Leicester tea merchant and social reformer J. W. Barrs on Herman Melville

Leicester Mercury (Leicester, Leicestershire, England)
August 8, 1882

Published in the London National Reformer (November 8, 1891) over the pseudonym "SIRIUS" about six weeks after the death of Herman Melville in New York City, the long-forgotten memorial tribute transcribed herein was evidently written by Melville's English admirer and correspondent John William Barrs (c1852-1922), a Leicester tea merchant and radical secularist. 

Unique details in the pseudonymous National Reformer article titled "HERMAN MELVILLE" have precise matches in the lengthy fan-letter dated January 13, 1890 that Barrs wrote Melville, now in the Melville collection at Houghton Library, Harvard and available in the "Letters Received" section of the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth, on pages 759-762. In 1890 J. W. Barrs told Melville himself exactly what "Sirius" tells readers of the National Reformer, specifically about his having read Mardi to the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston, about the ignorance concerning Melville's literary works allegedly displayed by Marston's American friend Louise Chandler Moulton, about Barrs' particular fondness for the character of Babbalanja, and his deep appreciation of Walt Whitman. Courtesy of James Billson, Barrs had received a copy of Melville's poetry and prose collection John Marr and Other Sailors, which explains how "Sirius" could know so much of so rare a volume, privately printed for the author in 1888. 

Barrs, a good friend of the poet James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis), had given Melville the posthumously published volume A Voice from the Nile: and other poems (London: Reeves and Turner, 1884); Sealts Number 522, now at Princeton, as indicated in the "Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville" at Melville's Marginalia Online. 

J. W. Barrs, presentation inscription to Herman Melville in
A voice from the Nile : and other poems / by the late James Thomson ("B. V.")
Princeton University Library

From the London National Reformer of November 8, 1891; digitized and first made available on the great British Newspaper Archive in April 2025: 

HERMAN MELVILLE. 

AMERICA has just lost one of her most original writers and her finest stylist. It is with deep regret that we learn of the death of Herman Melville, the author of two perfect narratives of adventure, “Omoo” and "Typee”, of one of the most brilliant of allegorical novels, "Mardi”, and of the most powerful and imaginative novel of seafaring life, “Moby Dick, or the Whale”, ever written by one of an English-speaking race. And, to the eternal disgrace of United States literature, he has died practically forgotten; indeed, for the last twenty years he has, as a writer, been utterly neglected by his countrymen. Some eight years ago I remember reading through a great part of Melville’s "Mardi" to Phillip Bourke Marston, who had not previously known any of Melville’s books. He expressed unbounded delight in Melville’s imagination, his prose style, and his subtlety of thought, and promised to learn something of him from his (Marston’s) intimate friend Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, and to acquaint me with anything of interest concerning Melville he might learn from her. In a letter to me shortly after he said he had asked Mrs. Moulton for some information about Melville, but all she said was that she "had heard of him, and believed if he was not dead that he lived in, or somewhere near to, New York”. This evidence of a general neglect (for Mrs. Moulton must, from her literary reputation, be credited with knowing something of all writers in the States whose works were in vogue, even if but among the innermost circles of American literature) received a further confirmation but a few days ago when I met a particularly well-read Americaine, who had just arrived here for the purpose of taking some Oxford degrees open to women. Her ignorance of Herman Melville and of his works was even deeper, if deeper it could be, than Mrs. Moulton’s. Indeed, so thoroughly oblivious had the Americans become of the man who to the day of his death was their richest prose writer, and so utterly was Melville himself without any hope of any recognition of his genius, that the issue of his last publication, a booklet (1888) entitled “John Marr and other Sailors, with some sea-pieces”, was restricted to twenty-five copies, and distributed among his friends and admirers—not surely a very wide circle, in Melville’s opinion, but I am fain to believe an altogether wider one than he knew of. The trinity of writers of this century produced by America who eventually shall be esteemed her highest names in literature will surely be made up of Poe, Whitman, and Melville. Concerning the two former there is a large consensus of opinion as to their lofty place in English and their highest place in American letters; and it is difficult to doubt that such works as “Moby Dick” and "Mardi”, together with “Omoo” and “Typee”, will eventually place Melville’s name on a level with Poe’s and Whitman’s. Melville’s insight into the problems of life was, I think, less sustained than Whitman’s; less positive, perhaps, also; but keener, more piercing, now and again boring the core of some mystery with a Meredithean swiftness, but with a sympathy more obvious than Meredith’s. Indeed Melville’s inmost self is as interwoven with his work as is Poe’s in his, and this personal note it is which gives a great and added charm to every book he has written. The narrative, novel, or allegory pulsates with Melville’s individuality; the artist, in fact, pervades the work—one might almost say, is the work—in almost every instance. 

