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Article Excerpt
This issue continues the work begun in Brian Higgins' and Hershel Parker's Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews and picks up where Richard E. Winslow III left off in Extracts 113 (June 1998), with new contributions from Mark Wojnar. Their thorough investigation of previously unexplored journals shows the extraordinarily rich vein these reviews, notices, sightings, obituaries, and retrospective pieces provide for further scholarship on Melville's reception and influence.
Some of these pieces Strike a very contemporary note. In a long review from the New Bedford Mercury, for example, the author considers Melville seriously as a poet, although the subject is Mardi, and places him squarely in the company of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Arthur Hugh Clough (hence we have quoted the whole article). This reading reinforces Hershel Parker' s thesis in Volume Two of his Herman Melville: A Biography, and the contentions of John Bryant and Douglas Robillard, that Melville was writing poetry long before he acquired any reputation as a poet. Another surprisingly contemporary subject is Melville's relation to the visual arts. The reviews of Moby-Dick suggest that readers responded particularly strongly to the scenes of whale killing with their graphic details, and an article from The National Magazine shows the power of Melville' s visual effects in "The Try-Works." Ironically this writer concludes, "What a picture might a painter of genius make of the scene!" As anyone who has read Elizabeth Schultz' s or Robert K. Wallace' s work might ask, though, was not Melville a painter of genius, or at least someone thoroughly enmeshed in the visual arts, as critics like Christopher Sten, Dennis Berthold, and Douglas Robillard have shown?
As we've seen in the past, nineteenth-century reviewers did not always read carefully (see the Norfolk County Journal notice on Redburn), quote accurately (note the Republican Journal's review of Moby-Dick, where Tashtego gets a new name), write originally (the Boston Evening Daily Transcript borrows blithely from the British press), or abate their venom long enough to consider the themes of greatest interest to twenty-first century readers. At the same time we learn that "No man can write better than Melville when he chooses to write naturally"; that "Our friends most assuredly will need no introduction to the author of `Typee'"; and that "the author [of The Piazza Tales] is so well known in this country as a writer of pleasant stories, that it is hardly necessary to do more than to announce that he is the author of this new book." It may come as a surprise to discover that Melville was considered to have a "rollicking, devil may-care style of story-telling" by a reviewer of The Confidence-Man or that "Mr. Melville has achieved a considerable reputation as a writer of war poems." These opinions, although some seem unfashionable now, offer a curiously immediate and direct glimpse into the world of Melville's readership in all its variety.
Some of these items may undoubtedly belong in Hershel Parker's new Melville Log: the free-wheeling association of Melville and Munchausen in the January 1849 New Bedford Mercury or a piece from the same newspaper about a whale sinking a ship off the coast of Nicaragua; a reference to Melville's residence in the author-rich vicinity of Lenox, Massachusetts, and another to his return from his travels to the Holy Land in 1857; and an obituary, some retrospective articles, and a photograph that show the beginnings of growth in his reputation during the 1890s. While not literary reviews per se, these gleanings from the published record show Melville' s presence in American letters and culture through the second half of the nineteenth century, not only as the popular author Typee and Omoo, but also as the contemporary of Henry Ward Beecher, Oliver Wendell Holmes, G. W. Curtis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maria Sedgwick, Fanny Butler, G. P. R. James, and George Bancroft.
As in the past, we have accumulated multiple submissions into a critical mass. The work goes on, however, and we welcome new discoveries. Contributions by Mark Wojnar are indicated as such in brackets; the other materials come from Richard Winslow. We have quoted the full text of each review and identified excerpts by reference to the Northwestern-Newberry edition.
--The Editors
TYPEE
New Bedford Mercury [Massachusetts]. 26 January 1849.
HOW TO FIND THE VALUE OF CALIFORNIA. Multiply Typee by Baron Munchausen--add the seven league boots of Jack the Giant Killer--carry the Moon Hoax, raised to its fiftieth power, to the amount with its unit figure in the column of millions--cast out the nines and subtract 17,000 miles in short rations. The remainder will be the square of the Arabian Night's Entertainments--to which add seventeen new voyages for Sinbad the Sailor--a topsail schooner load of Aladdin's lamps (latest patents) and the great carbuncle for Mount Jebungsrbad--which gives light to two-thirds of Humbugiston--and divide the whole, or your own jugular, with a bowie-knife! And the result will be astonishing! [Mark Wojnar]
OMOO
New Hampshire Gazette and Republican Union [Portsmouth, New Hampshire]. Tuesday, 14 September 1847 (vol. 93, no. 37, p. 1, col. 6). SAILORS' PRANKS
During the night (says the author of Adventures in the South Seas), some of those on deck would come below to light a pipe or take a mouthful of beef and biscuit. [followed by excerpt from Chapter 11, "Doctor Long Ghost, a Wag---One of His Capers." From "During the night some of those on deck would come below to light a pipe" to end of chapter (NN, 42-3).]
MARDI
New Bedford Mercury [Massachusetts]. 8 June 1849.
Mardi, Kavanagh, a Romance, by Longfellow, and "The Bothie of Topper na Fuosich, "...
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