The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress in Mark Twain House's Reading Challenge

Aug 26, 2022 Emma Gerstein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

It’s been awhile since I spent so much time on one book—which is not to say it dragged or was uninteresting, but rather that it makes for good “pick up” reading. The chapters are the perfect length to get some reading in while busy. I read this in the car, on a train, in the bath, and even while being fought over by two large golden retrievers. Certain passages of it will undoubtedly stay with me forever (Venice at midnight, the ruins of Pompeii), and certain passages made me uncomfortable—there It’s been awhile since I spent so much time on one book—which is not to say it dragged or was uninteresting, but rather that it makes for good “pick up” reading. The chapters are the perfect length to get some reading in while busy. I read this in the car, on a train, in the bath, and even while being fought over by two large golden retrievers. Certain passages of it will undoubtedly stay with me forever (Venice at midnight, the ruins of Pompeii), and certain passages made me uncomfortable—there are incredibly offensive descriptions of indigenous populations, religions, ways of life, and poverty. The word “savages” appears every couple of pages without fail, and is often coupled with “stupid”, “ignorant”, or “idiotic”. There are cultures and peoples Twain seems reverent of, and there are those he is dismissive of and, at times, even abusive of—with not much clear distinction between the foreigners he finds acceptable versus the ones he finds unacceptable (save the concept of soap and Christianity, which in all fairness checks out for a pilgrimage to the “Holy Land” that was undertaken in 1867). Now, this is a first reading and I make absolutely no claims to have gone into this with an overtly critical eye—but it did require a fair amount of cognitive dissonance to keep reading when it takes you from an incredibly human description of the awe and shock of innate mortality and sense of overwhelming immutability that historical landmarks can evoke… to an overview of a busy (insert locale here) street packed with beggars that the white, Presbyterian tourists then casually degrade. Both ends of that spectrum, unfortunately, still resonate as facets of 21st century travel and the vast disparities created by tourist economies, but… well. The man sums it up perfectly himself in the conclusion: “It would be well if such an excursion could be gotten up every year and the system regularly inaugurated. 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 can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Overall, it is an absolutely valuable text *because* of that persistent dissonance, I think. It’s very early on in Twain’s literary, personal, and moral journey, so it feels like a sort of checkpoint or touchstone in terms of ideology. If someone you know is looking for “the moment he realized racism was wrong,” this text serves as the perfect example of how nonlinear his personal evolution was—and I immediately want to pick up some of his later travel writing so I can start comparing and see where he changed and where he stayed the same.
Beyond the discomfort, there is a very particular kind of comfort—even though it was published more than a century ago, a shocking amount of the mundane details are charmingly familiar: the way he and his posse razz each other, the reflections on the difference a good night’s sleep can have on one’s outlook, the dropping of everything to seek out ice cream, the not having any idea of what constitutes good art but trying your damnedest to understand what everyone is oohing and ahhing at… those little moments feel cozy, like they’ve accidentally slipped through time to show you that people have always been people.
I’m glad it made me uncomfortable, because it’s given me a lot to think about both in terms of Twain and in terms my place in the 21st century aftermath of colonization, imperialism, proselytization… all that mess. And I wish I had read it in college as a part of my “anthropology of tourism” study abroad course, because so much of it translates retrospectively to what the goals of that course and trip were. It was certainly more engaging than the textbook we never actually ended up using… ...more

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