Fireside’s ‘funny artist’ provided an illustration of Cyrano complete with sword, elaborate hat and convincingly voluminous nose.

The small boy editor was interested in other kinds of drama too. His piece on ‘The Theatre’ mentions as well as Cyrano the melodrama Over the Sea, then playing at the Music Hall, and the ragtime comic opera By the Sad Sea Waves with its lyrics by J. Sherrie Matthews and Harry Bulger. Matthews and Bulger played two wastrels taken on as instructors at a sanatorium where they wreak havoc. The show featured Gilbert and Sullivan parodies and minstrel songs which included the hit ‘coon song and chorus’ entitled ‘You Told Me You Had Money in the Bank’, published later that year.45 This song began ‘Mr Gideon Strong you’ve treated me wrong’, and here too the ragtime mix of catchy tunes and lyrics that fused vernacular idiom with cheeky use of rhyme was perhaps all the more appealing for belonging to a world so different from that of Tom’s parents.

As a student, Tom’s brother had a taste for Tin Pan Alley songs. Writing his own advert for a ‘great show’ called A Hot Time, Tom also pencilled a lyric about ‘Hasty Red, the Negro Hustler’, and noted ‘The coon dance’: like the Eliots’ odd-job man, Stephen, both African Americans and whites regularly used the words ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ in the 1890s.46 St Louis was clearly a city where African Americans, while no longer slaves, were regarded as an underclass; in newspapers such as the Globe-Democrat (whose politics were, like Tom’s father’s and like his uncle Ed’s, Republican), they feature, if at all, largely in caricature drawings, in stories about crime or disease, or in entertainments such as the ‘Coon Carnival’.47 Tom grew up with a sense of a ‘colour bar’, but also with an awareness that there was valuable material in a wide spectrum of culture. His Fireside is evidence of that.

In his little magazine and in local newspaper cartoons, hoboes too were figures of fun. He showed them being given food by Mrs Rogers, apparently the Eliot family’s cook, or begging in the street, sleeping rough or spending time in a lock-up. Spread across numbers 5, 6 and 7, the longest of the Fireside’s tiny short stories is about the adventures of a hobo called Mosly Wrags. Mosly has a taste for ‘a saloon’ where he can ‘drown his sorrows’. The previous year in St Louis police raided ‘cheap saloons where the hoboes hang out’, and sixty-six hoboes had been rounded up; many found themselves jailed.48 Released from his lock-up, Mosly Wrags returns to begging. His young creator, while clearly intrigued, turns away with mock fastidiousness: ‘But we shall have no more to do with him.’49 An interest both in the tones of decorum and in what contradicts or disrupts them would be characteristic of poems Tom wrote a decade later: readiness to mix high and low life, evident in the pages of this tiny journal, would remain part of his gift.

As a mature poet, he knew that he had learned not just from the opportunities to access elite culture that his childhood environment offered, but also from growing up in Locust Street with a sense of urban decay in

A neighbourhood which had become shabby to a degree approaching slumminess, after all our friends and acquaintances had moved further west. And in my childhood, before the days of motor cars, people who lived in town stayed in town. So it was, that for nine months of the year my scenery was almost exclusively urban, and a good deal of it seedily, drably urban at that.

He came to realise that in his poetry ‘My urban imagery was that of St. Louis, upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed.’50 He made verse that has its roots in a childhood sense of a tension between propriety and its enemies.

