In May 1847, President Orson Spencer of the British Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints received a letter from three local members in rural Kidderminster, England. These men asked, among other things, about a pamphlet, “A Dialogue between Joseph Smith and the Devil,” published by Parley P. Pratt the previous year. “Did Brother Joseph and the old Gentleman indeed talk together in the manner spoken of?” they asked.1
This same pamphlet, a few years later, was a source of entertainment and occupation onboard the ship John M. Wood, sailing from England to New Orleans. Members of the LDS immigration company performed the dialogue, which is similar to a short play, onboard ship, to the amusement of the other passengers. One of the immigrants reported in his diary on a party, “One of the best they ever attended.” Adding that “…after the feast they enjoyed themselves with songs, reciting and etc. One piece that was performed was ‘Joseph Smith and the Devil.’”2
More recently, this dialogue, now easily available online, attracted the attention of apologists, who poked fun at the text’s description of Joseph Smith taking a beer with the Devil, saying the latter was “just the kind of guy to have a beer with.”3 Others, on reading this text are confused, because “Mormons don’t drink.”
These misunderstandings and amusements give a good summary of the reactions that Pratt’s dialogue has provoked in its more than 175-year history. But they also ignore that Joe Smith and the Devil may be the 19th century’s most widely distributed work of Mormon fiction, principally because it was first published on the front page of the New York Herald, at the time the largest circulation newspaper in the world.4
Of course, the importance of a text doesn’t depend solely on how widely distributed or known it is. Joe Smith and the Devil’s importance lies not just in its wide dispersal, but also in three additional factors: its status as the first significant work of Mormon fiction, its innovative use of the dialogue literary form, and in its satirical and light-hearted attack on Mormon critics, which resonated with early Mormon missionaries and church members.
Why Did Pratt Write it?
Parley’s intention in writing Joe Smith and the Devil was likely influenced by his years of preaching Mormonism to often unsympathetic audiences. Previous to writing the dialogue he had served at least five missions, in which he suffered the rejection common to all those trying to interest people in changing core beliefs. In addition, he was preaching at a time when violence against aberrant beliefs was common, which led to his very first publication, a pamphlet describing his treatment by a mob in Mentor, Ohio when he tried to preach there.5
Faced with this rejection, Parley sought repeatedly to expose mistreatment of Mormons and the role of religion in mob violence, all while defending and promoting Mormon views. He wrote his most influential work, A Voice of Warning, in New York City where he found that “Of all the places in which the English language is spoken, I found the City of New York to be the most difficult as to access to the minds or attention of the people.” Beyond his first publication, this reaction to being rejected and to suffering violence for his beliefs appears in his non-fiction, including A Voice of Warning (1837), and later in his creative works, including An epistle of Demetrius, Junior, the silversmith (1840) and Joe Smith and the Devil.
First Significant Work of Mormon Fiction
Pratt wrote Joe Smith and the Devil in May of 1844, after nearly a decade of publishing Mormon-inspired works of poetry and proselytism. His literary production came despite the anti-creedal church members and leaders who opposed publishing anything that might compete or conflict with scripture. As a result, the first works outside of scripture, newspapers and hymnals only started appearing in 1835, thanks to the efforts of early missionaries, including Pratt and Orson Hyde. A pioneer of Mormon publishing, Pratt’s first contributions included the first book of Mormon poetry, The Millennium (1835), and his missionary text, A Voice of Warning (1837).6
However, none of these works can be considered fiction. Like other religious leaders in nineteenth century America, LDS Church leaders regularly cautioned members against reading fiction, because it didn’t portray actual events—in their view, it literally wasn’t true. As a result, Mormon authors didn’t produce works of fiction until the 1880s.
Joe Smith and the Devil as a Dialogue
If Mormons didn’t write fiction in 1844, then how can Joe Smith and the Devil be considered the earliest work of Mormon fiction?7 I believe this may be because Pratt didn’t consider it fiction. Instead, he thought that this work was a separate form of literature, a dialogue, following a literary tradition that extends back at least as far as Plato and perhaps including the Book of Job. While a dialogue is fiction, in the sense that the events portrayed probably didn’t actually occur, it is more argument than plot-driven narrative. In a dialogue, two or more individuals simply talk with each other, and the arc of the narrative brings the reader through an argument to the author’s conclusion.
