书名：The Prince and the Pauper 王子与贫儿 100周年纪念版
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数620
作者：Mark Twain马克·吐温
出版社名称： Signet Classics
出版时间：2002
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451528353
商品尺寸：10.6 x 1.6 x 17.1 cm
包装：平装
页数：224 （以实物为准）
The Prince and the Pauper《王子与贫儿》，是美国批判现实主义作家马克吐温的经典作品，创作于美国帝国主义时期。巧妙结合文学手段，讽刺了当时萧条经济中美国社会的现状。一经出版，便被翻译成各种语言，广受全世界读者的关注与深爱。马克吐温一度被称为“美国文学史上的林肯”，被评为影响美国100位名人中的第16位。他的文学贡献使得占据了不可撼动的世界地位。他的所有作品都堪称经典，值得深入研读。
With an Afterword by Everett Emerson
Twain wroteThe Prince and the Pauper having already startedThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain wrote, “My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the King himself and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others...” Having returned from a second European tour which formed the basis of A Tramp Abroad (1880), Twain read extensively English and French history. Initially intended as a play, it was originally set in Victorian England, before he decided to set it further back in time. The “whipping-boy story” was published in the Hartfod Bazar Budget of July 4, 1880 before he deleted it from the novel at the suggestion of William Dean Howells.
Review:
“Twain was… enough of a genius to build his morality into his books, with humor and wit and—in the case ofThe Prince and the Pauper—wonderful plotting.” —E. L. Doctorow
Two boys exchange their clothes and their lives in Mark Twain’s classic satiric comedy.
They are the same age. They look alike. In fact, there is but one difference between them: Tom Canty is a child of the London slums; Edward Tudor is heir to the throne of England. Just how insubstantial this difference really is becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of roles… with the pauper caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wandering, horror-stricken, through the lower depths of sixteenth-century English society.
Out of the theme of switched identities, Mark Twain has fashioned both a scathing attack upon social hypocrisy and injustice and an irresistible comedy imbued with the sense of high-spirited play that belongs to his most creative period.
Mark Twainwas born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835 and died in Redding, Connecticut, in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”
A graduate of Harvard College,Everett Emerson is Alumni Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the authoror editorof many books, including Mark Twain: A Literary Life(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Emerson also has taught in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, and California. He isthe founder of the Mark Twain Circle, and for twenty years edited the journalEarlyAmerican Literature.
Chapter II
Tom’s Early Life
Let us skip a number of years.
London was fifteen hundred years old, and was a great town-for that day. It had a hundred thousand inhabitants-some think double as many. The streets were very narrow, and crooked, and dirty, especially in the part where Tom Canty lived, which was not far from London Bridge. The houses were of wood, with the second story projecting over the first, and the third sticking its elbows out beyond the second. The higher the houses grew, the broader they grew. They were skeletons of strong criss-cross beams, with solid material between, coated with plaster. The beams were painted red or blue or black, according to the owner’s taste, and this gave the houses a very picturesque look. The windows were small, glazed with little diamond-shaped panes, and they opened outward, on hinges, like doors.
The house which Tom’s father lived in was up a foul little pocket called Offal Court, out of Pudding Lane. It was small, decayed, and ricketty, but it was packed full of wretchedly poor families. Canty’s tribe occupied a room on the third floor. The mother and father had a sort of bedstead in the corner, but Tom, his grandmother, and his two sisters, Bet and Nan, were not restricted-they had all the floor to themselves, and might sleep where they chose. There were the remains of a blanket or two and some bundles of ancient and dirty straw, but these could not rightly be called beds, for they were not organized; they were kicked into a general pile, mornings, and selections made from the mass at night, for service.
Bet and Nan were fifteen years old-twins. They were good-hearted girls, unclean, clothed in rags, and profoundly ignorant. Their mother was like them. But the father and the grandmother were a couple of fiends. They got drunk whenever they could; then they fought each other or anybody else who came in the way; they cursed and swore always, drunk or sober; John Canty was a thief, and his mother a beggar. They made beggars of the children, but failed to make thieves of them. Among, but not of, the dreadful rabble that inhabited the house, was a good old priest whom the king had turned out of house and home with a pension of a few farthings, and he used to get the children aside and teach them right ways secretly. Father Andrew also taught Tom a little Latin, and how to read and write; and would have done the same with the girls, but they were afraid of the jeers of their friends, who could not have endured such a queer accomplishment in them.
