James C. Welling's promotion to co-editor of the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER, full text of the published 1860 announcement by William W. Seaton

J. C. Welling via Library of Congress

Herein I am pleased to give the complete text of the 1860 editorial by William Winston Seaton (1785-1866), officially making James Clarke Welling (1825-1894) co-editor of the Washington, D.C. National Intelligencer after the death of Joseph Gales, Jr. (1786-1860), Seaton's brother-in-law and business partner. The National Intelligencer was an influential Whig newspaper that embraced conservative, pro-Union values up to and through the American Civil War. Issued only months before the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States, amid the intense and growing secession crisis, Seaton's "Editorial Announcement" on August 30, 1860 affirmed the newspaper's guiding principles and determination "to hold the Union of the States as the basis of their peace and happiness" and "to support the Constitution, which is the cement of the Union, as well in its limitations as in its authorities." Welling, already an accomplished educator and journalist, would go on to have a distinguished career after the war as president of Columbian College, now the George Washington University. As amply attested by friends and colleagues at the memorial service held after his death, James Clarke Welling became a leading member of numerous organizations devoted to supporting the arts and sciences, including the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic Society.

Seaton's formal statement of Welling's well-deserved promotion first appeared on page 3 of the Daily National Intelligencer for Thursday, August 30, 1860. Abridged versions circulated widely thereafter in American newspapers North and South. 

https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83026172/1860-08-30/ed-1/?sp=3&r=-0.053,0.039,0.387,0.161,0

Of particular importance for Melville studies is the disclosure of Welling's employment history as literary editor of the National Intelligencer. With gratifying specificity, Welling is credited with writing the highly regarded "Notes on New Books" column since the departure (no later than March 1851) of Edward William Johnston (1799-1867). 

Washington City Southern Press - March 15, 1851
via genealogybank.com

As announced in the Southern Press of March 15, 1851, "Edward W. Johnston, esq., of Washington, formerly of Virginia, has become one of the proprietors of the Richmond Whig, and will in a few weeks take charge of the editorial department of the paper." Having served for a decade as literary editor before Welling replaced him, Edward W. Johnston (an older brother of Joseph Eggleston Johnston, the Confederate general) most likely wrote the generous notice of Melville's first two books that appeared in the National Intelligencer on May 27, 1847; reprinted in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995) at pages 72-75 (Typee) and 114-115; 118-119 (Omoo).

According to the timeline "for the last ten years" provided by Seaton in August 1860, Welling's tenure as literary editor and author of "Notes on New Books" must have begun seven or eight months before the long and laudatory review of Moby-Dick appeared on December 16, 1851 in the "Notes on New Books" column of the Daily National Intelligencer. Seaton's announcement thus provides strong evidence for Welling's authorship of this mostly positive and impressively erudite American notice of Moby-Dick, mistakenly attributed in previous Melville scholarship to William Allan Butler. 

The notably "imposing" review of Moby-Dick in the National Intelligencer was first ascribed to William A. Butler, cautiously and carefully, by Hugh W. Hetherington in his chapter on "Early Reviews of Moby-Dick" for the collection of Moby-Dick Centennial Essays, edited by Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield (Southern Methodist University Press, 1953) at page 106. However, after Perry Miller endorsed the suggestion in his brilliant Raven and the Whale, Hetherington reiterated his erroneous guess in Melville's Reviewers: British and American (University of North Carolina Press, 1961) at pages 214-215, presenting the formerly tentative ascription to Butler as "very likely." 

Hetherington's mistake, later amplified by Hershel Parker, apparently resulted from confusion about the title and typical content of pseudonymous contributions to the National Intelligencer in 1850 and 1851 by the genial lawyer-poet William Allen Butler. Hetherington, Perry Miller, and Parker after them wrongly conflated Butler's light and breezy "Notices of New Books," serially published in the National Intelligencer over the pen-name "Jacques du Monde," with the weightier reviews in the "Notes on New Books" column that James C. Welling began furnishing in June 1851 at the latest, a month or two after the previous literary editor, Edward W. Johnston, left to conduct the Richmond Whig. Butler, the good friend of Evert and George Duyckinck, was by his own admission only ever an "occasional correspondent" of the Washington National Intelligencer; as revealed in William Allen Butler, A Retrospect of Forty Years, 1825-1865, edited by his daughter Harriet Allen Butler (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911) page 234. 

As Welling himself recalled in the last year of his life: 

"I was the Literary Editor of the old National Intelligencer before I assumed its political conduct in the year 1858."

-- Quoted from a letter dated February 12, 1894 and partially printed in The Nation on September 13, 1894.

Given that his tenure as literary editor extended well past 1856, James C. Welling also can reasonably be credited with writing the review of Leaves of Grass that appeared in the "Notes on New Books" section of the National Intelligencer on February 18, 1856. This gently mocking response to Walt Whitman, as pointed out by Hershel Parker in the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (footnote 4, page 607), employed the same arresting phrase "sinuosities of thought" previously used in the more favorable review of Moby-Dick (National Intelligencer, December 16, 1851). While praising Whitman's "wonderful powers of description and of word-painting" Welling could not follow the airier "transcendental sinuosities of thought" he encountered in Leaves of Grass. Similarly elusive, Melville's "sinuosities of a thought" in Moby-Dick reached "depths of pathos that few can fathom." However, as Welling perceived them in 1851, Melville's winding ways of thinking and writing brought the reader somewhere worth getting to; whereas Whitman's twisted thought-trails (like Emerson's philosophy according to Longfellow) disappointingly "dwindle to a squirrel path and run up a tree." 

Here is the formal statement in which William W. Seaton positively identified his co-editor James C. Welling as literary editor and author of "Notes on New Books" after the departure of Edward William Johnston ten years before; transcribed below from the Daily National Intelligencer of August 30, 1860.