While Plato’s dialogues are the best-known example of this literary form, dialogues were also a frequently used form during the Roman period, and its use extended through the Middle Ages and into Pratt’s day. The first English-language dialogue appeared in the thirteenth century and, even into the 19th century, the dialogue was widely employed to promote an argument or point-of-view. In 1844 alone, at least 20 other dialogues were published in English, the majority of which addressed religious questions.8
Since dialogues were so common, it is not surprising that Joe Smith and the Devil was not the first Mormon dialogue. Two years earlier Parley himself wrote Dialogue between a Latter-day Saint and an enquirer after truth, which was originally published in the Millennial Star in 1842. Later his brother, Orson Pratt, wrote A Dialogue between Tradition, Reason and Scriptus, published in 1844 in Orson’s Prophetic Almanac for 1845, at about the same time as or soon after Joe Smith and the Devil.
However, Parley’s 1844 work was significantly different from the other Mormon dialogues. Where the earlier dialogues were hardly more than a list of questions and answers—more FAQ than fiction, Joe Smith and the Devil seems less formal, lighter and more life-like, as if two flesh-and-blood individuals were talking. It also includes a few stage directions and a prop (the handbill), unlike the other two works. Even the arc of the dialogue is more complex, more true-to-life than its more formal cousins.
Joe Smith and the Devil also differs from the two other dialogues in its use of satire. In this Parley drew on his previous work, An Epistle of Demetrius, Junior, the Silversmith (1840), which employed satire to suggest that mainstream Christianity, especially the Church of England, was corrupted by money and entrenched interests. The 1844 dialogue takes up the same satirical message, suggesting that the real leader of Christendom is the devil, who is in a gentlemanly fight against Joseph Smith, because he is upsetting the devil’s entrenched kingdom.
But this innovative use of satire, together with Pratt’s use of stage directions and the fact that the dialogue was performed at one point, also makes Joe Smith and the Devil less like a dialogue and more like a closet drama—a play meant to be read rather that performed. By moving farther away from the elements that make a dialogue less engaging and more like a catechism or question-and-answer lesson, Parley also shifted towards something more like drama. However, the dialogue still doesn’t have the same kind of narrative arc that would be expected in a drama, making this work almost something new.
Distribution and Reaction
Parley’s innovation in loosening the dialogue form, in making it more play-like and less formal and in using satire, is perhaps the most significant reason for its relative success compared to other Mormon literary works of the time. In addition to first appearing on the front page of the New York Herald on Sunday, August 25, 1844 (just two months following Joseph Smith’s martyrdom), within a week it was published again in the Herald (in its weekly edition, which included the most notable items of the week), and in the Mormon newspaper in New York City, The Prophet. A month later it appeared in the Nauvoo Neighbor, the more secular sister publication to the Church’s official organ, the Times and Seasons. When Parley returned to New York City in early 1845 to take over publishing The Prophet, he printed the dialogue as a 12-page pamphlet, perhaps for use as a tract. Then, when he arrived in England later in 1845, he again printed the dialogue as a pamphlet, including in the same tract Orson’s Dialogue between Tradition, Reason and Scriptus.
It was in England that, I believe, the dialogue had its greatest effect. The tract remained in the catalog of publications of the British Mission for years, perhaps because of overly optimistic print runs, and was likely distributed by missionaries, at least among church members. The dialogue’s criticism of the Church of England and “hireling” priests would have resonated with the members, if not also with some portion of the general population, because many felt disaffected from mainstream society and despised by those in power.
