London Weekly Dispatch on The Confidence-Man

Found among recently digitized images of historic newspapers on The British Newspaper Archive and transcribed by me below, a review of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man in the London Weekly Dispatch for Sunday, 26 April 1857. Previously unrecorded in Melville scholarship I think--pages from the Weekly Dispatch and Sunday Dispatch were not available on the British Newspaper Archive before October 2020.

THE CONFIDENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE. BY HERMAN MELVILLE.—Longman and Co., Paternoster-row.— This volume may come very properly under the denomination of Psychological fiction (or any quite as vague or definite, which ever the reader pleases), but it is, in structure and style, in manner, as in matter, as distinct from any of those former magnificent productions of Herman Melville's gifted pen as it is possible to conceive. We confess ourselves puzzled by it, while all the time, a clear analysis of social cant, sham assent to philanthropic dogmas and maxims, which we all ignore (more or less) when put to the test, and a demonstration that selfishness is substituted for confidence in daily and mutual intercourse are fully perceptible. His agent is a masquerader of many parts, assumptions and pretensions, each one more protean and elusive than the other, but each, and every one, harping upon "confidence," the test being, asking frankly for a hundred dollars upon the basis of an unquestioning "confidence" in the representations made. The deduction is, that there is no great reliance placed, or to be placed, in the frank virtue of " confidence " but which, in the form of the expressive platitude "No Trust" (in theory or in practice), is not quite so clear a fact as may be thought. Hospitals, innumerable schools, asylums, places of repentance, of reformation, homes of health, of sanity, &c., without number, have been built, and are supported through "confidence." What means "supported by voluntary subscriptions" but "confidence"? How is it that so many thousand begging-letter impostors live, and live well, but upon the "letter of credit" drawn upon "confidence"? We have not quite lost confidence in each other, bad as the world may be, and "backward as we all may be in going forward." Is it astonishing to the author that his agent should meet with so many rebuffs, that a little solid basis for this "confidence" (value 100 dollars) should be required? If we have got hold of his purpose at all (and we may very easily have failed from the eccentric adumbra veiling his "masquerade") he has not proved his point. If we have not we cannot understand him. Besides, what is glorious rhapsody, almost poetry, in "Moby Dick," for instance, is in this volume, "prose" — that is to say, "prosy"—and we regret to say it. Flashes of the man's strong and striking originality appear not unfrequently; but these cast only a lambent glare upon the misty moorland of his hidden meaning. He may mean that which we cannot solve; and the Œdipus is, therefore, to be found—will be found without question, and questionless with ease. It is a book to read, however queer and quaint, tedious, yet oracular; and, as a specimen of what is to be met with in its pages, take the following: — 

FRIENDS (WITH "CONFIDENCE") WANTED. 

[excerpt from The Confidence-Man chapter 19] "My name is Thomas Fry. Until my 23rd year, I went by the nickname of Happy Tom—happy—ha, ha! They called me Happy Tom, d'ye see? because I was so good-natured and laughing all the time, just as I am now—ha, ha!" Upon this, the herb-doctor would, perhaps, have run, but once more the hyæna clawed him. Presently, sobering down, he continued:— "Well, I was born in New York, and there I lived a steady, hard-working man, a cooper by trade. One evening I went to a political meeting in the Park — for you must know, I was in those days a great patriot. As bad luck would have it, there was trouble near, between a gentleman who had been drinking wine and a pavior who was sober. The pavior chewed tobacco, and the gentleman said it was beastly in him, and pushed him, wanting to have his place. The pavior chewed on, and pushed back. Well, the gentleman carried a sword-cane, and presently the pavior was down—skewered." "How was that?" "Why you see the pavior undertook something above his strength." "The other must have been a Samson then. 'Strong as a pavior,' is a proverb." "So it is, and the gentleman was in body a rather weakly man, but for all that, I say again, the pavior undertook something above his strength." "What are you talking about'? He tried to maintain his rights, didn't he ?" "Yes; but for all that, I say again, he undertook something above his strength." "I don't understand you. But go on." "Along with the gentleman, I, with other witnesses, was taken to the Tombs. There was an examination, and, to appear at the trial, the gentleman and witnesses all gave bail—I mean all but me." "And why didn't you?" "Could'nt get it." "Steady, hard-working cooper like you; what was the reason you could'nt get bail?" "Steady, hard-working cooper hadn't no friends. Well, souse I went into a wet cell, like a canal-boat splashing into the lock; locked up in pickle, d'ye see? against the time of the trial." "But what had you done?" "Why, I hadn't got any friends, I tell ye. A worse crime than murder, as yell see afore long." "Murder? Did the wounded man die?" "Died the third night." "Then the gentleman's bail didn't help him. Imprisoned now, wasn't he?" "Had too many friends. No, it was I that was imprisoned.— But I was going on: They let me walk about the corridor day by day but at night I must into lock. There the wet and the damp struck into my bones. They doctored me, but no use. When the trial came, I was boosted up and said my say." "And what was that?" "My say was that I saw the steel go in, and saw it sticking in." "And that hung the gentleman?" "Hung him with a gold chain! His friends called a meeting in the Park, and presented him with a gold watch and chain upon his acquittal." "Acquittal?" "Didn't I say he had friends?" There was a pause, broken at last by the herb-doctor's saying:— "Well, there is a bright side to everything. If this speak prosaically for justice, it speaks romantically for friendship? But go on, my fine fellow." "My say being said, they told me I might go. I said I could not without help. So the constables helped me, asking where would I go? I told them back to the 'Tombs.' I knew no other place. 'But where are your friends?' said they. 'I have none.' So they put me into a hand-barrow with an awning to it, and wheeled me down to the dock and on board a boat, and away to Blackwell's Island to the Corporation Hospital. There I got worse—got pretty much as you see me now. Couldn't cure me. After three years, I grew sick of lying in a grated iron bed alongside of groaning thieves and mouldering burglars. They gave me five silver dollars, and these crutches, and I hobbled off. I had an only brother who went to Indiana, years ago. I begged about, to make up a sum to go to him; got to Indiana at last, and they directed me to his grave. It was on a great plain, in a log churchyard with a stump fence, the old gray roots sticking all ways like moose-antlers. The bier, set over the grave, it being the last dug, was of green hickory; bark on, and green twigs sprouting from it. Some one had planted a bunch of violets on the mound, but it was a poor soil (always choose the poorest soils for grave-yards), and they were all dried to tinder. I was going to sit and rest myself on the bier, and think about my brother in heaven, but the bier broke down, the legs being only tacked. So, after driving some hogs out of the yard that were rooting there, I came away, and, not to make too long a story of it, here I am, drifting down stream like any other bit of wreck." 

Surveying Putnam's Monthly Magazine for July and August 1855, the same newspaper had noticed "a wild fiction called 'The Bell Tower'" in the August issue:

"... from the wild, fitful and deeply sculptured arabesque of the style (if we may be permitted so to designate it), we should at once point out Herman Melville as the author."

-- London Weekly Dispatch, 2 September 1855.