It also reveals what happened when Twain broke the Greek government’s quarantine, evaded the police, and visited the Parthenon by moonlight.
When Twain arrived in Greece on August 14, 1867, he was 31 years old. He wore the familiar bushy mustache, but his hair had not yet turned white. He had grown up as Samuel Clemens in Hannibal, Mo., worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, and, during the Civil War, headed to Nevada, where he failed as a miner but started to know success as “Mark Twain,” the writer. In 1865, based in California, he came to the attention of readers in the East with a short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The novels that would make him a superstar of American literature lay in the future.
Shortly after moving to New York City, a magnet for aspiring writers then and now, Twain learned about a five-month cruise to the Holy Land, organized by Henry Ward Beecher, the pastor of a church in Brooklyn and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A group of about 75 would stop for excursions along the way. Twain cooked up the idea to join and got the Alta to pay his way in exchange for a series of regular dispatches. He produced more than 50. Later, they became the basis for The Innocents Abroad.
Twain delivered an amusing and insightful narrative of people and places, back when travel journalism was less consumer-driven than it is now. Rather than offering lists of things to do, he aimed to deliver a vicarious experience for readers who probably never would make the journey themselves. Readers enjoyed Twain’s grumbling about his fellow passengers, whom he deemed too old and straitlaced: “They never romped, they talked but little, they never sang, save in the nightly prayer-meeting,” he wrote. “The pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse.”
Twain found much to like across the ocean, but he also loved to demolish European pretensions. In Milan, he visited “an ancient tumble-down ruin of a church,” home to The Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci. A dozen artists had set up easels to copy the masterwork. “I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to the original,” he deadpanned. This was a major theme: Older things aren’t necessarily better than younger things. His patriotic point was that the Old World should step aside and watch the New World rise. The Innocents Abroad may be read as a cultural declaration of independence.