From Janesville to the Holy Land, Letters by Julia Newell

In other posts we’ve provided links to the letters written to newspapers during the Quaker City voyage by Mark Twain and Moses S. Beach. Another passenger, who wrote 14 letters to her hometown newspaper, the Janesville Gazette, was Julia Newell.

Newell does not always identify the excursionists by their real names. For example, she called used Dr. Hub of Hubsville instead of the actual Dr. James H. Payne from Boston, and Robin Goodfellow instead of Dr. Abraham Reeves Jackson.

Julia Newell was one of the few single women traveling on the trip, and may have been the only woman who traveled on horseback through some of the more difficult areas of the journey. She became friendly with Dr. Abraham Reeves Jackson on the trip, and four years after the trip she married him.

NewspaperLocationWrittenPublished
Janesville GazetteFayol, Azore Islands1867-06-221867-07-23
Janesville GazetteGibralter, Tangier, Marseilles1867-07-141867-08-01
Janesville GazetteParis1867-07-141867-08-16
Janesville GazetteSwitzerland1867-07-201867-08-24
Janesville GazetteItaly1867-07-201867-09-07
Janesville GazetteFlorence1867-07-291867-09-12
Janesville GazetteRome1867-10-03
Janesville GazetteNaples1867-08-101867-10-17
Janesville GazetteConstantinople1867-09-031867-10-21
Janesville GazetteBeirut1867-09-151867-11-06
Janesville GazetteOctober 18671867-11-23
Janesville GazetteJerusalemOctober 18671867-11-30
Janesville GazetteAlexandria, Cairo and the Pyramids1867-12-07
Janesville GazetteSpain1867-10-011867-12-14

List of publication dates came from “Appendix D: Itinerary of the Quaker City Excursion”. Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2, 1867–1868. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Richard Bucci, and Lin Salamo. University of California Press, 1990. The letters were then located in an online newspaper archive, the additional details added, the digital clippings created, and links added to them.


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