The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress was published by American author Mark Twain in 1869. The travel literature chronicles Twain's pleasure cruise on board the chartered vessel Quaker City (formerly USS Quaker City) through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of religious pilgrims in 1867. It was the best selling of Twain's works during his lifetime.
Contents |
Starter Commentary and Material for Innocents Abroad
Analysis
At first blush, Innocents Abroad is an ordinary travel book. It is based on an actual expedition, in a retired Civil War ship (the USS Quaker City). The excursion upon which the book is based was billed as a Holy Land expedition, with numerous stops along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as a train excursion from Marseilles, France to Paris for the 1867 Paris Exhibition, and a side trip through the Black Sea to Odessa, all before the ultimate pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Twain records his observations and critiques of various aspects of culture and society he meets while on his journey, some more serious than others, which gradually turn from witty and comedic to biting and bitter as he progresses closer to the Holy Land. Interestingly, once in the Holy Land proper, his tone shifts again, this time to a combination of his former light-hearted comedy and a reverence not unlike the attitude he had previously mocked in his traveling companions.
Many of his criticisms within the chronicle are based on comparisons between the grandiose (and often apocryphal) writings and perceptions of his contemporaries that were considered in high regard as sources of indispensable information for traveling in the environments mentioned within the work. He also makes light of his fellow travelers and the natives of the various countries and regions he visits, as well as his own expectations and reactions.
Themes
A major theme of the book, insofar as a book assembled and revised from the newspaper columns Twain sent back to America as the journey progressed can have a theme, is that of the conflict between history and the modern world; the narrator continually encounters petty profiteering and trivializations of the past as he journeys, as well as the strange emphasis placed on particular events in the past, and is either outraged, puzzled, or bored by the encounter. One example can be found in the sequence during which the boat has stopped at Gibraltar. On shore, the narrator encounters seemingly dozens of people intent on regaling him, and everyone else in the known world, with a bland and pointless anecdote concerning how a particular hill nearby acquired its name, heedless of the fact that the anecdote is, indeed, bland, pointless, and toward the end, entirely too repetitive. Another example may be found in the discussion of the story of Abelard and Heloise, where the skeptical American deconstructs the story and comes to the conclusion that entirely too much fuss has been made about the two lovers. Only when the ship reaches areas of the world that do not exploit for profit or bore passers-by with inexplicable interest in their history, such as the passage dealing with the ship's time at the Canary Islands, is this trait not found in the text.
This reaction to those who profit from the past is found, in an equivocal and unsure balance with reverence, in the section of the book that deals with the ship's company's experiences in the Holy Land. The narrator reacts here, not only to the exploitation of the past and the unreasoning (to the American eye of the time) adherence to old ways, but to the profanation of religious history, and to the shattering of illusions, such as his dismay in finding that the nations described in the Old Testament could easily have fit inside many American states and territories, and that the kings of those nations might very well have ruled over fewer people than could be found in some small towns.
This equivocal reaction to the religious history the narrator encounters may be magnified by the prejudices of the time, as the United States was still primarily a Protestant nation at this point. The Catholic Church, in particular, receives a considerable amount of attention from the narrator, seemingly not because of any particular differences in doctrine that it may have with the narrator's own attitudes, but, rather because of its institutionalized nature. This is particularly apparent in the section of the book dealing with Italy, where the poverty of the lay population and the relative affluence of the church causes the narrator to urge, in the text of the book, if not directly, the inhabitants to rob their priests.
External Links
- Hypertext Map from University of Virginia etext, Innocents Abroad, a part of Mark Twain in His Times
As a travel book, Innocents Abroad is accessible through any one of its chapters, many of which were published serially in the United States. (A compilation of the original newspaper accounts was the subject of McKeithan (1958)). In many of the chapters, a uniquely Twainian sentence or word stands out. A sampling of chapter material appears below and includes links to visual representations as well as to dedicated Mark Twain projects that have included Innocents Abroad in their sweep:
Ch.1 Holy Land tour flyer reprints The Quaker City travel prospectus and comments on exclusivity in passenger selection.
Ch.4 Ship Routine outlines the passengers' daily routines and their affectation of sailor language.
Ch. 8 Tangier, Morocco "We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign -- foreign from top to bottom -- foreign from center to circumference -- foreign inside and outside and all around -- nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness -- nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. And lo! in Tangier we have found it."
Ch.11 The Prado and other Marseille tourist sites. "We were troubled a little at dinner to-day, by the conduct of an American, who talked very loudly and coarsely. and laughed boisterously when all others were so quiet and well behaved. He ordered wine with a royal flourish...." Drove the Prado avenue, visited Chateau Borely, the Zoological Gardens, and the Castle d‘If. Discussed prisoner drawings created during the years Château d'If was used as a prison.
Ch. 12 Marseilles to Paris by Train Old Travelers; Lyon, Saône, Tonnerre, Sens, Melun, Fontainebleu "and scores of other beautiful cities"; dinner, shopping, a terrifying shave. "Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles."
Reviews
- Hirst, Robert H. "The Making of The Innocents Abroad : 1867–1872." Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1975.
- Howells, William Dean. The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims Progress, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1869.
Secondary References
Mark Twain Projects
- etext.virginia.edu -- Innocents Abroad Homepage
- Mark Twain Project at the University of California
- The Innocents Abroad Map
On Line Snippets
- Image of Mark Twain, on board ship in 1897, at 60 years old. (Twain traveled at age 32 and published Innocents Abroad, in 1869, at the age of 34, but this image is sometimes associated with the earlier Twain.) For comparison, see 1871 image and 1875 (approx) image
Scholarly works
- Fulton, Joe B. The Reverend Mark Twain: Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8142-1024-4
- Melton, Jeffrey Alan. Mark Twain, travel books, and tourism : the tide of a great popular movement, Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 2002.
- Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine: Mark Twain and the Touristic Comodification of the Holy Land (working paper).
- Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine : Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land mania, Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0691007284. ISBN 0691009732.
- Rogers, Stephanie Stidham. American Protestant Pilgrimage: Nineteenth-Century Impressions of Palestine, Princeton Theological Seminary: Koinonea XV.1 60-80 (2003).
- Steinbrink, Jeffrey. Getting To Be Mark Twain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 (covering the period from 1867 to 1871) (Twain set sail (on June 8, 1867) for a five month Mediterranean tour on board the Quaker City)(Innocents Abroad, detailing the Quaker City tour, was first published in 1869).
- Walker, Franklin Dickerson. Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne, and Mark Twain in the Holy Land, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press (1974). ISBN 0-295-95344-6
Primary Sources
- The Innocents Abroad at Project Gutenberg
- The Innocents Abroad, from Internet Archive. Illustrated, scanned original editions.
- Innocents Abroad (with facsimiles of original illustrations) in Wright American Fiction 1851-1875
- Lexicon from Wordie, Words rounded up while reading The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
- McKeithan, Daniel Morley, ed., Traveling with the innocents abroad; Mark Twain's original reports from Europe and the Holy Land. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958.
- Quaker City, the ship that took the Innocents abroad.
- Correspondence markers (April 1867, June 1867, and November 1867) from the Mark Twain Project
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