If asked to describe Melville's religion, I should do so in the words Pessimistic-Pantheist or Pessimistic-Atheist. Full of democratic fire, yet with a fear which he could not shake off—so far as I can find in reading him—that the aristocrat would always get the best of it under one guise or another; lacking, unfortunately for himself —whether or not for truth—that overmastering faith in the future apotheosis of the average man to permeating and overfilling Whitman; he was not less sympathetic than the "Good Grey Poet”. Perhhaps, indeed, as he was less hopeful, so his sympathy was of even a greater depth. Melville had less than Whitman the gift of dealing in his thought with men in the mass. Whitman has created no characters in his poems: Melville has created many. His Ahab in “The Whale”, his Jackson in “Red Jacket" [Redburn], his Babbalanja in "Mardi ”, to note just three, are unequalled in American or any other fiction. There can be little hesitation, after perusal of his “John Marr”, written but three years ago, in concluding that Melville’s early antagonism to Supernaturalism had become his settled conviction; for in that booklet, the sad undertone of which is ever in the ear as one reads, there is a calm acquiescence in the facts of life and death as they present themselves undistorted by any chimæras of the fancy, a quiet acceptance of death as an end—oblivion, so far as we can know — and as an absolute and perfect anodyne for the suffering caused by all our "weakness and weariness and nameless woes”’. On the grave of one forgotten before he died, yet to be remembered by his countrymen long after he is dead, we Freethinkers may be permitted to lay a spray of laurel. In Herman Melville the world has lost a great writer, a noble teacher, and a brave and loving heart. On the other hand, America has added one more blot to her literary history by her neglect of one of her most manly minds, one of her most brilliant imaginations. 

SIRIUS.  

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0005488/18911108/028/0011

Other contributions signed "Sirius" in the London National Reformer are most likely by the genial atheist J. W. Barrs. Like his encomium of Herman Melville on November 8th, the following pieces all appeared in 1891. All but one are signed "SIRIUS." The business-minded letter against tariffs on imports ("Fair Trade v. Free Trade," published on November 1, 1891) is signed "JOHN W. BARRS." The earliest item listed here below, a letter to the editor dated April 18, 1891 and sent from Leicester, polemically quotes from a chapter in Mardi in order to expose the supposed "hollowness of the Christian dogma of eternal life."

• From the London National Reformer, April 26, 1891:
  

"THE BROWNING HEAVEN" AND "THE CAT O' NINE TAILS." TO THE EDITOR OF THE "NATIONAL REFORMER".

Sir,—Some of the numberless difficulties with which the theory of the immortality of man bristles, and many of which are either stated or inferred in your able article of last week, are so well put by Herman Melville, that you may not be disinclined to print an extract from his "Mardi." Here it is:

"But if our dead fathers somewhere and somehow live, why not our unborn sons; for backward or forward eternity is the same; already have we been the nothing we dread to be". 

The short chapter entitled "Babbalanja Solus" from which I quote, is well worth quoting entire, as probably by no one has the hollowness of the Christian dogma of eternal life been more poetically demolished. Touching the raising of Lazarus, who surely had some knowledge of heaven or hell, if only so much as the knowledge one gets of France, by going to Paris and back in twenty-four hours, Melville remarks: "But rubbed he not his eyes and stared he not most vacantly! Not one revelation did he make. Ye gods! to have been a bystander there!" A pity our interviewer was not then invented. 

A word, also, if  you have space, on the flogging of criminals. Marcus Clarke's "For the Term of His Natural Life", a story founded on the official Convict Prison Reports and others equally reliable—that is, equally reliable for not overstating the case against the use of the "cat"—exhausts the subject, and would, I think, leave your adverse critics as bitterly opposed to its use on any man (aye, even on a murderer and cannibal like the wretch Gabbett in Clarke's story) as you are yourself. The use of the "cat" may be justified by the passions; never, I think, by the intellect, after a full review of its effects on all brought within the sphere of its results.  

 

SIRIUS,

Leicester, April 18, 1891. 

 

P.S. Even where the use of the "cat" is confined to special classes of criminals and is inflicted only by order of a Judge, it must be borne in mind that verdicts are fallible, and one dreads to think how much of truth there is in the Frenchman's paradoxical saying that "There is only one thing more terrible than crime and that is——Justice".

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0005488/18910426/027/0013 

• "Dr. Wace's Consolation." London National Reformer, May 24, 1891.

• "Nonproof v. Disproof: or Dr. Wace's Consolation." London National Reformer, May 31, 1891.

• "Nonproof v. Disproof." London National Reformer, June 14, 1891.

