Early on Saturday, January 11, 1851, Herman Melville headed out into the snowy landscape typical of a western Massachusetts winter with his wife, Elizabeth, his mother, Maria, and his sister Frances. Pulled by their horse, Charlie, the family traveled by sleigh several miles northeast through the Berkshire Hills. Melville was by all accounts an energetic sleigh driver. He regularly entertained guests and relations with afternoon rides to pick up letters from the local post office and on circuits of Arrowhead farm; ten days earlier he had collected his wife by sleigh from the train depot when she returned from her Thanksgiving and Christmas trip to Boston. The destination of this Saturday excursion was Dalton, a small town on the east branch of the Housatonic River, whose waters joined the west and southwest branches just north of Melville’s Arrowhead home in Pittsfield. The family did not return home until nearly six in the evening. But the trip was not just an opportunity for Melville to spend time driving through picturesque winter scenes shaped by the frozen form of water; he was drawn to Dalton because of what happened there to water’s liquid form.
Located at a point where the Housatonic falls from the hills and picks up speed, the town was perfectly suited to water-powered mill industry. Dalton benefited from one further advantage: a substratum of quartz beneath the surrounding hills that produced the purified water supply prized by manufacturers of durable, high-quality paper. Dalton’s population in 1850 was just over one thousand; when Melville and his family visited they would have found five working paper mills, and another opened later in the year. In January 1851, Melville was in the middle of writing Moby-Dick (1851). Although no original manuscript survives, he likely wrote the later parts of his great novel of the watery ocean on distilled Housatonic water given substance by the linen rags with which Dalton manufacturers combined it to make paper.
The trip to Dalton was part of Melville’s working week. He acquired the physical material on which to write and he would make papermaking his theme in the second half of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” a story published four years later in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Some weeks after the trip, Melville wrote to the New York editor and publisher Evert Duyckinck on paper embossed with a papermaker’s mark: “CARSON’S DALTON MS.” Beside the stamp Melville annotated the words: “—about 5 miles from here, North East. I went there & got a sleigh-load of this paper. A great neighborhood for authors, you see, is Pittsfield” (C 179). The Berkshire Hills were the home or summer home of several other writers familiar to Melville during this period: Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fanny Kemble, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick.1 Rather than this writerly network, however, the annotation on the letter to Duyckinck—no doubt also intended to puncture Duyckinck’s metropolitan sense of superiority—suggests that more important to Melville’s understanding of what constituted a “great neighborhood for authors” was his place in the heart of the Berkshire County papermaking industry.
Melville’s proximity to the papermaking industry illustrates that as much as writing relies on an author’s cerebral and imaginative faculties, it also relies on the material and practical endeavor of authors in a publishing system. Acquiring paper was only the first in a sequence of events that became increasingly pressing for Melville after his visit to Dalton. While he wrote new sections of Moby-Dick in his notoriously illegible handwriting, his sisters transcribed and made fair copy of what he had written. Melville also prepared Moby-Dick for publication like no other of his novels. He finished writing the book without the offer of a contract; Harper & Brothers, publisher of his four previous novels, turned down Melville’s request for an advance on the grounds that he remained in debt to them for nearly $700 following poor sales of Mardi (1849) and weaker sales for Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) than expected of the author of Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Melville only finalized a contract with Harper once he had himself engaged a printer—Robert Craighead of New York, printer of Typee—to set the type and produce printing plates for the novel; Harper then paid for and used these plates. During the summer of 1851, between Pittsfield and temporary sojourns in the dust and heat of New York City organizing printing and contractual arrangements, Melville finished writing Moby-Dick while Craighead worked simultaneously on the typesetting; Melville rather than the publisher took responsibility for editing and proofing (MD 660–64).2
For all books, being read is the denouement to a much longer story of creation and distribution that in the nineteenth century began with rags in a paper mill and ended with the postal service, the bookseller, and the distribution agent. And being read, as Leah Price has argued of Victorian Britain, was just one of many uses to which books were put.3 One part of bringing a book to publication is writing its literary content; the copy of Moby-Dick that readers held in their hands in 1851 was also the result of Melville’s idiosyncratic involvement in its publishing journey. This book takes up the significance of a different kind of publishing journey during the years from 1853 to 1856, when Melville’s writing appeared first in magazine rather than book form. Spared the rigors imposed by Moby-Dick, when he wrote for magazines Melville nevertheless faced new writing and publishing practices and new relationships that shaped the next phase of his writing career.
My primary aim, then, is to fathom Melville’s magazine writing by doing better justice to the cultural form in which it first appeared. Melville published some of his most widely read and admired work—“Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” for instance—during this period. Magazines were not merely the containers of his work. They mediated and shaped Melville’s literary ambitions, and the stories were print objects with specific publishing histories; Melville had to engage with magazine publishers, editors, and conventions if he wanted to see his writing in print and receive payment. In short, magazines presented Melville with new challenges. This book examines his literary response.
