DEC Dix, Edwards & Company Letters and Agreements (MS Am 800.13), Houghton Library, Harvard University. With item number.
GPP George Palmer Putnam Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. With box and folder number.
GWCC George William Curtis Correspondence (MS Am 1124–1124.1), Houghton Library, Harvard University. With item number.
1. Two letters from Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Harper Brothers, on September 8 and 25, 1856, bear the same “Carson’s Dalton” stamp as Melville’s letter to Duyckinck. Record ID 137550, Misc American Harper, Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
2. One explanation for why Melville took what for him was an unusual step is that having the plates ready would speed up the publication of the novel and so pay him royalties more quickly.
3. Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 19–38.
4. Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1851, 72.
5. Heather A. Haveman, Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 27.
6. A draft of this letter is in box 11, GPP.
7. Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 4.
8. Both Harper’s and Putnam’s are freely available through Cornell University Library’s Making of America Collection: http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/.
9. As long ago as the 1960s Barbara Welter based her understanding of the “cult of true womanhood” on the ideological tenor of magazines directed at female audiences; Nina Baym subsequently pioneered the recovery of women’s reading more generally in the nineteenth century. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18.2 (1966): 151–74; and Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). See also Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves, eds., “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837–1916 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Amy Aronson, Taking Liberties: Early American Women’s Magazines and Their Readers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For the intersection of gender and race, see Noliwe M. Rooks, Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). On magazines and the American middle class, see Heidi L. Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America: “Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art” and Antebellum Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2003); Cynthia Lee Patterson, Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010).
10. The story of the creation of a reading public and the nature of that public’s reading demands and habits is told in Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a more theoretical approach to readers and modes of reader response, see two books by James L. Machor: Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Books that concentrate on specific reading groups and practices include Sarah Wadsworth, In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006); Gillian D. Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); and Maura D’Amore, Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).
11. Putnam letter draft, box 11, GPP.
12. On Poe, see Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jonathan H. Hartmann, The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Routledge, 2008); J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann, eds., Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012). On Stowe, see Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852–2002 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); Mark Canada, Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America: Thoreau, Stowe, and Their Contemporaries Respond to the Rise of the Commercial Press (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On James, see Michael Anesko, “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Amy Tucker, The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). On popular women writers, see Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Melissa J. Homestead, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Melissa J. Homestead and Pamela T. Washington, eds., E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012).
13. Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 227; William V. Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling: Fiction after Moby-Dick, 1851–1857 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 7; Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33.2 (1981): 129; Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 4; Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xii; William B. Dillingham, Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853–1856 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 11.
14. Fisher, Going Under, 1–12; Mumford, Herman Melville, 361; Spanos, Herman Melville, 11, 25.
15. Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 2, 3.
16. Francesca Sawaya, The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
17. Melville’s lifetime earnings from Moby-Dick amounted to $1,260, of which just over $700 was received as an advance on royalties from his British publisher, Richard Bentley. See MD 689.
18. The reviewer in the Albany (NY) Evening Journal was sure Melville’s reputation would help sell The Confidence-Man “even if its merits were much less than they are,” while the Boston Evening Transcript thought Melville had “become so widely known, that any work from his pen is sure to find a host of readers.” The Cincinnati Enquirer, on the other hand, considered the novel “one of the dullest and most dismally monotonous books we remember to have read,” declaring in summation that Melville’s “authorship is toward the nadir rather than the zenith, and he has been progressing in the form of an inverted climax.” Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 487, 506.
19. Ibid., 545.
20. Trish Loughran, The Republic of Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3.
21. For more on the reappraisal of Melville’s long writing career, see “Late Melvilles,” a special issue of Leviathan, 18.3 (2016).
22. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002), 2:921. According to Parker, a typesetter may have mistakenly added “Hiram” to Melville’s surname to make good in a headline the omission of Melville’s first name from Hillard’s obituary. After recognizing the mistake, someone then chiseled away the metal type so that later editions of the newspaper appeared with an inky blur where the first name should be. The results of this correction are evident in the digitized version of the New York Times. Before Hillard’s tribute, the New York Times printed two short obituaries on September 29 and October 2, both of which referred to “Herman Melville.” How “Hiram” became “Henry,” as it did in Jay Leyda’s Log, is not clear. Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 2:788. To complicate matters, the name “Harry Melville” appears in the digitized indexing of the New York Times.
23. New York Times, October 6, 1891.
24. Jackson, The Business of Letters, 2; McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 4; Jonathan Dollimore, foreword to The Demonic: Literature and Experience, by Ewan Fernie (New York: Routledge, 2013), xvi.
25. David Dowling, Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 5.
26. Attention to form and aesthetics refused to go away even in the historicist turn of the 1980s and 1990s. See Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, eds., American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 2–3.
27. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 152, 12. See also Marjorie Levinson, “What Is the New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 558–69; Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1–21; Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43.2 (2012): 183–203.
1. The median survival rate for magazines increased from 0.4 years in the 1740s to 1.9 years in the 1840s and 1850s. The number of magazines lasting more than 25 years increased from 4.3 percent for those first published between 1801 and 1820 to 8.2 percent for those first published between 1821 and 1840, and 10.5 percent for magazines first published between 1841 and 1860. Heather A. Haveman, Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 29.
2. “Monthlies,” New York Times, April 3, 1855.
3. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 43.