• "John Jarvis /  Ejus Liber / 1799." London National Reformer, August 30, 1891.
  

• "Health and Atheism." London National Reformer, September 20, 1891.

• Signed "JOHN W. BARRS." "Fair Trade V. Free Trade." London National Reformer, November 1, 1891.

• "Christianity in the Sandwich Islands," London National Reformer, November 15, 1891.

Leicester Mercury -  Saturday, July 15, 1922
via newspapers.com

From the Leicester Mercury (Leicestershire, England) of July 15, 1922:

The late Mr. John William Barrs, who died at the Chantry House, The Newarkes, on Thursday [July 13, 1922], at the age of 70 years, was the son of a former member of the Town Council and the old School Board, and a well-known tradesman.

Mr. Barrs, unlike his father, who was a Churchman and Tory of the old school, became an out-and-out Radical. He was a great reader, and his contributions to newspaper correspondence had a distinct literary flavour, marked perhaps by the keenness of his criticisms which, however, were never envenomed.

London WEEKLY TIMES & ECHO, notice of THE WHALE with excerpt from Chapter 3, "The Spouter Inn"

Found on the wonderful British Newspaper Archive with images newly available in June 2025, an early notice of The Whale in the London Weekly Times & Echo for Sunday, November 2, 1851. This item is not collected in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). I will add it now to my inventory of 1851-1852 reviews of Moby Dick; or The Whale, here:

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html

From the London Weekly Times & Echo (2 November 1851):

THE WHALE. By Herman Melville, Author of "Typee," "Omoo," "Redburn," &c. 3 Vols. London: Bentley, New Burlington street.

Mr. Herman Melville stands alone in his peculiar celebrity, that of enabling the public to obtain glimpses of the private life and confidential transactions of seamen and their companions. In the volumes before us he gives evidence of having enjoyed most favourable opportunities of studying the personal characters of harpooners, mates, and sailors generally, and of becoming acquainted with the struggles, adventures, and experiences attendant upon whaling expeditions. "The Whale" is a book in which there is a great deal of romance mixed up with real sketches of life and manners. The captain of a ship that starts from Nantucket for the South Seas to catch the whale undertakes the voyage for the sole purpose of making the chase of the white whale, which, we are told, can neither be captured nor hurt, as the harpoon will not wound it, and which possesses extraordinary strength and cunning. The catastrophe of this daring adventure is that the ship is attacked by the white whale, and sinks with all on board. The early chapters, though containing but little adventure, are by far the best, and relate to topics that are, for the most part, fresh to English readers. Mr. Herman Melville there appears in his strongest point--sketching of character; and we cannot resist the temptation of laying before our readers one of his broad pictures of 

LIFE IN AMERICAN SEAPORTS. 

[Excerpted from Chapter 3, The Spouter-Inn in the British edition, titled The Whale]

Entering that gable-ended "Spouter Inn" you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry, with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.  * * * * * Upon entering the place, I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.” * * “I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be ready directly.” — I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought. At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings. Good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner. — "My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead certainty.” — "Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?” — "Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny; “the harpooner is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and likes ’em rare.”

* * Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.” — A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the bar—when the little wrinkled old fellow there officiating soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which the fellow mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island. The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously. 

The "little wrinkled old fellow" tending bar in the London Weekly Times & Echo version above (printed "wrinkled little old fellow" in The Whale) is a "wrinkled little old Jonah" in the 1851 American edition of Moby-Dick. A longer excerpt from Chapter 3 "The Spouter Inn," correctly giving "wrinkled little old fellow" from the British edition, had appeared with the generally negative review of The Whale in the London Athenaeum on October 25, 1851. 

Related post 

• Moby-Dick widely praised in 1851-2
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html

The House Where Moby Dick was Written

H. N. Hudson, 1847 letter to Evert A. Duyckinck

Here is my transcription of a letter from Henry Norman Hudson to Evert A. Duyckinck, now at NYPL in the Duyckinck family papers, Literary correspondence of Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck. Digital images of this 3-page manuscript letter dated March 27, 1847 are accessible via NYPL Digital Collections. Citation:

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Hudson, Henry Norman (1814-86)" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1845 - 1854.  https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9462eaa0-69fc-0133-794f-00505686a51c

Boston, March 27, 1847

My dear Sir;

