Saturday, January 11, 2025

Mr. Whipple, the Reviewer for GRAHAM'S MAGAZINE, 1849-1853


Graham's Magazine for April 1853 offered a long and extremely favorable tribute to Edwin Percy Whipple, highly esteemed at the time as a leading American critic, essayist, and lecturer. 
Signed "J.G.D." (who's that?), the article is so full of extravagant praise, I could not help wondering if some of it was meant to be understood as satire. Reading again, allowing plenty of room for hyperbole, I take the writer to be fairly and squarely in Mr. Whipple's corner. Nonetheless, the style of writing displays a Melvillean delight in the play of language and use of literary and rhetorical devices (assonance and alliteration, bathos, antithesis, puns, innumerable allusions) for ironic or comic effects. However you regard the lionizing of E. P. Whipple in the April 1853 issue of Graham's, HERMAN MELVILLE is already in the house--thanks to "J. G. D." the author, who prefaces the article with an epigraph borrowed from the "Pleasant Shady Talk" of Melville's devil-possessed philosopher Babbalanja in the second volume of Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849):


EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE.  

"The [True] critics are more rare than true poets. A great critic is a sultan among satraps; but pretenders are thick as ants striving to scale a palm after its aerial sweetness." — HERMAN MELVILLE.

From the jump then, "J. G. D." self-identifies as a genuine Melville aficionado. A fan even of Mardi❣ ❣❣ With this rarest of quotes for an epigraph, the claim for the greatness of Mr. Whipple as a literary critic will be argued in light of Melville's pronouncement on the scarcity of sultanic "true critics," as opposed to the plenitude of pretenders. This, in Melville's lofty palm of a book which the pretentious ant-critics had striven mightily to scale, and hate on. Outside of Mardi itself, the chosen quotation appears nowhere else in the gigantic digitized collection of searchable works at HathiTrust Digital Library until 1921, when Raymond M. Weaver used it in the landmark biography Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran Company). 

Now for a sample of the author's entertaining prose style, at once bluff yet abundantly expressive, being rich in creative word choices, metaphors and conceits: 

  • Mr. Whipple "is all free from the supple superciliousness and the common cant, strut, swagger, twaddle, and conceit of reviewing." (page 448)
  • Interesting military metaphor here--bordering on astronomy, as in Dupont's Round Fight, one of Melville's Civil War poems in Battle-Pieces: "None of his faculties ever sally out foraging or frolicking on their own account, but are all marshaled in orderly array, and move together in unity." (448)
  • "Between the motion of Mr. Whipple's thoughts and those of most men, there is about the same difference as between the movements of a catamount and a caterpillar." (449)
  • Whipple's brand of criticism "gives no quarter to vapid and pithless pretension, overweening fatuity, genteel immorality, saint-seeming hypocrisy, or silly slim flimsiness; he especially whips all vulgar elegant idlers and foul fools, all wanton literary aggressors--whether they carry a pike against a man, or only a pique--" (450)
  • "neat as a nut" (450)
  • "to stir a saint... or tickle a cultivated sinner" (451)
  • "He is neither a mystic nor a worldling...." (451)
  • "earnest as an ancient prophet, and sharp as a pick-pocket.” (451)
  • "True genius is the transfiguration of common sense, and not the annihilation of it." (452)

Late in the article, "J.G.D." scorns the "intense inanity" exhibited in the patronizing London Athenæum review (November 22, 1851) of Whipple's collected lectures on Literature and Life (Boston, 1850):

"It is very questionable whether blind noodles, boobies and snobs are the fit persons to judge of works of genius;--and the London Athenæum, if that be a fair sample of its literary verdicts, may safely be set down as a remarkably owly concern."

This deliciously worded dismissal of "literary verdicts," plural, handed down by transatlantic "noodles,  boobies and snobs," also plural, might easily be applied to the influentially bad review of The Whale as "an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact," published the month before in the same English journal.

To be sure, the excessive, zestful, over-the-top style adopted by "J. G. D." is not suited to everybody's taste. One fellow-journalist in Philadelphia complained of the "rhapsody of adjectives" loosed in the "High Falutin" tribute to Mr. Whipple. 

Pennsylvania Freeman - April 7, 1853
"HIGH FALUTIN." -- A writer in the last number of Graham's Magazine, goes into a rhapsody of adjectives, over the merits of Mr. Edwin P. Whipple. Here are specimens: 
"His integral character, the vast but facile and benign power of his nature," has hitherto received but a "slim appreciation." He has an "ethereal, colossal, and commanding intellect,--a sturdy, circumspective, foresightful, spirit-piercing sagacity;" and as a "lucid and reliable, racy and candid and decisive" "interpretative critic," he is "the most obviously excellent and most widely known." His style is "most affluent, clear, terse, plastic, pictorial, philologically perfect, and correct to a comma."

There; that is enough for our readers at once. We pity those who have to take the whole at one dose.  -- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Freeman, April 7, 1853
But hold up. Can it really be, that this sultan of 19th century lit crit never said a mumbling word in public about any work by Herman Melville? Come to think about it, how in the world could "J. G. D." have endorsed Mr. Whipple so effusively and exclusively, indulging in such a "rhapsody of adjectives," if said Mr. Whipple had never stooped to review Melville's Mardi, that portentous allegory from which the singularly rare epigraph to the article on "Edwin Percy Whipple" derives? 

As Hugh Hetherington harrumphed in a footnote to Melville's Reviewers: British and American, 1846-1891 (University of North Carolina Press, 1961), with explicit reference to the praise for Whipple's superior "intellect" in the 1853 article in Graham's,
"This great mind does not seem to have shown any awareness of the existence of Melville." (Melville's Reviewers, page 9)

In stark contrast to the seemingly indifferent Mr. Whipple of Boston with his presumed neglect of Melville's genius, Hetherington proposes Bayard Taylor as the "real Melville enthusiast" who penned the remarkably sympathetic reviews in Graham's Magazine of Mardi (June 1849) and Redburn (January 1850).

Hetherington's conjectural assignment of these two reviews in Graham's to Bayard Taylor would not be adopted in subsequent collections of Melville reviews. Although Bayard Taylor did serve briefly as nominal editor of Graham's and continued to submit occasional pieces, the contributions of Taylor and other big-name authors were credited to attract more readers and hopefully increase sales of the magazine. Hetherington's chief authority for information about Graham's is Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (New York, 1930). The first volume of Mott's History incorporates findings published in his earlier study, A Brief History of 'Graham's Magazine'.

  • Mott, Frank Luther. “A Brief History of ‘Graham’s Magazine.’” Studies in Philology, vol. 25, no. 3, 1928, pp. 362–74. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4172007. Accessed 10 Jan. 2025.

Mott emphasized the limited role of Taylor who even in 1848 "was never more than a contributing editor." Also in the earlier study, Mott placed Mr. Whipple in the corps of regular contributors to Graham's, as reorganized in 1849-1850: "Edwin P. Whipple wrote articles and reviews." 

Boston Evening Transcript - August 20, 1850
via newspapers.com
Whipple's role as "the Reviewer" for Graham's magazine in this period was openly acknowledged in a newspaper article first published in the Oswego NY Commercial Times and reprinted in several Massachusetts newspapers. (Published in Oswego, New York by James N. Brown, the Commercial Times on November 26, 1851 plugged Moby-Dick as a "welcome" new book, "written with considerable spirit" and loaded with "wit and humor.") The earliest reprinting of "MR WHIPPLE, THE REVIEWER" I have found so far appeared under that heading in the Boston Evening Transcript of August 20, 1850. 

