Twain. Library of Congress photo.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JUNE 18, 2024 | Here’s something different today. Let’s go back in time with Mark Twain, and one of our all-time favorite books.
What’s Mark Twain’s bestselling book? You might be surprised.
It’s not Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn.
It’s The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, firmly establishing Mark Twain as a serious writer. This was Twain’s second book, and an outgrowth of an assignment from the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, to pay him $1,250 to file letters from abroad for publication. He sent 51 letters, and those, along with a few others written for newspapers in New York, comprise Innocents Abroad. The dispatches, followed by lectures in later years that Twain delivered based on his travels, helped establish Twain’s voice as an American original. During Twain’s lifetime, Innocents was his most popular book, and today it remains perhaps the most celebrated travel book by an American writer. It reads as if the trip was most recent. It’s fun to read as Twain takes a distinctly curious eye at others, and tells you what he’s thinking.
The book is an account of a five-month voyage to Morocco, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, southern Russia, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Many Christians may have particularly enjoyed his description of the Holy Land, one of the first Americans to provide vivid eye pictures to Biblical scholars of how people in that land lived at that time, and what the land looked like.
As the bestselling book of Twain’s lifetime (and one of the most popular travelogues ever published), The Innocents Abroad documents Twain’s voyages in Europe and the Middle East in hilarious fashion. (A large party chartered a steamer to take them to the Old World.)
The trip was one of the first all-inclusive tours, something unusual at that time. The ship stopped at numerous Mediterranean Sea ports, allowing the passengers to take extended excursions on land. Among them:
- A train excursion from Marseille to Paris for the 1867 Paris Exhibition during the reign of Napoleon III and the Second French Empire;
- Travel through the Papal States to Rome;
- A side trip through the Black Sea to Odessa;
- The highlight of the trip, an excursion through the Holy Land;
- Arriving in Egypt and seeing the Great Pyramids.
Twain reports the voyage covered over 20,000 miles of land and sea. One reason the book is so popular is that it reads so well in the modern day. Twain explains matters through problems he and his group encounter, as if they just stepped off the boat yesterday. This group of travelers over 150 years ago experienced the same problems tourists do today. Some critics credit its longevity to its fresh approach: It was written from a different angle than most travel books of its time.
From traveling, Twain maintained that it changed people. He wrote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
But The Innocents Abroad was not Twain’s personal best favorite. That would be his fictional account of a saga of France, his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896). Who has read and can write us a recommendation on the Joan of Arc book ?
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