Ignorance is a great teacher. When I first wrote about Herman Melville nearly twenty years ago, I gave no thought to the original publication of a story I treated as a freestanding piece of fiction in need of interpretation. If, as part of my research, I did read somewhere that “Bartleby, the Scrivener” first appeared anonymously in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, then that information evidently went in one eye and out the other. I wasn’t alone. Between the composition of “The Happy Failure” and “The Fiddler” in the summer of 1853 and the publication of The Piazza Tales in May 1856, Herman Melville published seven pieces in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and seven—three in serial form—in Putnam’s, which also rejected “The Two Temples” and serialized Israel Potter. Harper’s and Putnam’s, however, attract little more attention in the vast expanse of Melville criticism than an object to which Putnam’s compared itself in its first editorial of January 1853: a speck of “star-dust” in “the celestial dairy” of America.
Eventually, after more than ten years, the light from that speck of star-dust crossed the galaxy to land on my eye. The more I noticed its gleam, no amount of blinking would wipe it away. Melville worked exclusively as a magazine writer between the completion of his lost novel, The Isle of the Cross, in 1853 and the publication of his final novel, The Confidence-Man, in 1857. He earned more money from magazine writing in these few years than from the combined sales during his lifetime of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man. The circulation of Harper’s reached two hundred thousand per issue at its peak, which meant Melville’s writing reached a broader audience than ever before. Even the less popular Putnam’s sold many times more copies per issue than did Melville’s novels. Could these simple facts affect our understanding of “Bartleby” and Melville’s other stories? Were there new ways to understand Melville and the work he published in Harper’s and Putnam’s if we reinstated their ties to 1850s periodical publishing? Were there more intricate stories to tell about Melville’s own magazine storytelling? This book is an attempt to overcome my own ignorance and to answer these questions. In short, its response is an emphatic “yes.”
Herman Melville: Among the Magazines is the first book to reconnect Melville to a cultural form that attained new significance in the nineteenth century. Putnam’s and Harper’s were only two of thousands of magazines that lit up America. The number of weekly and monthly titles grew from a handful in 1800 to over three and a half thousand by the century’s end. Many more came and went along the way. A feature of literary life for several decades, magazines and periodicals grew in number from the 1830s and 1840s onward because of the development of a print industry taking advantage of mechanical advances in papermaking and printing, faster transportation networks, healthy literacy rates, and expanding and diversifying demand from educated urban consumers. Once established, the momentum of magazine culture was unstoppable. Multi-authored, serially published, and collaboratively produced, the magazine form bequeathed mass culture to America after the Civil War. Like many other writers, Melville was swept up in the surf of this magazine mania. Writing the book I discovered a new Melville “embedded” in the forgotten materials, editors, writers, and literary traditions of the magazine world.
I also found an author who responded to magazine writing with confidence rather than skepticism or anxiety. Melville’s work for Putnam’s and Harper’s shows that he extended his fascination with the paper world on which he wrote and on which industrialized print culture relied; writing for magazines ratified Melville’s belief that authorship was a material as much as an intellectual activity and reaffirmed his sense of himself as a writer after the commercial failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre. To think of Melville as a downwardly mobile writer forced to grub along in an inferior literary sphere is to misunderstand his faith in his own art and the significance of magazines to the cultural habits of literate Americans. Melville’s writerly confidence is evident in the way he responded both pragmatically and with dazzling displays of innovation to the conventions of magazine publishing, the aesthetic and intellectual preferences of editors, and the staple genres of magazine content. Ranging across these genres as he wrote for Harper’s and Putnam’s, Melville succeeded where many other writers in the 1850s failed: he reinvented the magazine sketch and tale traditions in ways that helped create the modern short story.
I prefer to tell the story of this literary achievement rather than read Melville’s magazine writing symptomatically for broader cultural, historical, or political diagnosis. In part, this is because the results of such diagnoses are already numerous and powerful. But there are two others reasons. First, concentrating on his literary achievements helps us better see Melville’s magazine years as a transitional phase in a long and varied career, one in which he was not always a writer, did not always have ambitions to be a writer, professional or otherwise, and would not always be a writer for whom making a living from writing was a primary concern. Second, that speck of star-dust leads the eye away from readers and their judgments to writers and their actions; from the complexities of various aspects of American history as they emerge in Melville’s representation of them to the contingencies of magazine publication. As much as they are literary narratives subject to interpretation following publication, Melville’s stories are objects that narrate their own journey to magazine publication. By reading Melville’s writing as magazine writing, I concentrate on the sequence that connected thinking, writing, and magazine publication and attend to the practicalities of writing that existed before the cycle of distribution, circulation, and reading was set in train.
I am grateful to the many people who helped turn up the dimmer switch on the narrow beam of light with which Among the Magazines began. The British Academy and the University of Nottingham provided invaluable financial support. For their patience and direction, I thank the archivists and librarians at the Houghton Library, Harvard; the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library; and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. Although this book spends little time on nineteenth-century readers, it had some careful readers of its own. And I am grateful to many other interlocutors who provided advice, stimulation, mentorship, and support. So my thanks to Hester Blum, John Fagg, Paul Giles, Leon Jackson, Richard King, Bob Levine, Katie McGettigan, Pete Messent, Dave Murray, Judie Newman, Matthew Pethers, John Stauffer, Anthea Trodd, Robin Vandome, Sara Wood, and Brian Yothers. For taking up my original proposal and persevering with me, great thanks to Brian Halley. For the keenest of eyes, thank you to Mary Bellino. I take responsibility, of course, for any botches.
Zoe Trodd deserves a paragraph of her own. This book only flourished in her ambit. The year in which much of it was written was also a year that changed my life in ways I hadn’t believed possible. The two events—book and life—now seem inseparable. Like us. Whatever qualities I now see in this book I know are there because of Zoe’s help. You are a dream from which I hope never to awake.
Part of chapter 1 appeared in “The ‘Plain Facts’ of Fine Paper in ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,’” American Literature 84.3 (2012): 505–32. It is republished by permission of Duke University Press. Other parts of the book appeared in “Bartleby and the Magazine Fiction,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press), 99–112, and are reprinted with permission.