“Sinners & Pilgrims”
Colonel Denny’s Journal and Photo Album Give Different Version of The Innocents Abroad
In October 1867, near the end of the five-month-long Quaker City “excursion to Europe and the Holy Land,” Mark Twain wrote to his old friend Joe Goodman: “This pleasure party of ours is composed of the d—dest, rustiest, [most] ignorant, vulgar, slimy, psalm-singing cattle that could be scraped up in seventeen States. They wanted Holy Land, and they got it. It was a stunner. It is an awful trial to a man’s religion to waltz it through the Holy Land.”
William R. Denny
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That intemperate outburst gives us a fair idea of the animosity that had developed between Mark Twain and most of the 64 other passengers. When the ship reached home in November, he published a savage blast at the “pilgrims” in the New York Herald.
“Well, I was bitter on those passengers,” he explained to Mary Mason Fairbanks, one of the few who remained on good terms with him. “You don’t know what atrocious things women, & men too gray-haired & old to have their noses pulled, said about me. And but for your protecting hand I would have given them a screed or two that would have penetrated even their muddy intellects & afforded them something worth abusing me about.”
Indeed, he obviously hoped his Herald letter would “bring out bitter replies from some of the Quaker City’s strange menagerie of ignorance, imbecility, bigotry & dotage, & so give me an excuse to go into the secret history of the excursion & tell truthfully how that curious company conducted themselves in foreign lands and on board ship.”
The “strange menagerie” of passengers wisely refrained from answering Mark Twain in print. But he never really needed any “excuse” to go into the secret history of the excursion, and that vengeful impulse soon began to fuel the satire he ultimately directed at his fellow travelers in The Innocents Abroad (1869).
Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain)
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Essentially a factual account, Innocents nevertheless contained elements of fiction — incidents and characters based only remotely on the facts. Much effort has therefore been spent over the years to find independent or parallel accounts of the trip, the better to understand how Mark Twain altered or embellished the facts. Colonel William R. Denny’s journal and photograph album, written and compiled while he was a passenger on the Quaker City, were recently given to Bancroft’s Mark Twain Papers by Denny’s great-grandchildren. These remarkable documents are among the most illuminating collateral accounts ever found for the Quaker City excursion. In a narrow sense they are not entirely new to us. It is 25 years now since I first set eyes on Colonel Denny’s album and journal, in the summer of 1973. I stumbled on their existence while working as a graduate student for the Mark Twain Papers, visiting the library at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. At the time I was also writing a dissertation on “The Making of The Innocents Abroad,” so I was more than a little excited to get wind of previously unknown primary documents from the Quaker City. |
I was also preternaturally naive in 1973, but the Denny clan proved willing to overlook that, and were in fact quite eager to satisfy my curiosity about their documents. A single telephone call (and a Greyhound bus) got me to an interview with Elizabeth Chapman Denny Vann, one of Colonel Denny’s granddaughters, then living in Richmond. She showed me a photocopy of her grandfather’s extensive journal and urged me to visit Westminster, Maryland, where one of Denny’s greatgranddaughters stood guard over the photograph album.
That was my reason for asking to visit Elizabeth Denny Dixon Whitfield and her husband Theodore, who kindly agreed to let me come, then insisted that I stay the weekend, which I did, enjoying their company, their matchless azaleas and leatherleaf viburnum, not to mention the family stories about Mark Twain handed down from earlier generations. Mrs. Whitfield showed me the photograph album in which Denny had collected nearly 50 portraits of the passengers Mark Twain later characterized so rudely to Joe Goodman. (Before Denny’s album, we knew of photographs for fewer than half a dozen passengers.) I can only say that these photographs proved to be a window on Mark Twain’s world unlike any other I have looked through, before or since.
Dr. William M. Gibson
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Even more remarkably, perhaps, after only two days’ acquaintance, Mrs. Whitfield entrusted me with the photographs long enough to have them microfilmed in Charlottesville. I don’t believe I had the wit even to offer to sign a receipt for them! To make a long story short, I brought that microfilm back to Bancroft, hoping to use it in our planned edition of The Innocents Abroad. I also used it to help write my dissertation, after which I went to UCLA to teach for three years before returning to Bancroft in 1980. In 1990 we used a handful of the photographs to help document Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2: 1867-1868, but I still thought the full and proper use of the microfilm would come only with our edition of Innocents, which is even now several years off. Then, just last year, word reached me (through her brother, John Dixon) that Mrs. Whitfield wanted to give the album to the Mark Twain Papers! It was a breathtaking idea, especially because we had never discussed such a possibility, even in our desultory correspondence since 1973. But she was very firm, very gracious, and as generous and determined as always. She also urged me to write to her cousins, Collins Denny III and his brother, Clifford, to whom the Denny journal had been given by their father. She warned them that I was “the world’s worst correspondent” (which is true), but eventually I managed to explain why Bancroft might be a good place for these documents to live, how they would be used and cared for, and why Mark Twain’s papers would provide a meaningful context for them. |
In late October and early November, Denny’s great-grandchildren made their decision, the photo album and journal arrived, were appraised, and made permanent parts of the collection. The journal, and especially the photographs of the “pilgrims,” will make a major contribution to our fall exhibition, “Mark Twain at Large: His Travels at Home and Abroad,” opening September 25.