4. This accounting is also taking place in several books on the history of paper published in recent years. See Ian Sansom, Paper: An Elegy (London: Fourth Estate, 2012); Nicholas A. Basbanes, On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (New York: Knopf, 2013); Alexander Monro, The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention (London: Allen Lane, 2014); Lothar Müller, White Magic: The Age of Paper, trans. Jessica Spengler (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014); Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging through History (New York: Norton, 2016).
5. Elizabeth Renker, Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), xviii, 61.
6. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002), 2:142.
7. Ibid., 139, 143.
8. Ibid., 143.
9. Ibid., 161, 163, 164.
10. “Our Young Authors—Melville,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, February 1853, 164.
11. Harrison Elliott, “A Century Ago: An Eminent Author Looked upon Paper and Papermaking,” Paper Maker 21.2 (1952): 55–58; Judith A. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 384.
12. Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 1:403; Marvin Fisher, “Melville’s ‘Tartarus’: The Deflowering of New England,” American Quarterly 23.1 (1971): 79; Philip Young, “The Machine in Tartarus: Melville’s Inferno,” American Literature 63.2 (1991): 214; Parker, Herman Melville, 1:810.
13. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 383.
14. A. J. Valente, Rag Paper Manufacture in the United States, 1801–1900: A History, with Directories of Mills and Owners (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 35.
15. Quoted in Parker, Herman Melville, 1:801.
16. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 10.
17. Christina Lupton, “The Theory of Paper: Skepticism, Common Sense, Poststructuralism,” Modern Language Quarterly 71.4 (2010): 427.
18. Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 27.
19. Valente, Rag Paper Manufacture, 35, 201; Daniel Pidgeon, Old-World Questions and New-World Answers (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1884), 107; History of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, 2 vols. (New York: J. B. Beers, 1885), 1:664.
20. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 160–62; for differences in the machines, see 96–103. The authoritative guide to papermaking machines is R. H. Clapperton, The Paper-Making Machine: Its Invention, Evolution and Development (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1967).
21. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 183.
22. Ibid., 182. “Cleaned” and “dressed” in this context mean prepared for the vat where rags were turned to pulp.
23. Aaron Winter, “Seeds of Discontent: The Expanding Satiric Range of Melville’s Transatlantic Diptychs,” Leviathan 8.2 (2006): 29.
24. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 182; Avi J. Cohen, “Technological Change as Historical Process: The Case of the U.S. Pulp and Paper Industry, 1915–1940,” Journal of Economic History 44.3 (1984): 787.
25. Wayne E. Fuller, The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 66.
26. Maynard H. Benjamin, The History of Envelopes, 1840–1900 (Alexandria, VA: Envelope Manufacturers Association, 2002), 29.
27. David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 60, 95.
28. Leo L. Lincoln and Lee C. Drickamer, Postal History of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, 1790–1981 (Williamstown, MA: Lee C. Drickamer, 1982), 1.
29. Valente, Rag Paper Manufacture, 9.
30. Benjamin Franklin, “Paper; a Poem,” in Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1947; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1978), 239–40.
31. Fuller, American Mail, 25.
32. Lincoln and Drickamer, Postal History, 54–55, 23.
33. Valente, Rag Paper Manufacture, 12.
34. Derrida, Paper Machine, 42, 44.
35. Leo Marx, “Melville’s Parable of the Wall,” Sewanee Review 61.4 (1953): 602.
36. The other examples are Helmstone, the narrator of “The Fiddler,” and the narrator of “The ’Gees.” Blandmour in “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” is a poet although not the narrator of the piece.
37. For more on this, see Graham Thompson, “‘Dead Letters! . . . Dead Men?’: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’” Journal of American Studies 34.3 (2000): 395–411.
38. Marx, “Melville’s Parable of the Wall,” 627, 626.
39. All these pieces appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine: “The Railway Works at Crewe,” August 1850, 408–11; “Novelty Iron Works; with Description of Marine Steam Engines, and Their Construction,” May 1851, 721–34; “Weovil Biscuit Manufactory,” September 1851, 487–88; “Galvanoplasty,” November 1854, 811–14; “How Gunpowder Is Made: Visit to the Hounslow Mills,” April 1852, 643–47.
40. McLaughlin, Paperwork, 116.
41. It is noticeable that the detailed understanding of the place of writers in the antebellum literary market is not matched by an understanding of the practicalities of writers writing. Other than the biographies, there are two exceptions in Melville’s case: Elizabeth Renker, Strike through the Mask; and Michael Kearns, Writing for the Street, Writing in the Garret: Melville, Dickinson, and Private Publication (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 84–119.
42. Derrida, Paper Machine, 65.
43. Michael Newbury, Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 63; David Dowling, Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 143.
44. Newbury, Figuring Authorship, 76.
45. Sylvia Jenkins Cook, Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131.
46. Dowling, Capital Letters, 143.
47. Cindy Weinstein, The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6.
48. Lupton, “The Theory of Paper,” 407.
49. Ibid., 408.
50. Dowling, Capital Letters, 18, 19.
51. Newbury, Figuring Authorship, 65.
1. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, June 1853, 704.
2. Philip H. Brown, January 23, 1855, box 4, folder 29, and Eve Wilder, October 19, 1854, box 9, folder 61, GPP.
3. Several other pieces in Yankee Doodle have been attributed to Melville: “The New Planet,” July 24, 1847; “On the Sea Serpent,” September 11, 1847; “A Short Patent Sermon. According to Blair, the Rhetorician,” July 10, 1847; and “View of the Barnum Property,” July 31, 1847. “On the Chinese Junk” was a series of thirteen pieces, which appeared between July 17 and September 18, 1847. Melville probably wrote some, but not all, of these short pieces of filler.
4. Harper’s was organized enough to semi-automate the addressing of each subscription issue: “Subscribers who receive their copies through the mail directly from the Publishers will notice that the address is printed upon each copy. These are all set up in type, and printed on narrow slips of paper. . . . A little machine, hardly as large as an ‘apple-parer,’ turned by hand, cuts off every address from the long slip, and pastes it on the Magazine.” The slip also included the issue number when one’s subscription expired. “Making the Magazine,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1865, 22.
5. Nathaniel Parker Willis, Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1845), 5.
6. The popularity of their work, however, indicates the broader cultural function it served. Maura D’Amore argues that Donald Mitchell, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Henry Ward Beecher, for instance, “cultivated a masculine domesticity of self-nurture” in their genteel magazine forms, whose purpose was to defend “the boundaries of personhood through domestic modes and activities that bespoke individual dreams and aspirations.” Maura D’Amore, Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 3–4.
7. Eliza Leslie, Pencil Sketches; or, Outlines of Character and Manners (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833), 13.
8. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Tales and Sketches (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1835), 165, 170, 174, 179.
9. Susan Williams argues that “cacoethes scribendi” was a common discourse for discussing authorship in the nineteenth century, and that it “became a stock way to talk about amateur, unrestrained writing as opposed to professionalized authorship.” Williams, Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 21. In Sedgwick’s story, Alice is the only female character to resist the urge to write, but the only one to make it into print. The inference is that having an “itch” is not enough to make one an author.
10. In an early judgment that would affect later critical treatments, Fred Pattee wrote off the 1850s as the undistinguished “Decade after Poe,” when the development of the short story stalls during “an orgy of feminine sentimentalism and emotionalism, a half-savage rioting in color and superlatives and fantastic fancies.” Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (New York: Harper & Bros, 1923), 152. It is also worth noting Susan Williams’s argument that many women writers were eager to distinguish themselves from their “scribbling” companions. Williams, Reclaiming Authorship, 24–29.
11. For more on Child’s challenges to time-honored institutions of race and gender, see Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
12. Lydia Maria Child, Fact and Fiction: A Collection of Stories (New York: C. S. Francis, 1846), 147.
13. For more on New York’s intellectual culture during the 1840s and 1850s, see the classic account in Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956); and Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14. Michael Slater, Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 474.
15. Eugene Exman, The Brothers Harper: A Unique Partnership and Its Impact on the Cultural Life of America from 1817–1853 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 309.
16. David Marvin Stone, February 6, 1854, box 6, folder 52, and Dr. Theodore Johnson and Dr. Francis Johnson, October 18, 1854, box 2, folder 46, GPP.
17. Kristie Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), 15.
18. Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977). A more recent example of this tendency is evident in Timothy Helwig, “Melville’s Liminal Bachelor and the Making of Middle-Class Manhood in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,” American Periodicals 24.1 (2014): 1–20. Helwig assumes that Harper’s was oblivious to Melville’s ideological critique of the bachelor persona.
19. For examples from the year Melville first published in Harper’s, see “Storm and Rest,” July 1854, 229–32; “Drunkard’s Bible,” August 1854, 385–90; “Father and Son,” September 1854, 525–31; “Faithful Margaret,” October 1854, 659–64.
20. See, respectively, Egbert S. Oliver, “‘Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!’ and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus,” New England Quarterly 21.2 (1948): 204–16; William B. Dillingham, Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853–1856 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 57–61; Sheila Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 170.
21. Quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002), 2:188.
22. “Blind Man’s Wreath,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, May 1854, 767.
23. “Better than Diamonds,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1853, 501.
24. “The Virginian Canaan,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1853, 32–33.
25. “A Word at the Start,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1850, 1–2.
26. Melville possibly took his inspiration for the bipartite stories from a book he read on diptych paintings in 1848 and from viewing pictures of this sort during a visit to London in 1849. See Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and His Work (New York: Knopf, 2005), 224. Godey’s Lady’s Book, to which Melville subscribed, also published stories in this mode. See Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings, 172–73.
27. Amanpal Garcha, From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49.
28. James Fenimore Cooper, “Old Ironsides,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, May 1853, 473.
29. Francis H. Underwood, March 7, 1853, box 6, folder 70, GPP.
30. Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 161.
31. Harper’s printed author details above contributions from its better-known authors. In both Putnam’s and Harper’s editorial responsibility remained anonymous. Harper’s gave original publication details for reprinted material during its first year; thereafter it dropped the credits. Looking back at the change in an August 1877 editorial column, George William Curtis observed: “The attraction of a magazine to the general reader is greater if the contents have the air of being—what, in fact, they really are for him—then and there first published.” See John Dowgray, “A History of Harper’s Literary Magazines, 1850–1900” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1956), 69.
