The Prince and the Pauper

Tom Canty, a pauper boy from Offal Court who has spent his childhood fantasizing about princes, and Edward Tudor, heir to Henry VIII, meet by chance, swap clothes as a lark, and discover neither can swap back once the world outside has already decided which of them is which: Tom is trapped inside a royal court that assumes he's simply gone mad, and Edward is cast out into a London his own future laws will go on enforcing against people exactly like the ones now refusing to believe he's the king.

Twain sends Edward through the underside of his own kingdom, whipping posts, debtors' prisons, executions handed down for petty theft, a vicious internal hierarchy among the thieves and beggars who've built their own brutal order out of shared desperation, turning a children's fable into a fairly direct piece of social protest: the boy who will eventually write the laws first has to survive being punished by them. Tom, meanwhile, coached by a sympathetic clerk into performing kingliness convincingly, governs well enough that the novel lets a reader wonder, without ever quite saying so, whether the pauper might make the better monarch.

The Great Seal of England, the one object that could prove Edward's identity beyond argument, sits forgotten through most of the novel because Edward himself used it, before the swap, to crack nuts, and its recovery becomes a running joke that doubles as a serious point: the physical trappings of royal authority mean nothing at all once the people who hold them have forgotten what they were ever for.

Tom, meanwhile, mistaken for mad whenever he tries to explain the swap honestly, learns fast that the palace rewards a confident performance of kingship far more than it rewards the truth, and Twain lets that lesson sit uncomfortably close to the novel's larger argument about Edward: a throne, like the Seal itself, cares less what a person actually is than what they can be made to convincingly resemble.