Free Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard by Roger Austen

Stoddards reached the Pacific shore, Charles's latent voluptuousness had asserted itself; on the outside he might still be a Presbyterian, but he sensed that he was a pagan at heart.
Several weeks later the Stoddard family sailed through the Golden Gate, and Charles began living a life that was, especially compared with his memories of Rochester, exciting and romantic. Gold-seekers, adventurers, and desperate characters were everywhere; frame houses, tents, and a few brick buildings were springing up at every turn; and Market Street was sprawling westward toward the dunes of drifting sand. Most of the fifty thousand residents were fairly young men who had chosen to come west unencumbered by family, and merely his being a child made Charles something of an anomaly. Growing up in this rowdy frontier town must have been a particularly unusual experience for a soft, dreamy child like Charles Warren Stoddard. On the one hand there were the civilizing influences of church and school, but on the otherindeed, almost next doorthere was the barely fathomable but irresistible allure of the Barbary Coast.
The Stoddards were, of course, a perfectly respectable family, and the children were expected to grow up as well-behaved Christians even in an outpost of civilization full of sin and shamelessness. At their first home near the eastern end of Union Street near Kearny, Charles's parents continued the traditions of family prayers and grace at table. Every Sunday found them in the First Presbyterian Church on Stockton near Broadway, where Mr. Stoddard taught a Sunday-school class.
The schools were modeled on the example of New England, and at the Union Street Public School Charles used readers and spellers that came highly recommended from the East. A major civilizing force in Charles's life at this time was his composition teacher, Mrs. Amelia Clappe, who was a graduate of Amherst Academy, a "relative of Julia Ward Howe, a friend of Emily Dickinson, and an admirer of Margaret Fuller." 8 Stoddard recalled that his "very first literary effort" had been an essay about a butterfly written for Mrs. Clappe. 9 Consistent with prevailing cultural standards, the fireside poets of New England and the sentimental English poets were upheld for San Francisco's schoolchildren to emulate, and in a few years Charles began to do just that.

 

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At the same time, beyond the protective limits of the family home and the school across the street, Charles was gaining quite another kind of education. Just a few blocks south of Union Street, at the bottom of Telegraph Hill and overflowing as far south as Portsmouth Square, lay a notorious area called "Sydney-Town," later to be known as the Barbary Coast. For decades it inspired fulminations from preachers, reformers, and editors alike. The following tirade is representative:
The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whore-monger, lewd women, cut-throats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. 10
And there also was young Charles Stoddard, drawn to the hurdy-gurdy attractions of the "El Dorado," the "Arcade," and the "Polka.'' The doors of such dives were, after all, open to the public, and there did seem to be "a vast deal of jollity within." So Charles, either by himself or with a neighborhood chum, ventured inside to get his eyes' fill. At the faro tables the