The Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain describes his travels on a luxury cruise that takes him and a couple hundred other Americans from New York across the Atlantic to the Azores, Gibraltar, Morocco, Marseille, Paris, much of Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine in 1867. It is fascinating to hear about an American traveler's experience at such a time when the world was industrializing and probably already as different from the 18th century as it was different from our world in the 21st century today.

Twain takes in the hallowed sights and sites along the “grand tour” of Western Europe and the near Middle East with a wry and usually hilariously cynical skepticism. Rather than recount how extraordinarily beautiful the art of the old masters is, Twain instead typically comments on the way that tourists take in that art–almost always using the stock observations of the guidebooks. Twain never holds back and freely describes the uglier, chintzier, seedier, and more unpleasant experiences that a traveler would have faced, be they underhanded tour guides, fraudulent histories offered at sites, bad food, awful weather, shameful behavior from fellow American tourists, or otherwise.

This is the first pre 20th century travel writing that I have read, but I suspect that Twain's is among the most readable, in large part because he seeks to parody the stodgy cliches of other travel writing popular of the time. It offers a fascinating insight into the way people lived in urban and rural places from a perspective that is unique and historical, but familiar (as an American). This does not mean Twain's work is without fault. Despite many instances where Twain works to dispel prejudices (his preface even includes a famous epigraph about the power of travel to give one empathy and dispel racism), Twain expresses ugly attitudes towards “the Turk” and “Mohammedans”, perhaps consistent with his general anti-religious sentiments, but frustratingly ignorant nonetheless.