Melville would have been unusual among nineteenth-century writers had he not written for magazines, but it was not inevitable that he became a magazine writer. His reluctance to commit himself to the periodical form is evident on two occasions in 1850 and 1851. The first provides only circumstantial evidence but suggests pragmatic thoughts were already exercising him. On August 10, 1850, Melville’s father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, received a letter from the editor of the popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book asking for Melville’s current address. At the back of the January 1851 issue of Godey’s an advertisement appeared describing the delights awaiting readers during the following year. Beneath a headline proclaiming “THE LADY’S BOOK FOR 1851 SHALL EXCEED EVERY OTHER MAGAZINE” was a three-column list of writers familiar to the magazine’s readers, together with “some writers of great celebrity, whose names have not yet appeared in the ‘Book.’” The penultimate name in the third column was Herman Melville, just above “Nathl. Hawthorn.”4 Presuming Shaw passed along Melville’s address and Melville replied positively to Godey’s request, he was clearly thinking of supplementing his income with magazine work. There is, however, no evidence that Melville ever broke away from writing Moby-Dick to submit contributions to the magazine.
The second occasion is the letter to Duyckinck pointing out what “a great neighborhood for authors, you see, is Pittsfield.” Melville’s purpose in this letter was primarily to refuse Duyckinck’s request that he send a contribution—“A dash of salt spray”—and a daguerreotype of himself for Holden’s Dollar Magazine, a new publication Duyckinck was due to begin editing with his brother, George, in April 1851. The terms of Melville’s rejection of the daguerreotype are well known: as “almost everybody is having his ‘mug’ engraved nowadays . . . to see one’s ‘mug’ in a magazine, is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody. . . . I respectfully decline being oblivionated by a Daguerreotype.” The written contribution Melville refused by emphasizing that his Berkshire County residence had removed him from the literary culture of New York City and the persona of the famous young writer of sea fiction that Duyckinck was asking him to reprise: “Where am I to get salt spray here in inland Pittsfield? I shall have to import it from foreign parts. All I now have to do with salt, is when I salt my horse & cow.” Neither did Melville want distractions, even the distraction of “so small a thing” as writing for a magazine, that would take him away from the writing of Moby-Dick: “I am not in the humor to write the kind of thing you need,” he wrote Duyckinck (C 179–80). By 1853, after the failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre (1852) and the rejection by Harper & Brothers of the now lost novel The Isle of the Cross, Melville could not afford to do without such distractions.
The magazine environment of the 1850s was febrile. An average of 150 magazines were founded each year of the decade, and so Melville was soon handed the opportunity to be a magazine writer again in October 1852, when he received a letter from the publisher of his first novel.5 George Palmer Putnam was planning “an original periodical of a character different from any now in existence” and wanted “to have the best talent of the country to aid us in the undertaking.” Putnam was not singling out Melville. He sent the stock letter to dozens of other American writers, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau, and Cooper. To achieve his ambitions for the magazine, Putnam made it clear that as “gratuitous contributions ought not to be relied on, even though they could be, we expect to pay as liberally as the nature of the work will allow for all articles that we accept.”6 Melville did not respond to Putnam’s call until the following summer, by which point he had also reached agreement with the Harper firm to write for their magazine. Harper’s New Monthly first appeared in June 1850, publishing largely reprinted and imported material, but soon started to include more native content as competing magazines such as Godey’s and Putnam’s advertised the American pedigree of their writers. The competition in books between Melville’s two publishers now moved into the world of magazines. The deal Melville reached with Harper was that any payment for his magazine writing would not be set against the debts accrued by his novels. At this point Melville again started to earn money from his writing. Now, though, he was a magazine writer.
The arrival of Harper’s and Putnam’s indicates how the magazine market diversified after the 1840s. Already successful book publishers, the owners of these new entrants to the magazine world brought with them innovative methods and standards to service the stratifying taste cultures evident particularly among growing numbers of urban consumers. Magazine publishing entered a new phase of development at precisely this point. Meredith McGill ends her study of “the culture of reprinting” in the year Melville published his first story in Putnam’s. This magazine, McGill argues, with its emphasis on indigenous content, marked a decisive shift away from the “exuberant understanding of culture as iteration and not origination” that marked the 1830s and ’40s, when the unauthorized reprinting of foreign literature—in books and magazines—was at its peak.7 How, then, does this book navigate the new magazine terrain of which Melville was now part?
