Mark Twain's Revisions of The Innocents Abroad for the British Edition of 1872

S EVERAL YEARS AGO Mr. Leon T. Dickinson made a study of Mark Twain's revisions of his Alta California letters when preparing them for book publication as The Innocents Abroad.' Mr. Dickinson showed that Twain did a painstaking job of editing these hastily written newspaper letters-deleting much of the crude frontier humor, modifying the irreverence, formalizing the slangy diction, striving for a more polished style, and writing in the needed continuity. He revised in the light of two facts: (i) he was addressing a different audience from the one he had addressed in his newspaper letters, and (2) he was now writing, not newspaper articles, but a book.2 The present study is a sequel to Mr. Dickinson's. It will show what further revisions Mark Twain made when he prepared The Innocents Abroad for publication in England in I872. Although neither as fundamental nor, perhaps, as extensive as his earlier revisions, these later revisions are sufficiently numerous to mark a definite trend. This trend sheds additional light upon Twain's development as a literary artist and provides one more signpost along his progress toward one of the great styles of the English language.3 In the first place, why did Mark Twain bother to re-edit The Innocents Abroad at all? Domestically and professionally the years I870-I872 were among the most hectic and trying of his life.4 More

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