BOOK REVIEW

The following review appeared 17 September 2024 on the Mark Twain Forum.

Copyright © 2024 Mark Twain Forum
This review may not be published or redistributed in any medium without permission.

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Barbara Schmidt

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Philip Trauring is a new name in Mark Twain scholarship. He has never previously published a scholarly journal article or presented a research paper on Mark Twain at any conference. However, it would be a serious mistake to underestimate Trauring and his ability to annotate and publish under his own label Mark Twain's groundbreaking, bestseller travel epic The Innocents Abroad. This new Quint Books edition proves Trauring has utilized the best authorities in his Mark Twain research. The wraparound photo on the book's cover features a rarely-seen color image of the Quaker City steamship, made in 1867 in Italy. The original painting is now owned by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. Trauring acknowledges Mark Twain scholar Kevin Mac Donnell for providing previously unpublished material for an Appendix and Robert Hirst of the Mark Twain Project for providing typescripts of primary research materials as well as a copy of Hirst's own dissertation. Benjamin Griffin, also of the Mark Twain Project, provided access to historical documents.

Trauring, a former technology entrepreneur, has lived abroad many years and has a personal knowledge of many of the sites Mark Twain visited on his tour of the Holy Land. He responded to interview questions regarding his motivation for researching and publishing this now indispensable edition which features over 1,200 footnotes (conveniently placed at the bottom of pages for easy access), eight appendices, a lexicon, and even an index of people, places and things (a feature I have never previously seen in a Mark Twain edition). It was a project that he completed in two years. The only previous annotated edition of The Innocents Abroad was the unillustrated 1984 edition issued by Library of America--a dual edition paired with Roughing It--that, due to limited space requirements, featured only 153 end notes written by Guy Cardwell. When comparing the two editions, it is interesting to observe that Trauring and Cardwell chose to annotate the same material in most cases, but they do not always agree on some facts. Trauring's more recent research has benefited by the abundance of new database and research materials that have become available in the past forty years.

According to Trauring, "I spent many years living abroad, and when I returned to the US, I thought my children were behind in their knowledge of American literature. To be sure they were, but as I looked into it I found a very different world from when I was in high school. While my children were behind, I found that to a large extent so were their classmates and others their age. Perhaps we simply live in the world of YouTube and TikTok, but I thought maybe I could help make some of the books I loved more approachable" (Trauring, August 13, 2024). Reading through Trauring's annotations, it is easy to visualize his children at his side asking questions about 19th century slang terms and figures of speech that many 21st century readers do not recognize. Terms like "gallus" and "magic lantern" and "sally forth" and "Gilderoy's Kite" and "seven-league boots" and dozens more are defined and put in historical context for today's readers. Nautical terms such as "dead-light" and "bowsprit" and "yawl" and "thort-ships" and "belaying pin" are defined, as well as how to tell time on a ship by the count of bells.

Trauring's choice of annotations reveal how often older generation Mark Twain scholars may have overestimated the abilities of younger readers to intuitively grasp these definitions and concepts. Trauring also has a talent for including additional historical insights and entertaining trivia into his annotations--such as the fact that all passengers on board the Quaker City used pocket watches because wrist watches had not yet been invented; or that one of the books by Victor Hugo that Mark Twain referenced in a story was made into a movie in 1953 starring Rock Hudson; or how the US Consul in the Azores at the time of Twain's visit was connected to a murder trial that was possibly the first to use dental records to convict a murderer. These tidbits are plentiful throughout the book.

Mark Twain documented his five month journey with complete strangers on the steamship Quaker City traveling to Europe and the Holy Land with a series of newspaper articles mailed back to the US. In his Introduction, Trauring explains the trip was one of the first organized tours from the US to Europe after the Civil War and generated immense interest in the public and press. The San Francisco Daily Alta newspaper paid today's equivalent of $25,000 for Mark Twain's ticket in order to obtain his eyewitness accounts.

From Gibraltar, Spain, France, Genoa, Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Athens, Constantinople, Odessa, Yalta, Smyrna, Beirut, Damascus, the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria, and Tangiers--countries and cities opened their art galleries, churches, history and geography to the excursionists. Mark Twain's lampooning of the religious absurdities he observed grew (as did his skepticism of religion, politics and mankind) throughout the trip in the newspaper dispatches he was sending back home. The American newspaper readers loved his honest and candid impressions laced with humor that later resulted in a book that became a bestseller.

