The writings of Mark Twain are so well-known and loved that it is difficult to choose among them, but there can be no doubt that his ageless classics The Prince and the Pauper is one of the most delight and tenderly moving of them all.

In this story of a pauper and a prince who, through an accident, changed places, Mark Twain drew such a vivid picture of sixteenth-century England and the people of that period that his readers have often been convinced all these exciting events really happened. But as May Lamberton Becker points out in her Introduction: "Of course you will not find this story in history. It never really happened. Edward VI never had so exciting an adventure in all his brief life and troubled reign. . . . Mark Twain had no use at all for times when the poor were badly treated, and in those days poor folks were treated very badly. He shows you this through the experiences of a boy of warm sympathies, thrust out of secure surroundings into a hard life whose existence he has never suspected, learning to see it in this new light and trying to do something about it. As Mark Twain said, 'It may have happened, it may not have happened, but it could have happened,' and we may as well leave it at that."

From the dust jacket of the 1948 Rainbow Classic edition published by The World Publishing Company