Lord of the Flies
five stars out of five, stating that "Golding paints a truly terrifying
picture of the decay of a minuscule society ... Well on its way to
becoming a modern classic".
"Lord of the Flies presents a view of humanity unimaginable
before the horrors of Nazi Europe, and then plunges into speculations
about mankind in the state of nature. Bleak and specific, but universal,
fusing rage and grief, Lord of the Flies is both a novel of the 1950s, and for all time."
In his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, Marc D. Hauser says the following about Golding's Lord of the Flies:
"This riveting fiction, standard reading in most intro courses to
English literature, should be standard reading in biology, economics,
psychology, and philosophy."
Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good earned it position 68 on the American Library Association's list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990–1999.
The book has been criticized as "cynical" and portraying humanity
exclusively as "selfish creatures". It has been linked with "Tragedy of
the commons" by Garrett Hardin and books by Ayn Rand, and countered by "Management of the Commons" by Elinor Ostrom. Parallels have been drawn between the "Lord of the Flies" and an actual incident from 1965 when a group of schoolboys who sailed a fishing boat from Tonga were hit by a storm and marooned on the uninhabited island of ʻAta, considered dead by their relatives in Nuku‘alofa.
The group not only managed to survive for over 15 months but "had set
up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store
rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken
pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and
much determination". As a result, when ship captain Peter Warner found them, they were in good health and spirits. Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, writing about this situation said that Golding's portrayal was unrealistic.
It was awarded a place on both lists of Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 41 on the editor's list, and 25 on the reader's list.
In 2003, the novel was listed at number 70 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Time also included the novel in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time.
Popular in schools, especially in the English-speaking world, a 2016 UK poll saw Lord of the Flies ranked third in the nation's favourite books from school, behind George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.
A fourth adaptation, to feature an all-female cast, was announced by Warner Bros. in August 2017, but was subsequently abandoned. In July 2019, director Luca Guadagnino was said to be in negotiations for a conventionally cast version. Ladyworld, an all-female adaptation, was released in 2018.
Stage
Nigel Williams adapted the text for the stage.
It was debuted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in July 1996.
The Pilot Theatre Company has toured it extensively in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
Kansas-based Orange Mouse Theatricals and Mathew Klickstein produced a topical, gender-bending adaptation called Ladies of the Fly that was co-written by a group of young girls (ages 8–16) based on both the original text and their own lives. The production was performed by the girls themselves as an immersive live-action show in August 2018.
Radio
In June 2013, BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast a dramatisation by Judith Adams in four 30-minute episodes directed by Sasha Yevtushenko. The cast included Ruth Wilson
as "The Narrator", Finn Bennett as "Ralph", Richard Linnel as "Jack",
Caspar Hilton-Hilley as "Piggy" and Jack Caine as "Simon".
Fire on the Mountain
Painted Faces
Beast from the Air
Gift for Darkness
Influence
Many writers have borrowed plot elements from Lord of the Flies. By the early 1960s, it was required reading in many schools and colleges.
Literature
Author Stephen King uses the name Castle Rock, from the mountain fort in Lord of the Flies, as a fictional town that has appeared in a number of his novels. The book itself appears prominently in his novels Hearts in Atlantis (1999), Misery (1987), and Cujo (1981).
King wrote an introduction for a new edition of Lord of the Flies (2011) to mark the centenary of William Golding's birth in 1911.
The Filipino indie pop/alternative rock outfit The Camerawalls include a song entitled "Lord of the Flies" on their 2008 album Pocket Guide to the Otherworld.
Editions
Golding, William (1958) [1954]. Lord of the Flies (Print ed.). Boston: Faber & Faber.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an 1889 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The book was originally titled A Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Some early editions are titled A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.
In the book, a Yankeeengineer from Connecticut named Hank Morgan receives a severe blow to the head and is somehow transported in time and space to England during the reign of King Arthur.