32. One caveat: as with “Bartleby,” anonymous publication was no guarantee of anonymity. Newspaper gossip, at least for those who read it, revealed Melville as the author of “The Encantadas” in the New York Evening Post of February 14. William Cullen Bryant tipped off readers that Melville was awake from the nightmare of Pierre and that Putnam’s was to publish what he described as “a reminiscence of life among a group of islands on the equator.” For the attribution of this note to Bryant, see Parker, Herman Melville, 2:211. If Bryant, however, was only just noticing that Melville was awake after Pierre, then Melville’s authorship of “Bartleby” was obviously not widely known following the leaking of his authorship of that story by The Literary World.
33. Fisher, Going Under, 29.
34. Several interpretations exist of the name Salvator R. Tarnmoor. Salvator R. is understood to refer to Salvator Rosa, the seventeenth-century Italian painter; Tarnmoor is a portmanteau word that condenses Gothic and racial blackness in various ways by juxtaposing “tar,” “tarn,” and “moor.” See Parker, Herman Melville, 2:211; Fisher, Going Under, 29–30; Denise Tanyol, “The Alternative Taxonomies of Melville’s ‘The Encantadas,’” New England Quarterly 80.2 (2007): 255–56.
35. The Living Age, January 10, 1846, 71.
36. “Monthly Record of Current Events,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1852, 546.
37. “The Whale Fishery, and American Commerce in the Pacific Ocean,” Friends’ Review; A Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal, September 4, 1852, 807.
38. “A Trip to the Galapagos Islands,” The Pioneer; or, California Monthly Magazine, February 1854, 97–103; “Facts and Wonders of the Tortoise Family,” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, December 1850, 505–14.
39. Tanyol, “Alternative Taxonomies,” 244–45. As Tanyol notes (266–67), whether Melville read Darwin’s Voyage is a matter of guesswork: the frigate United States, on which Melville sailed during 1842–43, held a copy of the book, and Melville bought a copy along with a large number of other books in 1847.
40. Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N., 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1845), 505.
41. Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 155, 157.
42. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, April 19, 1855, item 42, DEC.
43. Garcha, From Sketch to Novel, 35.
44. Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 292.
45. John Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69.
46. For more on colonialism in “The Encantadas,” see Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 132–64.
47. See Merton M. Sealts Jr., “Did Melville Write ‘The Fiddler’?” Harvard Library Bulletin 26.1 (1978): 77–80.
48. For examples of this kind of approach, see Fisher, Going Under, 146–55; Michael James Collins, “‘The Master-Key of Our Theme’: Master Betty and the Politics of Theatricality in Herman Melville’s ‘The Fiddler,’” Journal of American Studies 47.3 (2013): 759–76.
49. James A. Maitland, The Lawyer’s Story; or, The Orphan’s Wrongs (New York: H. Long & Brother, 1853), 7.
50. The Tribune and the Times published the first chapter in the form of a long advertisement for the Sunday Dispatch, which serialized the novel every week until May 29, 1853. The story appeared in book form later that year. See Johannes Dietrich Bergmann, “‘Bartleby’ and The Lawyer’s Story,” American Literature 47.3 (1975): 432–36.
51. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, February 1853, 160.
52. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, April 1853, 353.
53. See Brian P. Lusky, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
54. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, January 1853, 1.
55. Ibid., 2.
56. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 473, 472, 479, 483.
1. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, June 18, 1855, item 58, DEC; George William Curtis to George Curtis, March 15, 1851, item 25, GWCC; George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, June 19, 1855, item 59, DEC.
2. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, June 18, 1855, item 58, DEC.
3. Arnold Tew has shown conclusively that “Mr. Law” was Dana and not Frederick Law Olmsted, who invested $5,500 in the magazine in March 1855 when Putnam sold to Dix and Edwards. Arnold G. Tew, “Putnam’s Magazine: Its Men and Their Literary and Social Policies” (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 77–80. Tew’s is the most detailed account of the history of Putnam’s Monthly.
4. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, June 19, 1855, item 59, DEC. There is no evidence to suggest that Curtis’s poems made their way into the pages of Putnam’s.
5. The circulation of Harper’s fluctuated, but Frank Luther Mott suggests that after early print runs of 7,500 copies, the magazine was soon up to 50,000 and reached 200,000 just before the Civil War. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930–1968), 2:391. For the Putnam’s figures, see Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 318, 321.
6. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, March 1857, 296.
7. Putnam to Harper & Brothers, December 14, 1853, box 2, folder 17, GPP.
8. George William Curtis to Charles Eliot Norton, May 28, 1853, item 67, GWCC.
9. Putnam’s was not entirely averse to promoting books and authors from the Putnam stable. In its very first issue, in January 1853, it carried a long review essay of Homes of American Authors (23–30), recently published by G. P. Putnam & Co.
10. Sheila Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 151–209.
11. Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 295; Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 271.
12. Quoted in Gordon Milne, George William Curtis and the Genteel Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), 75.
13. J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper: A Century of Publishing in Franklin Square (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), 101.
14. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 2:389.
15. “Our Young Authors,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, January 1853, 74–75, 77.
16. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 281.
17. O’Brien’s articles and stories for Harper’s include “A Dead Secret,” November 1853, 806–15; “The Bohemian,” July 1855, 233–42; “Bird Gossip,” November 1855, 820–25; “A Trip to Newfoundland,” December 1855, 45–57; “The Dragon-Fang Possessed by the Conjuror Piou-Lu,” March 1856, 519–26; “How to Keep Well,” December 1856, 56–61; “The Crystal Bell,” December 1856, 88–91; and “A Paper of All Sorts,” March 1858, 507–15. O’Brien also wrote “The Man about Town” series for Harper’s Weekly.