This terrain is available to us largely thanks to the enormous array of digitization projects in the late 1990s and 2000s that made nineteenth-century magazines more easily accessible.8 One aim of this book is to counterbalance an unintended consequence of digitization: the consolidation of the critic as a vicarious reader. The raison d’être of digitization is reading, and digitization relies on making available facsimile pages of magazines as they first appeared. But digitization also instigates particular kinds of critical reading. Because the sheer volume of material prohibits command over magazine content, critics have better explored the cultural work magazine consumption performed rather than the material history or significance of specific magazine pieces or magazine writers. Consequently, we know how magazines mediated nineteenth-century ideas and serviced an increasingly important middle class eager to consume its own image in the pages of magazines.9 By prioritizing the readers who consumed magazines, and the social and cultural contexts, networks, and media histories of which readers and magazines were part, what we know above all else are the ideological habitats of reading communities, which magazines did not simply cater to but helped create. This work is clearly important and enlivens any discussion of nineteenth-century literature and culture. But it is not the history of magazines. In training the critical eye on reading, digitization leaves in the dark a world less easily preserved but without which Melville’s magazine writing would never even have reached its readers.10
As a way of starting to make that world visible, consider this example. To achieve his ambitions for what would become Putnam’s Monthly, Putnam inspired contributions from the recipients of his stock letter by appealing to the yardstick of quality. “The facilities connected with an established publishing business,” he claimed, “will enable us to place the work at once on a high footing.”11 The “facilities” Putnam had in mind were the materials, personnel, and practices he could bring into alignment: high-quality paper, on which he insisted; fresh type set by John Trow, a leading New York printer and renowned early adopter of new technology; an editorial team of experienced journalists and writers—Charles Frederick Briggs, George William Curtis, and Parke Godwin; a stable of artists and engravers Putnam had been employing since the 1840s; and a subscription list of distinction bought from the owners of the defunct Whig Review. For Putnam, the quality of his magazine would be guaranteed not only by content; the object that reached the hands of his reader should be equally distinguished. Still relatively little is known about how this sequence of managed magazine materiality accommodated Melville or how writing for magazines shaped his work. The same is true of Hawthorne. Poe is slightly better served, as are Stowe, Henry James, and other important popular nineteenth-century writers such as E. D. E. N. Southworth and Fanny Fern. But even in these instances, the tendency is for magazine publication to play an ancillary role to the broader historical and ideological contexts in whose shadow material publication history can seem antiquarian by comparison.12
In contrast, this book focuses on writing rather than reading. Other than the magazine editors who read Melville’s work, the nineteenth-century readers of Harper’s and Putnam’s remain largely opaque. By taking a writer’s-eye view of magazine publishing, Melville’s place within it, and his exploration of its limits and possibilities, I take up the story from McGill’s endpoint and ask how Melville responded to the demand for literary origination. The answers this book provides, particularly in chapter 5, supplement McGill’s work by showing that iteration and origination were two ends of a spectrum whose intermediate points Melville often occupied. Melville offered plenty of origination. He also relied on a version of the reprinting ethos for “Bartleby,” which had very clear origins in the first chapter of James Maitland’s A Lawyer’s Story (1853). And Melville “reprinted” the forgotten narratives on which he based Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” but edited them so thoroughly that they passed as original works.
By looking out from the latticework of magazine publishing from a writer’s-eye view, this book asks: What did it mean to be a magazine writer in the 1850s? What did it require of an author, especially an author like Melville who turned to magazines after writing novels? How did Melville understand, anticipate, and adjust to the magazine form and where is the evidence in the work he published? Under what circumstances did editors judge and publish his work? In short, what is the ante-consumption history of Melville’s magazine writing?
I use the concept of “embedded authorship” to help answer these questions. My understanding of this concept forms at the confluence of recent approaches to authorship in nineteenth-century America and a well-established critical tradition that has long grappled with spatial metaphors to understand Melville’s place in literary and cultural history. From Lewis Mumford’s depiction of him standing “alone in a desert” to William Spanos’s description of the “exilic silence” of his later work, Melville exists as a writer in isolation. In Nina Baym’s Möbius strip–like formulation, Melville occupies the position of an insider who becomes an outsider to offer “consensus criticism of the consensus,” while for Samuel Otter, Melville has “an inside sense of the power of ideology, its satisfactions and its incarcerations.” In his short fiction, Marvin Fisher argues, Melville chooses “to go under as a literary strategy, to become our first major underground writer.” For William Dillingham, this fiction is where “an unfolding . . . takes place on the second plane submerged beneath layers of inoffensive wit, congenial reminiscing, and Irvingesque worldly maturity.”13
Neither does Melville sit comfortably in place in the mid-nineteenth century. The title of Fisher’s first chapter, “Portrait of the Artist in America,” suggests Melville’s Joycean, proto-modernist qualities; Mumford describes Melville as “a modernist before his time”; while for Spanos the later work is not only “proleptic of the poststructuralist or postmodern occasion” but of “proleptic import for the contemporary occasion.”14 Isolated, exiled, outside, inside, under, beneath, and out of sequence: the spaces Melville occupies see him dislocated from the more ordinary and everyday spaces of nineteenth-century America. This books reorients Melville’s work in a slightly different way: by embedding rather than dislocating. Melville and his writing were recovered in the twentieth century and pushed above the surrounding terrain in the topography of American literary culture; my aim is to press the writer and his writing back, so they share the same contour lines with, and nestle more fittingly against, the practicalities of the writing and publishing life in which they were once grounded.
Embedded authorship takes its lexical cue from Leon Jackson’s study of literary markets and society in nineteenth-century America, but repurposes embeddedness to suit my concern with the material creation of magazines. Jackson’s work is important because it drills down into the specificities of authorship to question long-standing assumptions about literary production and circulation. Primarily, it undercuts the idea that gradual and inevitable professionalization in a singular marketplace was the distinctive transformation of nineteenth-century authorship. Jackson shows that authors existed in multiple economies where the circulation of books—through trade, as gifts, or in other forms of exchange—helped consolidate “social bonds” to the extent that “webs of connection . . . were no less important a part of a transaction than any money that might have changed hands.” The more important story of the nineteenth century, he argues, is how those webs dissolved and lost significance as literary exchange became more impersonal. As cash and contracts assumed greater significance, social bonds gave way to “various mediatory individuals and agencies who stood between an author and his or her readers.” What distinguished the first half of the nineteenth century, Jackson concludes, was the “social disembedding” of authorial activity.15
The speed and reach of this disembedding was variable. Francesca Sawaya, for instance, outlines the persistence of philanthropy and patronage to literary activity for writers including Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser into the twentieth century.16 But for Melville the case is clearer. In his preference for the Berkshire County papermaking industry over the region’s network of writers one can see “social disembedding” in action. Following in the wake of his removal to Pittsfield from New York City, Melville distanced himself from the bonds established through his publishers and the appearance and success of his early work. Although he remained on personable terms with Duyckinck, even after a lukewarm review of Moby-Dick in The Literary World, Melville left behind potentially significant social affiliations that could have supported his future career.