I am altogether delighted with your paper. It has made Saturday quite a favorite day with me. I watch for its coming somewhat as a lover does for his appointed interview. I hope you will not make it necessary to me, and then withdraw it from me. It was my intention to have written something for its columns before this. Two weeks ago, indeed, I undertook to get up a few paragraphs with that view, but before I got through, I found my paper quite too long for your purpose. Besides, the matter was not exactly of the right stamp to appear in such a quarter; so I have sent it to Colton [George H. Colton, editor of the American Whig Review where Hudson's essay on the "Religious Union of Associationists" eventually did appear in the May 1847 issue]. It is on Mr. W. H. Channing and his "Church of Humanity." You will readily understand how, when I got engaged on such a theme, I found it difficult to stop. Whether Colton will publish the thing I do not know. The article is not very velvet-footed, though considerably milder than the one on "Festus." Our incontinent reformers are so conceited, that they can hardly be reached by any weapons but satire and ridicule. Their fanaticism of innovation seems proof against everything but the arrows of scorn. My article on the Philanthropists is not begun yet; though I have for some time kept up a thinking on the subject.

Many thanks for the civil things you have said of me. Much as these are calculated to make me like your paper, I think they have not produced so powerful an impression that way, as your notices of Somebody's Life of Taylor, of Griswold's late Sham [The Prose Writers of America, reviewed in the Literary World on March 20, 1847] and of Hazlitt's Napoleon [reviewed on March 27, 1847]. If with such papers as these the Literary World cannot go ahead, then the public is not worth writing for; that's all I have to say. It is high time Griswold's quackeries were exposed. I have long thought there was nothing too mean for him to do, provided he could make anything by it.

Have you seen the piece of softly, slobbering criticism on Emerson's Poems in the last Christian Examiner? If you want an example of precisely what criticism ought not to be, I advise you to read it. One would think the writer were made to die of a rose in aromatic pain. If criticism cannot speak out plainly, and call things by their right names, for heaven's sake let criticism hold its tongue. To be fit for the office of critic, and, indeed, for almost any office, it seems to me one must be a good hater; then his hatreds will serve to accredit his loves. These Boston authorlets, pretending to love everything and hate nothing, do not appear to have energy enough to do either. Always trying how finely and elegantly they can write, they seem alike affected in their censure and their praise. We are now having a very long drizzle of such criticisms in Mr. [George Stillman] Hillard's Lectures on Milton. Last evening I heard him on Paradise Lost. The first half of the lecture was taken up in puerile fault-finding, and the rest in straining after fine figures. It was very much as if a milliner should go to work, with lace, scissors and needle, to adorn the Falls of Niagara. Amid the sweet austerities of Milton's domestic scenes Mr. Hillard went whining along like some love-sick stripling. He has neither strength to feel Milton's delicacies, nor delicacy to feel his sublimities. He can cut very pretty ruffles out of the lace that others have woven; and that is about all he can do. Mr. Whipple seems to think people will be drawn to the study of Milton by these lectures. How any one that is weak enough to be moved by them is to stand up under Milton is beyond my comprehension.

However, the mutual admirers appear to think them very beautiful; and so I suppose the rest of us must submit. As for myself, I own it vexes me to see such a subject fall into such hands. I do not want people should be encouraged to suppose there is anything in Milton to countenance their amiable dulness and refined insipidity. I know not whether Mr. Hillard overrates him more as a man, or underrates more as a poet. Milton rebelled like a hero, and wrote poetry like a hero; in both he was more like his own Satan, than like his commentator. He was a good hater; as is evident from the fact, that "he hated everything that he was required to obey" [paraphrasing Samuel Johnson on Milton in Johnson's Lives of the Poets]. Whatever he did, there was a strength and vigor about him, which it strikes me these petty spinners of literary gossamer had better let alone. And yet it is rather amusing to see a spider weaving a web to catch a lion.

As soon as anything appears to me, worth printing, I shall try to indite you some paragraphs. I am told an edition of Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs of her husband is coming out soon. It is a very delightful book; and perhaps I will get you up a notice of it when it appears. Wiffen's Tasso is another book that I am meditating a notice of. You know I have not much facility in occasional writing. Generally I have to think long before I can write anything, and write long after I have got to thinking.

Please give my regards to Headley [Joel Tyler Headley] and Matthews [Cornelius Mathews]; read them this letter (if, indeed, you ever read it at all;) then hurry it into deepest night; and believe me

Sincerely your friend &c ;

H. N. Hudson

Boston Evening Transcript - March 25, 1847
via genealogybank.com

Related post

• "The Fiddler" ascribed to Melville in the CHURCHMAN, edited by Henry Norman Hudson
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-fiddler-ascribed-to-melville-in.html

"A sort of philosophical Christian swindler"

Melville's Confidence-Man favorably reviewed in the Hartford Evening Express, edited by Joseph R. Hawley.

