Mark-Twain/Innocents-Abroad on Quint Books

Some technical details on the publication of The Innocents Abroad

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Our edition of The Innocents Abroad is a very special edition, and we wanted to share some of what sets it apart from others. In our Introduction, we discussed things like the 1200 footnotes, hundreds of definitions, and 8 appendixes, but there is more that makes this edition special.

A lot of special attention went into crafting the book, and making it authentic to the 1869 edition, while also updating it for contemporary readers. Here are some details to look out for:

Introducing The Innocents Abroad

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Quint Books is happy to announce the launch of our new book, a new edition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad.

The book has over 1200 footnotes, intended on making the book more accessible to new generations of readers. Footnotes cover the people, places, and events mentioned in the book, providing context that contemporary reads would have understood, but modern readers might not.

Also included are definitions of words and phrases used in the book, some of which are no longer in use, or used in different ways today. The hundreds of words that are defined are collected in the back of the book in their own index, called the Lexicon.

Will the real Miss Langdon please stand up?

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, at the end of the Quaker City’s five month journey with Mark Twain, the ship stopped in Bermuda for a few days. While there, the excursionists published a list of passengers, including those who had already left the trip earlier.

From the copy of the list owned by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, used with permission.

El Yuba Dam

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In Chapter 45 of The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain writes about traveling from Damascus to Kafr Hawr (which he calls Jonesborough), and then continuing on the following day to Banias. Twain wrote:

“We left Jonesborough very early in the morning, and rode forever and forever and forever, it seemed to me, over parched deserts and rocky hills, hungry, and with no water to drink. At noon we halted before the wretched town of El Yuba Dam, perched on a side of a mountain, but the dragoman said if we applied there for water we would be attacked by the whole tribe, for they did not love Christians. We had to journey on.”

Different views of the Quaker City Mock Trial

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad described the five month journey of dozens of passengers on the Quaker City ship traveling from New York to Europe and the Middle East. While cruising across the Atlantic Ocean out of New York, the Quaker City passengers needed activities to take up the many days it took before they reached their first destination. One of those activities was a Mock Trial, where they set up a trial of the Purser, Robert Vail, for ‘stealing’ a coat from Mark Twain.

Who was Blucher in The Innocents Abroad?

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Twain uses a fictional character in The Innocents Abroad to help him tell representative stories based on different passengers on the Quaker City. In his original Alta letters, he used a character named Mr. Brown.

Mr. Brown shows up roughly twenty one times in the Alta letters (roughly because it depends how you divide up the mentions in each letter). Seven of those times, Brown becomes Blucher in The Innocents Abroad. One time Brown become a more generic ‘thoughtful old pilgrim’. Two times Brown’s stories in the Alta letters become Jack’s stories in the book.

Quaker City Passenger Lists

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Who traveled with Mark Twain on the Quaker City? While some of his fellow passengers became well-known through their association with Twain, or through their own self-promotion after the cruise, the list of who traveled with Twain is hard to pin down exactly due to inaccuracies in some published lists.

There are five published lists of passengers from different places and times. Those are described and linked to below.

On November 8, 1867, the day the Quaker City departed New York, The Brooklyn Daily Union published a list of the passengers on the ship. However, that list was clearly provided to the Union before it was finalized, as it includes at least a dozen names of people who did not go on the trip. You can see this list in a clipping here: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-brooklyn-union-1867-06-08-the-medite/143538848/

From Janesville to the Holy Land, Letters by Julia Newell

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Mediterranean Bound, Letters by Moses S. Beach

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As mentioned in other posts, Mark Twain was not the only correspondent writing articles from the Quaker City (see Twain’s articles here). While Twain’s 50+ letters to the Daily Alta California formed the foundation of his book The Innocents Abroad, many other passengers were also writing to newspapers across the United States. The person who wrote the most letters to their paper, after Twain, was Moses S. Beach. Beach was the owner of the New York Sun, and he wrote thirty-seven letters to the newspaper during the trip.

Did Mark Twain meet the Czar?

