It is easy to forget that Twain actually left behind a third Boy Book besides Tom Sawyer and the Boy Book that far excelled its genre, Huckleberry Finn. Intervening between these publications, and composed during the same period when Twain was by turns, also completing Huckleberry Finn, was a novel hardly ever taught today, The Prince and the Pauper (1881).

–Alan Gribben, excerpt from the Mark Twain Journal 55.1-2 (Spring/Fall 2017): 127-144.

Image. When Tom Canty’s mother recognizes her son dressed as the young prince, Tom allows her to be shoved back into the crowd of the poor. Then “a shame fell upon him which consumed his pride to ashes and withered his stolen royalty. . . . Royalty had lost its grace and sweetness, its pomps were become a reproach, remorse was eating his heart out” (Chapter 31, The Prince and the Pauper ).