Found on genealogybank.com and transcribed herein, a previously uncollected review of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade in the Hartford Evening Express for April 14, 1857. Published in Hartford, Connecticut the Evening Express was a Republican daily newspaper then edited by Joseph Roswell Hawley in partnership with William Faxon. After the Civil War, General Hawley's Evening Express merged with the Hartford Courant which the distinguished war hero, governor, and future United States Representative and Senator from Connecticut also owned and edited. 

This item is not reprinted or listed in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). 

Instead of giving titles of Melville's previous works in the header, Hawley's Evening Express printed "&c." (for etc. or et cetera) three times, presuming that "everybody knows" Melville and his books. 

Hartford Evening Express - April 14, 1857

THE CONFIDENCE MAN: HIS MASQUERADE. By Herman Melville—Author of &c., &c., &c.— (we need not say what—everybody knows him.). Published by Dix, Edwards & Co.

A series of "rough and tumble" dashes at western life and American peculiarities generally, thrown off in the style of a man who would lead you to believe he isn't half trying: as an artist might take charcoal in his toes and show you how good a portrait he can sketch with his hands tied behind him and his eyes shut. Nevertheless Mr. Mellville is a good deal in earnest and makes a fascinating book—of course. The scene of operations is on a Mississippi steamboat, and the Confidence Man appears to be a sort of philosophical Christian swindler, making all kinds of experiments upon poor human nature with as little mercy as an entomologist pins beetles. 

For sale by F. A. Brown. 

*** 

"The Fiddler" ascribed to Melville in THE CHURCHMAN, edited by Henry Norman Hudson

Henry Norman Hudson (1814-1886)
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Herman Melville's short story "The Fiddler" first appeared, uncredited as usual for magazine fiction of the time, in the September 1854 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

Melville's narrator in The Fiddler is Helmstone, a proud classicist and poet. Helmstone seems appealingly earnest though self-absorbed and over-ambitious, at first, of critical acclaim and "immortal fame." Distraught by bad reviews of his last poem, Helmstone bumps into a friend named Standard on Broadway. There they meet Standard's acquaintance Hautboy, happily on his way to the circus to see a renowned clown. Hautboy is a grown man, fortyish, but joys in the circus performance like a child. After the show they join "crowds of others" at the fabulous Taylor's Saloon, downing "stews and punches" while seated "at one of the small marble tables." Although moved by the "clear honest cheeriness" that Hautboy exhibited at the circus, Helmstone doubts his ability to do more than laugh and clap. Clearly he's no genius, this Hautboy. So thinks Helmstone before hearing Hautboy play his "dented old fiddle." And says out loud during Hautboy's absence from their table at Taylor's. In response, Standard mysteriously alludes to "Master Betty," the once-famous child actor William Henry West Betty. Helmstone is baffled by his friend's reference to the celebrated British virtuoso until he actually hears Hautboy (at Hautboy's home, off Broadway) doing "Yankee Doodle" and other popular tunes with "the bow of an enchanter," like "an Orpheus." Through Standard, the narrator learns Hautboy's true identity and humble occupation, teaching music "from house to house." Helmstone instantly recognizes the real name of Hautboy (whispered in his ear by Standard) as a favorite entertainer whom he had enthusiastically cheered and applauded "in the theater" as a boy. Thus chastened, the narrator ditches his poems in manuscript and buys a fiddle. Instead of writing, Helmstone will take lessons from Hautboy and let go his dreams of literary glory.

William H. Gilman in Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York University Press and Oxford University Press, 1951) at page 316, note 148 identified Joseph Burke (1815-1902) as the likeliest real-life model for Melville's fictional fiddler, Hautboy. As a child in the early 1830's Melville could have seen "Master Burke" perform in Albany, New York and, like his narrator Helmstone in "The Fiddler," made himself "hoarse" from yelling and "applauding that name in the theatre."

MASTER BURKE as ROMEO.
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Later in the last century, John M. J. Gretchko began a provocative essay on sexually suggestive wordplay and germane historical contexts in "The Fiddler" by calling attention to the anonymity that Melville might have expected and indeed preferred; see "Fiddling with Melville's 'Fiddler'" in Melville Society Extracts Number 104 (March 1996) pages 20-23 at page 20. Citing Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Did Melville Write "The Fiddler"? Harvard Library Bulletin 26 (January 1978) pages 77-80, Gretchko observed that the story's original anonymity in some measure appears to have encouraged the later, false attribution of "The Fiddler" to Fitz-James O'Brien. As demonstrated by Sealts, and duly affirmed in the 1987 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, edited by G. Thomas Tanselle, Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, strong external evidence for Melville's authorship of "The Fiddler" is supplied by Melville's wife Elizabeth Shaw Melville, who 

listed "The Fiddler" in her memoranda of her husband's periodical pieces and kept a copy of it in her collection of his magazine stories. -- Northwestern-Newberry Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, Editorial Appendix, Notes on "The Fiddler," page 692.