Trauring's edition is based on the first edition published by American Publishing Company in 1869 with some updates to spelling that were made in the 1899 edition. All 235 illustrations from the first edition are included. The cover utilizes the subtitle "The New Pilgrim's Progress" (singular, as did the cover of the 1869 edition) while the title page utilizes "The New Pilgrims' Progress" (plural, also as in the first edition). This edition also incorporates subject headers at the top of each page and these are included in the Table of Contents. Trauring emphasizes his footnotes are meant to provide facts without any literary criticism.

Valuable research materials in Appendix 1 include a list of contemporaneous accounts such as other passengers' notebooks and where they are now located or where they were published. Trauring also references his own website (quintbooks.com) that he has designed for this edition and contains online links to all of Mark Twain's newspaper accounts of the trip. Appendix 2 includes a bibliography of Mark Twain's own source materials and guide books that he used throughout the excursion. Appendix 3 lists Trauring's own research materials and websites he utilized in annotating this edition (including the Mark Twain Forum). Appendix 4, compiled from five different sources, includes a list of all excursionists on the Quaker City and the nicknames Mark Twain gave some of them. Appendix 5 includes the list of the ship's officers and crew (80 names) based on passenger Robert Bell's journal that is currently in the Kevin Mac Donnell collection and published here for the first time.

Appendix 6 is a reprint of an article written by Mark Twain's fellow passenger Mary Mason Fairbanks who became his lifelong friend. Fairbanks wrote the article for the January 1892 The Chautauquan magazine, more than twenty years after The Innocents Abroad had become a national best seller. Fairbanks describes the profound impact the five month journey abroad to Europe, Asia, and the African continent had on Clemens, the young journalist. "It was the bridge by which he crossed from a restless, wavering, well-nigh purposeless youth, to a new life of growing aspirations, expanding affectation, fixed ambitions, and a national celebrity" (p. 675). She concludes, "The Quaker City sailed out of New York harbor with no celebrities on board. She brought back the Great American Humorist" (p. 679).

By contrast, two appendices feature uncomplimentary articles and interviews by Mark Twain's fellow passengers. Appendix 7 is a reprint of passenger Stephen M. Griswold's May 3, 1910 letter to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, written after Mark Twain died. Griswold put forth the sensational claim that Mark Twain never visited the Russian Czar Alexander II in Yalta as he claimed in The Innocents Abroad. According to Griswold, Mark Twain and seven other passengers attended a dance ashore the night before but returned to the ship too late the next morning to make the visit with the Czar and his family because the ship's passengers and their royal escort had left without them. Griswold claimed Twain later asked to use Griswold's notes of the visit to write up the event for his own newspaper report. In a June 5, 1910 interview in the same newspaper, Griswold repeated his claim. Chapter 38 of The Innocents Abroad indicates Mark Twain did attend a dance ashore in Yalta. He wrote, "In that Russian town of Yalta I danced an astonishing sort of dance an hour long and one I had not heard of before, with a very pretty girl . . ." (p. 401). However, evidence indicating Mark Twain did manage to make the visit with the Czar includes a letter written to his mother the following day on August 26, 1867 describing the visit. Trauring emphasizes he has found no direct contemporary evidence to support Griswold's claim, made forty years after the voyage and after Mark Twain's death.

Appendix 8 is a reprint of an interview with passenger and journalist Nina Larowe, published in the Morning Oregonian on April 22, 1910, after Mark Twain died. Larowe's uncomplimentary article criticized Mark Twain's drinking and swearing. She complained, "Twain was not a bit religious and he was hard on the religious people" (p. 693).

Trauring's book concludes with a Lexicon of unusual words found in The Innocents Abroad and an Index of items such as Biblical References, Christian Saints, Literary References, Newspapers, Places, Songs, etc. that Trauring developed to help himself navigate as he worked on annotations.

Readers may wonder how Trauring's edition, published under his own imprint Quint Books, will differ from a future Works edition published by the editors of the Mark Twain Project and University of California Press. The University of California Press editions focus on establishing authoritative texts based on actual manuscripts including those never previously published, comparisons of original newspaper reports with first edition book publication, comparisons of American and European editions, determining accidental variations due to editing and typesetting, and establishing authorial intent. It is likely Trauring's research on the annotations he has incorporated into the Quint Books edition will be beneficial to all future editions.

Reading through Trauring's The Innocents Abroad is the equivalent of rediscovering Mark Twain guiding his contemporary readers through the 19th century pleasure excursion trip while Philip Trauring is whispering hints in the reader's ear of what was really happening and how these same places and countries and cities look today. It really is a "Quint Essential" edition.