Artemus Ward pronounced him to be the “father of the American school of humor.”
The illustrations of the Clockmaker by Hervieu, and of Wise Saws by Leech, supplied the conventional type of “Brother Jonathan,” or “Uncle Sam,” with his shrewd smile, his long hair, his goatee, his furry hat, and his short striped trousers held down by long straps, a precise contrast to the conventional testy, pompous, pot-bellied John Bull, with his knee-breeches and swallow-tail coat.
Among all the numerous notices of Sam Slick’s works that have appeared from time to time, that by the Illustrated London News, on July 15th, 1842, which was accompanied by an excellent portrait of Judge Haliburton, is the most discriminating and appreciative.
“Sam Slick’s entrée into the literary world would appear to have been in the columns of a weekly Nova Scotian journal, in which he wrote seven or eight years ago a series of sketches illustrative of homely American character. There was no name attached to them, but they soon became so popular that the editor of the Nova Scotian newspaper applied to the author for permission to reprint them entire; and this being granted, he brought them out in a small, unpretending duodecimo volume, the popularity of which, at first confined to our American colonies, soon spread over the United States, by all classes of whose inhabitants it was most cordially welcomed. At Boston, at New York, at Philadelphia, at Baltimore, in short, in all the leading cities and towns of the Union, this anonymous little volume was to be found on the drawing-room tables of the most influential members of the social community; while, even in the emigrant’s solitary farm house and the squatter’s log hut among the primeval forests of the Far West, it was read with the deepest interest, cheering the spirits of the backwoodsman by its wholesome, vigorous and lively pictures of every-day life. A recent traveller records his surprise and pleasure at meeting with a well-thumbed copy in a log hut in the woods of the Mississippi valley.
“The primary cause of its success, we conceive, may be found in its sound, sagacious, unexaggerated views of human nature—not of human nature as it is modified by artificial institutions and subjected to the despotic caprices of fashion, but as it exists in a free and comparatively unsophisticated state, full of faith in its own impulses and quick to sympathize with kindred humanity; adventurous, self-relying, untrammelled by social etiquette; giving full vent to the emotions that rise within its breast; regardless of the distinctions of caste, but ready to find friends and brethren among all of whom it may come in contact.
“Such is the human nature delineated in Sam Slick.
“Another reason for Sam Slick’s popularity is the humor with which the work is overflowing. Of its kind it is decidedly original. In describing it we must borrow a phrase from architecture, and say that it is of a ‘composite order;’ by which we mean that it combines the qualities of English and Scotch humor—the hearty, mellow spirit of the one, and the shrewd, caustic qualities of the other. It derives little help from the fancy, but has its ground-work in the understanding, and affects us by its quiet truth and force and the piquant satire with which it is flavored. In a word—it is the sunny side of common sense.”
A review of “Nature and Human Nature” drew attention to the fact that no writer has produced purer conceptions of the female character than are to be found in Sam Slick’s works. They show none of those morbid, sexualistic tendencies which are betrayed in some modern novels written by young ladies, or in semi-scientific papers on sexual subjects by “advanced females.” Tacitus praised the social purity of the Germans at the expense of his corrupt fellow-countrymen. “No one there makes a jest of vice,” which we may now read, “No one there writes novels about adultery.” Sam Slick tells us how he romped and flirted with country girls; but in all he has written there is not the slightest trace of impropriety, even by the most remote implication. There is no harm in Sam Slick’s jokes, which were originally intended for rough, plain-spoken backwoods Bluenoses of sixty years ago; for, while impurity corrupts, however refined it may be, coarseness does not. The Bible is often coarse, but never impure.
Some years before Sydney Smith made what is generally set down as his best joke, as to a day being so hot that it would be a comfort to “take off our flesh and sit in our bones,” it had made its appearance in “Sam Slick;” and the country girl who says, “I guess I wasn’t brought up at all, I growed up,” probably suggested Topsy’s, “spec I growed.”
After this sketch had been written, a somewhat startling suggestion, that the idea of The Clockmaker had been borrowed from Dickens, and that Sam Slick was merely a Yankee version of Sam Weller, led to an inquiry into the point. The coincidences were many, and could hardly be accidental. Dickens sends off Pickwick in his wanderings without any apparent object in view, accompanied by a shrewd and humorous Cockney valet, whose sayings and doings are the prominent feature of the book; while Judge Haliburton sends off the author on very similar travels, accompanied by a cute Yankee, for whose yarns and jokes the book is simply a peg on which they can be hung. In both cases there is the faintest apology for a connected story.