What's new today on Melvilliana, unrecorded in Melville scholarship before now, is my discovery of an early and explicit attribution of "The Fiddler" to Herman Melville in the New York Churchman of September 9, 1854, contemporary with the story's first, anonymous publication in Harper's magazine. 

New York Churchman - September 9, 1854

"The Fiddler" was seldom referenced in newspaper roundups of periodical literature and, except in the Churchman, never linked to Herman Melville. Despite the rarity of any notice at all, the Churchman editor discloses Melville's authorship of "The Fiddler" positively and rather casually, not so much as breaking news but as a matter of fact, familiar to insiders in New York City. Accompanied by a line of plot summary, this so-far unique contemporary attribution of "The Fiddler" to Herman Melville appeared in the last issue of the Churchman to be edited by H. N. Hudson. A Vermonter by birth, Henry Norman Hudson was already well known for his trenchant literary criticism and popular lectures on Shakespeare. As shown by Mark Bayer, "Hudson was a prolific scholar, editor, and educator" whose influence on Shakespeare studies in the United States deserves fuller appreciation and respect. 

• Bayer, Mark. “Henry Norman Hudson and the Origins of American Shakespeare Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2017): 271–95. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48559742.

Middlebury Vermont Register - January 5, 1853
via genealogybank.com

Because the department of Literature was indisputably Hudson's domain, I think reviews and notices therein may reasonably be charged to his account during his short and stormy tenure of twenty months as editor, from January 1853 through September 9, 1854. Whether he supplied the content of every item is impossible to determine without more information. 

Articles Hudson did not approve of allegedly had been solicited or planted by owner John Hecker. Real or imagined, his employer's interference eventually motivated Hudson's resignation. By his own account, however, the editorial meddling that most offended Hudson had dealt with Church doctrine and traditions, as he specified soon after his departure in a letter to the New York Times dated Sept. 16, 1854, and printed there on September 20, 1854. Hudson would be succeeded as editor of the Churchman by Thomas Ramsay, a British layman. As revealed in Hudson's letter to the editor of the New York Times, Ramsay had written the two-part article "Our Mother Church of England" supposedly foisted on Hudson by his domineering boss.

Whether Hudson was too impractical or too temperamental, or whether the proprietor was a little impatient, we can not be sure. That friction arose is entirely certain and that Hudson was firmly determined to have no more of it is equally plain. He resigned, he announced in THE CHURCHMAN (September 9, 1854), because the proprietor was setting "the editorial department at strife and controversy with itself" by engaging outside writers without consulting the editor.  -- Clifton H. Brewer on "The History of The Churchman: Some Old-Time Editors" in The Churchman Volume 132 (November 28, 1925) pages 10-11.

In this light, as rebellious littérateur, Henry Norman Hudson looks and acts like a ballsy Bartleby. And talks a bit like Turkey, another of Melville's characters in Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853). In the afore-cited letter to the New York Times, Hudson adopts Turkey's catch-phrase with submission:

"With submission, then, I must still think that I was substantially right in making the announcement as I did."

On his last day at work, September 9, 1854, editor H. N. Hudson chose to notice two contributions by Melville in different magazines, "The Fiddler" in Harper's and several chapters of "Israel Potter" in Putnam's. In "Harper's Magazine for September" the Churchman editor acknowledges only three items. Ignored altogether are three new chapters from Thackeray's new novel, The Newcomes. Instead, Hudson notices

a sketch, "The Fiddler," by MELVILLE, showing how an author, as the world goes, may be reconciled to the failure of his volume....

Brief as it is, this treatment of "The Fiddler" in the Churchman features a handy summary of the story's moral along with the casual attribution to Melville. Both the commentary and the attribution are unparalleled. In Hudson's selective survey of Harper's for September, the notice of "The Fiddler" appears in between mentions of an "illustrated paper on the old Dutch times of Manhattan" (uncredited in Harper's but associated by Hudson with "the competent resources" of Benson John Lossing) and Tayler Lewis on the "Unity of the Human Race" (sole topic of the unsigned essay taking up the whole "Editor's Table" that month, starting with the question, "IS THE HUMAN RACE ONE OR MANY?"). 