Why all the excitement about documents that Mark Twain did not write, and that don’t even quote him or refer to him all that often? In part it is simply invaluable to have Denny’s perspective on his rambunctious traveling companion: “Saml L Clemens of Sanfrancisco Calafornia, a wicked fellow that will take the name of the Lord in vain, that is no respector of persons, yet he is liberal, kind and obliging, and if he were only a christian would make his mark.”
Bloodgood Haviland Cutter
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In part, however, it is important to remember that Mark Twain “liked to get hold of true stories to tell them in his own fashion.” Denny’s journal gives us an independent view of the facts as set down by someone of quite different temperament, religious persuasion, and social expectation — a pillar of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, a longtime Sunday School superintendent from Winchester, Virginia, and an ex- Confederate colonel and spy.
Yet Denny was also someone Mark Twain knew and liked well enough to travel with. They and six others took a side trip to Tangier; they and only two others risked arrest during the famous midnight visit to the Parthenon (Denny was mentioned five times by name in Mark Twain’s chapter about it); and they and six others traveled for three weeks on horseback down through the Holy Land, the trip which Mark Twain said was a “trial to a man’s religion.” Mark Twain was 31 and a charter member of the “Quaker City night-hawks,” while Denny, who was only 44, naturally allied himself with a much more sober and devout faction — “sinners” and “pilgrims,” as Mark Twain put it.
Yet we know from the journal (and from Denny family stories) that it was Mark Twain who sought out Denny as a companion for the trip through the Holy Land. He also borrowed and read all the books on the subject which Denny had brought along. Denny at first declined to permit Mark Twain to join his party, saying that he had been planning this trip all his life, and knew he could not enjoy it in the company of someone who regularly took the name of the Lord God in vain. Only by promising to refrain from blasphemy for the entire three weeks did Mark Twain succeed in changing Denny’s resolve. His reasons for doing so were purely practical — he needed Denny’s help as an informed guide — but in retrospect we can see that Denny paid a price for having exacted that promise of good behavior.
Consider just one piece of the new evidence — Denny’s description of his attempt to sail on the Sea of Galilee: “While the others were resting I rode to the sea shore and hailed a sail boat man who was gliding swiftly over the water. He came and I called our party and tried to get them to give us a sail over the sea to Tiberias but he asked such an exorbitant price that we would not give it, and he seemed independant because he thought we were in his power and reluctantly left, and we reluctantly saw him leave. So thus we were disappointed and so was he. He lost the money he could have made and we saved it.” That is all he says.
Mark Twain seized upon this event a way to cast comic doubt on the sincerity of the pilgrims’ piety. He dwelt length on their anxiety to “take shipping” on Galilee, saying that he feared they would “squander millions” in order to fulfill it. Then, when two Napoleons (about $8) were demanded by the boatmen, all such plans collapsed:
Mary Mason Fairbanks
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“...in a single instant of time, as it seemed to me, that ship was twenty paces from the shore, and speeding away like a frightened thing! Eight crestfallen creatures stood upon the shore, and this — this after all that frenzied zeal, that o’er mastering ecstasy! Oh, shameful, shameful ending, after such unseemly boasting!... Instantly there was wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp. The two Napoleons were offered, more if necessary, and pilgrims and dragoman shouted themselves hoarse with pleadings to the retreating boatmen to come back. But they sailed serenely away and paid no farther heed to pilgrims who had dreamed all their lives of some day skimming over the sacred waters of Galilee...and then concluded they had better not, because it would cost a dollar apiece!”
This result is scarcely fair to Denny, who is deliberately not named in the Holy Land section. But Mark Twain was at least more truthful about his own motives at the time: “How the pilgrims abused each other! Each said it was the other’s fault, and each in turn denied it. No word was spoken by the sinners — even the mildest sarcasm might have been dangerous at such a time. Sinners that have been kept down and had examples held up to them, and suffered frequent lectures, and been so put upon in a moral way and in the matter of going slow and being serious and bottling up slang, and so crowded in regard to the matter of being proper and always and forever behaving, that their lives have become a burden to them, would not lag behind pilgrims at such a time as this, and wink furtively, and be joyful, and commit other such crimes, because it wouldn’t occur to them to do it. Otherwise they would. But they did do it, though, and it did them a world of good to hear the pilgrims abuse each other, too. We took an unworthy satisfaction in seeing them fall out, now and then, because it showed that they were only poor human people like us, after all.”
Robert Hirst is general editor of the
Mark Twain Project and curator of the
Mark Twain Papers. He first began work on
the Papers as a graduate student in 1967.
He became general editor in 1980.
Volume 113
Fall 1998
Table of Contents
"Sinners & Pilgrims" Colonel Denny’s Journal and Photo Album
From the Director: Students in Bancroft?
Ovid’s Metamorphoses Metamorphosed
Bonnie Hardwick Follows Her Passions
Rube Goldberg: An American Genius
William P. Barlow, Jr.—A Friend Indeed
Plumbing the Depths of the Spring Valley Water Company
Basketball? At Bancroft? The Oral History of Pete Newell
Jean Stone Honored at Annual Meeting
New Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting
