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The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress was published by American author Mark Twain in 1869. The travel-book chronicles Twain's pleasure cruise on board the chartered vessel "Quaker City" through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of religious pilgrims. Twain makes constant criticisms of various aspects of culture and society he meets while on his journey, some more serious than others, which gradually turn from witty and comedic to biting and bitter as he progresses closer to the Holy Land. Interestingly, once in the Holy Land proper, his tone shifts again, this time to a combination of his former light-hearted comedy and a cloying reverence not unlike the attitude he had previously mocked in his traveling companions.

Many of his criticisms within the chronicle are based on comparisons between the grandiose (and often apocryphal) writings and perceptions of his contemporaries that were considered in high regard as sources of indispensable information for travelling in the environments mentioned within the work. He also makes light of his fellow travellers and the natives of the various countries and regions he visits, as well as his own expectations and reactions.

A major theme of the book, insofar as a book assembled and revised from the newspaper columns Twain sent back to America as the journey progressed can have a theme, is that of the conflict between history and the modern world; the narrator continually encounters petty profiteering and trivializations of the past as he journeys, as well as the strange emphasis placed on particular events in the past, and is either outraged, puzzled, or bored by the encounter. One example can be found in the sequence during which the boat has stopped at Gibraltar. On shore, the narrator encounters seemingly dozens of people intent on regaling him, and everyone else in the known world, with a bland and pointless anecdote concerning how a particular hill nearby acquired its name, heedless of the fact that the anecdote is, indeed, bland, pointless, and toward the end, entirely too repetitive. Another example may be found in the discussion of the story of Abelard and Heloise, where the skeptical American deconstructs the story and comes to the conclusion that entirely too much fuss has been made about the two lovers. Only when the ship reaches areas of the world that do not exploit for profit or bore passers-by with inexplicable interest in their history, such as the passage dealing with the ship's time at the Canary Islands, is this trait not found in the text.

This reaction to those who profit from the past is found, in an equivocal and unsure balance with reverence, in the section of the book that deals with the ship's company's experiences in the Holy Land. The narrator reacts here, not only to the exploitation of the past and the unreasoning (to the American eye of the time) adherence to old ways, but to the profanation of religious history, and to the shattering of illusions, such as his dismay in finding that the nations described in the Old Testament could easily have fit inside many American states and territories, and that the kings of those nations might very well have ruled over fewer people than could be found in some small towns.

This equivocal reaction to the religious history the narrator encounters may be magnified by the prejudices of the time, as the United States was still primarily a Protestant nation at the time. The Catholic Church, in particular, receives a considerable amount of attention from the narrator, seemingly not because of any particular differences in doctrine that it may have with the narrator's own attitudes, but, rather because of its institutionalized nature. This is particularly apparent in the section of the book dealing with Italy, where the poverty of the secular population and the relative affluence of the church causes the narrator to urge, in the text of the book, if not directly, the inhabitants to rob their priests.

Many critics, including Leslie Fielder, in the afterword to the 1997 Signet Classics edition of the work, have described the book as an illustration of the American culture of the time confronting the established European and Middle Eastern cultures. Frequently amazed, occasionally impressed (but invariably loath to show it), sometimes insular, and almost always skeptical, the narrator of the book describes his experiences in Europe and the Holy Land in such a way that, quite often, the reader learns little of the area in which the narrator finds himself, but an amazing amount of the expectations and prejudices of a specific American tourist.

Description of the Holy Land

Twain's writings have been cited by pro-Zionist writers like Ernst Frankensten, Joan Peters and Alan Dershowitz as a primary source on the history of what is now the modern-day State of Israel. Twain described the land as empty of people and things, and essentially abandoned :

We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given wholly to weeds - a silent, mournful expanse... A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely... We never saw a human being on the whole route. We pressed on toward the goal of our crusade, renowned Jerusalem. The further we went the hotter the sun got and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became... There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem... Jerusalem is mournful, dreary and lifeless. I would not desire to live here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land... Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.

Others, like Kathleen Christison have been critical of Twain's book:

In modern times, Twain's exaggerations have become grist for the mills of those who propagate the line that Palestine was a desolate land until settled and cultivated by Jewish pioneers. Twain's descriptions are high in Israeli government press handouts that present a case for Israel's redemption of a land that had previously been empty and barren. His gross characterizations of the land and the people in the time before mass Jewish immigration are also often used by U.S. propagandists for Israel.... Twain's description of the all-Arab town of Nablus is typical... Calling the town Shechem, its biblical name, he described in detail the ancient roots of Jews there but never mentioned an Arab presence and only once used the name Nablus. In fact, Nablus had a population of 20,000 who were almost all Arabs apart from a few Samaritans.

Description of Greece and Syria

Twain describes both Greece and Syria as both being desolate and deserted:

"From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidden sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns of some ancient temples, lonely and deserted---a fitting symbol of desolation that has come upon all Greece in these latter ages. We saw no plowed fields, very few villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and hardly ever an isolated house. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures, or commerce, apparently... The nation numbers only eight hundred thousand souls."

"Damascus is beautiful from the mountain. It is beautiful even to foreigners accustomed to luxuriant vegetation, and I can easily understand how unspeakably beautiful it must be to eyes that are only used to the God-forsaken barrenness and desolation of Syria. I should think a Syrian would go wild with ecstasy when such a picture bursts upon him for the first time."

Trivia

The character the "Poet Lariat" was modeled on Plandome, NY resident Bloodgood Cutter, an association Cutter relished so much that he discussed his acquaintance with Twain to "anyone he would meet."

The book is arguably the first true American "bestseller", having been sold by door-to-door salesmen (in lavish hardbound editions) in numbers not previously seen outside of the Bible.

References

1. K. Christison, Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy, Univ. of California Press, 1999; p16.
2. Christison, p20.
3. B. B. Doumani, The political economy of population counts in Ottoman Palestine: Nablus, Circa 1950, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol 26 (1994) 1-17.

eBook

• The Innocents Abroad at Project Gutenberg
• Free typeset PDF ebook of The Innocents Abroad and other Twain books optimized for printing, plus extensive Twain reading list

• 1869 books
• American literature
• Mark Twain
• History of Israel
• Palestinian history