Washington Daily National Intelligencer - August 30, 1860
via genealogybank.com

 EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

As the surviving Editor of the National Intelligencer, I have to announce that Mr. JAMES C. WELLING will hereafter be associated with me in the editorial conduct of this journal. In making this announcement it is proper to state that Mr. WELLING is no stranger to the columns of the Intelligencer, having been, in different capacities, connected with it for the last ten years, during the first five of which, after the retirement of the accomplished EDWARD WILLIAM JOHNSTON from the Literary department of the paper, Mr. WELLING had charge of it, and was the author of those "Notes on New Books," which, by the scholarship and ability evinced in their composition, would, of themselves, be a sufficient evidence of the qualifications he brings to the tasks of journalism. But it is just to add that during the last five years he has participated in all the duties incident to the editorship of this journal, and has thus served a noviciate quite long enough to give full proof of his vocation to the exacting career upon which he has entered. Enjoying during this period, in the fullest degree, the confidence of my late lamented colleague, Mr. GALES, he has equally, by his high moral and conscientious character, no less than by his rare attainments, merited my own; and I avail myself of his temporary absence from Washington to make this announcement to the patrons whom it is the honor of the Intelligencer to address. 

It is hardly necessary, either in view of this announcement, or of the irreparable bereavement which the paper has recently sustained, for me to state that the principles and aims of the National Intelligencer will undergo no change whatever; on the contrary, it will, in all respects, continue to pursue the path which it has undeviatingly trod throughout its previous course. If indeed the occasion required of me a renewed declaration of the principles by which the journal will be guided, I could but repeat what it was deemed fitting, some years ago, at an epoch in its history, to avow, and in which revolving years have made no change, viz:  That in Politics the paper would continue to be Constitutional and Conservative; to hold the true objects of a just administration of this Government to be, to cherish peace and friendly intercourse with all foreign nations having correspondent dispositions; to scrupulously avoid all interference with the domestic or internal affairs of other nations; to maintain sincere neutrality towards belligerent Powers; to prefer in all cases amicable discussion and reasonable accommodation of differences to a decision of them by appeals to arms; to hold the Union of the States as the basis of their peace and happiness; to support the Constitution, which is the cement of the Union, as well in its limitations as in its authorities; to respect the rights and authorities reserved to the States and to the People as equally incorporated with, and essential to the success of the general system; to avoid the slightest interference with the rights of conscience or the functions of religion, so wisely exempted from civil jurisdiction; to preserve, in their full energy, the other salutary provisions in behalf of private and personal rights, and of the freedom of the press; to provide and maintain an adequate regular military force, and a respectable and efficient navy; to promote, by authorized means, improvements friendly to agriculture, to manufactures, and to external and internal commerce; and to favor, in like manner, the advancement of science and the diffusion of information as the best aliment to true liberty. 

Such have been the objects which, for near fifty years, the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER has endeavored to promote, in every proper way, and will continue steadily to advocate. 

WM. W. SEATON.

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

• Unabridged review of MOBY-DICK by James C. Welling in the Washington National Intelligencer
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html 

• Socialistic rhapsodies and theosophical trash, James Clarke Welling's 1852 review of Lectures and Miscellanies by Henry James Sr. 
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/07/socialistic-rhapsodies-and-theosophical.html

Reviving Melville before the "Melville Revival"

Book-lover Frederick B. De Berard on the greatness of MOBY-DICK

Rediscovering De Berard’s condensed “Epic of the Whale,” Critical Synopsis, and Melville bio in Volume 2 of the “Classic Library” (1902) and “Classic Tales” (1905) anthologies 

Portrait of Frederick B. De Berard.
Source: Classic Tales by Famous Authors Vol. 1
(New York: The Bodleian Society, 1905)

👉 First published on Substack, reposted here since I am keen to put into the mix of accessible, searchable data the actual words used by anthologist and unabashed bibliophile Frederick Brigham De Berard in praise of Melville and Moby-Dick. Not that De Berard was alone in recording his high estimation of Melville's writings, only two years into the new 20th century. Edwin Monroe Bacon devoted five pages to Melville as one of the "Famous Makers of American Literature" profiled in Literary Pilgrimages in New England (Silver, Burdett & Company, 1902) on pages 451-456. Bacon creatively fashioned the section on Melville in Berkshire County, Mass. as a dialogue with local Pittsfield expert "Mrs. H. M. Plunkett" = Harriette Merrick Hodge Plunkett, the well-known health advocate and journalist.

" 'Moby Dick' has been called the most dramatic and imaginative of his works. In his later writings he was much given to speculative philosophy, and his popularity waned.... Notwithstanding his remarkable adventures and sea-faring life, there was nothing of the jovial, breezy air of the sailor about him. He had more the gentle carriage of the student, the manner of the man of books. He was more than Dana a pioneer of our sea-story writers, and in his best works set a pace not easy for his successors to follow. His picturesque style came through his excellent training in English composition, to which he showed an aptitude in his youth, and from his early reading of the masters of English literature."

-- Literary Pilgrimages, page 456 https://archive.org/details/literarypilgrima00bacorich/page/456/mode/2up

By 1905 numerous surveys of American Literature counted Moby Dick as an important work, in some way worthy of attention in this fresh field of study. Granted, some early efforts happily classified Melville with "lesser writers" or "minor writers." Necessarily, the elevation of Melville's status to Giant of American Letters would take time, and the concentrated efforts of exceptionally competent academics--at Columbia University during the 1920's "Melville Revival," and later at Yale, under the tutelage of Stanley T. Williams. Nevertheless, Moby-Dick got respectful attention in numerous textbooks published between 1891 and 1905, including the following titles:

• Julian Hawthorne and Leonard Lemmon, American Literature: an Elementary Textbook for Use in High Schools and Academies (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1891). At page 211 rates Moby-Dick "the most powerful of Melville's books." 

• Alphonso G. Newcomer, American Literature (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1901) page 128. Ranks Herman Melville as "the most important" of New York "writers of tales of adventure whose scenes were laid on shipboard or in remote quarters of the earth...." Melville "in his youth embarked upon a whaling vessel bound for the Pacific and spent several years, a portion of the time in captivity, among the South Sea Islands. The series of partly fanciful tales founded upon his experiences — Typee (1846 ), Оmоо (1847), Moby Dick, or the White Whale (1851), etc., — had a wide circulation, and an occasional admirer can still be found who will pronounce them superior to Cooper's."

• Charles Noble, Studies in American Literature (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898) at pages 287-288. Cites Melville as "our best novelist of travel and sea-life"; Moby-Dick (1851) listed with Mardi (1849), Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), and Clarel (1876) as notable literary productions after Typee and Omoo. 

• Henry S. Pancoast, An Introduction to American Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1898). While this volume contains no substantive discussion of Melville or his writings, Typee and Moby-Dick are duly listed in the Appendix, Table III charting the "Literature of the Republic" c. 1809-1897.
  
  The perceived slight motivated Albert H. Smyth to point out, as a mistake, "the omission of Herman Melville, in his best books—'Moby Dick', 'Typee', 'Omoo'—one of the best of American writers" in an otherwise favorable review of Pancoast's Introduction, published in the April 1898 issue of The Citizen. 

• William P. Trent, A History of American Literature, 1607-1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905). Placing Melville with "The Romancers" on pages 389-391, Trent recognizes Moby-Dick as a "masterpiece," flawed however by "inordinate length" and the bad influence of Carlye (a fault lamented by Melville's earliest critics, some more than fifty years before).
  
  "Melville's greatest achievement still awaited him, however, for after two other fair books of adventure he published, in 1851, his masterpiece, Moby Dick, or the White Whale. If it were not for its inordinate length, its frequently inartistic heaping up of details, and its obvious imitation of Carlylean tricks of style and construction, this narrative of tremendous power and wide knowledge might be perhaps pronounced the greatest sea story in literature. The breath of the sea is in it and much of the passion and charm of the most venturous of all the venturous callings plied upon the deep. It is a cool reader that does not become almost as eager as the terrible Captain Ahab in his demoniacal pursuit of Moby Dick, the invincible whale, a creation of the imagination not unworthy of a great poet. In this uneven , but on the whole genuine, work of genius, Melville probably overtasked himself...."

• Mildred Cabell Watkins, American Literature (American Book Company, 1894) page 47. Commends Moby-Dick to young readers as one of Melville's "wildly exciting tales of adventure."

• Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, Chronological Outlines of American Literature with an introduction by Brander Mathews (New York: Macmillan Company, 1894) pages 166 and 265.

***

Packed with variously diverting tales of the sea, Volume 2 in the 20-volume Classic Library of Famous Literature (New York: The Bodleian Society, 1902) gives Moby-Dick its due, and then some. This particular volume offers a bold abridgement of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece by series editor-arranger Frederick B. De Berard (1853-1927). The editorially condensed version unfolds in twenty-three sections that draw generously from narrative and Ahab-centered chapters of Moby-Dick, casting them collectively as “The Epic of the Whale.” [Fn 1; see below]

Six entertaining pieces by other writers follow the reader-friendly digest of Melville’s whaling “Epic.” Hennig Cohen, the outstanding old-school Melville scholar who (way back in the 1970’s) first discovered De Berard’s high regard for Melville and Moby-Dick, thus described the contents of Volume 2 in a little noticed bibliographical note:

Melville is clearly preëminent among a good and varied company. The other selections, in the order in which they appear, are a melodramatic excerpt on Malay pirates from Hard Cash by Charles Reade and Victor Hugo’s bravura description of the cannon that breaks loose on shipboard from Ninety-Three; two personal narratives, Richard Henry Dana on rounding Cape Horn, and an account of “A Real Shipwreck” in the South Seas in the 1870s by the Earl of Pembroke; and finally, two comic selections, William S. Sullivan’s [Gilbert’s] Bab ballad “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell” and Samuel Lover’s Sketch “Barny O’Reirdon, the Navigator.” [Fn 2]

All seven of the nautical stories in Volume 2, including the condensed “Epic of the Whale,” had previously been collected by De Berard in Famous Tales of the Sea (New York: International Book and Publishing Co., 1899; copyrighted by Isaac H. Blanchard Co.). 

Below are links to digitized texts of the “The Epic of the Whale” in three differently titled anthologies, each edited by Frederick Brigham De Berard and accessible via either Hathi Trust Digital Library 

• Epic of the Whale in Famous Tales of the Sea (New York, 1899) pages 11-129.

• Epic of the Whale in the Classic Library of Famous Literature (New York, 1902) Volume 2, pages 11-129.

or the Internet Archive:

• Epic of the Whale in Classic Tales by Famous Authors (New York, 1905) Volume 2, pages 11-129.

As Cohen also found before me, the 1899 set of Famous Tales lacked the impressive editorial apparatus provided in the 1902 Classic Library and 1905 Classic Tales volumes produced in New York by the Bodleian Society (not affiliated with the renowned library in Oxford, England).

The 1902 and 1905 sets contain the same “General Preface” by Frederick B. De Berard and “General Introduction” by Rossiter Johnson, presented sequentially in the front of Volume 1 (featuring stories of “Battle, Camp and Siege”) together with dignified photographic portraits of De Berard and Johnson. Although Rossiter Johnson had personally known and corresponded with Herman Melville, the “General Introduction” that Johnson provided does not specifically mention or identify the author of Moby-Dick alongside other, named American writers including Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Edward Everett Hale, and Bret Harte. [Fn 3]

De Berard likewise left Melville out of the “General Preface,” although it opens quoting Sir Thomas Browne (one of Melville’s favorite authors) on mutability (one of Melville’s favorite themes). As a good bibliophile should, De Berard fairly revels in the enjoyment of timeless “literature of imagination and fancy—the powerful imaginings of the great romancers and novelists, the beautiful fancies of great poets.” De Berard’s enthusiasm for books and authors, and for a shared culture of reading based on great works of literature, seems boundless. [Fn 4] His remarkably ardent “General Preface” begs for a closer look which I hope to give in a future post.