Jackson’s model is by far the best available for understanding the changing complexion of literary markets in the nineteenth century. But it says more about the economies in which authorship operated than authorship itself. By drawing on the work of the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi, Jackson takes a structural approach in which authorship moves to the rhythms of economic and social forces. Ultimately, economies always determine authorship: if an economy is embedded, literary activity serves the function of cementing social bonds; if an economy is disembedded, literary activity becomes a financial or contractual practice. Jackson’s transactional approach to authorship also means that exchange is his primary focus rather than the composition of literary objects. But authorship can precede the exchange, or even the potential exchange, of a literary object. If a literary object is an effect, exchange is not its only cause. And exchange certainly does not predictably determine the form and content, the shape and nature, of a literary object.
The changes Jackson describes as social disembedding had practical consequences for writers who needed to adjust their bearings to the altered dynamics of book and magazine publishing. As a result of his removal to Pittsfield and his decision to write for magazines in the wake of Pierre, Melville had to establish new working relationships with those other “mediatory individuals and agencies”—papermakers, typesetters, printers, magazines, editors, and publishers—who managed the sequence of events that turned rags and water into books and magazines in a depersonalizing environment. While no longer serving the social purpose of an earlier moment, neither were these working relationships straightforwardly economic or marketized. Nor were they just the context in which writers were situated. Instead, these relationships were part of a chain of material creation that included writers—in addition to many other actors and events—and to which writers improvised pragmatic responses. When I say that Melville was embedded in these material relations, then, I use embeddedness not in the strictly socioanthropological sense that Jackson uses it, but metaphorically to indicate spatial connection to that chain of material creation.
An author’s embeddedness might be deep or shallow. Buying paper and transporting it home from a mill on a sleigh is a deeper form of embeddedness than Thomas Carlyle’s employment of a stationery manufacturer, Parkins & Gotto, to service his paper needs. Embeddedness may also be strong or weak. Melville never shared as supportive a relationship with any of his publishers as Hawthorne shared with William Ticknor. Instead, his relationship with Putnam and the Harpers was pragmatic and businesslike on all sides. Embeddedness can be close or distant. Poe was so beset by the business of magazine publishing that he was editing magazines in which his tales and poems were also appearing. Melville remained in Pittsfield throughout his magazine-writing career and worked to no schedule except his own. So while Melville probably had a heightened understanding of the interaction of a writer with the physical materials of writing after his visit to Dalton, he lacked—and showed no signs of wanting to cultivate—the editorial guidance a Ticknor might have provided to turn his career in a different direction. Unlike Poe, Melville never got so close to magazines that he became an editor, but, as I show in chapter 5, editing was sufficiently important for him to assume the role of editor when he customized the real-life events that inspired Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno.”
A writer’s embeddedness can also change over time. Writers can move from being suppliers of content to editors of content. Charles Frederick Briggs and George William Curtis, two characters who reappear in more detail later in this book, were both editors of Putnam’s. But Briggs first had ambitions as a novelist and achieved some success in the 1840s; Curtis first wrote travel narratives and social satires. Curtis, in particular, remained reluctant to become a full-time paid editor. But the changing landscape of publishing saw both of them making their livings primarily through editing in the 1850s. Their embeddedness developed unpredictably, and they found themselves in unexpected roles that shaped their future careers. In this transition it is also possible to see how embeddedness is bidirectional. Writers and authors respond to the changing nature of the publishing environment in ways that then allow them to shape the nature of literary activity in that environment. While he was acting as gatekeeper at Putnam’s and defining its reputation, Curtis was also writing a regular column for Harper’s.
Like the Housatonic River picking up tributaries on its journey toward the ocean, so other processes—transcribing, editing, printing—supplement the journey of writing toward publication that in Melville’s case began with purchasing the paper on which to write. Embedded authorship emphasizes that although an author’s stories are subject to interpretation following publication, they are also material objects that witness the circumstances and processes by which they come to publication. Neither the complexion nor the coordination of this preconsumption process are yet fully understood in the case of Melville’s magazine writing. But magazines were not just the symptom of a mass culture whose momentum spilled them across the streets, parlors, and railway carriages of the United States; magazines were the material objects and the cultural form—multi-authored, collaboratively produced, serially published—whose capacity to organize the various specialized elements of production bequeathed mass culture to America in the late nineteenth century.
