Susan K. Harris has served on the faculties of the University of Kansas, Penn State, and Queens College, CUNY.  Her specialties are Mark Twain Studies and Studies of American Women Writers. Among her six monographs are Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (U Missouri P, 1982); The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (Cambridge, 1996); and God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (Oxford, 2011). She has edited three American women’s novels for Penguin/Putnam Press, the Library of America’s volume of Twain’s historical romances, and a Houghton Mifflin pedagogical edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Her most recent work is Mark Twain, The World, and Me (U Alabama P, 2020).  Retired, she lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY.

A word about editions. Like most of Mark Twain’s books, Following the Equator (1897) was published in both British and American editions, and although the majority of the content is the same between them, there are marked differences in the books’ formatting.  The most striking difference is that the British edition (also 1897), titled More Tramps Abroad and published by Chatto and Windus, featured only 4 illustrations, whereas the American edition, published by the American Publishing Company, featured 193, by 11 different illustrators and photographers.  Additionally, contents are distributed differently across the chapters, with paragraphs and sections appearing in different chapters depending on which edition one examines.  The paragraphs themselves also tend to be longer in the British edition, at times encompassing sentences that are distributed across two or three far shorter paragraphs in the American edition.  Reading the two editions side-by-side suggests that Chatto and Windus felt they could depend on a readership able to read sustained paragraphs, whereas the American Publishing Company understood their readers to need short paragraphs and many visual aids. 

Formatting and illustrations aside, both editions conform to the protocols of travel literature, a popular 19th-century genre. As Jeffrey Melton notes in his essay on The Innocents Abroad, also featured on this CMTS website, “Travel literature is a varied and overlapping genre that combines the characteristics of journalism, autobiography, fiction, history, anthropology, and political analysis among others into a smorgasbord of narrative interpretation. As a composite literary form, it resists neat categorization.”  Innocents was Twain’s first published travelogue; Following is his fifth, and last. During the interval between them he had worked out his formula, basing the first-person narrative on observations recorded in his notes, journals, and letters to friends; interspersed with newspaper articles about ongoing events; segments of other writers’ accounts of journeys; local histories, and ethnographic materials—all liberally sprinkled with illustrations, at least in the American edition.  If Following was a purely visual project, it would be a collage, an assemblage of original drawings, newspaper clippings, photographs, and landscape paintings, interspersed with first-person narrative observations, opinions, analyses, and reminiscences. Little among existing documents, styles, and genres is off Twain’s table.

One of the challenges for writers of travel literature is striking a balance between readers’ comfort levels and their desire to learn about people, places, and cultures very different from their own.  For the writer, this often entails catering to widely-held readers’ preconceptions—call them prejudices—while also giving as accurate information as the writers can access about “foreign” communities’ physiognomies, dress, domestic arrangements, arts, religions, and overall levels of “civilization.”  The success of The Innocents Abroad lay in Twain’s skillful balancing of these factors. As Mellon notes, though, in that first travelogue, published in 1869, Twain did not question the moral aspects of his expert manipulation of western stereotypes. Following the Equator, I suggest, does.

Twain’s uneasiness with his material manifests especially in his frequent switches of viewpoint. His treatment of Australian Aboriginals is a case in point. Though he never, to his knowledge, met an Australian Aborigine (by 1895 most coastal communities had retreated inland, though cities also contained communities of mixed race people), he became intensely interested in what he could learn of their arts and technologies, introducing the topic through an elderly settler who opines that it is a “great pity that the race had died out,” and noting that his informant “instanced [Aboriginal] invention of [weapons known as] the boomerang and the ‘weet-weet’ as evidences of their brightness; and … said he had never seen a white man who had cleverness enough to learn to do the miracles with those two toys that the aboriginals had achieved” (194) [i].  These “toys” caught Twain’s imagination, and he elaborates on their implementation in another chapter, taking his materials from interviews with and written records from whites who had observed their uses.

In passages like this, Twain appeals to white westerners, and especially Americans’, assumption that other races and cultures are inferior because they lack energy and ambition. But Twain is also on the verge of deeper insights in these chapters, ones that the constraints of the genre, and his need to sell copies, prevented him from elaborating but that come through in terse, ironic sentences interspersed with his accounts. After a brief (and coded) allusion to Aboriginal birth control methods, for instance, he notes that the need to control births ceased “after the white man came.  The white man knew ways of keeping down the population which were worth several of [the Aboriginal’s]. The white man knew ways of reducing a native population 80 per cent, in 20 years. The native had never seen anything as fine as this” (208). Shortly after, Twain recounts—again from white sources, oral and written—stories about white settlers’ genocidal acts, including mass poisonings, in their drive to exterminate the native population. 

“The Usual Spirit.”  Illustration from Following The Equator. Chpt.XXI, p.211.