Mysterious Article I Wrote for LEVIATHAN on Melville and MODERN BRITISH ESSAYISTS

copyright 2020 by Hershel Parker.

I do not have this in my VITA. Was it ever published? Was it never published? Where else have I ever talked about the obvious use of MODERN BRITISH ESSAYISTS--in REDBURN, for instance?

2004 or so--Was this every published in LEVIATHAN? It was obviously written for LEVIATHAN and was being prepared with the editor’s comments in mind. "John" is clearly "John Bryant." Maybe he decided not to publish it? 

“Melville and The Modern British Essayists”

Hershel Parker

Morro Bay, CA

Fns will be different--

John wants a last one--

[for last fn] Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2.496-499.

           

     On 16 February 1849 the New York City publisher and bookseller John Wiley charged Melville's account $18 for The Modern British Essayists (Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1847-48). [JOHN WANTS FN HERE—to Mert?] No scholar has reported seeing Melville's set of Modern British Essayists, but it presumably consisted of eight volumes, as Merton M. Sealts, Jr., explained in his Melville's Reading (where the "Sealts number" of the set is 359):

     The 'set' . . . included eight numbered volumes: v. 1 (1847 or 1849): Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay.  Essays, Critical and Miscellaneous . . .  v. 2 (1847): Sir Archibald Alison, Bart. Miscellaneous Essays . . . v. 3 (1848): Sydney Smith.  The Works . . . v. 4 (1848): John Wilson.  The Recreations of Christopher North [pseud.] . . . v. 5 (1848): Thomas Carlyle.  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays . . . v. 6 (1848): Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey. Contributions to the Edinburgh Review . . . v. 7 (1848): Sir James Stephen.  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays . . .  Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd.  Critical and Miscellaneous Writings . . . With Additional Articles Never Before Published in This Country . . . v. 8 (1848): Sir James Mackintosh.  The Miscellaneous Works . . .  In addition, an unnumbered volume published by Carey and Hart in 1841 was advertised in some catalogues as part of the set: Sir Walter Scott, Bart.  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays . . . Collected by Himself . . .

A couple of points need clarification.  Sealts's location of the Wiley account statement as being in Harvard College Library-Wiley Collection is erroneous: it is in what Sealts refers to elsewhere as HCL-M, the Melville family papers at Harvard.  The present Houghton Library call number for this document is bMS Am 188 (524).  The 1841 Scott volume cited by Sealts may well have been (or have been intended as) the source for the Scott volume advertised (about the time Melville would have ordered his set) as "in press" and as part of the set, under its new title The Critical Writings of Sir Walter Scott; however, the book advertised with this title may never have been printed.  There may always be some uncertainty about just which volumes came into Melville's hands--probably the eight enumerated by Sealts (and not a Scott volume).

     Melville had arrived with his wife in Boston on 2 January 1849 and, leaving her there to await the birth of their first child, had returned to New York to work on the proofs of Mardi.  Then on 30 January he had arrived back in Boston, well before Malcolm's birth on 16 February.  Jay Leyda in The Melville Log (1951) sensibly labels Wiley's 16 February 1849 charge as a purchase made on Melville's behalf, presumably ordered a month or two earlier.  [JOHN WANTS A FN HERE]Melville may have picked up the bulky set as early as 3 March, when he made a brief trip back home to Manhattan.  If so, being a man who traveled light, he would have left the volumes off at his house on Fourth Avenue rather than hauling them to Boston.  (My own volumes are roughly nine and a half inches tall by six inches wide, and together eight volumes stretch to 13 linear inches.)  Melville’s set of Modern British Essayists, thus far unlocated, may have remained in his library for the rest of his life.  Perhaps because no one has found in his writings a specific reference to the set (as a set) or to a volume in it by title, Melville's possible use of Modern British Essayists has gone unexplored, as far as I know, except for brief references in my two-volume biography of Melville (1996 and 2002).  Here I want readers of Leviathan to gather round a long, well-lighted table as I open up these sealed volumes.  Perhaps one or more of my readers will take the challenge of elaborating or qualifying my claim that Modern British Essayists played a significant role in Melville's self-education.

