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| Leicester Mercury (Leicester, Leicestershire, England) August 8, 1882 |
Unique details in the pseudonymous National Reformer article titled "HERMAN MELVILLE" have precise matches in the lengthy fan-letter dated January 13, 1890 that Barrs wrote Melville, now in the Melville collection at Houghton Library, Harvard and available in the "Letters Received" section of the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth, on pages 759-762. In 1890 J. W. Barrs told Melville himself exactly what "Sirius" tells readers of the National Reformer, specifically about his having read Mardi to the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston, about the ignorance concerning Melville's literary works allegedly displayed by Marston's American friend Louise Chandler Moulton, about Barrs' particular fondness for the character of Babbalanja, and his deep appreciation of Walt Whitman. Courtesy of James Billson, Barrs had received a copy of Melville's poetry and prose collection John Marr and Other Sailors, which explains how "Sirius" could know so much of so rare a volume, privately printed for the author in 1888.
Barrs, a good friend of the poet James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis), had given Melville the posthumously published volume A Voice from the Nile: and other poems (London: Reeves and Turner, 1884); Sealts Number 522, now at Princeton, as indicated in the "Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville" at Melville's Marginalia Online.
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| J. W. Barrs, presentation inscription to Herman Melville in A voice from the Nile : and other poems / by the late James Thomson ("B. V.") Princeton University Library |
From the London National Reformer of November 8, 1891; digitized and first made available on the great British Newspaper Archive in April 2025:
HERMAN MELVILLE.
AMERICA has just lost one of her most original writers and her finest stylist. It is with deep regret that we learn of the death of Herman Melville, the author of two perfect narratives of adventure, “Omoo” and "Typee”, of one of the most brilliant of allegorical novels, "Mardi”, and of the most powerful and imaginative novel of seafaring life, “Moby Dick, or the Whale”, ever written by one of an English-speaking race. And, to the eternal disgrace of United States literature, he has died practically forgotten; indeed, for the last twenty years he has, as a writer, been utterly neglected by his countrymen. Some eight years ago I remember reading through a great part of Melville’s "Mardi" to Phillip Bourke Marston, who had not previously known any of Melville’s books. He expressed unbounded delight in Melville’s imagination, his prose style, and his subtlety of thought, and promised to learn something of him from his (Marston’s) intimate friend Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, and to acquaint me with anything of interest concerning Melville he might learn from her. In a letter to me shortly after he said he had asked Mrs. Moulton for some information about Melville, but all she said was that she "had heard of him, and believed if he was not dead that he lived in, or somewhere near to, New York”. This evidence of a general neglect (for Mrs. Moulton must, from her literary reputation, be credited with knowing something of all writers in the States whose works were in vogue, even if but among the innermost circles of American literature) received a further confirmation but a few days ago when I met a particularly well-read Americaine, who had just arrived here for the purpose of taking some Oxford degrees open to women. Her ignorance of Herman Melville and of his works was even deeper, if deeper it could be, than Mrs. Moulton’s. Indeed, so thoroughly oblivious had the Americans become of the man who to the day of his death was their richest prose writer, and so utterly was Melville himself without any hope of any recognition of his genius, that the issue of his last publication, a booklet (1888) entitled “John Marr and other Sailors, with some sea-pieces”, was restricted to twenty-five copies, and distributed among his friends and admirers—not surely a very wide circle, in Melville’s opinion, but I am fain to believe an altogether wider one than he knew of. The trinity of writers of this century produced by America who eventually shall be esteemed her highest names in literature will surely be made up of Poe, Whitman, and Melville. Concerning the two former there is a large consensus of opinion as to their lofty place in English and their highest place in American letters; and it is difficult to doubt that such works as “Moby Dick” and "Mardi”, together with “Omoo” and “Typee”, will eventually place Melville’s name on a level with Poe’s and Whitman’s. Melville’s insight into the problems of life was, I think, less sustained than Whitman’s; less positive, perhaps, also; but keener, more piercing, now and again boring the core of some mystery with a Meredithean swiftness, but with a sympathy more obvious than Meredith’s. Indeed Melville’s inmost self is as interwoven with his work as is Poe’s in his, and this personal note it is which gives a great and added charm to every book he has written. The narrative, novel, or allegory pulsates with Melville’s individuality; the artist, in fact, pervades the work—one might almost say, is the work—in almost every instance.
