书名：The Prince and the Pauper 王子与贫儿

难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数620L
作者：Mark Twain马克·吐温
出版社名称：Bantam Classics
出版时间：1983
语种：英文
ISBN：9780553212563
商品尺寸：10.6 x 1.6 x 17.1 cm
包装：简装
页数：224

The Prince and the Pauper《王子与贫儿》是美国批判现实主义作家马克·吐温的经典作品，创作于美国帝国主义时期，是他写给女儿们阅读的书，被孩子们认为是他zui好的作品。小说巧妙结合文学手段，讽刺了当时萧条经济中美国社会的现状。一经出版，便被翻译成各种语言，广受全世界读者的关注与深爱。马克·吐温一度被称为“美国文学史上的林肯”，被评为影响美国100位名人中的第16位。他的文学贡献使得占据了不可撼动的世界地位。
本书为Bantam Classics出版的英文原版简装本，内容完整无删减，小巧轻便，方便随身携带阅读。

Rich with surprise and hilarious adventure,The Prince and the Pauper is a delightful satire of England’s romantic past and a joyful boyhood romp filled with the same tongue-in-cheek irony that sparks the best of Mark Twain’s tall tales. Two boys, one an urchin from London’s filthy lanes, the other a prince born in a lavish palace, unwittingly trade identities. Thus a bedraggled “Prince of Poverty” discovers that his private dreams have all come true—while a pampered Prince of Wales finds himself tossed into a rough-and-tumble world of squalid beggars and villainous thieves. Originally written as a story for children,The Prince and the Pauper is a classic novel for adults as well—through its stinging attack on the ageless human folly of attempting to measure true worth by outer appearances. 
Review
“Twain was… enough of a genius to build his morality into his books, with humor and wit and—in the case ofThe Prince and the Pauper—wonderful plotting.” —E. L. Doctorow

The Prince and the Pauper《王子与贫儿》以16世纪的英国为背景，描写了王子和贫儿互换身份的童话式故事。一个阴差阳错的偶然机会，长相相同的王子爱德华和贫儿汤姆因互换衣服，从而导致了命运的颠倒。曾经的小乞丐成了王子的“替身”，真正的王子流落在外，受尽欺凌和嘲讽。后来，王子历经种种劫难，终于回到了王宫；而汤姆也将不属于自己的王位还给了王子。经过这样的“交换身份”，两个少年都懂得了很多东西……

Two boys exchange their clothes and their lives in Mark Twain’s classic satiric comedy.

They are the same age. They look alike. In fact, there is but one difference between them: Tom Canty is a child of the London slums; Edward Tudor is heir to the throne of England. Just how insubstantial this difference really is becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of roles… with the pauper caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wandering, horror-stricken, through the lower depths of sixteenth-century English society. 

Out of the theme of switched identities, Mark Twain has fashioned both a scathing attack upon social hypocrisy and injustice and an irresistible comedy imbued with the sense of high-spirited play that belongs to his most creative period.

马克·吐温，本名塞缪尔·朗赫恩·克列门斯，美国著名幽默大师、作家，美国批判现实主义文学的奠基人，被誉为“美国文学史上的林肯”。出生于美国密苏里州的一个穷苦律师家庭，从12岁起，曾先后做过印刷工人、水手、探矿者和记者等。这些经历为他的创作奠定了坚实的生活基础。其代表作品有《汤姆·索亚历险记》《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》《马克·吐温自传》《百万英镑》。

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, led one of the most exciting of literary lives. Raised in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had to leave school at age 12 and was successively a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a halfhearted Confederate soldier, and a prospector, miner, and reporter in the western territories. His experiences furnished him with a wide knowledge of humanity, as well as with the perfect grasp of local customs and speech which manifests itself in his writing. 
With the publication in 1865 of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Twain gained national attention as a frontier humorist, and the bestselling Innocents Abroad solidified his fame. But it wasn’t until Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally,The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), that he was recognized by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce. 
Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Twain grew more and more pessimistic—an outlook not alleviated by his natural skepticism and sarcasm. Though his fame continued to widen—Yale & Oxford awarded him honorary degrees—Twain spent his last years in gloom and exasperation, writing fables about “the damned human race.”

ChapterTwo

Tom’s Early Life

Let us skip a number of years.
London was fifteen hundred years old, and was a great town-for that day. It had a hundred thousand inhabitants-some think double as many. The streets were very narrow, and crooked, and dirty, especially in the part where Tom Canty lived, which was not far from London Bridge. The houses were of wood, with the second story projecting over the first, and the third sticking its elbows out beyond the second. The higher the houses grew, the broader they grew. They were skeletons of strong criss-cross beams, with solid material between, coated with plaster. The beams were painted red or blue or black, according to the owner’s taste, and this gave the houses a very picturesque look. The windows were small, glazed with little diamond-shaped panes, and they opened outward, on hinges, like doors.
The house which Tom’s father lived in was up a foul little pocket called Offal Court, out of Pudding Lane. It was small, decayed, and ricketty, but it was packed full of wretchedly poor families. Canty’s tribe occupied a room on the third floor. The mother and father had a sort of bedstead in the corner, but Tom, his grandmother, and his two sisters, Bet and Nan, were not restricted-they had all the floor to themselves, and might sleep where they chose. There were the remains of a blanket or two and some bundles of ancient and dirty straw, but these could not rightly be called beds, for they were not organized; they were kicked into a general pile, mornings, and selections made from the mass at night, for service.
Bet and Nan were fifteen years old-twins. They were good-hearted girls, unclean, clothed in rags, and profoundly ignorant. Their mother was like them. But the father and the grandmother were a couple of fiends. They got drunk whenever they could; then they fought each other or anybody else who came in the way; they cursed and swore always, drunk or sober; John Canty was a thief, and his mother a beggar. They made beggars of the children, but failed to make thieves of them. Among, but not of, the dreadful rabble that inhabited the house, was a good old priest whom the king had turned out of house and home with a pension of a few farthings, and he used to get the children aside and teach them right ways secretly. Father Andrew also taught Tom a little Latin, and how to read and write; and would have done the same with the girls, but they were afraid of the jeers of their friends, who could not have endured such a queer accomplishment in them.