Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In early June of 1867, while waiting to embark on America's first tourist cruise across the Atlantic, Mark Twain wrote his mother: “All I do know or feel, is, that I am wild with impatience to move, move – Move! Half a dozen times I have wished I had sailed long ago in some ship that wasn't going to keep me chained here to chafe for lagging ages while she got ready to go” (quoted in Twain 1990: 49–50). Frustrated by the problems specific to the departure of the Quaker City Pleasure Excursion, Twain here also betrays his growing eagerness to get on with his life. In his early thirties, unsettled personally and professionally, Twain was eager to “move,” indeed.The letter also carries a tone of self-reprobation for his tendency to misbehave while standing still, so his desire to get on with the cruise derives from both his wariness of the temptations of idleness and his failure yet to secure a sense of purpose to his life. Caught in the doldrums, little could he know that his passionate urge to “move” would eventually lead him not only to the four corners of the globe but also to a literary and cultural status far removed from the relative smallness of the mid-nineteenth-century Missouri of his youth. His restlessness would have been, like that of so many other young men, unfulfilled, however, had it not been for his ability to render his experiences attractive to readers worldwide. ... log in or subscribe to read full text