Mark Twain on India
willytex
Thread: Mark Twain on India
Subject: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World.
Author: willytex
Date: 11/02/2001
Mark Twain was considered to be the funniest man on Earth, and he was also
one of the most quoted men of his time. He was a popular humorist,
philosopher and social satirist. Mark Twain was the nom-de-plume of writer
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910, America's first literary celebrity. He
was born in 1835, the year Haley's Comet passed over, and vowed that he
would not die until he saw the famous comet. He died in 1910 -- the day
after the comet's return.
Samuel Clemens left his home in Hannibal, Missouri, for his first extended
trip abroad in 1895. Over the next fifty-seven years he travelled the entire
globe, working as an itinerant typesetter, a steamboat pilot on the
Mississippi River, and later as a prospector and newspaper reporter in the
American West. Clements apparently first used the pseudonym "Mark Twain"
while working on the frontier.
Clements made many one-night lecture stops at hundreds of small towns
throughout the world, settled down for months in hotels and rented villas in
England and Europe, escaped life's pressures on tropical islands, and basked
in society's limelight in many of the world's great cities. He visited five
continents, steamed across the Atlantic twenty-nine times, and crossed the
Pacific and Indian oceans as part of one complete round-the-world circuit.
On the other hand, "Mark Twain" appears repeatedly in many of his books, but
as the excitable, naive, hapless character he plays in the narratives. If
the typical 19th-century frontispiece depicted "the author" as someone to be
admired, the cartoonish figure of "Mark Twain" who is displayed inside MT's
texts was someone readers could comfortably look down on in amusement.
Besides these easily recognizable classics, Twain wrote five fascinating
Travelogues, detailing his experiences in the western U.S., along the
Mississippi, in Europe, the Mideast, and Asia.
Wrote Twain:
"The world never seemed so big before."
Mark Twain's great travel book, "Following the Equator: A Journey Around the
World" concerns his trip abroad to Australia and thence to New Zealand,
India, Ceylon, Mauritius, and South Africa.
Excerpts from "Following the Equator":
"These were indeed wonderful people, the natives. They ought not to thave
been wasted. They should have been crossed with the Whites. It would have
improved the Whites and done the natives no harm."
"But the natives were wasted, poor heroic wild creatures. They were gathered
together in little settlements on neighboring islands, and paternally cared
for by the Government, and instructed in religion, and deprived of tobacco,
because the superintendent of the Sunday-school was not a smoker, and so
considered smoking immoral."
"The Natives were not used to clothers, and houses, and regular hours, and
church, and school, and Sunday school, and work, and the other misplaced
persecutions of civilization, and they pined for their lost home and their
wild free life. Too late they repented that they had traded that heaven for
this hell. They sat homesick on their alien crages, adn day by day gazed out
through their tears over the sea with unappeasable longing toward the hazy
bulk which was the specter of what had beeen their paradise; one by one
their hearts broke and they died."
Summary:
Following The Equator is an account of Mark Twain's round-the-world lecture
tour of 1895/96. The book opens in Paris, from which Twain sets out on his
journey. In New York, his wife, Olivia, and daughter Clara decide to
continue on the tour with Twain. The family sets out from New York
accompanied by Major Pond, the tour manager for the North American leg.
Following a stop in British Columbia, the travellers set sail on the Pacific
Ocean.
The first stop in India is Bombay, which Twain finds to be a fabulous city
of great contradictions: great wealth and extreme poverty, ornate palaces
and ramshackle hovels. Twain gives a lengthy description of his interesting
experiences while taking in Bombay, including a religious ceremony, the
wedding of a 12-year-old girl, and a murder trial. The party takes the train
to Baroda, where Twain rides an elephant.
A longer train ride to Allahabad the City of God follows, where a religious
ceremony is being held. Next stop is Benares, an important religious center,
where they take a cruise on the Ganges. The journey through India continues,
with stops in Calcutta, Darjeeling, and numerous other cities. At this
point, Twain relates the history of the Great Mutiny of 1857, in which the
Indian people revolted against the British.
