A Companion to Herman Melville

Wyn Kelley

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781119045274
  9781405122313
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119117902
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In a series of 35 original essays, this companion demonstrates the relevance of Melville's works in the twenty-first century.

• Presents 35 original essays by scholars from around the world, representing a range of different approaches to Melville
• Considers Melville in a global context, and looks at the impact of global economies and technologies on the way people read Melville
• Takes account of the latest and most sophisticated scholarship, including postcolonial and feminist perspectives
• Locates Melville in his cultural milieu, revising our views of his politics on race, gender and democracy
• Reveals Melville as a more contemporary writer than his critics have sometimes assumed

Part I
Travels

1
A Traveling Life

Laurie Robertson-Lorant

By 1819, the year Herman Melville was born, New York, the “insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs” (MD 3), was a bustling seaport, a labyrinth of streets and alleyways where names like Canton, Guinea, Curaçao, Java, New Orleans, Papua, Calcutta, Maracaibo, and Marseilles rolled like poetry off the tongues of tattooed ruffians. A proverbial “forest of masts” swayed above the waterfront, and from the docks, great wooden cities of sail set forth carrying cotton, tobacco, spirits, furs, lumber, whale oil, cheese, livestock, potash, grains, and flours to the farthest reaches of the globe and returned with sugar and rum from the West Indies, spices and teas from India and Ceylon, porcelain and silk from China, Flemish lace and Belgian linens, bushels of cocoa beans, and slabs of rosewood, teak, and mahogany.

Melville was born at 6 Pearl Street, a stone’s throw from the Battery, where a baby in a carriage on the promenade could inhale salt and spicy air from oceans half the world away. His earliest boyhood memories were of ships and sailors and strange languages. His mother and grandmother conversed in Dutch, his father and Uncle Thomas both spoke French, and, from an early age, the apple-cheeked boy dreamed of exploring exotic shores and distant seas.

Both of Melville’s grandfathers were heroes of the American Revolution, which made the family’s history coeval with the history of the new nation. Melville’s maternal grandfather, the late Colonel Peter Gansevoort, had owned slaves, as many northern gentlemen did in those days, and he had cracked the heads of several Iroquois during the French and Indian Wars. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill,¹ a Boston merchant and sometime customs inspector, kept a glass vial on his mantel filled with tea leaves from the Boston Tea Party that conjured images of himself and the other Sons of Liberty dressed up as Mohawk Indians, war-whooping their way to Boston Harbor to dump the British tea. A neighborhood fire warden in his old age, the eccentric patriot wore the knee breeches, silk stockings, buckled pumps, and tricorne hat of the Revolutionary War until his dying day.

Melville’s father was both an epitome and a victim of the era of good feeling that followed the War of 1812. By the time Allan Melvill met Maria Gansevoort at a ball honoring Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry in 1813, the confluence of military victory and economic prosperity had given rise to a fulsomely nationalistic rhetoric that conflated the Puritan vision of Boston as “a city on a hill” and English settlers as a Christian army in the heathen wilderness of the New World with the secular vision of America as an entrepreneurial Eden where hard-working people could get ahead – everyone, that is, except American Indians, enslaved Africans, immigrant laborers, and women, all of whom lacked property and voting rights.

The suave Allan, an importer of fancy dry goods from France, and the lovely Maria were married in Albany in 1814, and the following year Maria gave birth to a son whom they named Gansevoort. Although Maria preferred to remain near her family and friends, so many merchants were competing for shrinking markets in Albany that Allan decided to move his family to Boston, where his father would help him set up his business. Their first daughter, Helen Maria, was born there in 1817. The following year, with New York’s trade with Europe and the Far East far outstripping that of both Boston and Philadelphia, Allan decided to move his family and his business there. Maria, who was certain her husband’s enterprise and ambition would earn them a place among the city’s fashionables, half-reluctantly agreed.

By the spring of 1818, thanks to loans from his father that enabled him to purchase luxury French dry goods, Allan sailed for France, stopping first in Edinburgh, where he hoped to establish the family’s descent from Scottish nobility. In Paris, he purchased fine linen handkerchiefs, kid gloves, lace mantillas, Leghorn hats, merino shawls, ostrich feathers, Moroccan reticules, satin, taffeta and velvet ribbons and perfumes from Cologne and had them shipped home to America. He also dined with the Marquis de Lafayette and the French family of his brother Thomas’s first wife.

Allan Melvill approached business with a kind of missionary zeal. He repeatedly expressed the conviction that religious piety guaranteed material success, and that commercial success was a sign of the favor of GOD, always capitalizing that name. The letters he wrote to his wife echo the Calvinism old Major Melvill repudiated when he left the Congregational Church to become a Unitarian. For Maria, a faithful communicant of the Dutch Reformed Church, Allan’s piety was proof that he was destined to succeed.

Confident of his future success, Allan leased an elegant house at the opposite end of Pearl Street from his office and moved his family there, but by midsummer, business was absolutely stagnant. By the time the couple’s third child, a robust boy, was born on a hot, muggy August 1, 1819, the first of the antebellum boom and bust cycles had forced twelve to thirteen thousand people in New York to go on relief. The baby was christened Herman, after his first ancestor in the New World, Harmen Harmense Gansevoort, a master brewer who emigrated from the Netherlands in 1656 and settled in Fort Orange (Albany), where he opened a brewery and taproom and, like other Dutch immigrants in the Hudson Valley, founded a dynasty.

