EUROPE IN MARK TWAIN'S TRAVEL WRITING by Tellervo Tokkonen A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August, 1990 EUROPE IN MARK TWAIN'S TRAVEL WRITING by Tellervo Tokkonen This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Mary Faraci, Department of English and Comparative Literature, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: l'Y\.~ 1--c&-1 A.~ (_ tl.C.) Thesis ~dvisor Chairperson, epartment of English and Comparative Literature ga.u.c4rc K ~)mhrt) Dean, College of Arts and Humanities w~~Jd.~~~ /-17-90 Dean of Graduate School Date ii ABSTRACT Author: Tellervo Tokkonen Title: Europe In Mark Twain's Travel Writing Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Mary Faraci Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1990 Mark Twain was popular in Europe from the start. His bitter satire and his humor appealed to European readers. "We are all offspring of Europe," Twain once said, and he was fascinated by the Old World throughout his career. First in The Innocents Abroad the writer traveled in European countries as an innocent tourist to experience European history and culture. He came to see, though, that the Catholic Church had excessive power there, that there were beggars and filth everywhere, and that the old masters' paintings were neglected. A Tramp Abroad continued satirizing the living conditions in Europe. The tone in the latter book is mostly pessimistic, and the author's increasing bitterness toward the Old World is well revealed in it. iii Table of Contents Page Introduction................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE. • . 10 The Innocents Abroad CHAPTER TWO . 3 9 A Tramp Abroad Conclusion................................... 58 Works Cited. 64 iv Introduction During the fifty years from 1850-1900, many Americans discovered Europe, with results that have been said to be culturally just as significant as the discovery of the American West (Thorp 826). In ever-increasing numbers the travelers returned to America to record what they had seen and felt in the Old World. In the first months of the year 1867, from four to five thousand tourists left for Europe every week (Innocents 1). Traveling was also responsible for a shift in attitudes which caused the famous "cosmopolitanism" of the twentieth century (Thorp 827). The reasons so many Americans went to Europe are not obscure. After the West was open, there was, of course, more money and more leisure for going abroad. There was also a whole class of newly rich people in America who had made their money in business during the Civil War. The revolutions of 1848 drew a few patriotic Americans to Italy and France so that they might be present when monarchic Europe would turn republican. The various European countries wooed American tourists by providing them with special objectives for their holidays, such as the Great Exhibitions in London in 1851 and in Paris in 1 2 1855 and 1867. More powerful than any other persuasion were the books written by pioneer generation of travelers. There were Washington Irving's Sketch Book (1819) . and Bracebridge Hall (1822). These books inspired Americans to seek and study England. N.P. Willis's Pencillings by the Way (1844), his collected travel letters contributed to the New York Mirror, enchanted the subscribers to the five hundred newspapers, which made excerpts from them (Blodgett 618). There was also Benjamin Silliman's A Journal of Travels in England, Holland and Scotland (1810), which induced thousands of Americans to go in quest of the holy places in Europe. In the time of Irving and Willis the casual tourist, who was abroad chiefly to absorb as many new experiences as possible in a short time, was an exception. After 1850 he was the ordinary type (Thorp 829). Many Americans in the 1850s and 1860s believed that their Americanism could be corrupted by foreign travel. There was much to disapprove of in Europe: the power of the Roman Church, the beggars, the indifference to social reforms of the British upperclasses, the evils of the land system in the Papal States, the lax morals of Parisians and Florentines, the absence of a ''go-ahead" spirit. Some patriotic travelers were so disturbed by what they saw 3 in the Old World that they considered it necessary to indict Europe. Julia Ward Howe, for instance, decided that even art study hardly justified a prolonged stay in foreign countries (Thorp 827). Many professional writers of the period, however, visited Europe and later wrote about their experiences there. The less imaginative of them soon developed a certain pattern for the travel book. The author had to start with the excitement of the voyage itself and devote a part of a chapter at least to the thrill of setting foot on foreign soil. Then he should mix architecture and scenery with a little bit of history cribbed from some travel guide. It was also possible to retell an old legend or to tell how dangerous it was to climb the Alps. Even as early as the 1860s this type of book began to yield to the kind which offered simply information and advice. Tourists were in a hurry and they wanted to know how to get over the ground without wasting time in any unprofitable expeditions. The books that such very determined travelers found most useful were those re­ presented by J.H.B. Latrobe's Hints for Six Months in Europe (1869) and c.c. Ferlton's Europe Viewed Through American Spectacles (1874), which supplied in addition to 310 double-columned pages of fact an appendix of 4 Hints to European Tourists. Before the century ended, travel writers had devised yet another sort of book designed for tourists who were in Europe to escape. Too sophisticated to ration their days to the Blue Grotto at Capri and the castles at Heidelberg, and too well­ traveled to need hints and help, they went to Europe to search for the picturesque, so Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with A Donkey in The Cevennes (1879) had delighted them, and for them the Pennells drew and wrote the stories of "pilgrimages" beginning with A Canterbury Pilgrimage (1885) (Thorp 832). William Dean Howells was the American consul at Venice from 1861 to 1865, and out of that experience came his Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867). Nor do these and his other travel books, Tuscan Cities (1886) and A Little Swiss Sojourn (1892), contain the sum of his impressions of Europe. In his early years this writer seemed to be as much of an international novelist as his friend Henry James, delighting in making contrasts between the fresh innocence of American girls and the deviousness of Europeans. Howells saw his Europe as a novelist was expected to see it. The life of Lucca in the past, the life of Venice in his time there; this is what he set his eyes on. The writer really makes the reader feel what it was like to be in Pisa in 1883 or in Vevey in 1887. 5 He tells us what the ordinary tourist wanted to see in old towns and cities, perhaps not so many churches and statues but the real life of people, or his Holiness hawking into his handkerchief during mass, or the guide in the Baptistry in Pisa who could howl so well that he had to repeat his performance twenty times a day to the tourists who had read about him in the guide books. Howells said that at home we can read history, but we can realize it, as if it were something personally experienced, only on the spot where it was lived. To effect this realization, Howells believed, was the real use of travel (Haight 878). His Venetian Life deals with the present. He studied the social life of Venice and the effect of the weight of its past on its inhabitants. His method in Tuscan Cities accords with his equally compelling purpose as a traveler: the experience of history. Howells's predilections as a tourist changed, as those of other Americans seemed to do between 1860s and 1890s. Beneath the ingratiating manner of Venetian Life the reader detects the seriousness of the generation of Howells's countrymen for whom Europe was a problem to be solved. In the travel essays of Henry James, collected in three volumes--Transatlantic Sketches (1875), Portraits of Places (1883), and A Little Tour in France (1884)-- 6 travel literature, in many critics' opinion, attains its highest development (Blackmur 1039). Henry James says that traveling to him is going to a play, attending a spectacle. Sometimes the conversation of his characters really supplies the -plot; sometimes the drama rises from the contrast between past and present, as when he is struck with the insufferable patronage of the culture- seeking tourists toward young Italy, preoccupied with its economic and political future. For Henry James the problem of travel literature was to feel the past and the present, the "monuments of unaging intellect,'' and the politics of the moment (Kazin 224). Critics agree that the earlier travel writers do not reach the level of the later group of them, which includes such authors as Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain, Howells, and Henry James. The difference is not explained simply by saying that the latter group was formed of better writers.