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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
"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.
Story of the Week: The Fiddler: Herman Melville (1819–1891) From Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Billy Budd, & Uncollected...
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