Here I want to focus on Volume 2 of the Classic Library and Classic Tales anthologies, where De Berard more than made up for the seeming neglect of Melville in Volume 1 by supplying a “Critical Synopsis” of the abridged Moby-Dick and short bio of its author. [Fn 5] Absent from most accounts of the legendary “Melville Revival,” the editorial contributions of Frederick Brigham De Berard deserve a wider circulation and appreciation. To that end, complete texts of the relevant “Critical Synopsis” and “Biographical” entry are given below, transcribed from digital images of Volume 2 in Classic Tales by Famous Authors (1905). Texts in Classic Tales are identical with those in the earlier Classic Library of Famous Literature (1902). For example, the typographical error of “Tmbiguities” for “Ambiguities” appears in both editions.

Enjoy!

CRITICAL SYNOPSIS OF SELECTIONS [ pages iii-iv ]

EPIC OF THE WHALE, THE : BY HERMAN MELVILLE

This is an abstract, or condensation, of the famous book, “Moby Dick; or, the White Whale,” which appeared in the ‘forties. It is one of the most powerful works ever written to depict the reality of a sailor’s life aboard a whaling ship. It is based upon the actual experience of the author, who, curiously enough, combined a taste for roving life of adventure with profound philosophic insight and remarkable literary power. The work is scarcely a story in the ordinary sense, having but a slight thread of plot.

In an encounter with an infuriated sperm whale, the captain of a New England whaling-ship had his leg bitten off and narrowly escaped with his life. Morbid regret was followed by melancholia and finally by monomania. Yearning for vengeance, he devoted his life to a search for the White Whale, “Moby Dick,” by which he had been maimed. For years he sailed in pursuit of his enemy, remaining at sea until his ship became crazy and weather-worn, and his crew were inspired with superstitious dread of the half-mythical monster, of whose very existence they were in doubt. The finding of the great whale, the attack upon it, and the destruction wrought upon boats, ship and crew, are related in the story. This slight and fanciful romance is the foundation for a series of intensely graphic descriptions of whaling life, of the sea and the creatures that dwell therein. The episodes descriptive of the whale and his life are classics of natural history. The accounts of the chase and capture of the mighty cetacean are unrivaled for their dramatic force and powerful diction. The present arrangement includes the narrative portions and those episodes relating directly to whale-life and whaling. 

  

BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF AUTHORS [ x - xi ]

... MELVILLE, HERMAN: Born at New York, August 1, 1819; died in that city, September 28, 1891. This author, comparatively neglected during more than a generation, ranks among the most powerful and original American men-of-letters. He led a roving and adventurous life. As a boy, he “ran away,” to sea, shipping at New Bedford for a whaling voyage, which extended over several years. While ashore on the Marquesas Islands, he and his companion were abandoned by their ship, and were made captive by the natives — a wholly savage race of cannibals. The story of his life as a sailor, his captivity and escape, and his experience as a “beach-comber” in Tahiti, are told in “Typee” (1846), “Omoo” (1847), and “White Jacket, the World in a Man-of-War” (1850). These works are vivid pictures of sea life and adventure; but Melville’s chief title to fame is due to “Moby Dick; or, the White Whale” — a work of great literary distinction, one of the most forceful series of descriptive pictures in the language, and an account of sea life and the mysteries of the deep which stands wholly alone for vividness and actuality. Melville’s other writings are: “Mardi, Etc.’‘ (1849), “Redburn” (1849), “Pierre; or, the Tmbiguities” (1852), several volumes of poems and short stories. He gave public lectures in the years 1857 to 1860; and from 1866 to 1885 was an official in the New York Customs Office. He became morbid in his later years, rigidly secluded himself from the public and all but a few friends, and died a recluse.

CLASSIC TALES BY FAMOUS AUTHORS, ed. Frederick B. De Berard.
Twenty volumes, offered by Kubik Fine Books Ltd. of Dayton, Ohio.

Footnotes

1. Editor Frederick B. De Berard compiled “The Epic of the Whale” from the following chapters in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), evidently using some version of the oft reprinted 1892 edition titled Moby Dick or the White Whale and copyrighted by Herman’s widow Elizabeth Shaw Melville: 
   

   1. The Monomaniac Captain [Chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck]
   2. Moby Dick [41]
   3. The Chase [Chapter 47, The Mat-Maker; and Chapter 48, The First 4. Lowering]
   4. The Line [60]
   5. Stubb Kills a Whale [61]
   6. The Dart [62]
   7. The Crotch [63]
   8. The Sharks [64, Stubb’s Supper]
   9. Cutting In [67]
   10. The Monkey-Rope [72]
   11. The Sperm Whale’s Head [74]
   12. The Battering-Ram [76]
   13. The Great Heidelburgh Tun [77]
   14. The Pequod Meets the Virgin [81]
   15. Pitchpoling [84]
   16. The Tail [86]
   17. The Grand Armada [87]
   18. The Try Works [96]
   19. Stowing Down and Clearing Up [98]
   20. Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton [103]
   21. The Chase—First Day [133]
   22. The Chase—Second Day [134]
   23. The Chase—Third Day [135] 

2. Hennig Cohen, “The Famous Tales Anthologies: Recognition of Melville, 1899” in Brodie, Alexander H., et al. “Bibliographical Notes.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, volume 68, number 2, 1974, pages 63–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24302066. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026. In the quoted passage, Cohen incorrectly attributes the “Yarn of Nancy Bell” to “William S. Sullivan,” apparently confusing William S. Gilbert with Gilbert’s composing partner Arthur Sullivan. De Berard’s Famous Tales of the Sea (1899); Classic Library (1902); and Classic Tales (1905) all credit the comic “Yarn” to Gilbert.
   