In the same column of the Churchman, surveying the contents of another prominent American journal, the editor went on to notice the latest installment of Melville's Israel Potter, as serialized in the September 1854 issue of Putnam's Monthly Magazine:

Putnam's Monthly has an elaborate article, clearly written, on the "Parties and Politics" of the country, past and present; several interesting descriptive papers of American nature; a continuation of Israel Potter's Fifty Years of Exile, the main incidents of which are founded on fact. POTTER was wounded at Bunker Hill, was captured by the British in an attempt to cut off their supplies in Boston harbour, and was carried to England. He was actually employed by FRANKLIN, as represented by MELVILLE in this embellished account of his career, the interest of which is well developed in the present number. 

Elsewhere in the same issue, Hudson gave a different sort of notice, announcing his decision to quit the newspaper for good.

"... it only remains for the Editor to inform the readers, that from henceforth he is not, and must not be held, responsible for the editorial conduct of the paper; and that he will withdraw from all connection with it as soon as practicable."  -- New York Churchman, September 9, 1854

At present the online archive at Newspapers.com has digital images of The Churchman for two years only, 1854 (10 months, March through December) and 1855 (two months, January and February), generously furnished by the Brooklyn Public Library. Hopefully, future searches in other digital and print archives will uncover additional references to Herman Melville's magazine fiction. It would be wonderful to find some notice of Bartleby, for instance, in November or December 1853; or "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" which first appeared in the December 1853 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine Magazine. 

For now I can offer three additional Melville items that appeared in the New York Churchman when edited by Henry Norman Hudson. In the Churchman for March 11, 1854, Hudson favorably noticed the opening sketch of "The Encantadas" in Putnam's Monthly. 

New York Churchman - March 11, 1854

Putnam's Monthly for March has the commencement of a series of papers by HERMAN MELVILLE, sketches of the barren islands of the Gallapagos, under the equator, on the Pacific. His opening sentence shows his graphic hand,-- "Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas or Enchanted Isles."

On April 22, 1854 the Churchman editor observed that "Putnam's Monthly for April continues Mr. MELVILLE"S Encantadas...."

Hudson also gave a shout-out to Melville in a long review of George W. Peck's Melbourne, and the Chincha Islands; with Sketches of Lima, and a Voyage round the World (New York: Charles Scribner, 1854); this mention appeared in the Churchman for May 6, 1854. 

New York Churchman - May 6, 1854

But we turn to more agreeable incidents. A sailor's dinner is a thing to be relished all the world over. Who does not remember, in Mr. MELVILLE'S capital book "Redburn," the achievements of that young gentleman on his first voyage when, at Liverpool, "he goes to supper at the sign of the 'Baltimore Clipper'," and the ardent company "wrapt themselves in hot jackets of beef-steaks." This is the kind of thing to give a wholesome shock to the dyspeptic. Would you know what appetite really is, of what this admirable structure is capable, flee Delmonico's and the St. Nicholas, the jaded tables of the Fifth avenue, and place yourself alongside of a potent skipper of the seas in DORAN's modest mansion, which rises amidst the incense of fiery oyster sacrifices in the very heart of the Fulton Market--or, for the same number of shillings, you may enjoy Mr. PECK's hardly less substantial feast at Melbourne. 

Reviewing Peck, Hudson directly quotes from Redburn Chapter 28.

Under Thomas Ramsay's editorial watch, the New York Churchman for June 5, 1856 featured a favorable review of The Piazza Tales; reprinted by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker in their great collection Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009) at pages 475-476. The Contemporary Reviews volume (see page 500) also has the brief notice of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade in the New York Churchman for April 30, 1857. 

Also reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, at pages 394-395, the review of Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale that appeared in the Churchman for December 6, 1851. William Walton then edited the Churchman. On Walton's watch, the Churchman appreciated the "character of the monomaniac Captain Ahab" as "a novelty, and powerfully drawn," but found it "pitiable to see so much talent perverted to sneers at revealed religion and the burlesquing of sacred passages of Holy Writ."

New York Daily Times - November 13, 1852

Cleaning up now with the aim of good housekeeping, I would suggest that the otherwise unidentified "Mr. Hudson" on page 249 in the first volume of Jay Leyda's good old Melville Log (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) could well be Henry Norman Hudson, then a resident of Boston and well known for his lectures on Shakespeare. Leyda thus quotes Ida Russell in a letter dated July 8, 1847 to her cousin Richard Henry Dana, Jr.:

"Mr. Herman Melville is expected to take tea with us tomorrow which is Friday afternoon he would like to meet you . . . If you see Mr. Hudson will you be so kind as to extend the invitation to him.  

I intend only to ask a few Dr. Vinton among others. If any other members of your family are in town I wish they would come."