After some initial confusion and his capture by one of Arthur's
knights, Hank realizes that he is actually in the past, and he uses his
knowledge to make people believe that he is a powerful magician. He attempts to modernize the past in order to make people's lives better, but in the end he is unable to prevent the death of Arthur and an interdict against him by the Catholic Church of the time, which grows fearful of his power.
Twain wrote the book as a burlesque of Romantic notions of chivalry
after being inspired by a dream in which he was a knight himself,
severely inconvenienced by the weight and cumbersome nature of his armor. It is a satire of feudalism and monarchy that also celebrates homespun ingenuity and democratic values while questioning the ideals of capitalism and outcomes of the Industrial Revolution. It is among several works by Twain and his contemporaries that mark the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era of socioeconomic discourse. It is often cited as a formative example of the time travel genre.
Plot
The
novel is a comedy set in 6th-century England and its medieval culture
through Hank Morgan's view; he is a 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut, who, after a blow to the head, awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval England
where he meets King Arthur himself. Hank, who had an image of that time
that had been colored over the years by romantic myths, takes on the
task of analyzing the problems and sharing his knowledge from 1300 years
in the future to try to modernize, Americanize, and improve the lives
of the people.
Many passages are quoted directly from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur,
a late medieval collection of Arthurian legends that constitutes one of
the main sources on the myth of King Arthur and Camelot. The frame
narrator is a 19th-century man (ostensibly Mark Twain himself) who meets
Hank Morgan in modern times and begins reading Hank's book in the
museum in which they both meet. Later, characters in the story retell
parts of it in Malory's original language. A chapter on medieval hermits
also draws from the work of William Edward Hartpole Lecky.
Introduction to the "stranger"
"'Bridgeport?' said I, pointing. 'Camelot', said he."
The story begins as a first-person narrative in Warwick Castle, where a man details his recollection of a tale told to him by an "interested stranger" who is personified as a knight through his simple language and familiarity with ancient armor.
After a brief tale of Sir Lancelot of Camelot and his role in slaying two giants from the third-person narrative, taken directly from Le Morte d'Arthur,
the man named Hank Morgan enters and, after being given whiskey by the
narrator, he is persuaded to reveal more of his story. Described through
first-person narrative as a man familiar with the firearms and machinery
trade, Hank is a man who had reached the level of superintendent
because of his proficiency in firearms manufacturing, with 2000
subordinates. He describes the beginning of his tale by illustrating
details of a disagreement with his subordinates during which he
sustained a head injury from a "crusher" to the head caused by a man named "Hercules" using a crowbar.
After passing out from the blow, Hank describes waking up
underneath an oak tree in a rural area of Camelot, where he soon
encounters the knight Sir Kay, riding by. Kay challenges him to a joust,
which is quickly lost by the unweaponed, unarmored Hank as he scuttles
up a tree. Kay captures Hank and leads him towards Camelot Castle. Upon recognizing that he has time-traveled to the 6th century, Hank realizes that he is the de facto smartest person on Earth, and with his knowledge he should soon be running things.
Hank is ridiculed at King Arthur's court for his strange
appearance and dress and is sentenced by them, particularly the magician
Merlin, to burn at the stake on 21 June. By a stroke of luck, the date of the burning coincides with a historical solar eclipse in 528 of which Hank had learned in his earlier life (however, NASA
and other listings of solar eclipses show there in fact was no solar
eclipse on that date). In prison, he sends the boy whom he christens
Clarence (whose real name is Amyas le Poulet)
to inform the king that he will blot out the sun if he is executed.
Hank believes the current date to be 20 June; however, it is actually
the 21st when he makes his threat, the day that the eclipse will occur
at 12:03 p.m. When the King decides to burn him, the eclipse catches
Hank by surprise. However, he quickly uses it to his advantage and
convinces the people that he caused the eclipse. He makes a bargain with
the king, is released, and becomes the second most powerful person in
the kingdom. (Twain may have drawn inspiration for that part of the
story from a historical incident in which Christopher Columbus exploited foreknowledge of a lunar eclipse.)
