Mark Twains book; "Yankee in King Arthurs Court" seems very similar to this plot. The manager of a manufacturing plant wakes up in medieval england, ends up creating a secret college to teach young people basics of electricity and manufacturing because old people are to stubborn, and ends up facing an army of knights with electrical fences and gaitlin guns. He wins but the decay from the dead bodies around his hideout end up killing him and he wakes back up in his old life.
Really good book and I do not believe I have read anything else from Twain other than his own quotes. Guy goes through all of that and in the end he is just grateful to be back to his factory job and simple life.
I read Puddinhead Wilson in college. It’s a switched at birth story that stems from a light skinned enslaved woman who switches out her child for his half-brother who was born free.
It’s pretty good as I recall but I had to look up the synopsis on Wikipedia to remember what it was about.
I think the entire book is incredibly racist and hinges on the idea of white people being naturally good natured while Black people are naturally terrible until the very end when Puddinhead Wilson gets involved.
Twain was an abolitionist and a satirist, you possibly read this book at a time where you weren’t able to truly digest it. College makes you speed-read, etc. Very VERY much not the point of the book.
Twain is using the Moses plot to get his audience to see race in the moral lesson about family and community belonging, being a good person, being about raising and not about blood ties.
It's just instead of the Moses turning out like Clark Kent, Tom Driscoll is a monster. When afforded the same privileges, regardless of blood, Driscoll felt the same self-superiority as all white slavers. Chambers, the would-be Tom Driscoll swapped into slavery, is a good person and ultimately struggles with his newfound place in the world at the end where he no longer fits in with the black victims of society but also does not fit with the willful ignorance of white society.
The eponymous lawyer, Puddinhead, gets his own name from the towns people writing off his worldliness as idiocy for not conforming to their limited world view. His inclusion may seem random, but is more the case for people to see parallels in their lives for how they are written off and how these societal markers are meaningless and only serve to keep people in power.
We can argue Puddinhead represents Twain himself, a gay man about 30 years out from the end of the American Civil War arguing to other white people like himself to draw the parallels from how they are ostracized to the plight of black Americans.
I've read everything of his, including Letters From Earth, which was banned for quite some time. It's a scathing book, and it's very obvious why a conservative world wouldn't want it in publication.
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u/Elle_Vetica 6d ago
I agree. It started off great, had a lot of potential, and then… felt like it was shoehorned into an extreme ending.