Set in sixteenth-century England, Mark Twain’s classic “tale
for young people of all ages” features two identical-looking boys—a
prince and a pauper—who trade clothes and step into each other’s
lives. While the urchin, Tom Canty, discovers luxury and power,
Prince Edward, dressed in rags, roams his kingdom and experiences
the cruelties inflicted on the poor by the Tudor monarchy. As
Christopher Paul Curtis observes in his Introduction, The Prince
and the Pauper is “funny, adventurous, and exciting, yet also
chock-full of . . . exquisitely reasoned harangues against
society’s ills.”
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the Mark Twain
Project edition, which is the approved text of the Center for
Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association.