By prioritizing the magazine, I develop my concept of embedded authorship in three directions pertinent to Melville. First of all, by their nature magazine contributions required a different relationship between author and publisher than did a novel. For Melville there was certainly none of the protracted contractual negotiation at which he had shown himself to be increasingly inept, even with his lawyer-brother Allan acting as attorney. If the coming to publication of Moby-Dick was unusual, when negotiating over Pierre Melville just made a bad deal. He received royalties of twenty-five cents per copy, but only after sales reached the 1,190 necessary for Harper to recoup its costs. A paltry 233 copies qualified for the royalty in the first year, nowhere near enough to clear Melville’s exiting debt to his publisher. Fire destroyed unsold copies when the Harper warehouse burned down in December 1853 and, despite a short reprint run in 1855, Melville did not receive a single cent on the book. With The Isle of the Cross he never got as far as a contract.
Writing for magazines removed Melville from the hands of publishers and into the hands of editors whose priority was getting the next month’s issue ready for print. At Harper’s Melville’s work passed through the hands of Henry Raymond, while at Putnam’s Charles Frederick Briggs and George William Curtis were the key intermediaries. Each issue of Harper’s and Putnam’s contained at least fifteen to twenty different sections—sometimes more—comprising stories, essays, sketches, reviews, and various editorial pieces. Magazines were exercises in collaboration; to stand a chance of succeeding in a competitive market, print and production processes needed efficient management. Melville was now one among many authors of these magazines. To keep things straightforward writers were paid by the page. Rates varied from writer to writer, but Melville received the relatively high amount of five dollars. As long as his stories were accepted, he was paid. From his magazine fiction during these years, Melville earned $1,329.50, or an average of almost $450 per year. This exceeded his lifetime earnings from both Moby-Dick and Pierre (PT 494).17 As a magazine writer, then, Melville was embedded in new kinds of relationships with editors and publishers, where the stakes of each transaction were lower but, when combined, far more rewarding.
The fiction Melville wrote for Harper’s and Putnam’s was also embedded literally in the magazines themselves. With the exception of “The Encantadas,” which appeared under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor, Harper’s and Putnam’s published all of Melville’s fiction anonymously. Without the imprimatur of his name and beyond the bounds of his reputation, Melville’s magazine writing rubbed shoulders with all manner of prosaic and exotic company typical of the miscellaneous nature of magazines. Neither did Melville have any control over when his stories appeared in Harper’s and Putnam’s; sometimes they were published several months after submission and payment. Together with the contingencies of location and juxtaposition, this meant magazines embedded Melville’s anonymous authorship between their covers in a way that did little to distinguish writers and instead sacrificed them for the sake of the magazine’s identity.
Finally, to work as magazine fiction, Melville’s writing needed to embed itself within the forms, genres, and conventions in which magazines traded. Melville was familiar with the form and content of magazines. He subscribed to The Literary World (until early 1852) and to Harper’s, and even in his famous letter to Hawthorne complaining that “dollars damn me” he mentions having read Hawthorne’s “The Unpardonable Sin” in, appropriately enough, Dollar Magazine. Magazines were not a mystery to Melville; he understood their conventions in the same way he understood the conventions of the sea fiction and travel narratives he embraced so successfully in his early books. Although he explored the genre of historical fiction in Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno,” the modes in which Melville worked were principally the sketch and the tale, or what Melville would help become the short story. When critics uproot Melville’s stories, shake them free of the magazines in which they first appeared, and examine them in the clear light of the laboratory rather than the woody shade of the planted border, too often they develop characteristics thought to be evidence of some new species. But the originality and innovation of Melville’s stories only becomes apparent when they are set against their magazine companions. Reading Melville’s work as magazine fiction means recognizing its embeddedness in the generic conventions of magazine writing.
Embedding Melville in the magazine world also affords the opportunity to return anew to a conundrum often posed of him: Why did he fall into obscurity and why was he not understood by his contemporaries to be the important writer he is considered today? One further aim of this book is to suggest new ways to think about this puzzle. After Typee, Melville wrote seven novels, including The Isle of the Cross, plus all of the magazine pieces; he published his final novel, The Confidence-Man, in 1857. Moby-Dick may have disappointed readers of Melville’s earlier work, while Pierre baffled and angered them, but the possibility was not lost that Melville would again write something to satisfy a book-buying audience. Neither were reviews of The Confidence-Man disastrous compared to Pierre, especially in Britain; they were, though, noticeably shorter and fewer in number. Even the good reviews looked back fondly to Typee and Omoo as they overestimated the capacity of Melville’s reputation to sell books; the bad reviews contrasted Melville’s Mississippi masquerade with the earlier work even more starkly.18 In the space of ten years Melville found an audience only to lose it. The literary world in which he wrote quickly used up the accelerant of his early work; he burned brightly but no back-up was in place to help him preserve fuel.
The magazine years, then, are the fulcrum on which the beam of Melville’s reputation and success balances. Three years before his death in 1891, Melville published a collection of poems, John Marr and Other Sailors, for which only one newspaper notice survives. The reviewer reminds his readers that “the reputation of no American writer stood higher forty years ago than that of Herman Melville” before judging that “his verse is marked by the same untrained imagination which distinguishes his prose.”19 Yet the magazine years also interrupt this declension narrative. The subscription and readership numbers of Harper’s and Putnam’s mean Melville was more widely read than ever. Unfortunately, given that Melville’s contributions appeared anonymously, most readers were unaware who they were reading. The magazine form supporting Melville’s writing career at the healthy rate of five dollars a page simultaneously concealed his identity to the readers who might become buyers of his books.