   Ignored in the Historical Note for the 1988 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Moby-Dick, Hennig Cohen’s 1974 find is rarely mentioned in subsequent Melville scolarship. Michael Kearns broke the silence by citing Cohen’s discovery as more good evidence for the popular appeal of Moby-Dick before the academic “Melville Revival.” See Michael Kearns, Writing for the Street, Writing in the Garret: Melville, Dickinson, and Private Publication (The Ohio State University Press, 2010) page 127. Accessible via JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16qk3jw.9 and Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/oa_monograph/book/24310/pdf.

3. For the content of known letters to Rossiter Johnson, see Herman Melville, Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) pages 503-504. <https://books.google.com/books/about/Correspondence.html?id=nBeBBc3m4yYC>

4. In the role of author F. B. De Berard contributed two pieces of his own to the Classic Library/Classic Tales anthology. Volume 3 includes De Berard’s How They Took the Kashmir Bastion with other “Tales of Heroism”; and Volume 17 places his account of Baldur the Beautiful with "Famous Tales of Gods and Heroes.” Brief as it is, De Berard’s modest author bio in Volume 3 may serve as a helpful starting point for further study: 
   

   "DE BERARD, FREDERICK B. : Born at Racine, Wis., 1853. A prolific writer during the past twenty-five years, but mainly upon technical subjects and topics of temporary interest. His strictly literary work has been confined to criticisms, reviews and a very few stories and poems. For a number of years he has been occupied with practical studies of economic questions, and particularly with investigations touching taxation and the municipal management of the city of New York."

   <https://archive.org/details/classictalesbyfa03debe/page/n33/mode/2up>

   Born October 4, 1853, Frederick B. De Berard was a son of Frances Julia Merrill and Fredrick William De Berard, a grocer in Racine, Wisconsin. Frederick B. married Anna Mary Collins (Annie) in Chicago on June 4, 1878 and the couple had two children. During the first three decades of the 20th century, De Berard worked for the Merchants’ Association of New York as a statistician and eventually chief researcher. He died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 73, as reported in the Brooklyn Eagle for August 12, 1927:

   "Frederick B. DeBerard of 544 E. 18th St., for 30 years connected with the Merchants Association of New York and regarded as one of the ablest investigators in this city, died Wednesday [August 10, 1927] at Lake Parlin, M[ain]e., where he had been spending the summer. Death was due to heart trouble.

   Mr. DeBerard, who was 73 years old, had been connected with the Merchants Association since it was founded and at the time of his death was director of research for the organization. He was in charge of all its important investigations. He was born in Racine, Wis., and is survived by his widow, Mrs. Annie M. DeBerard; a daughter, Miss Hazel DeBerard, and a son, Willard E. DeBerard. Services will be held in the Fairchild Chapel, 36 Lefferts pl., tomorrow afternoon at 1 o’clock. Interment will be in Kensico Cemetery."

5. As previously noted by Cohen, two other volumes in the Classical Library and Classic Tales sets also contain writings by Melville: Volume 14 reprints Melville’s short fiction The Bell Tower as one of six “Famous Tales of Enchantment”; and Volume 16 collects “Famous Tales of Barbarians and Savages” including Captive among Cannibals, condensed from passages in the latter half of Melville’s first book, Typee, more specifically chapters 15-19, 30, 32, and 34. Four stories in Volume 16 headed “In the South Seas” are adapted from two collections by Louis Becke (not Typee as stated in Cohen’s 1974 “Note”). De Berard excerpted “Rangers of the Tia Kau” from Becke’s By Reef and Palm (London; T. Fisher Unwin, 1894); while “Ninia,” “At a Kava Drinking,” and “Feast at Pentecost” are from The Ebbing of the Tide: South Sea Stories by Louis Becke (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1896).

Related posts

• Armour Caldwell at Tulane, 1908
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/06/armour-caldwell-at-tulane-1908.html 

• Forty years of Philip Hale on Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/08/forty-years-of-philip-hale-on-melville.html 

• Charles Goodrich Whiting, 1891 memorial article in the Springfield, Mass. Republican
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/08/charles-goodrich-whiting-author-of.html

• Forgotten or well known?
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2018/04/forgotten-or-well-known.html
  
  

Book-lover Frederick B. De Berard on the greatness of MOBY-DICK

Book-lover Frederick B. De Berard on the greatness of MOBY-DICK by Scott Norsworthy

Rediscovering De Berard’s condensed “Epic of the Whale,” Critical Synopsis, and Melville bio in Volume 2 of the “Classic Library” (1902) and “Classic Tales” (1905) anthologies

Read on Substack

MOBY-DICK in the BEE

Here's something you don't see every day even on #MelvilleMonday, a previously unrecorded notice of MOBY-DICK. This item is not reprinted or listed in the great compendium Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge UP, 1995) edited by Brian Higgins (1943-2015) and… pic.twitter.com/nC7vIiM68U

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) July 20, 2026

 

Pip the Crown Jewel of MOBY-DICK

"Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets." #MelvilleMonday

In Moby-Dick Chapter 93 The Castaway, Melville thus compares the "fictitiously" enhanced brilliancy… pic.twitter.com/CmaZdnaYHf

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) May 4, 2026

 

Kant's head on the larboard

Why Kant? I mean the right whale's head in Moby-Dick chapter 73, suspended on one side of the Pequod, counter-balanced by the sperm whale's head on the other side. Why make the right whale Kant and the sperm whale Locke? Much can and has been made of the dueling philosophies (say… pic.twitter.com/3UL3WLqbcF

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) March 23, 2026

 

Capturing a sperm whale

Capturing a sperm whale by Scott Norsworthy

Re-presenting the animated 1823 description by Henry J. Pickering aka "Thomas H. Bennett"

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Grassy glades, oh!

Grassy glades, oh! by Scott Norsworthy

a shared trigram in MOBY-DICK and "Scenes Beyond the Western Border"

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After-supper dialogue with "I. F." = IMAGINARY FRIEND

After supper by Scott Norsworthy

DRAGOONED: Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853). Number 7.

