Mark Twain's Mockup of Title Page and Dedication of "More Tramps Abroad,"Note About "Innocents Abroad"

It had been a difficult book to write – or more particularly, patch together, from his notebooks – and now that it was finished, he wasn’t sure what to call it. All that mattered, really, was that it followed on the heels of the devastating news of his beloved daughter Susy’s sudden death, and by the doing of it – the work – Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) had managed somehow to stay alive. He’d called it, in progress, “Round the World” – his fifth and last travel book, chronicling his world-wide lecture tour made between July 1895 and July 1896. Now, however, he thought of naming the work “Imitating the Equator”, “Another Innocent Abroad”, “The Latest Innocent Abroad” or here, as he suggests in this mock-up, “The Surviving Innocents Aboard.” But the title he chose, in July 1897, was Following the Equator – A Journey Around the World; and the title chosen by his English publishers, still different from that – More Tramps Abroad. Both bore the dedication, to Harry Rogers, the son of his intimate friend, Henry Huttleston Rogers, as written here:

THIS BOOK is affectionately inscribed to my young friend HARRY ROGERS with recognition of what he is, & apprehension of what he may become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of THE AUTHOR

Not present, however, “on a page by itself”, in either edition, is this touching “Explanatory Note.”

Of the seventy Innocents who sailed in the "Quaker City Excursion" twenty-eight years ago, I am the only innocent one still living. I called the record of the trip "The Innocents Abroad" & the title plausibly suggested that all of the excursionists were without guile, but that was a courteous exaggeration. Strictly, the title described only two of us. The other one is no more.

Clemens, finished, then began book he would work on the rest of it life. It was about Satan, and his intervention in the world, and it would not be published until after his death.

Autograph Manuscript Signed; 2 pages, recto and verso, quarto, no place, June 1897. The upper left corner is missing, not affecting text.