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the famous stories Mark Twain writes about in The Innocents Abroad is the meeting of Twain and his fellow excursionists with Czar Alexander II. Is it possible that Twain, who wrote about the event in newspaper accounts, and in his book, didn’t actually make it to the meeting with the Czar?

Twain writes to his mother (26 August, 1867) about the visit to the Czar, in detail. He also signed a letter (26 August, 1867) to ship owner Daniel Leary along with over twenty other passengers, thanking him for arranging the visit to the Czar. These would seem to lend credence to the idea that Twain was present.

Mark Twain’s Quaker City Letters

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad was based on his trip on the Quaker City side-paddle steamship. Twain’s ticket was paid for by the Daily Alta California newspaper in San Francisco, which paid the $1250 ticket price (roughly $25,000 in today’s dollars) in exchange for 50 letters during the journey which would be published in the paper. Some letters were lost in transit, and made up later. In addition to the letters sent to the Alta, Twain also sent several letters to papers in New York. Below is a list of all of the letters sent based on the Quaker City trip, which are the basis for The Innocents Abroad. To read the article, click on the publication date. Locations are those given in the article, even if made up by Twain (i.e. Baldwinsville). The table is sortable and searchable.

Can you trust a transcription?

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While Mark Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad is the most famous record of the tourist cruise in 1867 on the Quaker City paddle steamer, it wasn’t the only one. Many passengers on the ship, like Twain, corresponded with newspapers across the United States. One other passenger, Mrs. Louisa Griswold, also published a book of the journey, and some of the other letters and journals were in some form put into print. One journal, written by Mrs. Emily Severance, was published by her daughter many years later, as a record of the journey for her children and grandchildren. Printed in 1938 in a small edition, some copies made it out into libraries. Severance writes about the very fact that so many passengers were writing about the trip:

Finding a book that doesn’t exist

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, refers to a book twice in the text. In Chapter 48, he quotes from book saying:

“C.W.E.,” (of “Life in the Holy Land”), deposes as follows:

and then quotes a passage from the book. In Chapter 56, he again quotes a passage from the book, introducing it as:

A writer in “Life in the Holy Land” observes:

So who is C.W.E. and what book is Life in the Holy Land?

The advertisement Mark Twain inserted into The Innocents Abroad

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Twain’s story of the Wandering Jew in Chapter 54 of the The Innocents Abroad says their guide pointed out a mark left on a wall by the Wandering Jew, which read:

S T.—1860—X.

It isn’t dwelt on in the book, probably because everyone in the United States reading the book understood the joke immediately.

In the 1860s, a company called P.B. Drake & Co. created a massive guerrilla advertising campaign. The campaign started by simply placing the above cryptic text on the sides of buildings and even rocks. New Hampshire even had to pass a law banning advertisements that defaced natural settings, after Drake painting their ad on the side of the White Mountains. After the company generated enough interest in what the cryptic text was, it finally added the name of their product, Drake’s Plantation Bitters. They then started advertising in newspapers across the county. You can see one advertisement on the front page of the New York Times (June 28, 1862):

The Quaker City in the Levant Herald

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When Mark Twain was traveling on the Quaker City, the ship stopped twice in Constantinople (now the city of Istanbul) in Turkey. In Chapter 34 of The Innocents Abroad, Twain mentions the local English-language paper (actually bilingual, as it was printed in both English and French), The Levant Herald.

Twain mentions the paper and others in the city that were fighting censorship, in particular in their coverage of the revolt of Crete against Turkish rule (one of several revolts by Crete that eventually led to its brief period of independence between 1898 and 1913, when Crete became part of Greece).

Building a lexicon

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re going to dive into the deep end on the first post here, and explain some of what we do differently here at Quint. Our first book being prepared is Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, which was published in 1869. It might be surprising to many that this book, which many people have never heard of, was Twain’s most popular book during his lifetime. Today we think primarily of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or other novels like The Prince and the Pauper or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but Twain wrote five travel books, of which The Innocents Abroad was his first. This is the book that made Twain famous, and for a number of reasons it is the first book we’ve chosen to come out with in our Essentials edition.