A review by octavia_cade
Pudd'nhead Wilson: And Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain

3.0

This is one of those variants on the Prince and the Pauper type tales, in which a young slave woman in the American almost-South (does Missouri count as the South? I've honestly no idea) swaps her baby with that of the man she is enslaved by. The two boys grow up into each other's place, but the story really has no interest in the white-child-turned-slave, it's all about the slave-turned-white-child, and I'm not sure how I feel about him being thoroughly a bad person. On the one hand, he's cosseted and spoilt by his vacuous purported relatives to an extent which would ruin any child, but on the other it smacks a little too much of the (unfounded, in this case) argument that nature is overcoming nurture. Which is of course bollocks, but which would be absolutely of a piece with the attitudes of the time... attitudes which Twain is admittedly skewering. The final line - which I won't spoil - is so pointed, so vicious and ridiculous at once that it is both the only line Twain could have ended this story on, and worth reading the entire book for. Which seems to give the impression that it's a bad book, now that I think of it, but it isn't. I genuinely liked it, but the sting in the tail is what really makes it.