8 - Conclusion

Summary

In 1869, author Mark Twain published the first American travel book, Innocents Abroad, throughout which he documented his ‘pleasure trip’ across Europe and the Holy Lands with other American travellers. While not all the locations were ‘dark’, many were, and Twain spent considerable time describing prison cells, morgues, catacombs and sites of assassinations in vivid detail:

Next we went to visit the Morgue [in Paris], that horrible receptacle for the dead who die mysteriously and leave the manner of their taking off a dismal secret. We stood before a grating and looked through into a room which was hung all about with the clothing of dead men; coarse blouses, water-soaked; the delicate garments of women and children; patrician vestments, hacked and stabbed and stained with red; a hat that was crushed and bloody. On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked, swollen, purple; clasping the fragment of a broken bush with a grip which death had so petrified that human strength could not unloose it – mute witness of the last despairing effort to save the life that was doomed beyond all help. A stream of water trickled ceaselessly over the hideous face. We knew that the body and the clothing were there for identification by friends, but still we wondered if any body could love that repulsive object or grieve for its loss. … I half feared that the mother, or the wife or a brother of the dead man might come while we stood there, but nothing of the kind occurred. Men and women came, and some looked eagerly in, and pressed their faces against the bars; others glanced carelessly at the body, and turned away with a disappointed look – people, I thought, who live upon strong excitements, and who attend the exhibits of the Morgue regularly, just as other people go to see theatrical spectacles every night. When one of these looked in and passed on, I could not help thinking – ‘Now this don't afford you any satisfaction – a party with his head shot off is what you need.’ (Twain, 2003, 92, emphasis in original)

The concluding part of this quote focuses solely on others visiting the same site as a form of ‘leisure’, with Twain noting that a drowned corpse was not ‘intriguing’ enough for some of the viewers.