1851 Humorous sketches were a staple of the American popular press at the time. They kept people reading, and, since they were usually undated, could be slotted in whenever a filler was needed. Samuel Clemens wrote over 350 of them wherever he worked as a journeyman printer, and later reporter – in St Louis, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Carson City, Nevada.
His first was a short piece of about 150 words, headed ‘A Gallant Fireman’. In it, a fire breaks out next door but one to the Union printing house, forcing Clemens and his workmates to consider moving their material out of the way, in case the fire should spread. In the process, ‘our gallant devil [printer’s apprentice] … immediately gathered the broom, an old mallet, the wash pan and a dirty towel … rushed out of the office and deposited his precious burden some ten squares off’.
Trouble was, he was ‘of a snailish disposition, even in his quickest moments’, so the fire had been put out before he got back. On returning, ‘thinking he had immortalized himself, [he] threw his giant frame in a tragic attitude, and exclaimed, with an eloquent expression: “If that thar fire hadn’t bin put out, thar’d a’ bin the greatest confirmation of the age.”’
Alright, maybe compared to Mozart, who wrote his first opera when he was eleven years old, Clemens was no prodigy. But the sketch does contain important clues to the later work of the man who would become Mark Twain. Here the author is already deriving humour from accents as indicators of social level, and from elevated rhetoric – especially when it misses the mark, as in ‘confirmation’ for ‘conflagration’.
It also shows just how deeply interwoven with newspapers Clemens was. The story didn’t just appear in a newspaper; it’s also about one. And so were a number of his later sketches – those written in Nevada, for example, where local reporters, especially those of rival papers, often form the target of good-natured jokes.
Clemens himself started out as a printer’s devil, when he went to work for the Hannibal Gazette at the age of twelve. The editors of the Early Tales and Sketches think he not only wrote ‘A Gallant Fireman’, but set it up in type as well.1 From the beginning his involvement with publishing was underpinned by the physical process itself. And if laboriously hand-setting a stick of type teaches you anything beyond the craft itself, it’s the virtue of brevity.
1 E.M. Branch, Robert Hirst and Harriet Smith (eds), The Works of Mark Twain, Vol. 15, Early Tales & Sketches, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, pp. 5–6.