A Tramp Abroad

Summary

A Tramp Abroad is Mark Twain's comic account of his travels in Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy in 1878, published in 1880. The narrator announces that he will astonish mankind by crossing Europe on foot, hires an agent named Harris, and sets out to study art and the German language; in practice the pair ride trains, carriages, rafts, mules, and once a glacier, and the joke of the walking tour that never walks runs through the whole book. The first half is set in south-western Germany. At Heidelberg Twain describes the student corps and their dueling ground, where young men slash each other's faces with swords while a surgeon stands by, and he follows it with a mock account of a bloodless French duel in which he seconds Gambetta. He records Wagner opera, his own disastrous painting of Heidelberg Castle, a night spent crawling around a dark hotel room hunting a mouse, and a raft voyage down the Neckar that he decorates with invented Rhine legends, among them the Lorelei and the knight who conquers a dragon with a fire extinguisher. Tall tales interrupt the travel: Jim Baker's yarn of the blue jays who try to fill a house with acorns through a knot-hole, Nicodemus Dodge and the skeleton, and the Tennessean who waits years for an answer at Gadsby's hotel. The second half moves to Switzerland. At Lucerne Twain mocks the souvenir trade and then stops before the Lion of Lucerne, the dying lion cut into a cliff to honor the Swiss Guards killed defending the Tuileries on 10 August 1792. He calls it the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world, and he condemns Louis XVI for letting those heroes be massacred in his cause. From there the book climbs: sunrise missed on the Rigi, a burlesque expedition of guides, mules, and barkeepers up the Riffelberg, and a plan to ride a glacier down to Zermatt. Between the jokes Twain sets serious Alpine history: Whymper's account of the 1865 Matterhorn disaster, the three guides lost on Mont Blanc in 1820 whose remains the glacier gave up decades later, and the eleven climbers who died near the summit in 1870, one of whom left a notebook farewell to his wife. After Chamonix, Geneva, Milan, Venice, Rome, and Florence, the book ends with Titian's Moses, and six appendices follow, including the famous comic essay The Awful German Language. The American Publishing Company of Hartford issued the book by subscription in 1880, illustrated with more than three hundred drawings.

Top Lessons

• Loyalty that costs something

  In Chapter 26 Twain stops joking before the Lion of Lucerne, the memorial to the Swiss Guards who kept their oath at the Tuileries in 1792 and died for it. He finds no souvenir able to copy its sorrow and calls the guards heroes betrayed by a king who would not let them defend themselves. Loyalty is honored most where it was most costly.

• Faith at the edge of death

  Twain sets the comic Alps beside real tragedies: the Matterhorn disaster of 1865 and the eleven climbers who died on Mont Blanc in 1870. One of them wrote to his wife that he died with faith in God and would meet her in heaven. The book lets students see how a dying man's last words can show what he truly trusted.

• Laughing at ourselves, and at others

  Twain's best jokes are at his own expense: he never walks, misreads every guidebook, and boils his thermometer. But some jokes punch at whole peoples, from German manners and language to Italian shopkeepers, in the stereotypes of 1880. Readers should enjoy the self-mockery and weigh the national caricatures honestly, asking whether a joke humbles the teller or only belittles others.

• Seeing versus pretending to see

  Twain mocks tourists who repeat guidebook praise of paintings and sunsets they barely look at, and in his last chapter he admits that a great work of art, Titian's Moses, must be seen for oneself. Honest attention is a discipline: it requires looking long and refusing to fake an admiration one does not feel.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

A Tramp Abroad is not a medical book, but it has a few passages of interest for the history of medicine. Chapters 5 to 7 describe the Heidelberg student duels of the 1870s, in which a surgeon attends the fights, stops bouts when wounds are dangerous, and sews up faces and scalps on the spot; Twain notes that deaths sometimes followed and that the scars were worn with pride. Chapters 40 and 45 record death in the mountains: the three guides lost in a crevasse on Mont Blanc in 1820, whose remains the glacier delivered decades later, and the 1870 party of eleven who died of cold, exhaustion, and hunger near the summit, with a notebook that records frozen feet and failing strength.

• Chapters 5-6

  The student dueling room at Heidelberg, where a surgeon stands by to judge, stop, and dress the sword wounds to faces and heads.

• Chapter 40

  Remains of the guides lost on Mont Blanc in 1820 emerge from the Glacier des Bossons decades later and are identified by an old survivor of the climb.

• Chapter 45

  The 1870 Mont Blanc party dies of cold, hunger, and exhaustion in a snow cave; one climber's notebook records frozen feet and failing strength.