Mark Twain and the Introduction of the Time Travel Novel

 

Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was one of the earliest time travel novels and yet Twain writes with a polish that has apparently long since disappeared in the genre. A decade later H.G. Wells’s Time Machine would use time travel as a cautionary tale and popularized many of the tropes familiar to science-fiction and fantasy lovers today. Indeed, time travel novels have seldom strayed far from warnings of dystopia.

In this regard, A Connecticut Yankee started the mold by telling of things to come but, writing before the genre developed its own expectations, Twain had some wiggle room. The Past Middle Ages paints an unflattering parable to then contemporary America and Britain. Twain swims through the as yet unestablished laws and conventions of time travel fiction with remarkable ease for a pioneer in the genre.

Arguably, the embryo of time travel fiction was Dickens’s Christmas Carol and, though the future looked bleak enough to warn Scrooge of his miserly ways the glimpses of both the future and past were, in essence, moving picture which neither Scrooge nor the Spirits could interact with. It could be argued that Scrooge did not travel through time at all but was rather “shown” the past roots of dissent to greed and the dark future awaiting him unless he changed. The key here is that Scrooge could not alter the past but only create a better future.

To philosophers and future science-fiction writers this was something of a relief as the implications of altering the past could be dire. These warnings were not yet making waves, however, when Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee and still, the novel, in the end, returns both protagonist Hank Morgan and the reader safely back to the present (1880s) with virtually no changes or alterations.

Ironically, Hank Morgan is one of the few time travelers who, once convinced he was in the past and there to stay indefinitely, made it his principal objective to change the past unconcerned or, more likely, oblivious to the consequences.

Once awakening in Camelot after receiving a bump on the head administered by a disgruntled foreman at his factory he wastes little time astounding King Arthur and his knights with modern commodities. Morgan sets up telephones wires, a printing press for a daily paper, artillery and causes an army of knights to ditch their steeds for bicycles.

For all that, the past remains ultimately unchanged and the main points of the legend of King Arthur proceed as canonized in Sir Thomas Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur. King Arthur is still killed in battle with Mordred, Queen Guinevere still betrays him by returning the adulterous attentions of Sir Lancelot and she is still saved at the stake. History, despite all the futuristic advances brought by Morgan remains unchanged from the story passed on for centuries after. Perhaps that was Twain’s point.

Be that as it may, when the Catholic Church tightens its grip on Camelot, Morgan’s machinery, innovations and inventions are destroyed in total. Furthermore, anyone who witnessed them is dead before Morgan leaves the past. The entire army of knights ordered by the Church against Morgan and his small band of resistance is killed by the futuristic method of an electric fence; no witnesses survive to tell the tale. The priests and friars live on but surely bury the secret. Morgan’s small resistance army is trapped in a cave, doomed to die of starvation and battle wounds. Morgan himself “dies” of his wound though, in a sense, “saved” by Merlin, here depicted as a conniving fraud, before Merlin himself meets his demise on the electric fence. The past was almost changed but, as the old adage goes, the more things changed the more things remain the same. After the brief interval of innovation, after Morgan’s departure, the Middle Ages continued largely in darkness.

A question remains? Did Merlin whisk the deceased Morgan back to his own time (1879), if so then he truly was a wizard, or did it take Morgan 1,300 to wake up again, frozen in time.? One thing is certain, his greatest surprise must surely have been to find his world, despite his efforts to have remained just as he left it.