I found A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court much darker than I was expecting. It begins with humor, but the story gradually becomes more cynical and disturbing in places. Twain clearly wanted to criticize superstition, monarchy, and inequality, but the novel also ends up criticizing blind faith in progress and technology. What bothered me most was that Hank Morgan constantly treats the people of Camelot like children who need to be taught nineteenth-century ideas, industry, and technology in order to raise them out of their “backwardness.” I found Morgan arrogant in the way he assumes his own society is automatically superior. He rarely seems interested in understanding the culture he has entered. Instead of trying to understand the people and their way of life, he sets out to reshape everything according to his own standards, and unsurprisingly this leads to disastrous consequences. I also thought the tonal shifts in the novel were strange but interesting. One moment the book feels playful and adventurous, and the next it becomes violent, bleak, and almost apocalyptic. By the end of the book, Twain seems much less optimistic about human nature and technological “progress.” Although I didn’t always enjoy Hank Morgan as a character, I appreciated how ambitious the novel is. It feels surprisingly modern in the way it questions whether technological advancement actually makes society better. Overall, I found it uneven but thought-provoking, and much darker and more complex when compared to other works from Mark Twain.

I found it hard to read but maybe that's just me because it's old English