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Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain - I just re-read this classic for the Literature class I teach at our homeschool co-op. Twain is a master of wit and irony, and infuses just enough humor in this story of deception and prejudice to keep the serious theme from becoming oppressive.
The opening introduces us to the setting and the main characters. The title character is a lawyer from the north who is trying to establish his practice in Dawson's Landing. Unfortunately, David Wilson makes a joke that falls flat and the townsfolk label him a "pudd'nhead", which prejudices everyone from taking him seriously as a lawyer. Wilson is well-liked and cheerfully continues on as an accountant and pursues scientific hobbies such as collecting fingerprints.
We also meet Roxy, a slave woman who is only one-sixteenth black, and her infant son Chambers, who is only one-thirty-second black. Roxy is nurse to Tom Driscoll, son of one of the town's leading citizens, and the two baby boys are being raised together, but with clear distinctions in how they are dressed and treated. When Roxy's master threatens to sell all his slaves down the river, Roxy makes a bold move. She realizes that the baby boys look very much alike, and that the disinterested father can't tell them apart except by their clothing, she switches the infants in an effort to prevent her son being sold into slavery. Tom's father dies and Tom (now an imposter!) is adopted by his uncle, Judge Driscoll, and the deception continues unnoticed and unknown for twenty or so years.
When Roxy is set free, she goes to work on the steamboats, still the only person that knows of the switched identities. Tom grows up into a cruel and spoiled young man with a gambling habit that gets him into trouble. He treats the slaves of his household, and all blacks, with utter contempt and disdain, and isn't particularly nice to whites either. He turns to petty theft to cover his gambling debts, and this is how Roxy discovers him when she comes back to Dawson's Landing after her money has run out. She appeals to Tom for help and tells him the truth - that he is her son, and therefore black - and threatens to expose him unless he helps her financially.
The town is all abuzz over Italian twins that have settled in Dawson's Landing, and who challenge Judge Driscoll in a bitterly contested local election. When the Judge is found murdered, the twins are accused, and finally Pudd'nhead Wilson has a case! The outcome seems bleak but Pudd'nhead is sure that he can clear his clients if only he can match the fingerprints on the murder weapon to someone in his carefully cataloged collection. And when he finally makes that match, it makes for a dramatic courtroom scene that reveals the murderer and exposes the truth about the boys switched in the cradle so long ago.
Twain's novel features characters in conflict with themselves and others (the theme of our Literature curriculum), and is an ironic but solid indictment of racial prejudice and injustice and the further injustice of slavery. Even the ending, in which justice is meted out to the imposter Tom, hints that the real heir continued to be subject to unfair prejudice because he had been brought up as a black slave.
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by Sherry Thomas
by Anna Lee Huber - Have had this gothic by a favorite author on my TBR pile for a long time. Now that I've started, it's so hard to put down!
