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| Father Taylor, the sailors' preacher--from a photograph by J.W. Black, Boston via The New York Public Library Digital Collections |
As previously shown on Melvilliana, here
the Richmond Watchman and Observer of December 25, 1851 reprinted the opening section of James C. Welling's review of Moby-Dick in the Washington, DC National Intelligencer under the curiously incorrect heading, "How Saints are Made / by Herman Melville."
Edited by the Reverend Benjamin Gildersleeve (1791-1875) , the Watchman and Observer was a Presbyterian weekly newspaper then published in Richmond, Virginia.
Two weeks before, the same newspaper had offered an insightful (though often negative) review of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Transcribed herein, this newly discovered item is not collected in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). At pages 226-227 the Cambridge UP volume of Contemporary Reviews does give the review of Mardi: and a Voyage Thither that had appeared in the Watchman and Observer sometime "before 12 May 1849."
Probably the most original insight of all may be found in the closing comment on Father Mapple's memorable "sermon on Jonah," where the anonymous reviewer (Rev. Gildersleeve?) identifies Edward Thompson Taylor ("Father Taylor, the great sailor preacher of New England") as the likeliest real-life model for Melville's fictional chaplain.
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| Richmond Watchman and Observer - December 11, 1851 via genealogybank.com |
MOBY-DICK or the Whale, by Herman Melville
New York, Harper & Brothers 1851, 12 mo.
pp. 635. Through Nash & Woodhouse.
This is one of Melville's wild books about the sea, presenting the same mad mixture of good and bad, genius and guiltiness, depravity of heart and brilliancy of head, that we find in his other works. He has a reckless, sailor-like way about him, sometimes beautiful in its genuine emotion, but oftener repulsive in its flippant and blasphemous disregard of holy things, yet attractive to many because of its novelty and freshness. This book may be called the biography of a whale, for such is Moby-Dick its hero. There is much information about the whale, and whaling operations, but mingled up with much that is wild, and irreverant, and the perusal of it will give no one any knowledge or amusement which he cannot have with less risk from other works on the same subject. Among other strange things in it is a sermon on Jonah, put into the lips of we presume Father Taylor, the great sailor preacher of New England.
-- Richmond Watchman and Observer, December 11, 1851.
Related posts
- James C. Welling, his Notes on New Books
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/james-c-welling-his-notes-on-new-books.html
- Moby-Dick widely praised in 1851-2
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html
