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| The Starling. Engraving by Andrew Birrell after a drawing by Thomas Stothard. Source: Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, plate facing page 86 in the 1801 London edition owned by George L. Duyckinck. |
About the contemporary reception of "I and My Chimney" there is little to record in the absence of printed commentary.
-- Merton M. Sealts, Jr., "Melville's Chimney, Reexamined" in Pursuing Melville, 1940-1980 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982) page 172.
Here's something new, a rare contemporary take on "I and My Chimney." Without reference to authorship, this favorable and unusually substantive notice of Melville's short story (first published anonymously in the March 1856 issue of Putnam's Monthly Magazine) appeared in the Wilmington, North Carolina Daily Herald for March 11, 1856, in a survey of "Putnam's Monthly" for March contributed "For the Herald" by an unidentified reviewer. At this time the Herald was conducted by Talcottt Burr, Jr. (1819-1858), a talented and highly esteemed editor who died of typhoid fever less than two years later at the home of his father in Wilmington.
Of particular interest in the North Carolina notice of "I and My Chimney" is the mention of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey though France and Italy as a likely source or analogue for the narrator's comically affectionate treatment of his chimney as a close friend and confidante. Sterne's Tristram Shandy (Sealts Number 490 in the catalog of books owned and borrowed at Melville's Marginalia Online) had a major influence on the narrative style of Moby-Dick. As Armour Caldwell pointed out in a 1908 lecture at Tulane, Moby-Dick exhibits
"the same perverse disproportion, the same elaborate digressions and the same dramatic dialogue. It abounds with description and philosophizing, and this makes the story rather slow."
Shades of Sterne in the humorous parts of Melville's great whale book had previously been noted by James Clarke Welling in his long and laudatory review of Moby-Dick for the Washington National Intelligencer (December 16, 1851):
The humor of Mr. Melville is of that subdued yet unquenchable nature which spreads such a charm over the pages of Sterne. As illustrative of this quality in his style, we must refer our readers to the irresistibly comic passages scattered at irregular intervals through “Moby Dick."
In connection with "I and My Chimney," the North Carolina reviewer's specific reference to Sterne's Sentimental Journey alludes, I would guess, to the intensely personal lament for a Dead Ass by its grief-struck owner in "Nampont"; and the narrator Yorick's equally famous encounter in "The Captive" with a caged starling, treated as a speaking emblem of imprisonment who pathetically repeats, "I can't get out."
Previously unrecorded in Melville scholarship, the North Carolina notice of "I and My Chimney" is transcribed below from the Wilmington Daily Herald of March 11, 1856.
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| Wilmington NC Daily Herald - March 11, 1856 via newspapers.com |
Putnam's valuable periodical for March is before us, freighted as usual with its rich store of mature thoughts....
"I and My Chimney," is a pleasant, lively, rather humorous sketch, in which one finds no little of "latent philosophy." One may read it and read it again, and still there is something worthy of notice. Like Sterne, in his sentimental journey, the author gravely speaks to and of his "pet chimney;" sympathises with it in all its afflictions and misfortunes, and often, doubtless, looking up to it with profoundest admiration; and then he glides off into a pleasant soliloquy as follows:
"Now, if this chimney of mine were for size a sort of belfry, for ding-donging at me about it--my wife and daughters were a sort of bells, always chiming together, or taking up each other's melodies at every pause, my wife the key-clapper of all, a very sweet ringing and pealing and chimney, I confess, but then the most silvery of bells may, sometimes, dismally toll, as well as merrily play," &c.
But such extracts will give but an imperfect idea of the good old gentleman's soliloquies over the chimney and its secret closets and odd corners. In reading it, one almost insensibly imagines himself in some of those spacious old half-acre houses, that stand far out in the country, with a perfect camp-meeting of a fire-place, with huge "hickory" or oaken logs, piled on with no sparing hand. And then there is the high old mantle-piece with its quaint old ornaments and elaborate carving, and grotesque figures, with all the primitive simplicity of our saintly progenitors.
Related post
- 1856 comments on I and My Chimney
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/01/1856-comments-on-i-and-my-chimney-in.html
