The Prince and the Pauper tells the story of two young boys who are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive father in Offal Court off Pudding Lane in London, and Prince Edward, son of King Henry VIII. (Wikipedia)     [chương_files]  

One day a poor boy, Tom, gets a little too near the gates of the palace. and the guards start to beat him. However the prince himself intervenes and invites Tom into the palace. They talk about their differences in life and how very similar they both are to one another in appearance. They decide to trade clothes for a few minutes to see what it is like. Still in Tom’s clothes, the Prince, Edward, leaves the room for a few minutes, and the guards mistake him for the pauper, throwing him out of the palace! Tom decides to try and act like the prince, not knowing what has happened to him. Everyone thinks the prince is ill, causing him to forget things, while the real prince struggles to survive in the streets of his own kingdom. This story is about all the adventures both have in the process. –Summary by Fiddlesticks     [chương_files]  

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain creates an entertaining adventure of Middle America in the 1800’s – afloat on a raft on the Mississippi River. Huck escapes his civilized life when he arranges his own “murder” and turns back into the backwoods, downriver yokel he started as, and in the process springing a slave, Jim, from bondage. Huck and Jim experience life as a series of tableaux as the river sweeps them through small towns on their way South. At each stop, Huck engages his talent for mixing fact with bald-faced lies to endlessly get himself out of situations… and of course, putting him into others! Much has been written about the statement Twain is making about slavery in this book, but it’s really secondary to the story. The facts of how black people were treated in this period give Huck and Jim their license for life on the run. Modern listeners will be intrigued by the unencumbered life of the pair; they make do with coffee, fish from the river, and little else (but of course, when they do need something extra, they don’t mind helping themselves to it without recourse to money!) Huck and Jim have run-ins with desperadoes and family feuds and even manage to get run down by a steamboat. The adventures ratchet up when they are joined on the raft by a self-proclaimed “duke” and a “king” – shysters both, who spend their time in figuring how to fleece the public in the […]