The Innocents Abroad — Volume 02
1895
Here are the letters Mark Twain himself feared would ruin him. Written in 1867 when the twenty-two-year-old journalist signed on as correspondent for the Daily Alta California, these fifty dispatches from the Holy Land Excursion capture something The Innocents Abroad would later sand down: the full fury and farce of American tourists encountering the Old World. <br><br>Twain and seventy-six other passengers aboard the steamship Quaker City drift from Tangier to Paris to Venice, Constantinople, and finally Bethlehem, watching their fellow pilgrims gawk at relics, bumble through foreign customs, and gradually reveal their own spectacular ignorance. But these are not mere travelogues. They contain what one scholar calls "the most elegant vituperation ever to appear in an American newspaper" - Twain's savage, hilarious contempt for holy sites turned into commercial spectacles, for fellow travelers who weep at the wrong monuments, for the whole absurd enterprise of American tourists seeking culture abroad. <br><br>This volume presents the letters as originally written, before Twain revised them for eastern readers. The raw voice is rougher, angrier, and funnier than the sanitized book that made his reputation.
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“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.””
— Mark Twain
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.””
— Mark Twain
“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.””
— Mark Twain
“One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.””
— Mark Twain
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.””
— Mark Twain
“Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.””
— Mark Twain
“She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die.””
— Mark Twain
“As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred - and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth. Look at the grande Doumo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. Like all other men, I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. "Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?””
— Mark Twain
“We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.””
— Mark Twain
