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Vagabond Abroad: Mark Twain's 1895 Visit to New Zealand1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
Abstract
In 1895, an elderly, tired, and creatively challenged Samuel Clemens embarked upon a worldwide lecture tour whose primary purpose was to retire the debt which had driven him into bankruptcy. His personal woes were largely ignored by enthusiastic New Zealand audiences, which packed the halls and reveled in Clemens as Mark Twain. Some of Twain's novels preceded him, but his success in New Zealand owed more to his stage presence than to his literary prowess. This essay shows how Clemens performed Mark Twain to bridge cultural gaps halfway around the globe. In doing so, it highlights reading differences in English-speaking lands and between social classes. It also casts light on Twain's underappreciated skill in live performance, shows him as a flexible figure responding to particular audiences, and underscores the ways in which aspects of his stage show anticipate the shift to a celebrity-based culture.
- Type
- Essays
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 487 - 514
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2009
References
2 Southland Times, Nov. 4, 1895Google Scholar.
3 Twain did not travel directly to New Zealand. But it took approximately five days to travel by train from Hartford to San Francisco and several more to get to Victoria, British Columbia, where Twain boarded a ship. An entire week was needed to sail to Hawaii, Twain's first port of call, and two more weeks to Sydney, Australia. The voyage from Sydney to Bluff, New Zealand, took four or five days, depending on the seas.
4 Twain, Mark, Following the Equator, vol. 1 (1897Google Scholar; New York, 1992), 211. It was actually more than 1,600 miles from Sydney, from whence Twain sailed, to Bluff.
5 Ibid., 211-15. The story is a Twain invention in the form of an apocryphal dialogue between himself and “Professor X.”
6 The wage-labor force of the late nineteenth century was fluid. Industrial capitalism's development was exceedingly uneven, and laborers were more transnational than manufactured goods for much of the period. In the 1860s and 1870s, some North Americans went to New Zealand to take advantage of plentiful land and a booming economy. Around 1878, however, the New Zealand economy went into a twenty-year tailspin often called the “Long Depression,” and outmigration often outstripped immigration. Australia was the favored destination, but Canada and the United States also hosted job-seeking New Zealanders.
7 1Southland Times, Nov. 4, 1895Google Scholar.
8 Wellington Evening Post, Dec. 10, 1895Google Scholar. The reporter noted that exacting photographs were “not always a trait of stars.”
9 For example, neither The GildedAge nor Roughing It enjoyed robust sales abroad, and neither book was well represented in New Zealand libraries until well after Twain's visit.
10 A wonderful resource for Twain studies is Rasmussen, R. Kent, Mark Twain A-Z (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.
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75 Ibid.
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85 William Hodgkins's sketches of Twain are housed in the Alexander Turnbull Library's Photo Collection; see E-147-025 and A212/24, album 4.
86 Oamaru Mail, Nov. 14, 1895Google Scholar. A Twain remark in Sydney embroiled him in a dispute between followers of Henry George who believed in free trade and those who supported protectionist policies. For the rest of his time in the Antipodes, Twain declined to make political comments with more depth than generalized praise for democracy. See Shillingsburg, , At Home Abroad, 23Google Scholar.
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89 Ibid., ch. 32.
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108 A personal note: As a youngster I too saw Twain performed (by Hal Holbrook) before I ever read him. One cannot help but speculate that Twain as a pop-culture icon—in everything from movie adaptations of his novels to a Holodeck character in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode—has similarly made Twain familiar to others who have yet to read him.
109 See Kevin MacDonnell's “Mark Twain Collectibles,” housed in the MacDonnell Rare Books collection at the University of Texas Austin. A sample is available at http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/sc_as_mt/merchandiz/macdonnell.html (accessed May 22, 2008).
110 Contemporary novelist Richard Russo is among those who are frank about the need for writers to be visible if they hope their books to sell. Russo noted that only several hundred fiction writers in the entire United States support themselves entirely by writing, and even they must give lectures, teach workshops, and make public appearances. Remarks of Richard Russo delivered at Smith College, Oct. 13, 2007.