     With the series title "THE / MODERN / BRITISH / ESSAYISTS" and the volume author's name in gold stamping on the spine, Melville's set, in red or brown cloth, would have looked handsome enough ranged on a shelf.  (My joint Talfourd and Stephens volume has been rebound, so I merely assume that originally both names were on the spine.)  After Sealts's first listing of the set in 1948 (in the Harvard Library Bulletin), anyone intrigued enough might readily have located in research libraries another set of the volumes bought late in 1848 or early in 1849 as a set and preserved ever after as a set, and at that time might successfully have placed an order for a set with one of the bigger bookstores.  As the volumes deteriorated over the decades, many individual volumes and even entire sets must have been junked as not worth rebinding, given the poor quality of the paper.  By the time Sealts listed the set in his 1966 and 1988 book versions of Melville's Reading, anyone hunting the books could have come across stray volumes readily enough in bigger bookstores but seldom the complete set.  Now, after the creation of Internet sites such as bookfinder.com and abebooks.com, a student of Melville's reading can hope to piece together the eight volumes with late 1840s dates, albeit variously bound in red and brown, or rebound, and at a considerable range in prices.  The insides will not be handsome.  The paper used in all the copies I have seen was of inferior quality, despite the Carey & Hart claims, and the texts are in double columns, with tight gutters and skimpy margins, even when the edges have not been cut in rebinding.  Worst of all, the tiny print is torturous even to eyes not as tender as young sparrows, as Melville said his own eyes were.

     Apparently all the volumes had a series title-page, Modern British Essayists, followed by a title-page for the specific volume.  The series title page of the Macaulay volume reads "The Modern British Essayists. / VOL. I. / T. BABINGTON MACAULAY. / PHILADELPHIA: CAREY AND HART. / 1847."  The second title page identifies the volume as Essays, Critical and Miscellaneous by T. Babington Macaulay and carries the copyright date of MDCCCXLVII (in Roman numerals).  One of my copies of the Macaulay (with these 1847 and MDCCCXLVII title-page dates) bears this inscription on the front flyleaf: "Margaret A. Norfleet. / A Christmas gift from my / dear Mother--1848. / Received January 25^th 1849."  Presumably the gift was ordered in December 1848 and delivered in late January 1849, perhaps because the recipient did not live near Philadelphia.  In any case, the Norfleet copy provides evidence that in December 1848 or January 1849, about the time Melville most likely ordered his set, he could have taken advantage of a sale.  (I have another copy of the Macaulay with the same title-pages and with the same advertisement bound in; the advertisement is also in my Wilson and Jeffrey volumes.)  This Carey and Hart advertisement specifies that for $12, half the usual price, the purchaser would receive the eight volumes of the "Modern Essayists" bound in cloth, gilt: Macaulay, Alison, Sydney Smith, Carlyle, Wilson, Jeffrey, Stephen and Talfourd together, and Mackintosh.  (The series was called "Modern Essayists" in the advertisement, not "Modern British Essayists.")  Besides the eight volumes marketed as Modern Essayists, the Carey and Hart advertisement for "Modern Essayists" featured the "in press" Scott volume, as well as a volume of Selections from the London Quarterly Review, "being the best articles that have appeared in that able periodical," and also a volume of Modern French Essayists.  What Wiley charged Melville was halfway between the presumed regular price and the sale price.  Wiley may have overcharged him, but there is at least a possibility that Melville received a set printed on better paper than the half-price set.  I can't tell for sure, but my volumes without the advertisement may be printed on paper of a slightly better quality than those with it.

[Here is my intact set in fine condition, as packed to go to the Berkshire Athenaeum. It is so splendid even though it was assembled in the early 1990s without the benefit of the Internet.]

            Melville’s set would have included volumes with a bound-in, aggressively worded, late 1848 Carey and Hart advertisement:[1]

            The great success that has attended the publication of the Modern Essayists, comprising the Critical and Miscellaneous writings of the most distinguished authors of modern times, has induced the publishers to issue a new, revised, and very cheap edition, with finely engraved Portraits of the authors; and while they have added to the series the writings of several distinguished authors, they have reduced the price more than one half![JOHN WANTS A FN HERE]

No one has determined whether or not any of the texts were, in fact, “revised” after being included in the set.  Accurately claiming that the firm had republished the “cream” of three great quarterlies, Carey & Hart confidently promised to do still more:

                        The series will contain all the most able papers that have ever appeared in The Edinburgh Review, The London Quarterly Review, and Blackwood’s Magazine, and may indeed be called the cream of those publications.

