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

Noticed in North Carolina, "I and My Chimney"

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.

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

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

Noticed in Nova Scotia, Melville's PIAZZA TALES

We have seldom or ever read the equal of this chapter [Benito Cereno] in point of profound cunning and deception....

Here's something new concerning the early reception of Herman Melville's short fiction in Canada. Published in the Liverpool, Nova Scotia Transcript on July 31, 1856, this favorable and unusually detailed Canadian review of The Piazza Tales is not collected in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). As indicated on the masthead, the Liverpool Transcript was a weekly newspaper "devoted to moral, political and general intelligence and progress," then owned and edited by S. J. M. Allen.

Liverpool [Nova Scotia, Canada] Transcript
July 31, 1856 via Nova Scotia Archives

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE PIAZZA TALES. From the pen of Herman Melville, author of "Typee," "Omoo," etc. Dix & Edwards, New York. E. G. Fuller, Halifax.

The first chapter is devoted to pleasant reminiscences in favor of piazzas, and an "inland voyage to fairyland. A true voyage; but, take it all in all, interesting as if invented."

The second chapter consists of passages in the life of Bartleby, "who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of," with some mention of the author, his employees, his business, chambers and general surroundings, as a means of better understanding the chief character of this chapter. It will be found interesting--very.

The third chapter introduces to our notice the captain of an American Sealer, who displays stirling qualities in the capture of a Spanish slaver at the island of St. Maria, Chili. The slaves having risen, murder their owner and some of the officers and crew of the ship, take full command of the vessel, place the captain and the remainder of the crew under strict watchful guards to navigate and work the vessel. The ringleader Babo with his right hand man Atuful [Atufal] act, in the presence of the American captain a most conspicuous part in all the powers of deception and mock submission to the behests of the captain, who is completely tho' reluctantly compelled at the risk of his life to assist in carrying out their designs, so as to appear as the despotic commander and sole owner of ship and cargo. The whole story with Benito Cerino's [Cereno's] protest is admirably written, deleneating certain characters with an unmistakable hand. We have seldom or ever read the equal of this chapter in point of profound cunning and deception. 

The fourth chapter gives a humorous memorandum of "The Lightning-Rod Man" endeavoring to sell, during a storm of rain accompanied with thunder and lightning, certain rods to attract the lightning and convey it from the building.

The fifth tale is divided into ten chapters and is romantically discriptive of the Encantadas or Enchanted Isles--Gallipagos, the land, its singular appearance--the rocks--the peaks of mountains, the queer birds, reptiles, tortoises, etc., which inhabit those sun burnt regions of the Equator. The lone widow and her rescue occupies the eighth chapter. In fact "the enchanted isles" is enchantingly written.

The last tale in this admirably written work is that of "The Bell-Tower, built by the mechanician, the unblest foundling, Baunadonna," [Bannadonna] in Italy three hundred feet in air will repay the reader for his pains.

Two weeks before the favorable notice of the Piazza Tales appeared in the Liverpool Transcript, the same Canadian newspaper dropped an odd reference to "the firm of Bartleby, Benito Cereno" into a notice of The Schoolfellow, a well-regarded magazine for children. 

Liverpool Transcript - July 14, 1856

The School-fellow's Magazine, for June, illustrated. This appears to be a commendable work for boys and girls, many of the best American writers being engaged upon it, among whom we may mention Bayard Taylor. It is from the firm of Bartleby, Benito Cereno. 

Agents for the above works, E. G. Fuller, Halifax.

At this time both the Schoolfellow and Putnam's Monthly Magazine were published in New York City by Dix, Edwards & Co. The same "firm" had just issued Melville's new volume The Piazza Tales which of course contained the Putnam's stories "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno." Evidently the phrasing of this 1856 reference to "the firm of Bartleby, Benito Cereno" in some way points to Joshua Augustus Dix and Arthur T. Edwards as publishers of the Schoolfellow and Putnam's. Dix and Edwards were then "very young and very green" as Justin Martin has observed in Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (Da Capo Press, 2011) page 109. 

The Old Glory: costume sketches for Benito Cereno, 1976
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Duyckinck wrote reviews for the CHURCHMAN

"Duyckinck wrote reviews for an Episcopal magazine, the Churchman , and in March of 1854 was officially announced its literary editor. But by May he was able to tell Simms that he and George had decided to devote themselves heart and soul to that other ambition of Evert’s life, a… https://t.co/fpuXbi7O8A pic.twitter.com/cmpRAhePS6

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) August 3, 2025

 

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! 

