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Monday, May 11, 2020

Omoo in Prentice's Louisville Journal

George Dennison Prentice. Painting by Christian Mayr
c. 1844-5. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Here's another favorable Melville notice in the Louisville Journal, the weekly edition, edited by George Dennison Prentice. Before the pandemic I stuck it in the earlier post on Moby-Dick in the Louisville Journal. This notice of Omoo in the Louisville Weekly Journal turns up in the digital archives of historical newspapers at GenealogyBank by searching for "Mellville" rather than "Melville."

Without a central, searchable database of Melville reviews yet, it's no easy matter to determine if a possibly new find is really "new" in the sense of previously uncollected. Let's try anyway, for the benefits of exercise and discipline...
☑ Not transcribed or listed in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009).  
 ☑ Not in Kevin J. Hayes and Hershel Parker, Checklist of Melville Reviews (Northwestern University Press, 1991). Revised from the 1975 Checklist by Steven Mailloux and Hershel Parker.
 ☑ Not in George Monteiro, Herman Melville: Fugitive References (1845-1922), Resources for American Literary Study Volume 33 (2008; AMS Press, 2010) pages 19-93. Monteiro points out in the introduction at page 20 that "a search using other terms (including misspellings of the obvious terms) may well turn up additional references." 
☑ Not in Scott Norsworthy, Melville Reviews and Notices, Continued, Leviathan, vol. 13 no. 1, 2011, pages 88-115. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/493025.
☑ Not in Richard E. Winslow III, New Melville Reviews Surface." Melville Society Extracts 113 (June 1998) pages 8-15. 
☑ Not in Richard E. Winslow III, "Contemporary Notice of Melville at Home and Abroad." Melville Society Extracts 106 (September 1996) pages 1-11. 
☑ Not in Richard E. Winslow III, "New Reviews Trace Melville's Reputation." Melville Society Extracts 89 (June 1992) pages 7-12. 
☑ Not in Gary Scharnhorst, "More Uncollected Melville Reviews and Notices." Melville Society Extracts 106 (September 1996) pages 12-14.  
☑ Not in Gary Scharnhorst, "More Nineteenth Century Melville Reviews." Melville Society Extracts 89 (June 1992) pages 1-6. 
☑ Not in Gary Scharnhorst, "Melville Bibliography 1846-1897: A Sheaf of Uncollected Excerpts, Notices and Reviews." Two-part article in Melville Society Extracts 74 (September 1988) pages 8-12; and 75 (November 1988) pages 3-8.  
☑ Not in Burton R. Pollin, "Melville in Richmond, Figaro! and Elsewhere." Melville Society Extracts 89 (June 1992) pages 14-18. 
☑ Not in Kent P. Ljungquist, "Melville in the Newspapers: Some Uncollected Reviews and Notices." Melville Society Extracts 89 (June 1992) pages 19-24.
 ☑ Not in Sonja Krusic and Kevin J. Hayes, "Melville Reviews South and West." Melville Society Extracts 86 (September 1991) pages 6-8. [First page 6 currently not present in The Melville Society-Extracts Archive; page 5 with previous article has been scanned twice by mistake.]
A really serious and thorough examination of published scholarship would also need to consult mega databases like
☑ EBSCO HUMANITIES SOURCE ULTIMATE
<https://www.ebsco.com/products/research-databases/humanities-source-ultimate>
☑ EBSCO MLA INTERNATIONAL BIOGRPAHY 
☑ GALE <https://www.gale.com/open-access>
☑ JSTOR <https://www.jstor.org/> 
☑ Project MUSE (includes Leviathan) <https://muse.jhu.edu/> and 
☑ ProQuest <https://www.proquest.com/>
Relevant content in these behemoths is accessible either by individual subscription (mine include JSTOR and Leviathan in Project MUSE) or via the nearest academic library that can afford them. For my test case of Omoo, JSTOR and ProQuest yield the highly relevant study by James L. Machor, Reading the Rinsings of the Cup in Nineteenth-Century Literature Vol. 59, No. 1 (June 2004) pages 53-77. All about the early reception of Omoo, but nothing there about George D. Prentice or the Louisville Journal.

I also like to double-check Hershel Parker's Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002; and Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. Northwestern University Press, 2012. Parker in V1 of his biography at page 314 has the reference to George D. Prentice as "Prentiss the witty editor of the Louisville Journal" in Allan Melville's October 1844 letter to Herman. No further mention of Prentice there, or any Melville notice in the Louisville Journal. Kevin J. Hayes keeps discovering new items, so it's a good idea to consult his brisk but fact-rich biography Herman Melville (Reaktion Books, 2017); and Melville in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017), edited by Hayes with topical chapters contributed by dozens of distinguished scholars. 
Louisville Weekly Journal - June 16, 1847 via GenealogyBank
NEW WORKS.-- Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, by Herman Mellville. Mr. Mellville's former work, Typee, met with extraordinary favor. It was universally pronounced one of the most interesting books of adventures ever given to the public. The present work relates the adventures which afterwards befel the author in the South seas. It is a most pleasant book, and contains a great deal of information in regard to the Polynesian islands which cannot be elsewhere procured. It will doubtless be eagerly sought for by all those who have read the author's former work, and we advise our readers generally to do likewise. The title has a strange and foreign sound. Omoo is a word, as the author tells us, borrowed from the dialect of the Marquesas islands, where it signifies a rover, or rather a person who wanders from one island to another.

It is for sale by Mr. G. W. Noble, at the Literary Depot. 
The New York Public Library has The Poems of George D. Prentice (Cincinnati, 1876), Google-digitized and accessible courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library.

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