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| All the images on this page are from a copy of Prime's Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia (1857) in the Mark Twain House. The bookplate above left identifies it as having been bought by Jervis Langdon, MT's father-in-law. The signature of "C. J. Langdon" (above center) connects it to Jervis' son Charlie, who was MT's roommate on the Quaker City excursion (1867). That may have been when MT himself read this book. That he did read it is made vividly clear from the various comments MT wrote into Prime's text, including the caption above right. This isn't the Prime text that MT sarcastically deconstructs in Innocents Abroad, but even after all these decades, we can tell from his marginalia that MT read Boat Life with the same contempt that he also felt for Tent Life in the Holy Land. |
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Prime's two ante bellum books about traveling in the Mid-East remained very popular with American readers throughout the second half of the 19th century -- though not with MT. According to his comments on Boat Life, the Prime characteristic that irritated him most was the self-aggrandizing way in which "the author" portrayed himself. On the page at left, Prime describes his masterly scolding of the unreliable pilot of the boat on which he is traveling up the Nile. Perhaps some of MT's scorn derives from his sympathy for a fellow riverboat pilot . . . |
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In his own travel writings, MT allows his readers to look down on him as a hapless naif whose inexperience of the world keeps leading him into comic misadventures. As a persona, the "Mark Twain" of MT's first-person narratives is more anti-hero than hero. The seriousness with which Prime takes himself, on the other hand, and the god-like pose he strikes as a fearless, knowledgable and universally admired man of whatever new world he is traveling through, kept getting under MT's skin, as you can see at left. |
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Although MT never allowed any consideration of "the true," or even "the probable," to hamper his own travel narratives, he could not read the passage at left, describing a ten-foot fall inside a Nubian temple, without challenging the veracity of Prime's story. The length of MT's comment gives a good idea of how deeply he was moved by Prime's prose. |
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Of course, MT's quarrel was not just with the way Prime "lied" about himself. As the comments in Innocents Abroad about conventional travel accounts make clear, the problem with the kind of lush, romantic descriptions in which Prime indulges himself and his 19th century readers is their misrepresentation of reality. Here MT punctures the sentimental mood of Prime's Christmas Eve reflections with an aggressive reminder of what one would be more likely to encounter on the banks of the Nile. |
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Most of the pages of Boat Life are unmarked by MT's caustic commentary. The most defaced (that is to say, commented upon) pages are the two you can see by clicking on the detail at left. But while this degree of response is atypical, it does serve to measure how much passion MT could put into the work of disparagement. He was a very good hater. |
