The Prince and the Pauper

The Prince and the Pauper is a novel by the American writer Mark Twain, first published in 1881 in Canada and in the United States the following year. It was his first attempt at historical fiction, and it is set in England in the middle of the sixteenth century, which puts its material in a royal court rather than in the American river country of his earlier books.

The plot turns on a single coincidence. Tom Canty, a boy from a poor London family, and the Prince of Wales look so alike that they can trade clothes without being noticed, and the exchange that begins as a game is not undone. Each boy then has to live inside the other's life, which gives the novel two engines at once: the prince's education in poverty and the pauper's in the customs and corruption of the court.

Twain uses the double to hold a royal household and the conditions of the London poor in the same book, and the reign of Edward VI gives him a short, contested period in which to set it. The novel was written for a general readership rather than only for children, and it has been adapted for stage and film repeatedly since.