ABSTRACT
The Gilded Age begins with local color sequences from the Mississippi River, moves to Washington, D.C., to follow the doings of the United States Congress in regard to the Sellers and Hawkins family hopes. Sellers is an amalgam of Southwestern "Flush Times" and the platform comedian, but the political and social ethics of the comedians are retained in the narrative voice of the novel. Humor is used to foreshadow plot developments, and convincing scenes are created in burlesque and caricature. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner meant such humor to be identified with popular opinion and the traditional American literary comedy that was the mode in which they wrote. In The Prince and the Pauper, literary comedy is brought substantially closer to creating a complete novelistic medium. The real prince provides answers to two problems about monarchy and aristocracy which interested the democratic Artemus Ward in the 1860s.
