A Single-Taxer at King Arthur's CourtBeard is "not
only an excellent artist but an intelligent single-tax man
as well." So wrote the critic who reviewed the novel in the
New York Standard, the official paper of Henry
George's single-tax political party. That review begins by
asking, "Who could have suspected Mark Twain of being a
political and social reformer?" As an exposer of romantic
idealizations and a burlesquer of European literary forms
MT had been engaged with the kind of "reform" on display in
Connecticut Yankee throughout his career, but as
Henry Nash Smith has said, this reviewer "might be said to
be reviewing Beard's book rather than Mark Twain's."
Consistently Beard made the novel's more general critique
of the Old World look doctrinally consistent with the
Single Tax critique of social and economic injustice in
late 19th-century America. The first illustration below,
for example, uses the burdens of "rent" and "taxes" (two of
the key terms in George's vocabulary) to represent what the
text calls "burdens that have not honor." The next
illustration includes "absorber of unearned increment" and
"landgrabber" (again, George's words, not MT's) among the
vices of an aristocratic class. In Chapter 33 Beard uses
five drawings to illustrate the Yankee's (and MT's)
indictment of protectionist tariffs. In publicity for the
novel MT clearly wanted to avoid calling too much attention
to such a strictly political and economic theme, but
Beard's work makes it prominent, indeed, more prominent
than the narrative. (The word on the overfed stork's bill
is "CAPITAL," and the word on the
starving dog's hat is "LABOR."
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