However, the satirical nature of the dialogue was missed by some, as is evident in the letter that Mission President Orson Spencer received. In response to the letter from three local members in Kidderminster, Spencer patiently responded in the pages of the Millennial Star that the dialogue wasn’t meant literally, and that Joseph Smith didn’t actually have the discussion with the devil printed in the pamphlet. Meanwhile, other members delighted in the dialogue, and enjoyed its performance on the ship John M. Wood in 1854. Another member thought the dialogue so entertaining that he copied it, word-for-word, into his diary.9
The reaction from non-Mormons demonstrates that at least some of them felt attacked by it. In the months following the dialogue’s publication, the Stamford Mercury (England) noticed that “the Mormons are tickling the fancies of some with ‘a dialogue between Joseph Smith and the devil’.”10 The Liverpool edition of the dialogue was also among the Mormon works reviewed in Francis and John Rivington’s The English Review in September 1850. That review suggested that the dialogue was “blasphemous,” but included a substantial excerpt from the text and observed:
It cannot have escaped the reader, while perusing the foregoing extracts, how adroitly the enemy takes advantage of all the infirmities and defilements which, through the lapse of ages, and in consequence of her intercourse with the world, the Church of Christ has contracted; and of the countless schisms by which large portions as well as small sections of Christendom have been rent away from the body of Christ. We notice this particularly, because, while we examine and expose the awful delusions of the two sects which in our day lay claim to an extraordinary revelation, constituting them— respectively, according to their own pretensions,—the predestinated restorers of Israel, we are desirous of turning their errors to account for the edification of the Church, by drawing attention to those points in the condition of the Church and of Christendom generally, which have given the propagators of these sectarian and fanatical notions occasion to blaspheme the ordinance of God.11
Apparently, then, The English Review found Pratt’s criticisms of Christendom to be at least partially accurate and useful to reformers.
While The English Review confronted Pratt’s claims directly, non-Mormon author Marie A. Walsh, writing under the pen name Sandette, included two short excerpts from the dialogue in her novel My Queen, or Oreana Brentford: A romance of the Great Salt Lake (1878). In the seventh chapter of the novel, one character, Robert Deville, who is a Mormon convert, reads the dialogue to his wife when she has doubts about their impending immigration to Utah:
“Speaking of the devil, reminds me, that I have in my pocket the funniest thing about his black majesty and the prophet that ever I read. It made me laugh till the tears ran down my cheeks. It is the best thing out. Just right to drive away the blues. Shall I read it?”
“Yes, dear, if it will drive away the blues.”
“Oh! it will do that. You will laugh till you ache,—listen.”
He then reads the dialogue, but the response isn’t what he expected:
“Now, what do you think of that? Why, bless me, you don’t smile.”
“I should think not; it is outrageous. I don’t respect the prophet half as much as I did. O, Robert! I am afraid this is a bad move.”12
Walsh doesn’t clarify why the dialogue might lead Robert’s wife to have less respect for the prophet. Perhaps she, like the church member to whom Orson Spencer responded, didn’t understand the satire.
Forgotten, Rediscovered and Still Misunderstood
Over time, however, the attention to the dialogue dissipated, and it languished and was largely forgotten. It has subsequently been rediscovered twice. First, Joe Smith and the Devil was reprinted by several different local printers in Utah during the 1880s, who were seeking a way to promote their services. More recently, those anthologizing Mormon literature and the works of Parley P. Pratt rediscovered and reprinted the dialogue for a Mormon audience.
But while these academics see Pratt’s work as among the earliest in the development of Mormon literature, often they have failed to understand the context in which Pratt wrote the work and the reach it had outside of Mormonism. Without this context, academics have not given Joe Smith and the Devil much serious attention and therefore have failed to recognize the work’s moment and influence. And without this attention, scholars have even made factual errors about it. Some have erred in the circumstances of its publication, commonly and incorrectly asserting that it was first published on January 1, 1844.13 Others have misunderstood its form, suggesting that the dialogue was a “short story.”
So, still today, Pratt’s dialogue remains largely misunderstood among those who come across it. It is clearly dated, with some terms that aren’t well understood today. It is also still the source of misunderstandings, such as the confusion over Joseph Smith drinking beer (only later largely prohibited among Mormons) and the discomfort with references to the devil as “your majesty” (commonly done because the Bible suggests that the devil is the “king of this world”).14
Despite these misunderstandings, Joe Smith and the Devil is still the earliest work of Mormon fiction. It is also still the earliest Mormon fiction to be so widely distributed and to attract so much attention and one of the most innovative and unusual works of early Mormon literature, clearly demonstrating Pratt’s creativity. And most of all, Joe Smith and the Devil is a statement of Mormon attitudes toward traditional Christianity, a criticism of how religion has been run which justifies the restoration Mormonism brought. For these reasons, we should read it today.
