Mark twain gentle reader ass12/13/2023 ![]() “From being ‘appalled’ at this idea,” notes Kaplan, “he was now in favor of it.” citizenship to Chinese immigrants and African-Americans. On the very same day that Twain submitted his manuscript of The Innocents Abroad to his publisher, he also wrote a longform newspaper column for the New York Tribune revealing that he now believed in extending U.S. But he did need to meet this guide to see it in action in such a cultured and refined way.” “Twain did not need to go to Venice to imagine black intelligence. “Twain may well have rejected the racist idea of a hierarchy in intelligence by the time he left for Europe-but the guide would become Exhibit A of the potential intellectual equality of the races, an idea that Twain came to believe ever more firmly as his life went on,” Fishkin explains. According to her, prior to meeting this guide, Twain had not encountered an African-American that “possessed the kind of knowledge traditionally valued by Euro-Americans.” Kaplan, an art history professor at SUNY Purchase who has reviewed hundreds of 19th-century travel books in an effort to identify the Venetian guide and author of forthcoming book Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era.įishkin agrees with Kaplan that it was important for Twain to meet this man. “Twain's real interest in the issue of civil rights for African-Americans was sparked by his encounter with the guide,” says Paul H.D. ![]() Twain’s description of the African-American guide was a major statement in post-war America and also personally meaningful for the writer. “It is the first time Twain depicted an educated and cultured black person in print, and the guide is so superior to all of the other guides in the book that the difference is truly striking.” “One would be hard pressed to find as glowing a depiction of an educated black person in American letters during this period,” says Shelley Fisher Fishkin, an English professor at Stanford specializing in Mark Twain and marginalized voices in American literature. His description of the guide in The Innocents Abroad marked Twain’s first depiction of a sophisticated and accomplished black person in print., and he’d later repeat similar views in the American classic novels that followed his breakthrough fame from that book. When a young Twain left his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, for New York in 1853, for example, he wrote his mother in a letter that “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.”Ī few years later, Twain served briefly in a Confederate militia. Twain’s admiration for this still-unidentified guide-and brazen statement that he’d be better off in egalitarian Italy than in the United States-signaled a change in the writer’s views and willingness to voice such opinions publicly. Negroes are deemed as good as white people in Venice, and so this man feels no desire to go back to his native land. He dresses better than any of us, I think, and is daintily polite. ![]() He reads, writes, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, and French with perfect facility is a worshiper of art and thoroughly conversant with it knows the history of Venice by heart and never tires of talking of her illustrious career. “The guide I have spoken of is the only one we have had yet who knew anything,” Twain reported in the Venice chapter of the book. Twain had the opposite reaction instead, describing his guide with utmost respect. His trip began just two years after the end of the Civil War, a fraught time when it would have been easy for the Missouri-born Twain (who grew up in a slave-owning family) to poke fun at this guide, the son of an enslaved South Carolinian who self-emancipated himself when brought to Europe by a white American. One, however, was notably spared the sardonic misnomer treatment: an unnamed African-American who led Twain and his fellow travelers through the art and architecture of Venice. Among other jabs, the author nicknamed every guide with the all-American alias of “Ferguson,” completely writing off their actual identities. Twain’s local guides on this excursion only heightened the scribe’s inferiority complex, and so he settled the score on the printed page. It described, with characteristic sarcasm, the young writer’s inaugural trip overseas in 1867-a five-month tour of Europe and the Holy Land-and a period when he often felt like an uncouth American dunce. The humor-packed travelogue, currently celebrating its 150th anniversary of publication, was the author’s first book and his best-selling title during his lifetime. “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad,” Mark Twain famously warned in his 1869 travel memoir The Innocents Abroad.
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