18. George William Curtis to Putnam, August 26, 1854, box 1, folder 62, GPP. According to Tew, “The Editor at Large” column was written by Briggs; Wayne Kime suggests the author was O’Brien. See Tew, “Putnam’s Magazine,” 58; Wayne R. Kime, ed., Fitz-James O’Brien: Selected Literary Journalism, 1852–1860 (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2003), 126–38.
19. Quoted in Milne, George William Curtis, 57.
20. George William Curtis to William Douglas O’Connor, March 9, 1855, item 85, GWCC.
21. George William Curtis to William Douglas O’Connor, March 19 and April 2, 1855, items 87 and 89, GWCC.
22. George William Curtis to William Douglas O’Connor, September 7, 1855, item 99, GWCC.
23. “Making the Magazine,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1865, 21.
24. George William Curtis to William Douglas O’Connor, January 15, 1856, item 107, GWCC.
25. Quoted in Beryl Rowland, “Grace Church and Melville’s Story of ‘The Two Temples,’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28.3 (1973): 339–46. Melville climbed Trinity’s church steeple with his brother-in-law Lemuel Shaw Jr. on January 18, 1848. See PT 701.
26. “New-York Church Architecture,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, September 1853, 234.
27. Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 53.
28. Broadway Journal, March 8, 1845, 153.
29. Quoted in Betty Weidman, “Charles Frederick Briggs: A Critical Biography” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1968), 109.
30. Quoted ibid., 212.
31. Charles Frederick Briggs, The Trippings of Tom Pepper (New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co., 1847), 71.
32. Charles Frederick Briggs, Bankrupt Stories, Edited by Harry Franco (New York: John Allen, 1843), 61. The Haunted Merchant, parts of which originally appeared in the Knickerbocker, was the first volume in an envisaged series of “Bankrupt Stories.” No other volumes followed.
33. James T. Fields to George Palmer Putnam, November 7, 1853, box 1, folder 87, GPP.
34. James Russell Lowell, The Poetical Works of James R. Lowell: Volume II (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863), 70.
35. John Dowgray, “A History of Harper’s Literary Magazines, 1850–1900” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1956), 24.
36. “Advertisement,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. II, December 1850–May 1851, ii.
37. Jennifer Phegley, “Literary Piracy, Nationalism, and Women Readers in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1850–1855,” American Periodicals 14.1 (2004): 66.
38. Thomas Lilly, “The National Archive: Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and the Civic Responsibilities of a Commercial Literary Periodical, 1850–1853,” American Periodicals 15.2 (2005): 149.
39. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1859, 519–37. Fletcher Harper rejected Horace Greely’s offer to respond: “We published Senator Douglas’s article because it was an exposition of an important phase of the political history of the country, prepared by a statesman whose experience of territorial jurisprudence has been large, and whose leadership of an influential political party is undoubted. Should the recognized leaders of the Republican or the Southern Parties think fit to prepare similar expositions of the same historical question, from their respective points of view, we should probably be willing to publish them in the periodical which contained the article of Senator Douglas.” Quoted in Harper, House of Harper, 136.
40. “Making the Magazine,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1865, 21, 22. The dedication to simultaneity was such, Guernsey writes, that “where several customers reside in the same city special care is taken that the supplies for all shall go by the same conveyance, so that no one shall have any advantage over another” (22).
41. “New-York Daguerreotyped,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, February 1853, 121. The first two articles on “Business-Streets, Mercantile Blocks, Stores, and Banks” appeared in Putnam’s in February 1853, 121–37, and April 1853, 353–69. Others in the series were “Benevolent Institutions of New York,” June 1853, 673–91; “Educational Institutions of New York,” July 1853, 1–17; “New-York Church Architecture,” September 1853, 233–49; and “Private Residences,” March 1854, 233–48.
42. Dennis Berthold, “Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville’s ‘The Two Temples,’” American Literature 71.3 (1999): 441, 446.
43. Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 316.
44. This decision caused some editorial disagreement. Curtis wrote to Charles Eliot Norton that “Briggs was opposed, not because it was not good, but he thought it rather pointless for a magazine article. Godwin & I liked it very much, & differed with the good B. We, of course, carried the day.” George William Curtis to Charles Eliot Norton, April 20, 1853, item 65, GWCC.
45. Partnership Documents, March 1 and April 2, 1855, item 206, DEC.
46. Partnership Documents, May 1, 1856, item 206, DEC.
47. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, April 17, 19, and 20, 1855, and July 31, 1855, items 41–43 and 79, DEC.
48. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, January 2, 1856, and September 7, 1855, items 97 and 89, DEC.
49. Russ Castronovo, “Radical Configurations of History in the Era of American Slavery,” American Literature 65.3 (1993): 525, 538, 540. Ivy G. Wilson also argues that Melville’s allusions to slavery “ultimately divulge how racialized slavery could not but permeate his consciousness” and that in the story “ante-bellum America surfaces in the tale as a concomitant critique of the vicissitudes of U.S. nationalism.” Wilson, “‘No Soul Above’: Labor and the ‘Law in Art’ in Melville’s ‘The Bell-Tower,’” Arizona Quarterly 63.1 (2007): 30.
50. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, ed. William Charvat and others, vol. 3 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964), 3.
51. George William Curtis to William Douglas O’Connor, January 16, 1856, item 107, GWCC.
52. “Sea from Shore,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, July 1854, 47.
53. George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911), in Essential Santayana: Selected Writings, ed. Martin A. Coleman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 527.
54. Wilfred M. McClay, “Two Versions of the Genteel Tradition: Santayana and Brooks,” New England Quarterly 55.3 (1982): 368. It should be noted that Curtis did manage to outrage his father’s tastes with his portraits of Syrian women.
55. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 485.
56. “Our Authors and Authorship: Melville and Curtis,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, April 1857, 384, 389–90, 392, 393.
57. Godwin’s key essays for Putnam’s included “Our New President,” September 1853, 301–11; “Our Party and Politics,” September 1854, 233–47; “What Impression Do We and Should We Make Abroad,” October 1853, 345–54; “American Despotisms,” December 1854, 624–32; “Secret Societies—The Know Nothings,” January 1855, 88–97; “The Kansas Question,” October 1855, 425–36; “The Real Question,” April 1856, 428–35; and “The Political Aspect,” July 1856, 85–95. For more on the political nature of Putnam’s during this period see Tew, “Putnam’s Magazine,” 255–73.
58. Milne, George William Curtis, 104–5.
59. “Our Authors and Authorship,” 393.
60. George William Curtis, The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times: An Oration, Delivered on Tuesday, August 5, 1856, before the Literary Societies of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856), 7, 8, 45, 17, 20.
61. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, July 31, 1855, item 79, DEC.
62. Maurice S. Lee, “Melville’s Subversive Political Philosophy: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Fate of Speech,” American Literature 72.3 (2000): 500.
63. For more on Brockden Brown and the picturesque, see Dennis Berthold, “Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, and the Origins of the American Picturesque,” William and Mary Quarterly 41.1 (1984): 62–84.
64. See Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Samuel Otter argues that the depiction of Saddle Meadows in Pierre shows how “the antebellum ideology of the imperative landscape compelled and incarcerated.” Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 177. Larry Kutchen argues that Pierre is a “stunning deconstruction . . . of the picturesque as imperialist aesthetic that concealed the dark legacies of revolutionary violence.” Kutchen, “The ‘Vulgar Thread of the Canvas’: Revolution and the Picturesque in Ann Eliza Bleecker, Crèvecoeur, and Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature 36.3 (2001): 420.
65. Castronovo, “Radical Configurations of History,” 541.
66. “Our Young Authors—Melville,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, February 1853, 163, 164. For more on Browne’s influence on Melville’s work from Mardi onward, see Brian Foley, “Herman Melville and the Example of Sir Thomas Browne,” Modern Philology 81.3 (1984): 265–77.
67. Wayne R. Kime, “‘The Bell-Tower’: Melville’s Reply to a Review,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 22.1 (1976): 28–38.
68. Ibid., 37.
69. See, for instance, in Harper’s, “The Return of Pope Pius IX to Rome,” June 1850, 90–95; “Clara Corsini—A Tale of Naples,” December 1851, 68–75; “The Italian Sisters,” January 1854, 148–55; “Studies for a Picture of Venice,” July 1854, 186–96; “Visits to the Dead in the Catacombs of Rome,” April 1855, 577–600; “A Reminiscence of Rome,” November 1857, 740–45. Putnam’s published several poems with Italian settings, including “Ode to Southern Italy,” July 1853, 23–25; “Songs of Venice,” January 1853, 22–23; “Galgano,” May 1853, 512–17.
70. George William Curtis, Nile Notes of a Howadji (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852), 15.
71. Ida Rothschild, “Reframing Melville’s ‘Manifesto’: ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ and the Culture of Reprinting,” Cambridge Quarterly 41.3 (2012): 318–44.
72. “Authors and Authorship,” 384.
73. Castronovo, “Radical Configurations of History,” 525.
1. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.
2. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1997), 4.
3. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, March 1854, 318.
4. Ryan Cordell, “‘Taken Possession of’: The Reprinting and Reauthorship of Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Antebellum Religious Press,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1 (2013), www.digitalhumanities.org.
5. It is worth noting that for Genette, paratexuality and intertextuality are both subcategories of a larger process of transtextuality, which is “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts.” Genette, Palimpsests, 1.
6. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1850, 1.
7. When the novel was published in book form, Melville changed the title to Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. The change from “; or,” to “: His” appears small, but by weakening the integration of title and subtitle Melville changes the reader’s perspective. Thus in the magazine title the fifty years of exile are another way of revealing what happens to Israel and less a subtitle than an indication of theme and Israel’s own perspective; the colon and the “His” of the book title put Israel at one remove and indicate a third-person, authorial perspective on those years. The magazine version also has a further subtitle indicating theme: “A Fourth of July Story.” This is missing entirely from the book version. For more on the function of titles and subtitles, see Genette, Paratexts, 55–103.
8. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002), 2:216.
9. Thomas Mayo Brewer to George Palmer Putnam; December 27, 1852, box 7, folder 27, GPP.
10. “The American Association for the Advancement of Science,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, September 1853, 321–22.
11. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, Recollections of a Long Life: An Autobiography (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1902), 10. For more on Henry’s teaching of Melville, see Meredith Farmer, “Herman Melville and Joseph Henry at the Albany Academy; or Melville’s Education in Mathematics and Science,” Leviathan 18.2 (2016): 4–28
12. Joshua Matthews, “Peddlers of the Rod: Melville’s ‘The Lightning-Rod Man’ and the Antebellum Periodical Market,” Leviathan 12.3 (2010): 58.
13. Allan Moore Emery, “Melville on Science: ‘The Lightning-Rod Man,’” New England Quarterly 56.4 (1983): 567.
14. For more on the rise of spiritualism in this period, and the reasons behind it, see Bret E. Carrol, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
15. Genette, Paratexts, 2.
16. Jay Leyda, “Notes,” in The Complete Stories of Herman Melville (New York: Random House, 1949), xxvi–xxvii; Michael T. Gilmore, The Middle Way: Puritanism and Ideology in American Romantic Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 9; William Dillingham, Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853–1856 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 177.
17. “Spiritual Materialism,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, August 1854, 158, 160, 159, 164.
18. The Literary World, March 16, 1850, 276.
19. “Spiritual Materialism,” 163.
20. Cathy Gutierrez, Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 45–75.
21. Ethnology attracted Melville’s attention before “The ’Gees.” Samuel Otter shows how Moby-Dick takes up ethnology’s fascination with the examination and classification of the human body. In contrast to the ethnological primal scene of visual penetration, according to Otter, Melville “suggests an epistemology of the body based on . . . contact between individuals.” Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 101.
22. Parker, Herman Melville, 1:354–55.
23. “Is Man One or Many?” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, July 1854, 1–14.
24. Carolyn L. Karcher, “Melville’s ‘The ’Gees’: A Forgotten Satire on Scientific Racism,” American Quarterly 27.4 (1975): 425.
25. Ibid., 439–40.
26. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, March 1853, 338.
27. “Is Man One or Many?” 5, 14.
28. Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered (Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann & Co., 1854), 28, 16.
29. “Are All Men Descended from Adam?” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, January 1855, 87.
30. For more on the relationship between science and religion at this moment, see G. Blair Nelson, “‘Men Before Adam’: American Debates over the Ubiquity and Antiquity of Humanity,” in When Science and Christianity Meet, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 161–82.
31. “Editor’s Table,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1854, 548, 549.
32. “Editor’s Table,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1854, 687, 688, 690.
33. T. Addison Richards, “The Juniata,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1856, 440.
34. “Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1856, 450.
35. “Passages of Eastern Travel,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1856, 485.
36. These articles include, for example, “Tunnel of the Alps,” June 1850, 77; “Greenwich Weather-Wisdom,” July 1850, 265–69; “Borax Lagoons of Tuscany,” August 1850, 397–400; “The Railway Works at Crewe,” August 1850, 408–11; “Steam-Bridge of the Atlantic,” August 1850, 411–14; “The Crystal Palace,” April 1851, 584–88; Jacob Abbott, “The Novelty Works,” May 1851, 721–34; “How Gunpowder Is Made,” April 1852, 643–47; “Galvanoplasty,” November 1854, 811–14; Elias Loomis, “Astronomical Observatories in the United States,” June 1856, 25–52.
37. “Editor’s Table,” September 1854, 549.
38. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 472.
39. Peter Coviello describes this as a “sentimental logic of equivalence” and argues that “Benito Cereno” has a “withering regard for such a vision of harmonious mutual legibility.” Coviello, “The American in Charity: ‘Benito Cereno’ and Gothic Anti-Sentimentality,” Studies in American Fiction 30.2 (2002): 165.
1. Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 69, 70, 71.
2. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 7, 9.
3. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Melville’s Sources (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 27.
4. John Bryant, Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of “Typee” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 221, 222.
5. For more on the problem of determining the composition of Moby-Dick, see MD 648–59; Edwards, Melville’s Sources, 24–27.
6. Israel Potter is something of a hybrid. For the sections involving John Paul Jones, Melville relied on Robert C. Sands’s Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (1830) and John Henry Sherburne’s Life and Character of the Chevalier John Paul Jones (1825), while chapters 22 and 23 draw on Ethan Allen’s autobiographical A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity, first published in 1779 and reprinted several times in the nineteenth century.
7. Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.
8. For the biographical impact on Melville of a literary culture where borrowing and appropriation are endemic, see Ellen Weinauer, “Plagiarism and the Proprietary Self: Policing the Boundaries of Authorship in Herman Melville’s ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses,’” American Literature 69.4 (1997): 697–717.
9. Bryant, Melville Unfolding, 228.
10. For a defense of the position that plagiarism has always been a transhistorical literary crime, see Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
11. Nina Baym, “Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction,” PMLA 94.5 (1979): 910, 920.
12. Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 5. For McGill, Wheaton v. Peters was significant because it established “going-into-print as the moment when individual rights give way to the demands of the social” and defined “the private ownership of a printed text as the temporary alienation of public property” (45–46). Rather than hastening the arrival of a modern understanding of authorship in which literary property rights belong to the individual, Wheaton v. Peters subordinated individual rights to the interests of the public and the state. Ryan Cordell takes McGill’s argument about authors and texts one step further to imagine the virtual figure of the “network author,” who “accounts for the ways in which meaning and authority accrued to acts of circulation and aggregation across antebellum newspapers.” Cordell, “Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers,” American Literary History 27.3 (2015): 418.