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Falling harpooners per Scoresby and Melville

Accidents at Sea, North (falling into Right Whale's mouth) and South (Sperm Whale's head) #MelvilleMonday

"The harpooners not unfrequently fall into the fish's mouth, when it is exposed by the removal of a surface of blubber; where they might easily be drowned, but for the… pic.twitter.com/DAIvdfR0Ou

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) February 16, 2026

 

The little white attic : Moby-Dick: “like a true child of fire, I breathe i...

The little white attic : Moby-Dick: “like a true child of fire, I breathe i...: 1/ Moby-Dick is full of symbolism. I must thank Tom of Wuthering Expectations for pointing out that Ishmael is identified with water, and ...

Home-feelings, philosophy, and the magic of feminine logic

 

Home-feelings, philosophy, and the magic of feminine logic on and off the prairie by Scott Norsworthy

DRAGOONED: Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853) Number 5.

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On finding MOBY-DICK in the Boston MORNING JOURNAL, again

Unfortunately, the nice and early review of Moby-Dick in the Boston Morning Journal is not reprinted or listed anywhere in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge UP, 1995) edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker. The omission from this important collection seems… pic.twitter.com/yRpwcaUS0J

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) November 18, 2025

 

Unabridged! Welling's review of MOBY-DICK in the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER

Unabridged! Welling's review of MOBY-DICK in the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER: Original research and riffs on Herman Melville, authorship, and 19th century American literature. 

Complete text of James Clarke Welling's review, as first published in the Washington, DC National Intelligencer on December 16, 1851

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html

As a sailor might say

As a sailor might say by Scott Norsworthy

DRAGOONED: Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853). No. 3.

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A. W. Whelpley on "The Old-Time Printer"

Prang's aids for object teaching. Printer. ca. 1876. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003663928/.

Albert W. Whelpley (1831-1900) was head librarian of the Cincinnati Public Library when he commemorated "The Old-Time Printer" in a delightful and highly informative after-dinner speech, delivered January 17, 1898 at the annual meeting of the Cincinnati Typothetæ. Although long forgotten, Whelpley's talk is full of historical interest and value, being rich with details of his personal experience as a printer's devil and compositor in New York City from 1846 to 1856 or so. Melville aficionados will be especially interested in Whelpley's reminiscences about working at "the widely known printing office of Robert Craighead, on the corner of Fulton and Dutch streets." Whelpley quit with most of his coworkers during a labor strike, possibly in early May 1853 when journeymen book-printers went on strike in New York City.

New York Weekly Journal of Commerce - May 5, 1853

If Whelpley alludes to printers' strikes in April and May 1853, he would still have been working at Robert Craighead's former printing office on Fulton street in May 1851 when Melville hired Craighead to set his great Whale manuscript in type and have it plated. In that case young Whelpley might possibly have helped to produce Moby-Dick. Whelpley's boss William Henry Tinson, "the best-known foreman in New York" and Craighead's manager until May 1853, almost certainly did. 

In 1853 or later, Whelpley rejoined his old boss at 24 Beekman Street, where Tinson operated his own printing office, "also a famed one." Working there for W. H. Tinson, Printer and Stereotyper, Whelpley became personally acquainted with George P. Putnam and numerous other literary celebrities. A. W. Whelpley never once name-drops Herman Melville during his 1898 talk before the Cincinnati Typothetae. However, Whelpley somehow managed to acquire one of Melville's letters to Putnam (9 November 1854) concerning the magazine version of "Israel Potter." Submitting the concluding chapters in manuscript, Melville thus explained why he did not number them:

“Having forgotten the number of the last chapter sent you, I leave the numbering of the following ones to the printer.”

By his own account, Whelpley seems to have been employed as a compositor for W. H. Tinson in 1854 through April 1855 when Tinson's printing office set all of Putnam's Monthly Magazine in type, including the magazine version of "Israel Potter" which concluded in the March 1855 issue. If so, Whelpley might have indirectly received Melville's note to Putnam via Tinson. In any case, Whelpley got it somehow or other and eventually gave it to the Cincinnati Historical Society, as helpfully indicated in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville’s Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) at page 273. Whenever and however Whelpley first acquired it, Melville’s autograph letter of November 9, 1854 to George P. Putnam would have held personal significance as a memento of his youthful occupation in New York City, “working for W. H. Tinson, on Beekman Street.”

The complete text of A. W. Whelpley's encomium of "The Old-Time Printer"is transcribed below from The Printer & Bookmaker (July 1898) pages 230-234. Digital versions of the printed speech are accessible via Google Books

https://books.google.com/books?id=HITnAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA230-IA14&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false 

and courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library, here:

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951001904120c?urlappend=%3Bseq=580%3Bownerid=13510798902360098-596. 

Enjoy!

THE OLD-TIME PRINTER.*

*An address delivered at the annual meeting of the Cincinnati Typothetæ. 

BY A. W. WHELPLEY.

THE printer of the olden time! It is a theme so glorious that it should have been delegated to be handled by some one more practiced in the art of oratory and after-dinner speaking than he who is to address you. Some one whose well-rounded sentences and resonant voice should stir your natures to their very depths—one who might be able to paint glowing wordpictures of that glorious trinity of men who gave the art its birth! Of Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, whose names have come down through the centuries laden with honors; whose triumphs have been sounded in every land and in every language! Gutenberg, inventing movable types, and constructing a rude printing press to take his impressions from them; Fust, inventing the ink with which to make this possible; and Schoeffer, who, conceiving the plan to make better and more effective types than those used, cut a set of matrices to cast them in, which so delighted his master, Fust, that he gave him his only daughter for a wife!

He might take a long leap, and come to the men who, in the early days of this country, gave such renown to the printer's art, William Bradford, who came to America with William Penn, and Benjamin Franklin—both grand types of the old-time printer. And if he was to "the manner born" he could discourse eloquently of three old-time printers whose names are inseparably linked with this "Queen City of the West," Joseph A. James, Ephraim Morgan, and Achilles Pugh.