Hank is given the position of principal minister to the king and
is treated by all with the utmost fear and awe. His celebrity brings him
to be known by a new title, elected by the people, "The Boss". However,
he proclaims that his only income will be taken as a percentage of any
increase in the kingdom's gross national product,
which he succeeds in creating for the state as Arthur's chief minister,
which King Arthur sees as fair. Although the people fear him and he has
his new title, Hank is still seen as somewhat of an equal. The people
might grovel to him if he were a knight or some form of nobility, but
Hank faces problems from time to time since he refuses to seek to join
such ranks.
The Takeover
After being made "the Boss," Hank learns about medieval practices and superstitions.
Having superior knowledge, he is able to outdo the alleged sorcerers
and miracle-working church officials. At one point, soon after the
eclipse, people began gathering, hoping to see Hank perform another
miracle. Merlin, jealous of Hank having replaced him both as the king's
principal adviser and as the most powerful sorcerer of the realm, begins
spreading rumors that Hank is a fake and cannot supply another miracle.
Hank secretly manufactures gunpowder and a lightning rod, plants
explosive charges in Merlin's tower, and places the lightning rod at the
top and runs a wire to the explosive charges. He then announces (when
storms are frequent) that he will soon call down fire from heaven and
destroy Merlin's tower and challenges Merlin to use his sorcery to
prevent it. Of course, Merlin's "incantations" fail utterly to prevent
lightning striking the rod, triggering the explosive charges, and
leveling the tower, further diminishing Merlin's reputation.
Hank Morgan, in his position as King's Minister, uses his
authority and his modern knowledge to industrialize the country behind
the back of the rest of the ruling class. His assistant is Clarence, a
young boy he meets at court, whom he educates and gradually lets in on
most of his secrets, and eventually comes to rely on heavily. Hank sets
up secret schools, which teach modern ideas and modern English, thereby
removing the new generation from medieval concepts and secretly
constructs hidden factories, which produce modern tools and weapons. He
carefully selects the individuals he allows to enter his factories and
schools, seeking to select only the most promising and least
indoctrinated in medieval ideas, favoring selection of the young and
malleable whenever possible.
As Hank gradually adjusts to his new situation, he begins to attend medieval tournaments. A misunderstanding causes Sir Sagramore to challenge Hank to a duel to the death. The combat will take place when Sagramore returns from his quest for the Holy Grail.
Hank accepts and spends the next few years building up 19th-century
infrastructure behind the nobility's back. He then undertakes an
adventure with a wandering girl named the Demoiselle Alisande a la
Carteloise, nicknamed "Sandy" by Hank in short order, to save her royal
"mistresses" being held captive by ogres. On the way, Hank struggles
with the inconveniences of plate armor (actually an anachronism, which would not be developed until the High Middle Ages or see widespread use until the Late Middle Ages) and encounters Morgan le Fay.
The "princesses", "ogres", and "castles" are all revealed to be
actually pigs owned by peasant swineherds, but to Sandy, they still
appear as royalty. Hank buys the pigs from the peasants, and the two
leave.
On the way back to Camelot, they find a travelling group of
pilgrims headed for the Valley of Holiness. Another group of pilgrims,
however, comes from that direction and bears the news that the valley's
famous fountain has run dry. According to legend, long ago the fountain
had gone dry as soon as the monks of the valley's monastery built a bath
with it. The bath was destroyed and the water instantly returned, but
this time it has stopped with no clear cause. Hank is begged to restore
the fountain although Merlin is already trying to do so. When Merlin
fails, he claims that the fountain has been corrupted by a demon and
that it will never flow again. Hank, to look good, agrees that a demon
has corrupted the fountain but also claims to be able to banish it; in
reality, the "fountain" is simply leaking.
