These notes identify some of the source material, topical references, and historical information that Mark Twain wove into the text of A Connecticut Yankee, and provide information about the illustrations as well. They by no means exhaust the influences, sources, and echoes in the book of Mark Twain’s reading. Rather, they comment selectively, in an effort to clarify some of the more obscure allusions and to keep before the reader the curious theory of history Mark Twain employed—his idea that one could take events from, say, eighteenth-century France and transpose them to sixth-century Britain because “inasmuch as they existed in . . . far later times, it is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in practice in that day also.”

The following frequently cited works are referred to by short titles in the explanatory and textual notes. When the edition listed is known to be the one that Clemens owned, it is marked with an asterisk.

Ball, Charles. Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave. New York: H. Dayton, 1860. Editions published before 1858 carry the title Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave.

Barrett, Francis. The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer; Being a Complete System of Occult Philosophy. 1801. Reprint edition. New York: University Books, 1967.

Beard, Daniel Carter. Hardly a Man Is Now Alive: The Autobiography of Dan Beard. New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1939.

*Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution: A History. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856.

*Casanova de Seingalt, Giacomo Girolamo. Memoires de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt. 10 vols. Paris: Paulin, 1833–1837.

“Dan Beard Tells about Those ‘Yankee’ Pictures.” Twainian 3 (October 1943): 4–5.

*Froude, James Anthony. Short Studies on Great Subjects. New York: Charles Scribner and Co., 1868.

Gneiting, Teona Tone. “Picture and Text: A Theory of Illustrated Fiction in the Nineteenth Century.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977.

Green, John Richard. History of the English People. 4 vols. Chicago: Belford, Clarke and Co., 1883.

Green, John Richard. A Short History of the English People. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1875.

*Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. A History of England in the Eighteenth Century. 8 vols. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1887–1890.

*Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1874.

*Malory, Sir Thomas. Morte Darthur. Globe edition. Edited by Sir Edward Strachey. London: Macmillan and Co., 1870–1886.

*Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy. The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the Reign of Louis XIV. and the Regency. Translated by Bayle St. John. 3 vols. London: Bickers and Son, n.d., .

*Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe. The Ancient Regime. Translated by John Durand. New York: H. Holt and Co., 1876.

*Trumbull, James Hammond, ed. The True-Blue Laws of Connecticut and New Haven and the False Blue-Laws Invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters. Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1876.