13. Irving, Sketch-Book, 72.
14. For more on the prehistory, success, and decline of the magazine novel, see Jared Gardner, “Serial Fiction and the Novel,” in The American Novel, 1870–1940, ed. Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 289–303. Patricia Okker examines how the production and consumption of magazine serials helped shape communal identity in Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); while Michael Lund provides a full, although not complete, list of novels published in serial form in America’s Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850–1900 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).
15. For interpretations of Israel Potter that emphasize its ideologically progressive or subversive terms, see Gale Temple, “Israel Potter: Sketch Patriotism,” Leviathan 11.1 (2009): 3–18; Joshua Tendler, “A Monument Upon a Hill: Antebellum Commemoration Culture, the Here-and-Now, and Democratic Citizenship in Melville’s Israel Potter,” Studies in American Fiction 42.1 (2015): 29–50.
16. David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar, “Israel Potter: Genesis of a Legend,” William and Mary Quarterly 41.3 (1984): 367. Chacko and Kulcsar reconstruct the real life of Israel Potter in Beggarman, Spy: The Secret Life and Times of Israel Potter (Cedarburg, WI: Foremost Press, 2010). They have also fictionalized Potter’s life in Gone Over (Cedarburg, WI: Foremost Press, 2009) and The Brimstone Papers (Cedarburg, WI: Foremost Press, 2010).
17. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, May 1855, 548.
18. George William Curtis to William Douglas O’Connor, March 19, 1855, item 87, GWCC.
19. Robert S. Levine, “The Revolutionary Aesthetics of Israel Potter,” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 167.
20. Ibid., 170.
21. Henry Trumbull, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (Providence, RI: Henry Trumbull, 1824), 15.
22. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002), 2:243.
23. Levine, “Revolutionary Aesthetics,” 160.
24. John Thomas Smith, The Cries of London: Exhibiting Several of the Itinerant Traders of Antient and Modern Times (London: J. B. Nichols & Son, 1839), 53.
25. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 47.
26. Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 198.
27. See Barbara Foley, “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville’s ‘Bartleby,’” American Literature 72.1 (2000): 87–116; and Dennis Berthold, “Class Acts: The Astor Pace Riots and Melville’s ‘The Two Temples,’” American Literature 71.3 (1999): 429–61.
28. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 191, 197.
29. Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery, in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands (Boston: E. G. House, 1817), 318, 320.
30. Ibid., 320, 321–322.
31. Todorov, “Typology of Detective Fiction,” 47.
32. Trish Loughran, “Reading in the Present Tense: Benito Cereno and the Time of Reading,” in American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, ed. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 230, 230–31. Loughran repeats a mistake that Alma MacDougall corrected almost thirty years before: George William Curtis did not warn Joshua Dix “away from publishing Benito Cereno as a freestanding novel” (ibid., 228) when he wrote to him advising that he “decline any novel from Melville that is not extremely good.” The book about which Dix consulted him was The Confidence-Man. See Alma A. MacDougall, “The Chronology of The Confidence-Man and ‘Benito Cereno’: Redating Two 1855 Curtis and Melville Letters,” Melville Society Extracts, no. 53 (February 1983): 3–6.
33. Charles Swann, “Whodunnit? Or, Who Did What? Benito Cereno and the Politics of Narrative Structure,” in American Studies in Transition, ed. David E. Nye and Christen Kold Thomsen (Odense: Odense University Press, 1985), 210.
34. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, April 19, 1855, item 43, DEC.
35. Catherine Toal, “‘Some Things Which Could Never Have Happened’: Fiction, Identification, and ‘Benito Cereno,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.1 (2006): 33.
1. Dan McCall, The Silence of Bartleby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), x.
2. For full details of known reprintings of Hawthorne’s stories, see George Monteiro, “Fugitive Periodical Printings of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 37.1 (2011): 143–55.
3. George William Curtis to J. A. Dix, June 29, 1855, item 35, DEC. For confirmation of the date of this letter see Alma A. MacDougall, “The Chronology of The Confidence-Man and ‘Benito Cereno’: Redating Two 1855 Curtis and Melville Letters,” Melville Society Extracts, no. 53 (February 1983): 3–6.
4. Frederick L. Olmsted to J. A. Dix, September 4, 1856, item 184, DEC.
5. Quoted in Arnold G. Tew, “Putnam’s Magazine: Its Men and Their Literary and Social Policies” (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 117. The published works included S. C. Smith, Chile Con Carne; Frederic Townsend, Glimpses of Nineveh (excerpts of which appeared in Putnam’s); T. H. Gladstone, The Englishman in Kansas; and M. Field, Rural Architecture.
6. Tew, “Putnam’s Magazine,” 118.
7. Rossiter Johnson, ed., Little Classics (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1875), iii, iv.
8. Edmund C. Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson, eds., A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Volume 1 (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1887), v.
9. Ibid., viii.
10. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 161.
11. Wai-Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112.5 (1997): 1062.
12. From Melville’s marginalia on his copy of John Milton’s Paradise Regained, quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002), 2:162.
13. “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, October 1888, 800.