Twain’s Ironic Juxtaposition

Frontispiece by Daniel Carter Beard to the first edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

We marched comfortably along, through glades and over brooks which I could not remember to have seen before–which puzzled me and made me wonder–and yet we did not come to any circus or sign of a circus. So I gave up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was from an asylum. But we never came to an asylum–so I was up a stump, as you may say. I asked him how far we were from Hartford.

He said he had never heard of the place; which I took to be a lie, but allowed it to go at that. At the end of an hour we saw a far-away town sleeping in a valley by a winding river; and beyond it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with towers and turrets, the first I had ever seen out of a picture.

“Bridgeport?” said I, pointing.

“Camelot,” said he.

–Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, pt. 1 (1889)