Shortly after his first birthday, baby Herman was “entirely weaned” (Allan Melvill to Thomas Melvill, Jr., August 15, 1820, BA), and a year later his father was boasting that he was “rugged as a Bear” (Allan Melvill to Peter Gansevoort, November 3, 1821, Leyda 1: 9). Meanwhile, on August 24, 1821, he gained a younger sister named Augusta who, like her brother, developed a “literary thirst” (Augusta Melville to Fanny Melville, March 17, 1954, MFP). After Augusta was born, Maria suffered a postpartum depression that dragged on for months. It is not clear how well Maria understood the extent of her husband’s mounting debts and incongruously grandiose schemes, but money worries did not prevent her from giving birth to a fifth child, a “noble boy” named Allan, after “hours of peril & anguish” (April 8, 1823, Leyda 1: 13). Three more children, Catherine, Frances Priscilla, and Thomas, followed in alternate years.

When Herman was six, his parents enrolled him in the Dutch Reformed Sunday School on Broome Street, where he was required to memorize the Calvinist catechism. Even that strict introduction to schooling did not prepare him for the rigors of the New-York Male High School, which was founded on the Lancastrian system of heavy punishments and light rewards. The school’s masters and student monitors considered boys who asked questions dangerous free thinkers, and free thinkers, like boys who misbehaved in ordinary ways, were dealt with harshly. To avoid humiliating punishments such as being suspended from the ceiling in a sack, shackled in a corner, or forced to wear a log around his neck, Herman learned to blend in and observe – a skill that would later serve him well on whaleships and a man-of-war. He was so shy his parents thought him backward: “As far as he understands men & things [he is] both solid & profound, & of a docile & amiable disposition … [but] very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension,” Allan Melvill warned his brother-in-law Peter Gansevoort before sending Herman to stay with him in Albany (AM to PG, August 10, 1826, Leyda 1: 5). More than likely, Melville, who was a sensitive child, was traumatized by the Male High School. Fortunately, his next school, Columbia Grammar School, was more liberal and humane.

Despite the fact that both parents favored the glib Gansevoort over the inarticulate dreamer, Herman had fond memories of his worldly father. Allan sometimes took his two older sons with him to the office, and as they walked down Pearl Street, Herman peered at the “old-fashioned coffeehouses” to see the “sunburnt sea-captains going in and out, smoking cigars, and talking about Havanna [sic], London, and Calcutta.” Even shipping notices held “a strange, romantic charm” (R 4) for the imaginative boy.

Between the ages of eight and twelve, Herman spent three summers with his Boston grandparents and a summer with his Aunt Mary and Uncle John DeWolf in Bristol, Rhode Island. Captain John DeWolf had sailed to Archangel in Russia and crossed Siberia by dogsled from the Sea of Okhotsk to St. Petersburg with Georg H. Langsdorff, the naturalist who had accompanied the Krusenstern expedition. Visits with globe-trotting relatives put Herman in touch with the world of exploration and discovery, but he probably did not know his uncle John owned a slave plantation in Cuba.

Before Melville was ten years old, his parents moved three times to larger houses in better neighborhoods, first to Courtlandt Street, next to Bleecker Street, then to Broadway. One more move – to one of the marble mansions on Bond and Great Jones Street – would have meant Mr. and Mrs. Allan Melvill had “arrived,” but that was not to be. As addicted to easy credit as a gambler to his dice, Allan borrowed constantly and fell deeper and deeper into debt. In desperation, he signed a promissory note for money he did not have and could not obtain when the note was called in. Forced to declare bankruptcy, he packed his family off to the Gansevoorts in Albany, liquidated his business, and left Manhattan in disgrace.

As difficult as it was to be uprooted, the move to Albany gave Herman Melville the opportunity to attend Albany Academy – whose fine classical curriculum included Geography, Natural History, Greek, Roman, and English History, Jewish Antiquities, and Latin – and the Albany Classical School, where the boy developed a “love for English composition” that led to his first attempts at writing fiction (Stedman).

Although Allan rehabilitated himself to some extent in Albany, he was determined to re-establish himself in Manhattan. Tragically, as a result of exposure during an unsuccessful steamer trip to New York in sub-zero weather, he contracted lobar pneumonia and died in Albany in January, 1832, quoting the Bible and raving deliriously. The shock Herman suffered was profound: “never again can such blights be made good; they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise might not erase it,” he would write in 1849 (R 53).

Left with eight children and dependent on her brother Peter to dole out funds from her late husband’s estate, Maria relied on her oldest sons to contribute to the family bank account. Gansevoort took over his father’s fur business, and Herman was forced to interrupt his schooling to work as a bank messenger. To escape, he spent several summers working on his Uncle Thomas’s Berkshire farm. Like Major Melvill, Thomas Melvill, Jr. was a colorful character. Having lived in Paris for a number of years with a French wife, he fancied himself something of a boulevardier. He wore his Sunday clothes and took pinches of snuff while raking hay in the fields. Herman enjoyed both his uncle’s foppish affectations and the rustic manners of his country cousins, especially Julia Maria, a bright girl who seems to have been a close friend.

In 1838, Melville’s mother moved her household across the river to Lansingburgh, a planned community of Albany expatriates that included several friends and relatives. Far from being a sleepy backwater in the 1830s and 40s, Lansingburgh, the oldest in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Texts and Abbreviations
• Preface
• Part I: Travels
• Part II: Geographies
• Part III: Nations
• Part IV: Libraries
• Part V: Texts
• Part VI: Meanings
• Index
• End User License Agreement