He procures assistants from Camelot trained by himself, who bring
along a pump and fireworks for special effects. They repair the
fountain and Hank begins the "banishment" of the demon. At the end of
several long pseudo-Germanic "magical" phrases cued to his firework
displays, he spouts a nonsense noise, "BGWJJILLIGKKK", but Merlin agrees
with Hank that it is the name of the demon. The fountain restored, Hank
goes on to debunk another magician who claims to be able to tell what
any person in the world is doing, including King Arthur. However, Hank
knows via telephone that the King is riding out to see the restored
fountain and not "resting from the chase" as the "false prophet" had
foretold to the people. Hank correctly states that the King will arrive
in the valley.
Hank has an idea to travel among the poor disguised as a peasant
to find out how they truly live. King Arthur joins him but has extreme
difficulty in acting like a peasant convincingly. Although Arthur is
somewhat disillusioned about the national standard of life after hearing
the story of a mother infected with smallpox,
he still ends up getting Hank and himself hunted down by the members of
a village after making several extremely erroneous remarks about
agriculture. Although they are saved by a nobleman's entourage, the same
nobleman later arrests them and sells them into slavery.
Hank steals a piece of metal in London and uses it to create a makeshift lockpick.
His plan is to free himself and the king, beat up their slave driver,
and return to Camelot. However, before he can free the king, a man
enters their quarters in the dark. Mistaking him for the slave driver,
Hank rushes after him alone and starts a fight with him. They are both
arrested. Hank lies his way out, but in his absence, the real slave
driver has discovered Hank's escape. Since Hank was the most valuable
slave, he was due to be sold the next day. The man becomes enraged and
begins beating his other slaves, who fight back and kill him. All the
slaves, including the king, will be hanged as soon as the missing one,
Hank, is found. Hank is captured, but he and Arthur are rescued by a
party of knights led by Lancelot,
riding bicycles. Then, the king becomes extremely bitter against
slavery and vows to abolish it when they get free, much to Hank's
delight.
Sagramore returns from his quest and fights Hank, who defeats him
and seven others, including Galahad and Lancelot, using a lasso. When
Merlin steals Hank's lasso, Sagramore returns to challenge him again.
This time, Hank kills him with a revolver. He proceeds to challenge the
knights of Britain to attack him en masse, which they do. After he kills
nine more knights with his revolvers, the rest break and flee. The next
day, Hank reveals his 19th-century infrastructure to the country. With
that fact, he was called a wizard since he told Clarence to do so as
well.
Interdict
Three
years later, Hank has married Sandy, and they have a baby. While asleep
and dreaming, Hank says, "Hello-Central", a reference to calling a
19th-century telephone
operator, and Sandy believes that the mystic phrase to be the name of a
former girlfriend or lover and thus to please him names their child
accordingly. However, the baby falls critically ill, and Hank's doctors
advise him to take his family overseas while the baby recovers. In
reality, it is a ploy by the Catholic Church to get Hank out of the
country to leave it without effective leadership. During the weeks that
Hank is absent, Arthur discovers Guinevere's infidelity with Lancelot. That causes a war between Lancelot and Arthur, who is eventually killed by Sir Mordred.
The church then places the land under interdict, causing all people to break away from Hank and revolt. Hank sees that something is wrong by the lack of trade in the English Channel,
and returns to Britain to meet with his good friend Clarence who
informs him of the war thus far. As time goes on, Clarence gathers 52
young cadets, aged from 14 to 17, who are to fight against all of
Britain. Hank's band fortifies itself in Merlin's Cave with a minefield,
electric wire and Gatling guns.
The Catholic Church sends an army of 30,000 knights to attack them, but
they are slaughtered by the cadets wielding Hank's modern weaponry.
However, Hank's men are now trapped in the cave by a wall of dead bodies and sickened by the miasma
bred by thousands of corpses. Hank attempts to go offer aid to any
wounded, but is stabbed by the first wounded man he tries to help, Sir Meliagraunce.
He is not seriously injured but is bedridden. Disease begins to set in.