Possibly Melville got to meet Dana and "Mr. Hudson" the next day on Friday, July 9, 1847, at tea with Ida Russell. In any event, Henry Norman Hudson's presence in Boston is definitely established by extant letters to Evert A. Duyckinck, accessible courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Most relevant there is Hudson's newsy 3-page letter from Boston dated March 27, 1847. Citation:

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Hudson, Henry Norman (1814-86)" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 16, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9462eaa0-69fc-0133-794f-00505686a51c

Looking further into the identity of Ida Russell's "Mr. Hudson," I just learned that Roma Rosen nominated Henry Norman Hudson 63 years ago in Melville's Uses of Shakespeare's Plays (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1962). As Rosen reasons, 

"There is a possibility that the "Mr. Hudson" mentioned in Miss Russell's invitation was the Shakespearean critic and that Melville met him, too, on this occasion." (pages 183-184)

Rosen makes a great case for the influence of Hudson's negative view of Polonius in Lectures on Shakespeare Volume 2 (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1848) pages 119-121 on the equally salty commentary of Charlie in the Confidence-Man Chapter 30. 

In the first two months of 1847, Henry Norman Hudson made a hit with his two-part review of Philip James Bailey's Festus, A Poem in the American Whig Review: 

"This book has come to us, wafted on a perfect gale of puffery."

Hudson's 1847 review of Festus very likely influenced Melville's critique of Transcendentalism in Pierre (1852), as James Duban argues in Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination (Northern Illinois University Press, 1983) at pages 172-176. John Stafford in The Literary Criticism of Young America (University of California Press, 1952) at page 102 recalls how

"Henry Norman Hudson thoroughly dissected P. J. Bailey's Festus for the Whig Review, objecting to its liberal and transcendental philosophy, its liberal and democratic politics.

At page 127 of the same book, Stafford pairs Hudson and George Washington Peck as New England "farm boys," both of whom became "conservative supporters of the Establishment party," more or less in opposition to democratic Young Americans and their Manhattan champion, Evert A. Duyckinck. 

Hudson's two-volume work, Lectures on Shakespeare (Baker and Scribner, 1848) is Number 376 in Melville's Sources by Mary  K. Bercaw (Northwestern University Press, 1987). Listed there on page 92, citing H. J. Lang who had proposed Hudson's 1848 Lectures on Shakespeare as a source for "Benito Cereno" and Billy Budd in "Poe in Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" English Studies Today, Fifth Series (1973) pages 405-429. 

From the obituary of Henry Norman Hudson, "the well known Shakespearian scholar," as published in the Boston Evening Transcript on January 18, 1886: 

... Personally Mr. Hudson was said to be a man of marked peculiarities. He cared little for the opinions of others where they were at variance with his own, and would not have been troubled if he had had to stand against the world. He had the courage of his convictions almost more than any other man of his time. In appearance he was thought to resemble Carlyle. His life work had been primarily the study of the one great subject of Shakespeare, and his English text-books were a vigorous protest "against putting young students through a course of mere nibbles and snatches from a multitude of authors, where they cannot stay long enough with any one to develop any real taste for him or derive any solid benefit from him." In 1852 he married Emily S., the oldest daughter of the late Henry Bright of Northampton. His son is a merchant in Omaha. 

Also published in the year of Hudson's death, Jeremiah Eames Rankin's public address The Shakespeare Interpreter (Middlebury, Vermont, 1886), concluding with a fine memorial tribute to Henry Norman Hudson on pages 29-42. 

For more in the way of 19th century biography, see the entry for HENRY NORMAN HUDSON in the Cyclopædia of American Literature, Volume 2, edited by Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856) pages 597-599. A later, more succinct treatment may be found in the New International Encyclopædia, Volume 9, edited by Daniel Coit Gilman, Harry Thurston Peck, and Frank Moore Colby (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903) at page 630. 

HUDSON, HENRY NORMAN (1814-86). An American Shakespearean scholar and editor, born at Cornwall, Addison Co., Vt. In early life he worked as a baker and a wheelwright. He graduated from Middlebury College, Vermont, in 1840, and then taught school in Kentucky and Alabama. He presently became an authority of considerable note on Shakespeare, lectured widely on his works, and was appointed a professor in Boston University. Among his works in this field are: Lectures on Shakespeare ( 2 vols., 1848); a valuable annotated edition (11 vols.,1851-56); and Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters (2 vols., 1872). Having entered the priesthood of the Protestant Episcopal Church, he was for some years editor of the Churchman; was rector at Litchfield, Conn., 1859-60, and served as chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War. On his return he published A Chaplain's Campaign with General Butler (1865). He was author also of Sermons (1874); Studies in Wordsworth (1884); Essays in Education (1884); and other works. 

Related post 

• H. N. Hudson, 1847 letter to Evert A. Duyckinck
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/04/h-n-hudson-1847-letter-to-evert.html

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