May 18 Saturday – Screamers, a small collection of Mark Twain’s stories published without Sam’s full approval, was reviewed in the London Spectator. Welland writes and quotes from the review: 

Screamers was reviewed belatedly and with some asperity in the Spectator on 18 May 1872. The anonymous reviewer saw the humour as less subtle than that of ‘Bret Harte and Colonel John Hay and Artemus Ward’ and lacking their ‘political and social ‘irony’; nevertheless, recognizing that Mark Twain might have an especial appeal ‘in countries where the politics, manners, customs, and tone of thought of Americans are comparatively little known’, he attempted a critical assessment:

The secret of his fun lies in the assumed childlike credulity with which he accepts the premises offered, and the real ability and assumed simplicity with which he follows them up to their logical but utterly absurd conclusions.

Yet, thought containing ‘a fair amount of excellent nonsense’, the book seemed to him ‘rather a hotch-potch, and of very unequal merit’; he found some ‘amusing, though rather pointless satire’, some pieces ‘of a very vulgar type’ and ‘one or two….such extravagant rubbish that they incline one to throw the book to the other end of the room’ [Welland 18-19].