But I am not equal to anything so lofty in conception, and propose to go back only half a century, to give you a few reminiscences, beginning with the business career of a slightly built, not over-strong, curly-headed youth, who, at the age of about thirteen years, thought the time had come for him to quit school and face the world to earn his own living.

A school-boy friend, who was already at work, secured him a position in the same office where he was employed, and in the autumn months of 1846 this boy, who had never been away from his home except in school hours, trudged gaily to the office in which he was to begin his career, to take the responsible situation of a printer's devil! This service consisted of various important duties, the most responsible of which was rolling a form for ten hours a day—from 7 to 12 A.M., from 1 to 6 P.M. When there was no form on the press, he was to busy himself as best he could. The other duties were to build the fires, make the lye with which to clean the forms, and wash the rollers; gather up the soiled towels to take home to his employer on certain nights of the week, and call for them on certain mornings; in fact, being a "general utility" for everybody about the place. 

 He can remember as well as if it were yesterday what a formidable undertaking it seemed to get through a day's rolling—and to count the tokens in his mind, as the sheets were "worked off," ten hours a day, ten tokens to be printed, to make a fair day's work. At the office at 6 to build the fire, and rarely getting home to his supper before 7:30 at night. Such was the life, and such were the duties of a boy in the 40's who was fortunate enough to secure a situation as a printer's devil. The pressman under whom he worked was a kind-hearted, phlegmatic Scotchman, named Archie Naughton—and he can call him to mind always—an old-time pressman who is deserving of a grand reward in the future life. He was very considerate of his devil, and always lightened his duties where possible—and never spoke a cross word.

The hours of service required would alarm a printer boy of this day, and would cause an eruption in the labor unions; but the young devil felt them no especial hardship; and he tumbled into bed at an early hour after supper, with his mother's blessing and a good conscience, and slept soundly the "sleep of the just," for, as he had not many temptations, he had few worries, as yet, to trouble his slumbers. He generally got his breakfast by 5:30, and in the dark hours of the winter mornings was well on his way to the office before 6 o'clock.

The boy was happy! and it was not long before he evinced some skill in setting type (which he learned in the noon hour, supposed to be devoted to dinner), and it was but a few months before he bade a not over-affectionate adieu to his rolling duties! It may be interesting to say that he was succeeded by an inking machine, which had just come into use.

This introduction to the printing business was in the office of John W. Oliver, on the corner of Ann and Nassau streets, New York, in the same building where the well-known Quaker printer, Daniel Fanshawe, ran his presses. A few months later this office of John W. Oliver was removed to the corner of Fulton and Nassau, in the old Sun building, and by that time the boy, who only a little while before had rolled forms, had now become quite a respectable job hand, and could run a job press very well. He preferred composition, however, and when opportunity offered would "stick type" on a weekly temperance paper called The Organ, published by Mr. Oliver, who was an ardent "Son of Temperance," an order then in its infancy.

Printer boys in those times were sturdy young fellows, that disdained to wear such undergarments as shirts and drawers, and some of whom would have discarded stockings, but for the interference of home folks. I can see this young boy, with his shirt sleeves rolled up to the full extent, his shirt front unbuttoned, with a paper cap on his head, to protect the luxuriant locks, that were his pride, from dirt and dust. When these conditions were fulfilled, the printer boy was in full uniform, and ready for business.

He soon made a change to an office managed by a literary Irishman, Dennis Hannegan, well known as the author of "The Orange Girl of Venice," a blood-curdling novel. Dennis was a clever and an honest man, and though he could not pay his hands their wages in cash, he gave them the equivalent in paper novels, all of which were read without death ensuing.

Dennis did a good thing for the subject of this sketch by kindly giving him a letter of introduction to W. H. Tinson, an excellent printer, at that time the best-known foreman in New York, and manager of the widely known printing office of Robert Craighead, on the corner of Fulton and Dutch streets. He was of a just nature, but a violent temper. Mr. Tinson honored the introduction, and took the boy, stipulating that he should serve his time at two-thirds men's wages, either working by piece or by the week. And it seemed a great piece of good fortune to drop so easily into such a situation.

This office literally swarmed with compositors of wonderful intelligence. It was an office in which slack times were seldom known. It had the cream of literature, as it had the pick of workmen. Here was a representative body of old-time printers that could discuss composition, rhetoric, punctuation; who were conscientious in spacing and leading; who would criticise bad work, and were intolerant of inferior workmen; who gave close attention to all the technicalities that go so far to improve the looks of the printed page. Men who would quarrel with the proofreader when they thought him wrong, and oftentimes carry their point. They were a representative set of old-time printers—middle-aged men—and younger dare-devils who could dance all night and work all day. It is doubtful if ever such another office existed, where there was so much wisdom and so much mirth combined, and so much good and conscientious work accomplished, with the pay so sure. All the grand English reviews, Blackwood's Magazine, the Literary World, the Medico-Chirurgical Quarterly, and scores of books from those reputable publishers, Wiley & Putnam, Scribner, Wood, Dodd, Carter Brothers, and others, were constantly in process of composing, stereotyping and printing.

Looking back through half a century, it is a gratification to call to mind the well-educated printers of that establishment. Many of them were Englishmen, who had served their apprenticeships in the old country, and were authority on every technical point of the printing business. How well they had studied their grammars, and how true were their ideas of the niceties of punctuation!

These printers of the olden time were always in the lead on affairs of the day. They could intelligently criticise the pulpit, the stage and the press. They could quote Scripture without limit, and were up in every current joke, and often very humorously repeated questionable stories—a custom not yet obsolete—which dates back, however, to Boccaccio—and in which art many of them were masters.

That office had a coterie of men (of which the boy of whom I am speaking was the youngest member) who by filling responsible positions as editors of prominent newspapers, writers of dramas, important military positions, have given good evidence of the value of the training of the printer of the olden time—one becoming a librarian, and one now bearing the best known name in the annals of printing in America, Theodore L. De Vinne.

