The setting of this novel is again the world that Sam Clemens grew up in, although now MT calls the village Dawson's Landing, and has moved it several hundred miles down the Mississippi River. The book was originally published in America, on 28 November 1894, as The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins. It began as a farce about Siamese twins -- two different temperaments inseparably linked in one body -- and wound up becoming an irony about two babies -- one slave, one free -- switched in their cradles. It was never very popular with MT's contemporaries, but as his most direct, sustained treatment of slavery it has attracted considerable attention in our time; there is as yet, however, no agreement about what it's saying. In Roxy the novel offers MT's most complex woman character. Despite the title, most commentary on the book assumes that her son, Tom/Valet de Chambers, is the central character. My own reading of it begins with the title. It is curious that MT should call it a tragedy when its ending is classically comic: true identities and an apparent social order are restored. And curiouser that he calls it Pudd'nhead Wilson's tragedy, when Wilson enacts the rise from obscurity to popularity and prestige that is usually thought of as the archetypal American success story.