Of course, other factors contributed to Melville’s failure to recover an audience, not least his determination to experiment; and Israel Potter and The Piazza Tales were made available to readers in book form, the latter albeit with a publisher, Dix & Edwards—owner of Putnam’s from March 1855 and publisher of The Confidence-Man—that went out of business in August 1857. The important point is that when The Confidence-Man was published Melville was more widely read than he had ever been. After complaining to Hawthorne that “dollars damn me!” Melville also wrote: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot” (C 191). Written while he was finishing Moby-Dick, this comment has come to stand as a convenient shorthand identifying Melville’s dissatisfaction with the demands of the literary market. But the comment is better understood in the context of the completion of that large and difficult novel. When it came to writing for magazines, Melville proved that he could undoubtedly “write the other way.”
Paying attention to Melville’s embeddedness in magazine forms and publishing helps us reassess his place in the literary culture of the 1850s and the criteria by which we should judge his reputation and success. Rather than an addendum to a once promising career, the magazine years saw Melville’s writing flourish in new, imaginative, and popular ways. Looking at its reception cannot measure the success of this writing. Beyond brief appraisals in the letters of a small literary circle who knew of Melville’s authorship, no records exist of what most readers thought, and magazines, apart from brief newspaper notices commenting on the content of new issues, were not reviewed like books. That Melville’s magazine enterprise was temporary, only adequately rather than richly rewarded, and did not lead to commercially successful books was the fault of neither Melville nor the reading public, nor even his publishers. The assumption these effects should follow results from an anachronistic understanding of a literary world more fluid, less professionalized, and less secure than what developed in the twentieth century.
In emphasizing the idiosyncratic nature of Melville’s experience of magazine writing, I share Trish Loughran’s view of the print world. While industrial changes affecting the production and circulation of print after the 1820s may have eventually centralized literary production, they also produced “simultaneous experiences of disintegration and national fragmentation” whose material evidence often evades retrospective impulses to flatten and unify national development.20 Melville’s experience is instructive, but if it was typical of anything at all about magazine publishing in the 1850s, dropping in and dropping out of the magazine world as Melville did was typical only of the discontinuity that plagued magazines. Some, like Putnam’s, dazzled but were snuffed out relatively quickly because they were not financially viable; many others were damp squibs that lasted only a single issue; only the lucky ones like Harper’s perfected a formula that enabled them to burn brightly and continuously over many decades. As magazines came and went, so did opportunities for writers.
Renewed interest and appreciation of the poetry Melville turned to writing in the 1860s helps cast the magazine years as a transitional phase in a long and varied writing career.21 Melville, like any other author trying to earn money by writing, was never entirely outside a market economy, since one’s reputation commodifies the possibilities of one’s future publishability. But it is a mistake to think that the desire to write, or the necessity of doing so, is always oriented to, or determined by, an economic market. In 1847, after the publication of Typee but before the publication of Omoo, Melville was engaged to Elizabeth and spent time in Washington with his brother Allan looking for a political appointment to ease the financial transition into marriage. Before he began writing magazine fiction in 1853 there was some prospect he might be appointed U.S. consul to the Sandwich Islands. In 1866, at the age of forty-seven, he took up employment as a New York customs officer. Writing was only one among several ways by which Melville earned, or thought of earning, a living; his commercial success and failure was contingent on an admixture of impulses and events sometimes within but often beyond his control given the volatile publishing culture of nineteenth-century America.
This book, then, cares little for narratives of obscurity and decline. The apocryphal story that Herman Melville became Henry Melville in a New York Times obituary is an invention of the twentieth century.22 O. G. Hillard was responsible for the obituary, which appeared a week after the author’s death. For Hershel Parker, Hillard’s claim that Melville was the equal only of James Russell Lowell—the poet, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and politician who died six weeks before Melville—does not do justice to Melville’s greatness. But Melville’s greatness as a writer belongs to the twentieth century as well. Hillard makes the more compelling point that one chooses obscurity as much as one falls into it and that Melville was “contented to be forgotten.” He also offers the tantalizing prospect that had Melville, like Lowell, “been offered the editorship of some magazine, he would probably have accepted the position and filled it well.”23 Unfortunately, literary history is full of what ifs. The book preface to Israel Potter imagines a letter from an editor “To His Highness the Bunker-Hill Monument,” but Melville never did sit formally at the editor’s table. For several years in the mid-1850s, however, he was squarely part of the magazine world, far away from the twentieth-century inventions that bequeath him to contemporary readers.
My final aim is to provide answers to the questions that follow from taking a writer’s-eye view of Melville’s embeddedness in the world of magazine publishing: What qualities does a writer bring to the composition of a text that make it suitable for magazine publication? What makes that text memorable rather than forgettable? What qualities account for the longevity of “Bartleby” and some of Melville’s other magazine writing, especially given the ordinariness of their first existence? To answer these questions, I retain a faith in the writer, the text, and textuality that is sometimes at odds with the rewriting of America’s literary and print history over the last fifteen years. This faith is prompted by a conviction that historically inflected criticism does not always provide the appropriate tools for understanding the form of literary texts; and certainly, that it offers little help when we try to decide what enables texts to endure the passage of time.
