A Single-Taxer at King Arthur's Court

Beard 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."

1889 CONNECTICUT YANKEE ILLUSTRATION
1889 CONNECTICUT YANKEE ILLUSTRATION
1889 CONNECTICUT YANKEE ILLUSTRATION


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