Notes:
1. "Mark Twain" is the fifth film in Ken Burns's popular American Lives
series and features interviews with Hal Holbrook, Arthur Miller and leading
Twain scholars.
2. Project Gutenberg ASCII text of Mark Twain's last travel book, first
published in 1897. Project Gutenberg Release #2895 (November 2001)
3. Nearly three years in the making and drawing from 63 hours of material,
thousands of archival photographs and nearly 20 interviews with top writers
and Twain scholars.
4. Boondocksnet.com
This site combines more than 1500 pages of local materials by and about Mark
Twain with links to the best resources available elsewhere on the Web.
5. Released in 1897 by the American Publishing Co. First edition had 712
pages and 193 illustrations. Mark Twain's fifth, and final, travel book
(preceded by The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, Life On The
Mississippi). Recounts Twain's experiences on a worldwide lecture tour in
1895-96, focusing primarily on India, Australia, and South Africa. It is the
only travel book in which the narrator identifies himself as Mark Twain;
earlier narrators were heavily based on Twain, but also contained fictional
elements in their characters.
6. Twain wrote the book shortly after the death of his 24-year-old daughter
Susy; he was greatly depressed, and admits to struggling for a lighthearted
tone to the novel, although he was in hell at the time. The first edition
contained the first photographs used as illustrations in a Twain book.
Some rejected titles for the book were: Another Innocent Abroad, The
Surviving Innocent Abroad, and The Latest Innocent Abroad.
7. A round-the-world lecture tour was arranged by Clemens to rescue him from
his despondent financial situation; his publishing house recently collapsed,
and the Paige Compositor, in which he invested heavily, was also a
commercial failure.
8. MT published one last travel book in 1897: Following the Equator . By
then he was over sixty, and had been through the traumas of his well-
publicized bankruptcy and the death of his oldest daughter, Susy. By 1897
photographs had taken the place of engravings for frontispieces, as shown
below left. There were several photographs inside the text as well, but most
of the pictures were still drawings, and as you can see from the drawing
below right , the figure of "Mark Twain" was still available for comic
purposes -- not only the reader, but "even the seagulls" can laugh at him.
Appendix I: A Twain Timeline:
1895: Contracts for around-the-world lecture tour, and makes publishing
agreement with Harper & Bros. for a book about the tour. Visits British
Colombia, Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand.
1896: Visits and lectures in India, South Africa, and England. Joan of Arc
is published. Daugther Susy Clemens dies in Hartford, age 23.
Appendix II: Contents of Chapter L.
On the Road to Benares--Dust and Waiting--The Bejeweled Crowd--A Native
Prince and his Guard--Zenana Lady--The Extremes of Fashion--The Hotel at
Benares--An Annex a Mile Away--Doors in India--The Peepul Tree--Warning
against Cold Baths--A Strange Fruit--Description of Benares--The
Beginning of Creation--Pilgrims to Benares--A Priest with a Good Business
Stand--Protestant Missionary--The Trinity Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu--
Religion the Business at Benares
Works Cited:
1. "Mark Twain in His Times", Written and Directed by Stephen Railton
Department of English, University of Virginia
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/index2.html
2. "Mark Twain House"
http://www.marktwainhouse.org/
3. "Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens"
By Andrew Hoffman 1997. William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Mack, Maynard. "Mark Twain". In "World Masterpieces". New York: Norton 2000.
1199-1202.
Twain, Mark "Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World." Project
Gutenberg Release #2895 (November 2001)
http://www.boondocksnet.com/twainwww/
http://www.boondocksnet.com/twainwww/writings_f.html
"Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography", by Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan,
and Ken Burns. Companion volume to the 4-hour Ken Burns documentary.
Available at Border's, November 2001
"Mark Twain at Large: His Travels Here and Abroad"
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/Exhibits/MTP/
Mark Twain's "Autobiography"
Although Mark Twain planned his autobiography for publication after his
death, he published these 25 chapters in the North American Review.
http://www.boondocksnet.com/twaintexts/autobiography/index.html