March 8 Saturday – What Baetzhold calls “the one most favorable British review” came from down under: “Mark Twain’s New Book. A Crusher for Royalty,” in the Sydney, Australia Bulletin [John Bull 353-4n2].

It is in all respects a fine [book]. The manner in which the archaic and ponderous language of those times, as handed down to us in Arthurian literature and legend, is sustained by all around him, and the sharp contrast to it of the American’s free-and-easy slang is simply wonderful; whoever has read Lecky will recognise how close to authentic history Mr. Clemens has kept wherever that is possible….From a purely literary point of view, it is far and away the best work the author has produced…. But, it is the meaning written in a big round hand between the lines that makes it one of the most valuable and timely books that have been given us lately. The merciless genealogy of the ridiculous and savage arbitrary power that is yet an active working curse to humanity; the manful and open manner in which the shame and impudence of an idle aristocracy living luxuriously out of the toil of the poor, half-starved wretches are shown up, will get in its work. There is hardly any kind of large abuse or wrong that is not vigorously tilted at [J. Jones 230-1].

In a 1968 American Literature article, “Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee and Australian Nationalism,” Jones writes:

…scarcely anything that Mark Twain could have produced could better have suited the spirit of the age than did the Yankee. At the time of its publication, Australian sentiment was already shaping itself in the direction of independence, which after extensive agitation and negotiation throughout the 1890’s was formally promulgated in 1901 [227].