A Tramp Abroad

Apr-11-1878
Sep-03-1879
scott 13 October 2021
Our Start

Sam Clemens wrote to his mother February 17 if 1878:

Life has come to be a very serious matter with me. I have a badgered, harassed feeling, a good part of my time. It comes mainly of business responsibilities & annoyances, & the persecutions of kindly letters from well-meaning strangers—to whom I must be rudely silent or else put in the biggest half of my time bothering over answers. There are other things, also, that help to consume my time & defeat my projects. Well, the consequence is, I cannot write a book at home. This cuts my income down. Therefore, I have about made up my mind to take my tribe & fly to some little corner of Europe & budge no more until I shall have completed one of the half dozen books that lie begun, up stairs. We Please say nothing about this at present. We propose to sail the 10th April.

From "A Tramp Abroad":  One day it occurred to me that it had been many years since the world had been afforded the spectacle of a man adventurous enough to undertake a journey through Europe on foot. After much thought, I decided that I was a person fitted to furnish to mankind this spectacle. So I determined to do it. This was in March, 1878.

I looked about me for the right sort of person to accompany me in the capacity of agent, and finally hired a Mr. Harris for this service.

It was also my purpose to study art while in Europe. Mr. Harris was in sympathy with me in this. He was as much of an enthusiast in art as I was, and not less anxious to learn to paint. I desired to learn the German language; so did Harris.

Toward the middle of April we sailed in the HOLSATIA, Captain Brandt, and had a very pleasant trip, indeed.

After a brief rest at Hamburg, we made preparations for a long pedestrian trip southward in the soft spring weather, but at the last moment we changed the program, for private reasons, and took the express-train.

Clara (Spaulding) Stanchfield wrote Paine, regarding this trip, in 1911:

The second trip was longer, and we remained abroad a year and a half, spending the first summer in Heidelberg and in the Autumn going to Italy. We returned to Munich for the winter. In the Spring we went to Paris and remained there four or five months, returning to America that Autumn. It is too bad that I haven’t my journals to refer to. Mr. Clemens met so many interesting and distinguished men at this time, many of them spending evenings with him at the Langham where we had our apartments. I remember Robert Browning coming one morning, and my surprise that he locked so much more like a farmer than a poet. Turgenev was then in London, and he came several times to see Mr. C — he seemed a great personage. Sir Charles Dilke was there at the height of his fame and we saw him frequently. I do not know why I mention these names when there are so many other equally interesting to speak of.

European Itinerary, 1878-1879 (from Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, Vol II)

* Accompanied by Joe Twichell

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