One night, Clarence finds Merlin weaving a spell over Hank, proclaiming
that he will sleep for 1,300 years. Merlin begins laughing deliriously
but ends up electrocuting himself on one of the electric wires. Clarence
and the others all apparently die from disease in the cave.
More than a millennium later, the narrator finishes the
manuscript and finds Hank on his deathbed and dreaming about Sandy. He
attempts to make one last "effect" but dies before he can finish it.
Publication history and response
First English edition, 1889
Twain first conceived of the idea behind A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in December 1884 and worked on it between 1885 and 1889. The principal part of the writing was done at Twain's summer home at Elmira, New York and was completed at Hartford, Connecticut. It was first published in England by Chatto & Windus under the title A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur in December 1889. Writer and critic William Dean Howells called it Twain's best work and "an object-lesson in democracy".
The work was met with some indignation in Great Britain as it was
perceived as "a direct attack on [its] the hereditary and aristocratic
institutions".
Analysis
The book pokes fun at contemporary society, but the main thrust is a satire of romanticized ideas of chivalry, and of the idealization of the Middle Ages common in the novels of Sir Walter Scott
and other 19th-century literature. Twain had a particular dislike for
Scott, blaming his kind of romanticizing of battle for the southern states' deciding to fight the American Civil War. He writes in Life on the Mississippi:
It was Sir Walter that made every
gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge,
before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value
these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down
there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in
them. [...] Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character,
as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible
for the war.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.
For example, the book portrays the medieval people as being very
gullible, as when Merlin makes a "veil of invisibility" which, according
to him, will make the wearer imperceptible to his enemies, though
friends can still see him. The knight Sir Sagramor wears it to fight Hank, who pretends that he cannot see Sagramor for effect to the audience.
Hank Morgan's opinions are also strongly denounciatory towards the Catholic Church of the medieval period; the Church is seen by the Yankee as an oppressive institution that stifles science and teaches peasants meekness
only as a means of preventing the overthrow of Church rule and
taxation. The book also contains many depictions and condemnations of
the dangers of superstition and the horrors of medieval slavery.
The book provides evidence of Twain's growing interest in Georgist economics and social theory. This is particularly evident in the interpretative illustrations by Georgist activist Daniel Carter Beard. Twain approved and considered them an essential part of the work.
George Orwell strongly disapproved of the book: "[Twain] squandered his time on boffooneries [such as] A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,
which is a deliberate flattery of all that is worst and most vulgar in
American Life" (i.e. the various American inventions and institutions
Hank Morgan introduces into sixth-century Britain and whose excellence
and superiority are taken for granted).
It is possible to see the book as an important transitional work
for Twain, in that earlier, sunnier passages recall the frontier humor
of his tall tales such as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,
while the corrosive view of human behavior in the apocalyptic latter
chapters is more akin to darker, later Twain works such as The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth.
George Hardy notes, "The final scenes of 'Connecticut Yankee'
depict massed cavalry attempting to storm a position defended by wire
and machine guns—and getting massacred, none reaching their objective.
Deduct the fantasy anachronism of the assailants being Medieval knights,
and you get a chillingly accurate prediction of a typical First World War battle.... The modern soldiers of 1914 with their bayonets had no more chance to win such a fight than Twain's knights".
One frequently overlooked aspect of the book is the emotional
intensity felt by Hank towards his family: wife Sandy and baby
Hello-Central. Twain's own son, Langdon, died of diphtheria at the age
of 19 months, which was likely reflected in Hello-Central's membranous
croup. Twain also outlived two of his three daughters, but they both
died after the completion of "Yankee." The last chapters of the book
are full of Hank's pronouncements of love, culminating in his final
delirium, where "an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and
you!" is worse than death.
As science fiction
While Connecticut Yankee is sometimes credited as the foundational work in the time travel subgenre of science fiction, Twain's novel had several important immediate predecessors. Among them are H.G. Wells's story "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888), which was a precursor to The Time Machine (1895). Also published the year before Connecticut Yankee was Edward Bellamy's wildly popular Looking Backward
(1888), in which the protagonist is put into a hypnosis-induced sleep
and wakes up in the year 2000. Yet another American novel that could
have served as a more direct inspiration to Twain was The Fortunate Island (1882) by Charles Heber Clark.
