13–15 December 1865
This sketch is taken from Clemens' “San Francisco Letter” to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise written on 11 December 1865 and published two or three days later. A clipping of the entire letter is preserved in the Yale Scrapbook.
Although “Christian Spectator” is ostensibly a review of the “second number” of the Reverend O. P. Fitzgerald's Christian Spectator, Clemens takes the occasion to comment indirectly on the “incendiary religious matter about hell-fire, and brimstone, and wicked young men knocked endways by a streak of lightning while in the act of going fishing on Sunday.” Within a few days he would publish “The Christmas Fireside” (no. 148), subtitled “The Story of the Bad Little Boy That Bore a Charmed Life,” which takes up the notion of divine punishment and ridicules the hypocritical piety of the Sunday school movement. Henry Nash Smith noted in 1954 that this theme “later acquired major importance when Mark Twain began Tom Sawyer as an attack on the conception of the Good Boy set forth in ‘the Sunday-school books.’ ”1
The “review” is surprisingly good-natured, probably because Clemens found the editor of the Spectator much less “hide-bound” than he expected. Amid a flurry of slight jokes and puns, Clemens comments indirectly on the San Francisco police (with whom he would clash more seriously in a few weeks), and his paratactic style at times approximates the less self-conscious ramblings of Simon Wheeler. The justice of his remarks cannot now be tested, however. The 1865 Christian Spectator, which was published in San Francisco, is no longer extant.
Rev. O. P. Fitzgerald, of the Minna street Methodist Church South, is fairly under way, now, with his new Christian Spectator. The second number is before me. I believe I can venture to recommend it to the people of Nevada, of both Northern and Southern proclivities. It is not jammed full of incendiary religious matter about hell-fire, and brimstone, and wicked young men knocked endways by a streak of lightning while in the act of going fishing on Sunday. Its contents are not exciting or calculated to make people set up all night to read them. I like the Spectator a great deal better than I expected to, and I think you ought to cheerfully spare room for a short review of it. The leading editorial says: “A journal of the character of the Spectator is always to a great extent the reflexⒶemendation of the editor's individuality.” Then follows a pleasant moral homily entitled “That Nubbin;” then puffs of a religious college and a Presbyterian church; then some poetical reflections on the happy fact “The War is Over,” then a “hyste” of some old slow coach of a preacher for not getting subscribers for the Spectator fast enough; then a confidential hint to the reader that he turn out and gather subscriptions—and forward the money; then a puff of the Oakland Female Seminary; then a remark that the Spectator's terms are cash; then a suggestion that the paper would make a gorgeous Christmas present—the only joke in the whole paper, and even this one is written with a fine show of seriousness; then a complimentary blast for Bishop PierceⒺexplanatory note; thenⒶemendation a col- [begin page 395] umn of “Personal Items” concerning distinguished Confederates, chiefly; then something about “Our New Dress”—not one of Ward's shirtsⒺexplanatory note for the editor, but the paper's new dress; then a word about “our publishing house at Nashville, Tenn.;” then a repetition of the fact that “our terms are cash;” then something concerning “our head”—not the editor's, which is “level,” but the paper's; then follow two columns of religious news not of a nature to drive one into a frenzy of excitement. On the outside is one of those entertaining novelettes, so popular among credulous Sabbath-school children, about a lone woman silently praying a desperate and blood-thirsty robber out of his boots—he looking on and fingering his clasp-knife and wiping it on his hand, and she calmly praying, till at last he “blanched beneath her fixed gaze, a panic appeared to seize him, and he closed his knife and went out.” Oh, that won't do, you know. That is rather too steep. I guess she must have scalded him a little. There is also a column about a “remarkable police officer,” and praising him up to the skies, and showing, by facts, sufficient to convince me that if he belonged to our force, Mr. Fitzgerald was drawing it rather strong. I read it with avidity, because I wished to know whether it was Chief Burke, or Blitz, or LeesⒺexplanatory note, the parson was trying to curry favor with. But it was only an allegory, after all; the impossible policeman was “Conscience.” It was one of those fine moral humbugs, like some advertisements which seduce you down a column of stuff about General Washington and wind up with a recommendation to “try Peterson's aromatic soap.”
Subscribe for the vivacious Christian Spectator; C. A. Klose is financial agent.
The first printing appeared in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably sometime between 13 and 15 December 1865. The only known copy of this printing, in a clipping in the Yale Scrapbook (p. 52), is copy-text. The copy-text remains the same for the quotations from the Christian Spectator because no file of the Spectator has been found. There are no textual notes.