Boston Emancipator & Republican - August 29, 1850
via genealogybank.com
Possibly Whipple himself had supplied a good deal of useful information about his life and literary career to the anonymous writer of "Mr. Whipple, the Reviewer." Some of the same biographical details are disclosed in extant letters from Whipple to Rufus W. Griswold, accessible online via Digital Commonwealth. As stated in the unsigned newspaper article, the recent two-volume collection of Whipple's Essays and Reviews (New York: D. Appleton, 1850) reprinted many pieces that had originally appeared in the prestigious Boston quarterly, the North American Review. Also just out at the time, the aforementioned volume of Whipple's Lectures on Subjects Connected with Literature and Life (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850), the English reprint of which would get ridiculously undervalued according to "J.G.D." by condescending twits ("blind noodles, boobies and snobs") at the London Athenæum. 

Salem, Mass. Register - September 15, 1850
via genealogybank.com
What's new, and crucial for the investigation now underway, is the public acknowledgement of Mr. Whipple's generally unheralded work for George Rex Graham of Philadelphia:
"For several years past, the Critical Notices in Graham's Magazine, have been written by Mr. Whipple. He dispatches this description of writing with astonishing facility, entire faithfulness, and unerring judgment."
A bit more casually, the National Era listed the unsigned "critical Notices by Mr. Whipple" among "especially commendable" highlights in the August 1850 issue of Graham's Magazine, alongside credited contributions of a poem by Bayard Taylor and a short story by Caroline Chesebro. In this issue Whipple had also contributed the long essay on Wordsworth over the initial "P." for his middle name, Percy. Presumably when speaking of unspecified, plural "critical notices" the Washington, D.C. National Era editor refers to the section near the end of each monthly installment in Graham's, usually titled "Review of New Books."
Washington, D. C. National Era - August 8, 1850
By 1850, according to the promotional newspaper item featuring "Mr. Whipple the Reviewer," Whipple had obtained at least two years of experience in the role of reviewer at Graham's, having "for several years past" been responsible for producing "the Critical Notices in Graham's Magazine." 

Writing from Boston on April 26, 1847 about his slot in the proposed volume on the Prose Writers of America, Whipple modestly instructed editor Rufus W. Griswold to 

"leave out of your notice of me, all biographical matter except the time when and the place where I was born, and the fact that I am engaged in Commercial pursuits. Cut out likewise the tremendous puff about my style being Milton and Addison fused together."
I'm guessing Griswold had little time to oblige these requests even if he wanted to. At any rate, Whipple still comes last in the published arrangement of authors, against his wishes. And Griswold's fulsome intro still includes the biographical tidbits and this "tremendous puff" that Whipple asked to be dropped:

"Though he is no copyist, some of his articles suggest a fusion of the strength of the Aeropagitica with the ease and liveliness of the Spectator."

At the close of the same letter Whipple chastised Griswold for his "shabby genteel damnation" of Cornelius Mathews. Good heavens! too bad Perry Miller did not have this passage to enrich his classic study The Raven and the Whale (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956):

I am glad to hear that you are well. I am sorry that Duyckinck published that article in the World. It is very one-sided and harsh. However you drew down the lightning on your own head by your shabby genteel damnation of Mathews. I always make it a rule never to join in when there is a cry of condemnation against a fellow creature and author. Mathews has not had justice done him, and therefore he is to be tenderly touched. You may depend upon it that his influence across the water will be against you if you do not modify your criticism upon him. I wish you would take out some of the eulogy on me and put it on to Cornelius. You would not, in that case, increase the aggregate of your praise. 

-- Edwin Percy Whipple, Boston, MA., autograph letter signed to R. W. Griswold, 26 April 1847. < https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/6h445920d>

Besides the 1850 newspaper item already cited herein, additional evidence of Whipple's role as the Reviewer for Graham's can be found in his extant letter to R. W. Griswold of January 6, 1849 (misdated 1848 by Whipple, writing early in the first month of the New Year 1849).