At ten, Tom copied out the first verse of Longfellow’s early poem ‘The Village Blacksmith’: Longfellow was a poet taught at Smith Academy. Yet Tom knew, too, of other kinds of verse. In 1898 some St Louis men had established a local Indiana Society, and had invited Indiana ‘genius’ James Whitcomb Riley to read.51 Riley had begun by imitating other poets, particularly Edgar Allan Poe, before becoming celebrated, as the Globe-Democrat explained, for his ‘Annals of the Poor’, his ‘Character Sketches’, and works such as ‘Little Orphant Annie’. Hailed as someone who would ‘one day stand at the head of American classics’, Riley read this last poem to a packed theatre in St Louis in 1898, the local audience relishing Annie’s account of the ‘little boy’ who refused to say his prayers and went ‘to bed at night, away upstairs’ only to be eaten alive:

An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you
Ef you
      Don’t
          Watch
              Out!52

In Fireside, number 14, Tom Eliot (who would use English and American dialect in his own, very different, mature poetry) wrote a little verse, ‘The fate of the Naughty Boy’, about ‘A Boy who went to bed one night’ only to be eaten by ‘The Goblins’, and in number 4 he included an advertisement for an invented work, ‘“The Bloomer Girl”, A Poem, By J. W. Riley’, accompanying it with a drawing of a female cyclist wearing bloomers, a piratical eye patch, and smoking a cigarette. No doubt she is one of those ‘new women’ noted by an 1896 St Louis Globe-Democrat parodist of Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ as ‘Riding bikes and clad in bloomers’; Tom’s sisters had been known to cycle, and several, perhaps all, shared his mother’s commitment to extending opportunities for women.53 Though belonging to none of the twenty ‘Women’s Clubs of St Louis’ which, in 1898, discussed topics ranging from Michelangelo to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Tom grew up well aware of debates around culture and gender.54

The little boy who not so long before had been smitten by a girl acting the part of a cherished, dying lass in a play at a seaside hotel continued to be interested in actresses. His story ‘Pretty Belle, the Belle of the Actresses’ mentions The Belle of New York, performed in St Louis in 1898.55 This hit musical starred beautiful Edna May as a Salvation Army girl who ends up marrying a millionaire. Its Pretty Belle’s most famous song was published later in the St Louis press:

I’m sure I look demure enough, as I go ’round the city;

And do my best to hide the fact that I am young and pretty;

And I therefore cannot see, when I go out to preach,

Why men must say to me that I’m a perfect peach!

With her teasing refrain that sings of young men and ‘the light of faith’, concluding that ‘they never proceed to follow that light, but always follow me!’, this Belle of New York was rather different from the ladies of 2635 Locust Street.56 But, however flippantly, Tom was interested in such a theatrical milieu. Edna May was back in St Louis in early 1899, by which time he was also mentioning, in Fireside, number 13, another, more scandalously vivacious actress, Paris-born Anna Held.

Anna Held was in St Louis acting the part of Suzette in The French Maid, a Ziegfeld extravaganza. Suzette at a seaside resort romances the entire British fleet. ‘“Brazen”, “sensual”, “bawdy” and “wanton”’, Held represented, as her modern biographer puts it, ‘everything that was glamorous about Broadway, everything that was naughty about Paris’.57 Already notorious for her 1897 ‘kissing marathon’ and for being reported as bathing, like Cleopatra, in milk, she became one of the most photographed actresses in America, featuring in the St Louis press several times during Tom’s boyhood and teens. When he mentioned her in 1899’s Fireside (and mention her is all he did), she was being billed at St Louis’s Century Theatre as ‘the Peerless Parisian Beauty’. For the Globe-Democrat’s theatre reviewer she made ‘a combined assault upon the sense of decency of every man and woman who went to that playhouse’; this was because of her tendency to ‘“skin down” closer in the matter of clothes than any other woman now before the public’.58 Again, this seems a world away from the behaviour of Tom’s mother and sisters, but the little boy, who was learning French and who noted a local performance of Othello starring Lawrence Hanley, paid just as much attention to the presence of Anna Held in The French Maid. She, too, was part of the allure of Paris, a city whose fashions, Moulin Rouge and risqué theatre life all featured in the St Louis papers. Paris was synonymous with style and sinfulness.

The ‘editor’ of the Fireside, whose vocabulary outpaced his spelling, liked to record ‘flirtation’ and ‘elopments’.