                        It is only necessary to mention the names of those authors whose writings will appear:

            T. Babington Macaulay,                                  Sir Walter Scott,

            Archibald Alison,                                            Lord Jeffrey,

            Rev. Sydney Smith,                                          Sir James Mackintosh,

            Professor Wilson,                                            T. Noon Talfourd,

            James Stephen,                                                J. G. Lockhart,

            Thomas Carlyle,                                              William Gifford,

            Robert Southey,                                               J. Wilson Crocker [sic].

The Southey, Lockhart, Gifford, and Croker volumes apparently were never printed, and no Scott volume has been identified as being part of the set.  Even without some promised volumes, the collection was every bit as important as Carey and Hart claimed.  The writers in Melville’s set were major British men of letters whose high status as critics was merely acknowledged, not established, by their inclusion in Modern British Essayists.

            Carey & Hart then itemized potential customers: heads of families (desiring to possess models of style for their children); managers of book societies and book clubs; school inspectors, schoolmasters, and tutors (wanting suitable prizes or additions to school libraries); travellers (the publishers thinking the hefty volumes suitable “to fill a corner in a portmanteau or carpet-bag”); passengers on board a ship; officers in the Army and Navy, and all “Economists in space or pocket,” who need to lay up “a concentrated Library, at a moderate cost”; those who need to send gifts to friends in distant countries.  Judging from his letter to Richard Bentley on 20 July 1851 (“This country & nearly all its affairs are governed by sturdy backwoodsmen—noble fellows enough, but not at all literary”), Melville would particularly have delighted in the next paragraph of the Carey & Hart ad:

                        The Modern Essayists will yield to the Settler in the Backwoods of America, the most valuable and interesting writings of all the most distinguished authors of our time, at less than one quarter the price they could be obtained in any other form.

The last buyer was envisioned as the “Student and Lover of Literature at Home, who has hitherto been compelled to wade through volumes of Reviews for a single article,” but who “may now become possessed of every article worth reading for little more than the cost of the annual subscription” (that is, not a subscription to a British periodical but to an American reprint).

            Here in one set, as advertised, were hundreds of articles from the great British quarterlies that enlightened the age, especially the Whig Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802 by Sydney Smith (1771-1845), Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), and Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868).  Here also were an abundance of articles from the great magazine’s two Tory rivals, the London Quarterly Review (founded in 1809) and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (founded in 1817), as well as others.  In the preface of his volume, Sydney Smith itemized his and his friends’ Whig grievances against the state and church:

                        To appreciate the value of the Edinburgh Review, the state of England at the period when that journal began should be had in remembrance.  The Catholics were not emancipated—the Corporation and Test Acts were unrepealed—the Game Laws were horribly oppressive—Steel Traps and Spring Guns were set all over the country—Prisoners tried for their Lives could have no Counsel—Lord Eldon and the Court of Chancery pressed heavily upon mankind—Libel was punished by the most cruel and vindictive imprisonments—the principles of Political Economy were little understood—the Law of Debt and of Conspiracy were upon the worse possible footing—the enormous wickedness of the Slave Trade was tolerated—a thousand evils were in existence, which the talents of good and able men have since lessened or removed; and these effects have been not a little assisted by the honest boldness of the Edinburgh Review.