"I have not yet had time to scrutinise your last books, Sacred and American. They look very well, and the Female Poets, especially, has amazed me by its research. I shall notice both in Graham's.

I am glad you like the Essays and Reviews. I see that they are beginning to blackguard me in New-York; and in Phila. I have been treated very shabbily. They seem to be apprehensive that the book will prove interesting to the public." 
-- Edwin Percy Whipple, Boston, MA., autograph letter signed to R. W. Griswold, 6 January 1849. Boston Public Library, Rufus W. Griswold Papers, 1834-1857. Accessible online via <https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/6h445933g>

Whipple refers here in a kind of shorthand form to just-published anthologies edited by Griswold, The Sacred Poets of England and America and The Female Poets of America. Fulfilling Whipple's written promise to Griswold in January, the Review of New Books department in the March 1849 issue of Graham's (now going as Graham's American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art) included substantial, favorable notices of both new books. 

Graham's American Monthly Magazine - March 1849

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Strongly confirming the identity of Mr. Whipple as the author of anonymous critical notices in Graham's, only three months before the appreciative take on Melville's third book Mardi: and a Voyage Thither graced page 385 of the June 1849 issue.  

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Graham's American Monthly Magazine - June 1849

Therefore, the Graham's reviewer of Mardi (and Redburn, too) who impressed Hugh W. Hetherington as a "real Melville enthusiast" was not Bayard Taylor, but Edwin Percy Whipple.

Mopping up, we may as well credit Mr. Whipple, verified reviewer at Graham's Magazine, with subsequent notices there of Mobby-Dick; or the Whale (with Moby misspelled Mobby in February 1852) and Pierre; or the Ambiguities (October 1852). Well, it's not so much of a stretch, after all. As long known in Hawthorne scholarship, Edwin Percy Whipple also wrote friendly reviews of Hawthorne's works in Graham's: of The Scarlet Letter in May 1850; The House of the Seven Gables in June 1851; The Snow Image in April 1852; The Blithedale Romance in September 1852; and Tanglewood Tales in September 1853. These items are all inventoried by Gary Scharnhorst in Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism before 1900 (Metuchen, N. J., & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1988) and ascribed there to Edwin Percy Whipple.

Whipple's tenure at Graham's extended from 1849 to 1853, according to William Charvat in The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, edited by Matthew J. Broccoli (Ohio State University Press, 1968). Focused mainly on the genial influence of Whipple's old friend James T. Fields, Charvat portrays the Graham's reviewer as
"...an irresistible object of the celebrated charms of James Fields. who saw to it that Whipple met, and remained in permanent social relations with, as many Ticknor and Fields authors as possible. It is not surprising that these were the subject of a majority of Whipple's unsigned reviews in Graham's between 1849 and 1853" (Profession of Authorship, page 177).
More work remains to be done, of course. I don't automatically suppose Whipple wrote the positive notice of Typee in the May 1846 number of Graham's. Then again, our man allegedly began contributing to newspapers and magazines at the age of fourteen, so who knows? Born March 8, 1819 (five months before the birth of Herman Melville on August 1st of the same year), Edwin Percy Whipple turned 15 in 1834. By the time Melville published his first book. Whipple had already made a name for himself as a reviewer to be reckoned with. Positive identification of Mr. Whipple as sympathetic reviewer of Mardi, Redburn, Moby-Dick, and--recognizing exceptional "force and subtlety of thinking and unity of purpose" in scenes "wrought out with great splendor and vigor"--of Pierre as well, invites further study of Whipple's writings. 
At first glance a number of Whipple's favorite subjects and themes emerge in the four Melville reviews published during his tenure as the writer of critical notices for Graham's Magazine, particularly his interest in revelations of a writer's mind or "mentality," of peculiar traits or signs of personal "individuality," and evidence of spirit and original genius.

Sad to say, I have yet to answer the question I started with. Who is "J. G. D."? Inquiring minds etc.

Links to some available bios of Edwin Percy Whipple


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