If asked to describe Melville's religion, I should do so in the words Pessimistic-Pantheist or Pessimistic-Atheist. Full of democratic fire, yet with a fear which he could not shake off—so far as I can find in reading him—that the aristocrat would always get the best of it under one guise or another; lacking, unfortunately for himself —whether or not for truth—that overmastering faith in the future apotheosis of the average man to permeating and overfilling Whitman; he was not less sympathetic than the "Good Grey Poet”. Perhhaps, indeed, as he was less hopeful, so his sympathy was of even a greater depth. Melville had less than Whitman the gift of dealing in his thought with men in the mass. Whitman has created no characters in his poems: Melville has created many. His Ahab in “The Whale”, his Jackson in “Red Jacket" [Redburn], his Babbalanja in "Mardi ”, to note just three, are unequalled in American or any other fiction. There can be little hesitation, after perusal of his “John Marr”, written but three years ago, in concluding that Melville’s early antagonism to Supernaturalism had become his settled conviction; for in that booklet, the sad undertone of which is ever in the ear as one reads, there is a calm acquiescence in the facts of life and death as they present themselves undistorted by any chimæras of the fancy, a quiet acceptance of death as an end—oblivion, so far as we can know — and as an absolute and perfect anodyne for the suffering caused by all our "weakness and weariness and nameless woes”’. On the grave of one forgotten before he died, yet to be remembered by his countrymen long after he is dead, we Freethinkers may be permitted to lay a spray of laurel. In Herman Melville the world has lost a great writer, a noble teacher, and a brave and loving heart. On the other hand, America has added one more blot to her literary history by her neglect of one of her most manly minds, one of her most brilliant imaginations.
SIRIUS.
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0005488/18911108/028/0011
Other contributions signed "Sirius" in the London National Reformer are most likely by the genial atheist J. W. Barrs. Like his encomium of Herman Melville on November 8th, the following pieces all appeared in 1891. All but one are signed "SIRIUS." The business-minded letter against tariffs on imports ("Fair Trade v. Free Trade," published on November 1, 1891) is signed "JOHN W. BARRS." The earliest item listed here below, a letter to the editor dated April 18, 1891 and sent from Leicester, polemically quotes from a chapter in Mardi in order to expose the supposed "hollowness of the Christian dogma of eternal life."
- From the London National Reformer, April 26, 1891:
"THE BROWNING HEAVEN" AND "THE CAT O' NINE TAILS." TO THE EDITOR OF THE "NATIONAL REFORMER".Sir,—Some of the numberless difficulties with which the theory of the immortality of man bristles, and many of which are either stated or inferred in your able article of last week, are so well put by Herman Melville, that you may not be disinclined to print an extract from his "Mardi." Here it is:"But if our dead fathers somewhere and somehow live, why not our unborn sons; for backward or forward eternity is the same; already have we been the nothing we dread to be".The short chapter entitled "Babbalanja Solus" from which I quote, is well worth quoting entire, as probably by no one has the hollowness of the Christian dogma of eternal life been more poetically demolished. Touching the raising of Lazarus, who surely had some knowledge of heaven or hell, if only so much as the knowledge one gets of France, by going to Paris and back in twenty-four hours, Melville remarks: "But rubbed he not his eyes and stared he not most vacantly! Not one revelation did he make. Ye gods! to have been a bystander there!" A pity our interviewer was not then invented.A word, also, if you have space, on the flogging of criminals. Marcus Clarke's "For the Term of His Natural Life", a story founded on the official Convict Prison Reports and others equally reliable—that is, equally reliable for not overstating the case against the use of the "cat"—exhausts the subject, and would, I think, leave your adverse critics as bitterly opposed to its use on any man (aye, even on a murderer and cannibal like the wretch Gabbett in Clarke's story) as you are yourself. The use of the "cat" may be justified by the passions; never, I think, by the intellect, after a full review of its effects on all brought within the sphere of its results.
SIRIUS,Leicester, April 18, 1891.
P.S. Even where the use of the "cat" is confined to special classes of criminals and is inflicted only by order of a Judge, it must be borne in mind that verdicts are fallible, and one dreads to think how much of truth there is in the Frenchman's paradoxical saying that "There is only one thing more terrible than crime and that is——Justice".
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0005488/18910426/027/0013
- "Dr. Wace's Consolation." London National Reformer, May 24, 1891.
- "Nonproof v. Disproof: or Dr. Wace's Consolation." London National Reformer, May 31, 1891.
- "Nonproof v. Disproof." London National Reformer, June 14, 1891.
- "John Jarvis / Ejus Liber / 1799." London National Reformer, August 30, 1891.
- "Health and Atheism." London National Reformer, September 20, 1891.
- Signed "JOHN W. BARRS." "Fair Trade V. Free Trade." London National Reformer, November 1, 1891.
- "Christianity in the Sandwich Islands," London National Reformer, November 15, 1891.
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| Leicester Mercury - Saturday, July 15, 1922 via newspapers.com |
The late Mr. John William Barrs, who died at the Chantry House, The Newarkes, on Thursday [July 13, 1922], at the age of 70 years, was the son of a former member of the Town Council and the old School Board, and a well-known tradesman.
Mr. Barrs, unlike his father, who was a Churchman and Tory of the old school, became an out-and-out Radical. He was a great reader, and his contributions to newspaper correspondence had a distinct literary flavour, marked perhaps by the keenness of his criticisms which, however, were never envenomed.