The Tory Quarterly Review, stoutly defending Church and Crown, was founded by William Gifford (1756-1826), the first editor; among the contributors were George Canning (1770-1827), John Hookham Frere (1769-1846), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Robert Southey (1774-1843).  William Hazlitt (1778-1830) chastized Gifford in The Spirit of the Age (1825) for his hostile recasting of Charles Lamb’s essay on Wordsworth’s The Excursion and for his publishing the virulent attack of John Wilson Croker (1780-1857) on Keats’s Endymion.  The Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine soon after its founding came into the hands of John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854), John Wilson (1785-1854), and James Hogg (1770-1835), the poet known to Melville as the “Ettrick Shepherd.”  All his life Melville regarded with profound respect the great British magazines (including the eighteenth-century predecessors of the Edinburgh Review).  From his father, long before he could read the quarterlies for himself, he knew the name of Francis Jeffrey, who had entertained Allan Melvill in 1818 and from whose garden in Edinburgh Allan had plucked a rose as a keepsake for Melville’s mother.  From Melville’s childhood, British quarterlies and monthlies were being reprinted, in their entirety or in selections, in many American cities as soon as ships brought copies over.  Albany, the capital of the Empire State, published some of these reprints, which were entirely legal in the absence of an international copyright law.  The erratically educated Melville had gained occasional access to great British literary reviewing through such reprintings in his early life, and he saw British quarterlies and monthlies from the 1850s and later decades--he profited from reviews of The Prelude in 1850, for instance--but what he needed, early in 1849 and for years afterwards, was just this massive compendium of Modern British Essayists.   Vol. 1. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), 758 pages.  Essays, / Critical and Miscellaneous. / by / T. Babington Macaulay. / Philadelphia: / Carey and Hart, Chesnut [sic in the earlier volumes] Street / Stereotyped by L. Johnson. / MDCCCXLVII.

            (Here and below, I do not attempt to imitate capitalization and other typographical features of these title-pages.)  The “Publishers’ Notice” to the Macaulay volume reads: “The very general and high commendation, bestowed by the press and the community upon the American edition of Macaulay’s Miscellaneous Writings, has induced the publishers to issue a new and cheap edition embracing the remainder of the articles in the Edinburgh Review, and several articles written and published while the author was at college.”  The bulk of the volume consisted of essays from the Edinburgh Review in roughly the order of publication, beginning with an essay on Milton (1825), one on Machiavelli (1827), and one on Dryden (1828).  The volume contained several essays likely to attract Melville’s eye, such as an 1831 essay on “Moore’s Life of Lord Byron” and an undated essay on “Cowley and Milton” (following an 1840 essay).  The “Publishers’ Notice” and the Contents pages indicate that Carey and Hart had republished Macaulay’s Miscellaneous Writings earlier, not in this set, and in 1847 had added recent articles from the Edinburgh Review and “several articles written and published while the author was at college.”  The 1847 additions to the earlier Carey and Hart volume began with an “Appendix” on 569, two poems, “Pompeii” (source not identified,), and “The Battle of Ivry,” from Knight’s Quarterly Magazine (1824), followed by ten essays from the Edinburgh Review (these out of chronological order).  My guess is that Melville quickly would have tired of Macaulay’s pomposity, pedantry, and vacuity, as in this definition in an essay on an inherently fascinating topic, “Milton”: “By poetry we mean, the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination: the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours.”  However, among the “additions” to the earlier volume were Macaulay’s 1829 essays on “Mill’s Essay on Government,” “Bentham’s Defence of Mill,” and “Utilitarian Theory of Government”—all likely to have interested Melville during the following years when he read Abraham Tucker and came to identify a cold malignity underlying Utilitarianism and Unitarianism.

            Vol. 2.  Archibald Alison (1792-1867), 390 pages.  Miscellaneous / Essays. / by / Archibald Alison, F. R. S. / Author of “History of Europe during the French Revolution.” / Reprinted from the English Originals, / with the author’s corrections for this edition. / Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 126 Chesnut Street. /1845).  (This is the son of the Archibald Alison [1757-1839] famous for Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, 1790; in the sixth volume of the set Melville could read Francis Jeffrey’s extensive review, “Alison on Taste.”)

            In a preface dated 1 September 1844, Alison expressed his gratitude to the American publishers: “A wish having been expressed by the publishers of this work to have a collection of my Miscellaneous Essays, published at different times and in different periodical works in Great Britain [Blackwood’s Magazine, almost exclusively], made for reprints in America, and selected and arranged by myself, I have willingly assented to so flattering a proposal.  I have endeavoured in making the selection to choose such as discuss subjects possessing, as far as possible, a general and durable interest; and to admit those only, relating to matters of social contest or national policy in Great Britain, which are likely, from the importance of the questions involved in them, to excite some interest as contemporary compositions among future generations of men.”  He expressed his pride, “as an English author, at the vast and boundless field for British literary exertion which is afforded by the extension of the Anglo-Saxon race on the other side of the Atlantic.”  His final wish was “that this strong though unseen mental bond may unite the British family in every part of the world, and cause them all to feel as brothers, even when the time arrives, as arrive it will, that they have obtained the domination of half the globe.” 

            His amusement at Anglo-American imperialism aside, Melville would have found “The Copyright Question,” originally published in the January 1842 Blackwood’s Magazine, of paramount interest.  Melville had read this piece, judging from the essay he wrote on Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse in August 1850.  He found in Alison an imperative that England must not content itself with the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Johnson, and Scott but must “prolong the race of these great men, or her intellectual career will speedily come to a close.”  Alison saw himself stranded in a modern England where “the whole talent of the nation is directed to periodical literature, or works of evanescent interest,” with the consequent degradation of the national character.  Many writers achieved mere popularity: “it is no longer necessary for an author to make himself profound before he writes”; “if we look abroad in France, where the reading public is much less numerous than in England, a more subtle and refined tone is prevalent in literature; while in America, where it is infinitely larger, the literature is incomparably more superficial.”  For Alison the present danger was not merely the “gradual extinction of the higher and nobler branches of our literature” but the “termination of the more elevated class of works in history, philosophy, and theology, which are calculated and are fitted to guide and direct the national thought.”  Standing against the tide of mediocrity were the “master-spirits” who for good or for evil “communicated their own impress to the generation which succeeded them.”  The term “master-spirits” which Melville used in his essay on Hawthorne derived ultimately from Julius Caesar, but his use of it may have been suggested by Alison’s application of it to great geniuses who are too profound to be appreciated by their own times.  Melville, for one, would resist the pressure all profound writers experience, the pressure “to exchange deep writing for agreeable writing.”

            The last essay in the Alison volume, “Homer, Dante, and Michael Angelo,” from the January 1845 Blackwood’s, concluded that great subjects remain for treatment: “Nature is inexhaustible; the events of men are unceasing, their variety is endless. . . .  Rely upon it, subjects for genius are not wanting; genius itself, steadily and perseveringly directed, is the thing required.  But genius and energy alone are not sufficient; courage and disinterestedness are needed more than all.  Courage to withstand the assaults of envy, to despise the ridicule of mediocrity—disinterestedness to trample under foot the seductions of ease, and disregard the attractions of opulence.  An heroic mind is more wanted in the library or the studio, than in the field.  It is wealth and cowardice which extinguish the light of genius, and dig the grave of literature as of nations.”  All this would have been heartening to Melville.

            Vol. 3.  Sydney Smith (1771-1845), 480 pages.  The / Works / of / The Rev. Sydney Smith. / Three Volumes, / Complete in one. / Philadelphia: / Carey and Hart. / Stereotyped by L. Johnson. / 1845.

            This consisted of Smith’s contributions to the Edinburgh Review followed by some of his speeches.  In the preface he recalled his founding of the organ and its continuance by Jeffrey and Brougham, taking pride in the part the Review played in eradicating evils in “the state of England.”  These ranged from the disenfranchisement of Catholics and toleration of the slave trade to the oppressiveness of game laws (“Steel Traps and Spring Guns were set all over the country.”   His “Game Laws” was first printed in the year of Herman Melville’s birth.  His “Man Traps and Spring Guns” was printed in 1821.  Redburn in his delightful ramble into the country encounters a sign “MAN-TRAPS AND SPRING GUNS” which may well have come from Smith’s volume.  We have known from his citation of it in his essay on Hawthorne that Melville was acutely aware of Smith’s 1820 essay on “America”: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?”  In his 1818 essay on “America” Smith had been more particular:

                        Literature the Americans have none—no native literature, we mean.  It is all imported.  They had a Franklin, indeed; and may afford to live for half a century on his fame.  There is, or was a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems; and his baptismal name was Timothy.  There is also a small account of Virginia by Jefferson, and an epic by Joel Barlow; and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr. Irving.  But why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks’ passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science and genius, in bales and hogsheads?  Prairies, steam-boats, grist-mills, are their natural objects for centuries to come.  Then, when they have got to the Pacific Ocean—epic poems, plays, pleasures of memory and all the elegant gratifications of an ancient people who have tamed the wild earth, and set down to amuse themselves.—This is the natural march of human affairs.

Alison in his 1844 preface was conciliatory; Smith was as incendiary as ever.

            Vol. 4. John Wilson (1785-1854), 307 pages.  The /  Recreations / of / Christopher North. / Complete in One Volume. / Philadelphia: / Carey & Hart, 126 Chesnut Street. / 1845.”

            Wilson was a glamorous figure in Melville’s early life, famous not only for his writing but for his exploits as a sportsman and for his striking physique and long blond hair.  In his twenties, after graduation from Oxford, Wilson bought an estate at Windemere called Elleray, and while there became a friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and De Quincey.  Resettling in Edinburgh, he became a Tory polemicist.  From 1817 until his death, he was a contributor and sometime editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, in which he was associated (as “Christopher North”) with John Gibson Lockhart and James Hogg.  In Blackwood’s from 1822 to 1835, he was the major contributor, along with Hogg and De Quincey, to “Noctes Ambrosianae,” supposed conversations taking place at a real Edinburgh pub, Ambrose’s Tavern.  He lived to comment on Mardi in the August 1849 Blackwood’s review of Mayo’s Kaloolah.  On 21 August 1849, the Boston Evening Transcript said that in the review Mardi was “spoken of as having been ‘closed with a yawn, a day or two after its publication!’”  In early September 1849, Thomas Powell wrote Evert Duyckinck about “that old humbug Christopher North” in relation to this review (Log 1:311-12).  Wilson remained in Edinburgh after Hogg died and after Lockhart moved to London, becoming a splashy fish in a pond that became progressively smaller.

            What Melville found in The Recreations of Christopher North were primarily reprints from Blackwood’s Magazine (later Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine), original publication dates not given, but on or before 1842, when the volume was first published.  The frontispiece, “Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket,” depicting the sportsman with the stock of his fowling piece resting on the earth, long sleeves snug far down the cuffs to the hand, wide lapels, skirt long, stretching down three-quarters of the way from belt to knee, would have caught Melville’s eye.  Another name for the jacket was “Shooting Jacket” (the garment Redburn leaves home with) along with a fowling piece.  Melville could read the curmudgeonly John Wilson (Christopher North) on the question of whether there was a great English poem (answer: only Paradise Lost).  There he could read several challenging comments on Wordsworth, and could read, with hostility, Wilson’s praise of doctrinally correct sacred poetry.  The importance of the Recreations for Melville, I would think, is that it afforded him intimate glimpses into the Wordsworthian milieu of the Lake District through several of the pieces: “A Day at Windemere,” “Stroll to Grassmere” (“First Saunter” and “Second Saunter”), in particular.  Wordsworth is brought into other essays, such as “An Hour’s Talk about Poetry,” “Morning Monologue,” “Sacred Poetry,” and “A Few Words on Thomson.”  “Go, read the Excursion,” Christopher North commanded in the prologue to “The Moors.”  Melville did read it, carefully.

            Vol. 5.  Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), 568 pages.  Critical / and / Miscellaneous / Essays. / By Thomas Carlyle, / Author of the History of the French Revolution. / A New Edition, / Complete in One Volume. / Philadelphia: / A. Hart, Late Carey & Hart, / No. 1126 Chestnut [sic] Street. / 1851.  (Because in some cases I do not know the year Carey and Hart first published certain volumes I give the earliest date of the volumes I own, knowing that they were all available in late 1848; for the Carlyle, I have an 1851 and 1852.)

            In the Carlyle volume, besides articles from the Edinburgh Review, Melville found articles from the Foreign Review, Fraser’s Magazine, the Westminster Review, the Foreign Quarterly Review, the New Monthly Magazine, the London and Westminster Review, and the Examiner.  This is not great Carlyle.  Nevertheless, here Melville had Carlyle’s review of Lockhart’s biography of Burns and of Scott along with a great deal on contemporary German writers, including a review of a biography of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, and a great deal on Goethe.  (Did Evert Duyckinck pick up the phrase “daughter-full house,” which he applied to Arrowhead, from Carlyle, in the review of Richter?)

            Vol. 6.  Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), 762 pages.  Contributions / to the / Edinburgh Review. / by / Francis Jeffrey, / Now One of the Judges of the Court of Session in Scotland. / Four Volumes. / Complete in One, / Philadelphia: / Carey and Hart. / 1846.

            This “Republication” was dedicated reverentially to the Reverend Sydney Smith, “the original projector” of the Edinburgh Review.  Jeffrey’s preface is of the highest importance for this explicit statement: “The Edinburgh Review, it is well known, aimed high from the beginning:--And, refusing to confine itself to the humble task of pronouncing on the mere literary merits of the works that came before it, professed to go deeply into the Principles on which its judgments were to be rested; as well as to take large and original views of all the important questions to which those works might relate.”  In our terminology, the quarterly, from the first, aspired to address theoretical issues, issues involving aesthetics.  Utterly self-taught in the theory of literature, Melville, even though belatedly, found in Jeffrey, I believe, his best teacher.

            What would have caught Melville’s attention first in this volume were reviews of the great Romantic poems that Jeffrey had published in the Edinburgh Review as the poems were appearing.  Lyrical Ballads predated the establishment of the magazine, but the poetry section of the volume contained Jeffrey’s reviews of Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets; Byron’s Sardanapalus and Manfred; R. H. Cromek’s Reliques of Robert Burns; Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming and Theodoric; Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake; George Crabbe’s Poems, The Borough, Tales, and Tales of the Hall; John Keats’s Endymion and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes; Samuel Rogers’s Human Life; Robert Southey’s Roderick: The Last of the Goths; Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Prisoner of Chillon; Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh; William Wordsworth’s The Excursion and The White Doe of Rylstone; Felicia Hemans’s Records of Women and The Forest Sanctuary.  However little of this poetry we ourselves are familiar with, we would be wise to assume that Melville knew almost all of it. [KEEP THE FN HERE BUT MAYBE RENUMBER][2]  Here Melville possessed an extraordinary cache of classic criticism, all the more notable because Jeffrey’s reviews really did constitute not only excellent examples of practical criticism but explicit attempts to write criticism from aesthetic principles.

            In 1862 Melville made a meticulous study of one essay in the Jeffrey volume, the January 1810 review of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Victor Alfieri.  For whatever reason, Melville took in his newly purchased copy of William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers and Lectures on the English Poets (two volumes in one).  Melville wrote “Jeffrey on Alfieri” to identify the source of his notes, which constitute perhaps the most specific evidence of his engagement with aesthetic concepts.[USE FN HERE INSTEAD OF INTERNAL REFERENCE  (See Parker 2.496-499.)]

Vol. 7. T. Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), 176 pages; and James Stephen (1789-1859), 158 pages.  The Talfourd title-page: Critical / and / Miscellaneous Writings / of / T. Noon Talfourd, / Author of “Ion.” / Second American Edition. / with / Additional Articles Never Before Published / In this Country. / Philadelphia: / A. Hart, late Carey & Hart, / No. 126 Chestnut [sic] Street. / 1853.  The Stephen title-page: Critical / and / Miscellaneous Essays, / by / James Stephen. / In one Volume. / Philadelphia: / A. Hart, late Carey & Hart, / No. 126 Chestnut [sic] Street. / 1853.

            These  may have been published as separate books.  Here each has its individual title-page and contents page. Alone among the nine authors, Stephen, whose title-pages comes after p. 176 of Talfourd, has no portrait in my copy.  The Talfourd essays are primarily from the New Monthly Magazine, the Retrospective Review, London Magazine.  Several public addresses conclude the volume, the most interesting to literary people being the one delivered “in the Court of Queen’s Bench, June 23, 1841,” where Talfourd defends Moxon, the publisher of Shelley’s works.  This was Edward Moxon (1801-1858), the cold, stiff man Melville managed to thaw in an interview late in 1849.  One of the literary essays, “On the Genius and Writings of Wordsworth,” reprinted from the New Monthly Magazine, was just the sort of loving guide to poems that Melville could benefit from.  Toward the end of it, Talfourd appealed to his readers to take up Wordsworth for themselves rather than being kept away by “base or ignorant criticism”:

            Not only Coleridge, Lloyd, Southey, Wilson, and Lamb—with whom his name has been usually connected—but almost all the living poets have paid eloquent homage to his genius.  He is loved by Montgomery, Cornwall, and Rogers—revered by the author of Waverley—ridiculed and pillaged by Lord Byron!  Jeffrey, if he begins an article on his greatest work with the pithy sentence “this will never do,” glows even while he criticises, and before he closes, though he came like Balaam to curse, like him “blesses altogether.”

Here was exemplified the riches of the Modern British Essayists, for in the Jeffrey volume Melville possessed the November 1815 article on The Excursion; being a Portion of the Recluse, a Poem which began: “This will never do!”

            The Stephen volume (this Stephen is the grandfather of Virginia Woolf) contained essays from Edinburgh Review, among them his review of Life of William Wilberforce by his Sons and other essays on religious figures, including one on George Whitfield and Richard Hurrell Froude, a review of an 1839 book called “Physical Theory of Another Life,” one on “The Port-Royalists,” another on “Ignatius Loyola and his Associates.”

            8.  Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832), 596 pages.  Title-page: The / Miscellaneous Works / of / The Right Honourable / Sir James Mackintosh / Three Volumes, / Complete in One. / Philadelphia: / A. Hart, late Carey & Hart, / No. 126 Chestnut Street. / 1850.

            In an “Advertisement to the London Edition” the editor, R. J. Mackintosh, explains that he has in general arranged the pieces in order, moving from the “more purely Philosophical, and proceeding through Literature to Politics.”  The essays for the most part had been published in the Edinburgh Review, but the editor also included public addresses, apparently printed from manuscripts, and revisions of published books, the Vindiciae Gallicae: A Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers, against the Accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, including Some Strictures on the Late Production of Mons. De Calonne (1791) and Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, Chiefly during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1830).  This last, “originally prefixed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” according to the full title in the Carey and Hart volume, contains a series of essays on particular thinkers.  Jonathan Edwards is treated, and later, in sequence, Abraham Tucker, William Paley, and Jeremy Bentham, all of whom interested Melville strongly.  Melville might have been attracted also to a review of Samuel Rogers’ Poems and Madame de Stael’s De L’Allemagne. 

CHECK WHAT JOHN WANTS TO DO—DROP THE ASTERISKS BUT WHAT DOES “DROP COP” MEAN??

            Modern British Essayists included much more than anyone could have absorbed, and for Melville the great value of it was in its classic essays on classic works of British Romanticism, a distillation of the best criticism of the best critics of his age.  More specifically, in Modern British Essayists Melville possessed classic pieces of literary criticism on the British great poets of the first half of the century, particularly Wordsworth.  However dismayed he was by the small print, Melville must have read essays in his Modern British Essayists in high excitement, on many occasions in different years.  To be sure, some of the volumes may have meant very little to him, but our tastes (particularly in philosophical essays) are not reliable as an index of his, and in some volumes, unquestionably, he found riches.  The best of the writers—Jeffrey, certainly—not only informed Melville on a vast range of literary and political topics but (over a period of many years) provoked him to think through complicated aesthetic issues for himself.  My own survey of the volumes, initially made for my biography of Melville and continuing for work on the last two Northwestern-Newberry volumes of The Writings of Herman Melville, is far from exhaustive.  Others who turn to the volumes may locate specific sources for Melville that I overlooked, and certainly anyone who undertook a serious re-examination of Melville’s use of Wordsworth, to name one conspicuous topic, would find in the volumes evidence which I scarcely touched in my necessarily brief comments.  These volumes, in short, are an almost unplundered treasure trove for Melvilleans.

Notes

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[1] One of my copies of the Macaulay (with the 1847 title-page date and with a bound-in Carey and Hart advertisement for the set) bears this inscription on the front flyleaf: "Margaret A. Norfleet. / A Christmas gift from my / dear Mother--1848. / Received January 25^th 1849."  Presumably the gift was ordered in December 1848 and delivered only in late January 1849, because the recipient lived far from Philadelphia.  At least some of Melville's volumes probably contained the advertisement, which is bound into my copies of Macaulay, Wilson, and Jeffrey.  To judge from the advertisement, Melville might have been taking advantage of a Carey and Hart sale when he ordered his set.

[2] Stanton Garner pointed out that the long-unidentified phrase "deadly space between” in Billy Budd, Sailor is from Campbell's "Battle of the Baltic”; has it been noticed that Outalissi in Melville's review of Parkman is a reference to Gertrude of Wyoming?  I am convinced that none of us knows anyone who knows British poetry as well as Melville did.
John wants fn on Vol 1