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Additional Unrecorded Reviews of Melville's Books
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
The editors of Moby-Dick as Doubloon sagely remark: ‘ Everything written about the book in 1851–1852, when reviews were affecting Melville's audiences and probably himself, is inherently more interesting than everything written in, say, 1951–1952 ’, This view is adequate reason for presenting the full text of over a dozen uncollected, unnoted reviews of Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Red-burn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man, appearing in ten journals of the period: in Philadelphia, the Dollar Newspaper and The Spirit of the Times; in New York, Fisher's National Magazine and Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, Holden's Dollar Magazine, The Golden Rule, The Home Journal, and Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine; in Syracuse, the Literary Union; and in Boston, the Boston Weekly Museum. Five of these titles appear in books and articles devoted to other Melville reviews. The most interesting review is that in the Literary Union, which is unusually ingenious in its presentation of very perceptive comments. In view of the number and diverse nature of the reviews and notices, it seems preferable to group them by journal titles, with brief introductory comments for each, rather than by date or the titles of Melville's novels.
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References
1 Parker, Hershel and Hayford, Harrison, Moby-Dick as Doubloon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970), p. xvGoogle Scholar. For the time and funds needed to visit many far-flung collections and to complete this paper, my thanks are owed to the Guggenheim Foundation and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York.
2 Hetherington, Hugh W., Melville's Reviewers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Parker and Hayford, op. cit.; Parker, , ‘Three Melville Reviews in the London Weekly Chronicle’, American Literature, 41 (1969), 584–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parker, , ‘A Reexamination of Melville's Reviewers’, Ametican Literature, 42 (1970), 226–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parker, , ‘Five Reviews Not in Moby-Dick as Doubloon’, English Language Notes, 9 (03 1972), 182–5Google Scholar; McDermott, John K., ‘The Spirit of the Times Reviews Moby-Dick’, New England Quarterly, 30 (09 1957), 392–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flanagan, John T., ‘The Spirit of the Times Reviews Melville’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 64 (1965), 57–64Google Scholar, and, pre-eminently, the ‘Historical Note’ in each of the CEAA texts of Melville's works thus far issued by North-western University Press.
3 See Mott, Frank L., A History of American Magazines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 1, pp. 358–63Google Scholar.
4 See his letter of 28 May 1844 to Lowell in Ostrom, John W., The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1, p. 253Google Scholar.
5 One must consider the possibility that the Syracuse magazine may have appeared months after the masthead date or that the April issue of the New Monthly may have appeared early, thus enabling the American typesetters to produce it in time. Still, the distance of Syracuse from New York favours a mere coincidence of reference in both reviews that shows the widespread partiality for Thalaba. Also note Elizabeth S. Foster's short reference to parallels between Thalaba and Mardi in the CEAA Mardi, p. 675Google Scholar.
6 Humphreys, A. R., Herman Melville (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd; New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 22Google Scholar. Davis, Merrell R., Melville's Mardi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp 76, 138n., 140n., 191–192n, 196Google Scholar.
7 See Leyda, Jay, Melville Log (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), pp. 211 and 243Google Scholar.
8 The Literary Union, I, no. 3 (21 April 1849), 42, cols. 1 and 2. In the 1849 New York edition of Mardi the passages occur on pp. 374–5 and p. 387 of vol. 2.
9 Humphreys, , Melville, pp. 23–4Google Scholar.
10 See the citations in Hetherington, , Melville's Reviewers, pp. 112–13, 118–20, 125, and 129Google Scholar.
11 The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1846), pp. 276–7Google Scholar. One should note also, Southey's very brief explanation of his versification as the ‘accent of feeling’, in the preface to the fourth ed. (p. 225).
12 Melville's Reviewers, pp. 118–20.
13 See Leyda, , Melville Log, pp. 303–4Google Scholar, for Melville's high praise of the ‘pathos’ of Fingal in the margin of his copy.
14 Hetherington, , Melville's Reviewers, p. 125Google Scholar.
15 Ibid., p. 215. For the full text see Moby-Dick as Doubloon, p. 84.
16 See his ‘Historical Note’, in Redburn (Chicago and Evanston: Northeastern University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.
17 This journal, despite its boast of 25,000 copies printed each week in 1849, has become very rare in all libraries. The New York Public Library set, which I have used, lacks volume 11, for the second half of 1849, and the volumes for 1851–53.