Robinson sees 'something fundamentally distracted' about it, a recurrent gap between the account of the trip itself and the real subjects of the narrator's interest that occur on some other (mental) level. (3) Few modern critics would argue with Forrest Robinson's more recent assessment that this is 'the least interesting of travel books'. It lacks the freedom, the lawless abandon, the sublime audacity, the spontaneous humor, the irresistible drollery of '. The reviewer of 'New Publications' for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin in May 1880 confessed 'to a feeling of disappointment. (2)Ī Tramp Abroad has suffered in critical comparison from the time of its first publication.

(1) The comic energy and innovatory cultural impact of this text made it both 'the most successful travel book in country's literary history' and a benchmark in the history of American travel writing. In Innocents, conventional assumptions about Europe, its traditions, and the value of its artistic heritage, were subjected to the iconoclastic eye of 'Mark Twain', playful and 'free-talking American frankly sizing up the Old World'. The final suggestion is that, as parasites on their cultural hosts, tramps and tourists are not finally as different as they might at first appear.Ī Tramp Abroad (1880) is normally considered one of Twain's less successful books, seen as a rather tired attempt to follow up the success of his earlier The Innocents Abroad (1869). The essay also examines the book's self-conscious concern with tourism as a subject, Twain's own depiction as tourist rather than sensitive traveller, and his awareness of the way mass tourism affects, and promotes a false version of, the countries it colonizes. This is a re-reading of Mark Twain's neglected travel book, A Tramp Abroad (1880) which explores the title pun, paying particular attention to Twain's highly ambivalent attitude to tramps as represented back home in America.

A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain