Young Professors Ignoring Scholarship Series: Dawn Coleman of Tennessee

In the LEVIATHAN: A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES for June 2015 which arrived here today I find that Dawn Coleman from the University of Tennessee declares that "Unitarianism has received scant notice, remembered primarily as the minor legacy of Allan Melville, as T. Walter Herbert details, or as the religion of Elizabeth [Shaw Melville].

There is a good deal about Unitarianism in the second volume of my biography of Melville (2002), which Coleman ignores, and much more in the 2006 2nd edition of the Norton Critical Edition of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN.

In the 2006 Preface, p. xi., there is this fairly lavish attention to Unitarianism, and a long section on Unitarianism in the body of the book, starting with a passage from Dr. John W. Francis, "The Bostonian Heresy Invades Manhattan." It is quite understandable that young professors think that 20th-century scholarship is to be ignored, but really, should 21st-century scholarship be ignored?

Here is the passage from the 2006 Preface to the Norton THE CONFIDENCE-MAN:

Although Presbyterians and other low church reviewers had condemned him since 1846, Melville was at home with their Calvinist theology rather than currently fashionable alternatives, particularly Unitarianism.  He read with a critical eye an abridgment of The Light of Nature Revealed by Abraham Tucker, a philosophical father of English Unitarianism.  Here we sample a section of Abraham Tucker’s ideas on “Benevolence” as well as part of Melville’s oblique commentary on Tucker and other Utilitarians and Unitarians, the Plinlimmon pamphlet in Pierre.  Melville knew the history of the double revolt in the 1770s and 1780s in which Bostonians, among them his grandfather, Thomas Melvill, first freed the city of British secular rule then seized the principal Anglican church, King’s Chapel, not for an old Protestant sect that believed in the Trinity but for the new American Unitarians.  (This Melville grandfather himself owned a pew at the Brattle Street Unitarian Church, known as the “Manifesto Church.”)  The Confidence-Man, as well as some of Melville’s stories, notably “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” embody Melville’s critique of contemporary American Unitarianism, especially as promulgated by Orville Dewey, who baptized three of Melville’s children and preached his father-in-law’s funeral sermon.  In “Utopias, Sects, Cults, and Cure-Alls,” background pieces by Melville himself as well as pieces by Orville Dewey suggest just what Melville thought of the coolness with which leading Unitarians responded to Jesus’s saying “The poor ye have always with you.”  In New York, Unitarians contrasted their views on begging with those of the reforming newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who, as Scott Norsworthy shows, was determined to use his New York Tribune to help the poor of the city.  In a major new historical and critical essay Susan M. Ryan examines “the Ambiguities of Benevolence” in the context of antebellum debates over race, slavery, and citizenship.  The chronology of Melville’s knowledge of Emerson and Thoreau printed in the 1971 Norton Critical Edition is revised as “The Latest Heresy: Melville and the Transcendentalists.”  Printed immediately following items on Unitarianism, this section now makes fuller sense, for Melville, like many others, understood some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s extreme opinions as those to be expected from a former Unitarian minister.