The most significant books to change our understanding of nineteenth-century literature and print culture challenge prevailing, often long-standing accounts of the period by revealing the significance of localized and plural print experiences. They are models of scholarship based on extensive archival research; all vividly explore the complex circumstances that produced and circulated print. They all have a commitment to get the history right. Jackson, for instance, aims for “a more historical and nuanced analysis than the professionalization model can provide.” McGill wants to “reach back through the foundational anxieties of literary nationalism to uncover a literature defined by its exuberant understanding of culture as iteration and not origination.” One criticism of this work, however, is that trying to get history right also risks sealing it in a time capsule. Reconstructing writers and texts so rigorously in the context of their contemporaneous publication, reprinting, and circulation risks becoming what Jonathan Dollimore has described as “a contextualizing which is also, and more fundamentally a containment.”24 The historicist impulse can sever the arteries of literary history; because it asks different questions, it cannot entirely explain why, for instance, Melville’s stories still have a heartbeat all these years later.
The literary history of nineteenth-century print has tended, then, to prioritize history over the literary. Every literary occasion is historically situated, but it is a critical choice to repeatedly make historical situatedness the ground for literary analysis. Questions about authorial creativity and transhistorical literary value are largely deferred—or dismissed—in cultural histories that focus on the circumstances in which texts existed and circulated. The wiring of context to text bypasses the material and practical activities of writerly creation and imagination. In a fascinating account of writers and their mentors in the nineteenth century, for instance, David Dowling starts with a disclaimer: “Authorship . . . functions in this book as a component of publishing history, which I treat as socially driven, diverse, and dependent on the economies of circulation in the literary market, a perspective that dismantles the myth of the autonomous romantic artist.”25 There are subtler understandings of authorship. McGill offers a much more granular sense of how Poe and Hawthorne balanced creative and industry imperatives. But the options of romantic authorship or an authorship reduced to “a component of publishing history” are altogether too limiting. As history dominates in the contingencies of literary and print studies, it risks relegating the writer to mere functionary rather than just dismantling the myth of the romantic artist.
I aim for a different understanding of authorship. An imaginative writer like Melville certainly operated in a commercializing media system. How he interacted with that system, and the results of that interaction, were still affected by decisions and choices Melville made. And whether we consider him an artist, an author, or just a plain writer writing copy, the best evidence to help answer questions about Melville’s magazine writing is still often to be found in the writing itself, especially when the biographical trail goes cold during the mid-1850s or the magazine archives prove no help. If we make the critical choice to tip the balance back in favor of the literary over the historical, we do not have to abandon the magazine world in which Melville’s stories first appeared. We can ask how our understanding of Melville’s authorship changes when we press his writing back between the leaves of the magazines in which it was published. And we can do so without allowing magazine publication to delimit the possible answers. Writing can be paid labor that tells more than the story of its own dependencies.
Acknowledging and engaging the internal, formal qualities of Melville’s stories is part of my project here. These are not old-fashioned concerns—though they may sometimes be considered unfashionable—but concerns that persist.26 The critical reflex that regarded timelessness as a marker of literary value is a cliché long since banished; the historicist or ideological reflex that replaced it risks becoming its own cliché. But one notable development paralleling the turn to print history in American literary studies since the early 2000s is the return to the text as a formal object, whether this is under the guise of new formalism, surface reading, object-oriented ontology, or a post-critique method that in the face of “the tsunami of context-based criticism,” Rita Felski argues, should adopt instead “a greater receptivity to the multifarious and many-shaded moods of texts.”27
The following chapters pay due diligence to the historicizing impetuses of important reappraisals of nineteenth-century print, but they are also driven by an underlying sense that the internal or formal “moods” of some of Melville’s stories have qualities that elude even the most sophisticated and nuanced reconstruction of historical context. One does not have to believe in the old kind of eternal or universal values to believe that textual durability might have internal as well as external causes. Print history can answer intractable questions about textual publication, reception, and reputation; it helps less when one tries to understand the imaginative acts of authorial creation that bring texts into existence in the first place. Other actors in publishing networks have valuable specialist skills that the cycle of print should integrate. But unlike the work of the many typesetters, printers, and editors involved in the print world, a writer’s output is also much more portable and potentially more transferrable, recyclable, and long-lasting.
Bringing together the material and the textual, each of the following chapters identifies how Melville was embedded in nineteenth-century magazine culture and the impact of this embeddedness on his writing’s formal qualities. Chapter 1 takes up the significance of Melville’s trip to buy paper in Dalton. Distinguishing between an economy of paper and an economy of print publishing to which paper is only sometimes connected, in this chapter I argue two things: that Melville had a detailed knowledge of paper and papermaking; and that when paper appears in his magazine writing it does so to reaffirm Melville’s own sense of himself as a writer, not to mark his alienation from an industrializing print marketplace. In both “Bartleby” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” he returned to paper for his subject matter; he showed that for all the agonies and struggles it may have caused him, it remained the material in which he placed his trust.
