n 1867, the San Francisco Alta Californian assigned its 31-year-old reporter Mark Twain to cover a steamboat pleasure excursion to the Mediterranean. Twain’s account of the trip was published two years later as The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress. The sprawling travelogue became the bestselling book of Twain’s career, fixing his voice and persona in the public mind.
The book’s irreverence has been often noted (and quoted) but less remarked upon has been its shape, which has the mythic quality of a great epic. It is in a true sense a pilgrimage, as Twain’s subtitle suggests; the allusion to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is not meant frivolously. The book has a definite American resonance too. The Pilgrim Fathers emigrated to the New World in search of freedom from the despotism and corruption in Europe. By Twain’s time, a class of “new pilgrims” felt themselves drawn back to the Old World, for reasons both spiritual and cultural. Twain’s traveling companions aboard the Quaker City were pious Christian folk interested in discovering their roots, and that is why the journey culminated in the Holy Land.
That grand goal came only after the travelers had genuflected at many cultural spots in Europe. Twain has reactions similar to those that many travelers in Europe still have today—admiring the ease and gracious living of the French and Italians, for example, and contrasting this with the driven and businesslike pace of life in America. He views Old Master artwork with a mixture of admiration and skepticism—suggesting, for instance, that they might have varied their usual repertoire of saints and martyrs with a canvas or two of Columbus discovering America.
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