In this novel, a technically proficient American is shipwrecked on an
island that broke off from Britain during Arthurian times, and never
developed any further.
Twain's book introduced what remains one of the main literary
devices used in Time Travel literature - a modern person is suddenly
hurled into the past, by some force completely beyond the traveler's
control, is stuck there irrevocably, and must make the best of it -
typically, by trying to introduce modern inventions and institutions
into the past society. Several works considered classics of science
fiction clearly follow on this pattern set by Twain, such as L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and Poul Anderson's The Man Who Came Early.
This strand of Time Travel literature is clearly distinct from that
following the basic pattern of the Wells works, where the protagonist is
in possession of a time machine and is able to travel at will back and
forth in time.
It has also inspired many variations and parodies, such as the 1979 Bugs Bunny special A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's Court. A Knight for a Day is a 1946 Disney short film starring Goofy that is loosely inspired by the novel. In 1995, Walt Disney Studios adapted the book into the feature film A Kid in King Arthur's Court. Army of Darkness drew many inspirations from the novel. A 1992 cartoon series, King Arthur & the Knights of Justice, could also be seen as deriving inspiration from the novel. Terry Pratchett's
1995 short story "Once and Future" tells a similar story of a
time-traveller, Mervin, stranded in a pre-Arthurian "Avalon", who refers
to himself as being like "the Connecticut Yankee". In 1998 Disney made
another adaption with Whoopi Goldberg in A Knight in Camelot. The 2001 film Black Knight similarly transports a modern-day American to Medieval England while adding racial element to the time-traveler plotline.
In the Carl Sagan novel Contact, the protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, is reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, specifically the scene where Hank first approaches Camelot, when she finds out about her father's death. The quotation "'Bridgeport?'
Said I. 'Camelot,' Said he" is also used later in the book, and the
story is used as a metaphor for contact between civilizations at very
different levels of technological and ethical advancement.
Yankee has also greatly influenced the premier Soviet sci-fi writers, Strugatsky Brothers, and their two seminal books. In humorous Monday Begins on Saturday Merlin's character is taken entirely from the Mark Twain's book, and he often references it. Hard to Be a God is essentially a remake of Yankee, concentrating on the moral and ethical questions of "civilizing the uncivilized." Its ending is almost identical to Yankee: both main protagonists crumble under the weight of dead bodies of those they tried to civilize.
The fifth season of TV series Once Upon a Time features Hank Morgan. He is introduced in the episode "Dreamcatcher"
as Sir Morgan, a widower with a teenaged daughter, Violet, living in a
Camelot that exists in a magical reality. Violet becomes a love
interest for main character Henry Mills.
Morgan does not appear on screen again, but is mentioned in later
episodes. He and Violet, along with other Camelot residents, are
transported to Storybrooke in the "real" world. When most of Arthur's
court returns to Camelot, Violet informs Henry that she and her father
will stay in Storybrooke, as her father is originally from Connecticut
in the same world. A tie-in novel, Henry and Violet, confirms other details consistent with Twain's novel, such as Hank leaving Connecticut in the year 1889.
In the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series by James A. Owen,
Hank appears in several books as a time-travelling "Messenger"
recruited by Mark Twain. Hank is able to travel through time and space
at will using an enchanted pocketwatch, which eventually suffers a
malfunction that strands him in the time stream. (Sandy and
Hello-Central are not mentioned in the series.)
The television series MacGyver
includes a two-part adaptation ("Good Knight MacGyver", season 7,
episodes 7 & 8, 1991) in which a modern-day engineer is transported
to Arthur's court, where he uses his "magic" (science) to assist Merlin
and save the king from a deadly plot. After over six seasons on the air,
the second part is the only episode to ever reveal MacGyver's first
name.
