The Reprobate Elect in The Innocents Abroad

Abstract

OMETIME in October, I867, aboard the steamship Quaker City, Mark Twain made a surprising discovery: he discovered what the book he had been writing since June was about. The book was (or, more properly, was to be) The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress.' The version he had been engaged in writing for about four months took the form of travel letters to the Alta California of San Francisco and the New York Tribune. Perhaps as much as a month before, in the second week of he and seven other men had left their cruise ship at Beirut. Guided by a dragoman named Abraham, attended by nineteen servingmen, followed by twenty-six pack mules bearing every conceivable camping accouterment, the eight had made their way through Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine on horseback. During the first week on the trail, Mark Twain wrote (and may well have posted) three letters to the Alta. They bear these datelines: In Camp, Mountains of Lebanon, Syria, September iith, I867; In Camp near Temnin el Foka, Valley of Lebanon, Sept. I2th; In Camp, Eight Hours Beyond Damascus, September I7th.2 These were the last Alta letters from abroad to bear precise dates. His dating the next twenty simply September, I867 supports the surmise that they were written later-most of them after he and his companions of the trail had returned to the Quaker City and the ship had set her bows toward America.3