Chapter 2 explores the genre conventions of magazine writing in which Melville’s work sat. In the 1850s he was plying his trade in magazines that were miscellaneous collections of sketches, tales, and essays, and where nobody yet used the term “short story.” This chapter examines how Melville ranged across genres in his magazine work, treading a fine line between conforming to and breaking away from magazine conventions; I argue that in doing so Melville accomplished what many other writers in the 1850s failed to do: reinvent the magazine sketch and tale traditions in ways that create the modern short story. From his embeddedness within the demands of genre, Melville burst his way out of its confines.
In chapter 3 I turn to Melville’s editors at Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, Charles Frederick Briggs and George William Curtis, who were responsible for rejecting and accepting Melville’s work. Curtis also worked for Harper’s at the same time. It was their judgments that turned Melville’s stories into magazine writing. Together with the turbulent history of Putnam’s, this chapter looks at the literary and editorial, intellectual, and aesthetic judgments Briggs and Curtis brought to Melville’s work. By capturing the texture of the literary history that ensnared Melville, I show that Briggs and Curtis’s editorial judgment embedded Melville’s writing in micro-contexts not always in harmony with the ideological macro-contexts critics now use to read the magazine pieces.
Chapter 4 concentrates on magazine paratexts. Each piece of Melville’s anonymous and pseudonymous magazine writing was embedded among dozens of other articles and illustrations. Magazines were a ragbag in which the ordinary sat beside the virtuoso, the original next to the reprinted, and the forgettable beside the enduring. Melville’s stories were not read in isolation as they now are; they were read in the shadow of the material alongside which they were printed and published. While it is impossible to recreate the 1850s experience of reading a magazine, reading the issues of Harper’s and Putnam’s magazines in which Melville’s writing appeared enables his stories and the magazines themselves to come to life in unexpected ways.
Finally, chapter 5 places the magazine writing into the longer context of a career in which Melville habitually relied on other literary sources. The magazine writing was different in one significant respect: rather than supplementing his own work with sources, Melville for the first time took existing, though long forgotten, sources and turned them into new stories. With “Benito Cereno” and Israel Potter, Melville embedded his magazine writing ever more in the prosaic terrain of his literary culture; Melville also now turned himself for the first time into an editor whose job was to alter the work of other authors for the pages of Putnam’s. Melville brilliantly upcycled these sources; he took discarded material and reused it to create narratives of much better quality than the originals, most spectacularly in “Benito Cereno,” where his editorial eye turned a routine sea captain’s narrative into the prototype for the American thriller.
On November 17, 1851, ten months after the family trip to buy paper from Carson’s mill in Dalton, Melville wrote a long letter to Hawthorne, who was soon to move from the town of Lenox—a seven-mile journey from Arrowhead—to West Newton, a village outside Boston, some 130 miles away. Just a few days earlier, Melville celebrated the publication of Moby-Dick by going with Hawthorne for dinner at the Little Red Inn in Lenox. Now Melville was replying to the lost letter in which Hawthorne offered his assessment of the book Melville dedicated to him. From Melville’s response and what Hawthorne said to others about Moby-Dick—“What a book Melville has written!” he wrote Evert Duyckinck—the letter was obviously flattering. Melville describes it as “joy-giving and exultation-breeding” and expressed his gratitude in several moments of affection that testify to the close relationship between the two men: “By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel the Godhead is broken up like bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling” (C 212). If the letter consummates a friendship begun when Melville relocated to Pittsfield, the tone suggests a fond farewell to a dear companion. While Melville and Hawthorne would remain in touch, their letters became less frequent and their time in each other’s company rare. The “great neighborhood for authors” would soon lose its most distinguished resident; Melville would lose a mentor and fellow traveler; and the wider social network of writers, whose Berkshire County enclave Melville in January declared less important than the local papermaking industry, would soon reject the novel Hawthorne so admired.
Melville consoles and reaffirms himself at such an occasion of heightened emotion and impending loss, by expressing his thoughts in the language of paper and the materiality of writing. When he disregards Hawthorne’s praise as mere appreciation, he does so because “not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition” and thus “we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended” (C 212). The passage of time and the experience of continual change, he tells Hawthorne, are marked in the act of his writing the letter because “the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that took it up and put it on this paper.” Finally, in the first of two postscripts to a letter he admits he cannot stop writing, Melville fantasizes about what he would do if Magians made up the world: “I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand—a million—billion thoughts” (C 213).
A riband of foolscap may be a contradiction in terms—foolscap is a size of cut paper—but the phrase better conveys than would, say, a “riband of paper,” the point Melville is making: that foolscap, produced either by hand or by the cutting of machine-made paper he observed at the Old Berkshire Mill in Dalton, is paper on which one writes, not on which one is published or circulated. In this fantasy of continuous thought and of writing unburdened by the breaks necessitated by sheets of paper, and prior to the act of readerly consumption, Melville imagines himself embedded in the workings of the papermaking machine, setting down his thoughts in words at one end of the process while at the other end in the mill beyond his house the papermakers feed and tend the machine. This book indulges Melville’s fantasy: first by imagining what sort of work a writer produces who dreams of being the consumer of a private supply of paper; second by following the words on the spooling riband of foolscap accumulating on Melville’s writing desk and study floor as they pass through the hands of editors, printers, and publishers into the pages of magazines; and finally by attending to at least some of the thousand, million, billion thoughts that came to him while he was embedded in the process of writing for those magazines.