THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

By
Mark Twain

Later Print Edition
1878

Book Description: Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1878.
8vo, 651 pp. Later printing edition.
Brown cloth, gilt titles/decorations on front and spine, 234 woodcut illustrations.
A Good+ copy. 234 illustrations.

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 through Europe and the Holy
Land with a group of religious pilgrims. It was the best selling of
Twain's works during his lifetime. 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.

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 cloying 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 travelling in the environments mentioned within the work.

He also makes light of his fellow travellers and the natives of the various countries
and regions he visits, as well as his own expectations and reactions.
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 secular
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.


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