These printers of the olden time, in this particular office, had prime opportunities to jostle against the men who were giving to America its literature; and the boy whose history I am giving you was particularly favored. He saw many celebrities, and was noticed by not a few. Here came James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Fenno Hoffman, George P. Morris, Nathaniel P. Willis, Rufus Griswold, Horace Greeley, Evert and George Duyckinck, and a host of others who are among the immortals in American literature.

One more change, and the boy, now grown to manhood, as far as his reminiscences in this city of his birth go, are completed.

There came a strike—we all know what strikes are—and every man and boy, except two, marched out from this home which had done so much for them for so many years. And the young man, true to his fellow workmen, but against his inclination, went with them, and bade adieu to the office of Robert Craighead forever. After forty years or more he pays the tribute to him which is deserved, and will never fail to cherish his name gratefully. The boy's career in New York closed with working for W. H. Tinson, on Beekman street. And this office was also a famed one. Here he made friends with the versatile publisher, George P. Putnam, and met and conversed with Bayard Taylor, Frederick Cozzens, author of the "Sparrowgrass Papers," John Brougham, Edward Stephens, author of "Jonathan Slick in New York," Tuckerman, the essayist, our Western poet, W. W. Fosdick, and Frederick Saunders, author of "Salad for the Solitary;" in this office was printed John Mitchel's Citizen, and here came daily those Irish patriots, John Mitchel, John Savage, Thomas Francis Meagher, and scores of others. These were the days when the author came to the printing office with his proofs, and often explained his corrections and the wherefores to the compositor.

These sometimes happy (sometimes otherwise) days came to end, as far as New York experiences are concerned, when this old-time printer came to Cincinnati for a brief visit. That visit has extended to over forty years; and while he oftentimes thinks of what a field he might have had in the city of his birth for growth, he in no wise lacks appreciation of the honors which his fellow citizens of Cincinnati have shown him, and of which he has always endeavored to be deserving! Nor does he in any wise lack appreciation of Cincinnati itself, in which community he feels that his life and his sympathies have so broadened, and in which for so many years he has lived so happily.

But Cincinnati was a new field for the young New Yorker. By force of filial duties he felt obligated to remain, though he was leaving all behind—birthplace, familiar scenes, friends and companions, yet he bravely accepted the new responsibilities, and for the third time was compelled to "seek a job." An introduction from a genial old-time printer of that day, Caleb Clark, sent him to the Franklin Type Foundry, where he received a welcome. There he remained (excepting a month or six weeks, when he was with dear old Mr. Thompson at the Methodist Book Concern), and in time came to have entire charge of the composing room. This business was then superintended by a gentleman who sits here to-night, Mr. Robert Allison, and I look back with pleasure to the period between 1857 and 1864. I think he parted with me with regret, when at the latter date I entered a new field of labor. During all the years that have passed his friendly interest in the young man—above I unconsciously dropped into the first person—has often been shown. He is to be congratulated on his long years of service in the profession, on his position as an employing printer, and on being one of the foremost citizens of Cincinnati.

The printer of the olden time! What memories are awakened—what thoughts will come of by-gone days and men who lived in them—heroes of the composing stick!

The printer of the olden time, and the printers of to-day, and all time, are and will be the greatest factors of our civilization. The preacher may touch our hearts with his glowing words; the actor may dazzle our eyes and charm our ears with the beauty of his scenic effects and the fervor of his declamation; the singer may enchant us with the rhapsody of his melody; the lecturer and statesman may make our minds captive by the force of their eloquent periods—but all their efforts would be as temporary and evanescent as were the lays which of yore the minstrels chanted in kingly courts, were it not for the Art of the Printer—the Art preservative of all the arts. His silent types and inks transfer to the printed sheet the words of the preacher, the lines of the actor, the song of the musician, and the speech of the statesman, and send them forever down the ages to an immortality which otherwise could not be.

Related posts 

• Introducing W. H. Tinson, Stereotyper
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/07/introducing-william-h-tinson-stereotyper.html

• Robert Craighead's third-story rooms on Fulton street
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2023/10/robert-craigheads-third-story-rooms-on.html

MOBY-DICK in Poughkeepsie

Christopher Patterson recently discovered this notice of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in the Poughkeepsie Eagle for December 6, 1851. It's not collected in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995). The Poughkeepsie Eagle was a weekly newspaper, then published every Saturday morning in Poughkeepsie, New York by Isaac Platt and William Schram.

MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE. By Herman Melville, author of "Typee," "Omoo," "Redburn," &c 

—The above work is founded on

       "That sea beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream."

It is full of interest from beginning to end, and promises to be the most popular of Melville's writings. The characters are various, each imparting peculiar interest to the reader. We respectfully dedicate it to all of our numerous readers. For slae [sale] by W. Wilson.

-- Poughkeepsie Eagle, December 6, 1851; found on newspapers.com

I'm counting this newly discovered notice of Moby-Dick in Poughkeepsie as favorable 🥰 and will add it to the census of early reviews, here:

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html

Christopher Patterson already has it registered as a five-star review on the Moby-Dick - Initial Reception page of his wonderful literary website, Literature's Pretty Long History. 👍👍👏👏🎉 Check it out! 

Introducing William H. Tinson, Stereotyper

Introducing William H. Tinson, Stereotyper by Scott Norsworthy

Robert Craighead's foreman c1845-1853; Albert W. Whelpley's boss and exemplary "old-time printer" in NYC

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Leicester tea merchant and social reformer J. W. Barrs on Herman Melville

Leicester Mercury (Leicester, Leicestershire, England)
August 8, 1882

Published in the London National Reformer (November 8, 1891) over the pseudonym "SIRIUS" about six weeks after the death of Herman Melville in New York City, the long-forgotten memorial tribute transcribed herein was evidently written by Melville's English admirer and correspondent John William Barrs (c1852-1922), a Leicester tea merchant and radical secularist. 

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. 

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.

Leicester Mercury -  Saturday, July 15, 1922
via newspapers.com

From the Leicester Mercury (Leicestershire, England) of July 15, 1922:

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.