London WEEKLY TIMES & ECHO, notice of THE WHALE with excerpt from Chapter 3, "The Spouter Inn"

Found on the wonderful British Newspaper Archive with images newly available in June 2025, an early notice of The Whale in the London Weekly Times & Echo for Sunday, November 2, 1851. This item is not collected in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). I will add it now to my inventory of 1851-1852 reviews of Moby Dick; or The Whale, here:

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

From the London Weekly Times & Echo (2 November 1851):

THE WHALE. By Herman Melville, Author of "Typee," "Omoo," "Redburn," &c. 3 Vols. London: Bentley, New Burlington street.

Mr. Herman Melville stands alone in his peculiar celebrity, that of enabling the public to obtain glimpses of the private life and confidential transactions of seamen and their companions. In the volumes before us he gives evidence of having enjoyed most favourable opportunities of studying the personal characters of harpooners, mates, and sailors generally, and of becoming acquainted with the struggles, adventures, and experiences attendant upon whaling expeditions. "The Whale" is a book in which there is a great deal of romance mixed up with real sketches of life and manners. The captain of a ship that starts from Nantucket for the South Seas to catch the whale undertakes the voyage for the sole purpose of making the chase of the white whale, which, we are told, can neither be captured nor hurt, as the harpoon will not wound it, and which possesses extraordinary strength and cunning. The catastrophe of this daring adventure is that the ship is attacked by the white whale, and sinks with all on board. The early chapters, though containing but little adventure, are by far the best, and relate to topics that are, for the most part, fresh to English readers. Mr. Herman Melville there appears in his strongest point--sketching of character; and we cannot resist the temptation of laying before our readers one of his broad pictures of 

LIFE IN AMERICAN SEAPORTS. 

[Excerpted from Chapter 3, The Spouter-Inn in the British edition, titled The Whale]

Entering that gable-ended "Spouter Inn" you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry, with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.  * * * * * Upon entering the place, I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.” * * “I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be ready directly.” — I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought. At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings. Good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner. — "My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead certainty.” — "Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?” — "Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny; “the harpooner is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and likes ’em rare.”

* * Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.” — A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the bar—when the little wrinkled old fellow there officiating soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which the fellow mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island. The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously. 

The "little wrinkled old fellow" tending bar in the London Weekly Times & Echo version above (printed "wrinkled little old fellow" in The Whale) is a "wrinkled little old Jonah" in the 1851 American edition of Moby-Dick. A longer excerpt from Chapter 3 "The Spouter Inn," correctly giving "wrinkled little old fellow" from the British edition, had appeared with the generally negative review of The Whale in the London Athenaeum on October 25, 1851. 

Related post 

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

"A sort of philosophical Christian swindler"

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. 

For sale by F. A. Brown. 

*** 

"The Fiddler" ascribed to Melville in THE CHURCHMAN, edited by Henry Norman Hudson with a regular department of "LITERATURE" supervised by Evert A. Duyckinck

Henry Norman Hudson (1814-1886)
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

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."

MASTER BURKE as ROMEO.
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

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 on Melvilliana 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

Harper's Magazine for September opens with an illustrated paper on the old Dutch times of Manhattan from the competent resources of LOSSING; has a sketch, "The Fiddler," by MELVILLE, showing how an author, as the world goes, may be reconciled to the failure of his volume; and TAYLER LEWIS throws out some conservative suggestions on the topic of the Unity of the Human Race.  -- The 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  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. 

Middlebury Vermont Register - January 5, 1853
via genealogybank.com

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.

Hudson abruptly quit his position as editor of the Churchman, alleging undue interference from the owner, John Hecker:

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. 

On Hudson's last day at work, September 9, 1854, the "Literature" department contained notices of 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 acknowledges only three items. Ignored altogether are three new chapters from Thackeray's new novel, The Newcomes. Instead, the Churchman 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 a remarkably casual attribution to Melville. Both the commentary and the attribution are unparalleled. In the 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 knowingly associated here 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 reviewer 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. 

These remarkably well-informed and favorable notices of Herman Melville's contributions to Harper's and Putnam's coincided with the tenure of Melville's good friend Evert A. Duyckinck as literary editor of the Churchman. Duyckinck's role as head of the regular "Department of Literature" was formally announced by owner John Hecker and editor H. N. Hudson in the Prospectus for volume 24, reprinted in the Churchman on March 4, 1854. 

The Churchman - March 4, 1854
via newspapers.com

"Arrangements have also been made for keeping up statedly a Department of Literature. This department is placed under the entire charge and control of EVERT A. DUYCKINCK, Esq., late Editor of the Literary World, whose name is deemed a sufficient guaranty of whatsoever attractions, both in matter and style, such a department is ordinarily capable of furnishing."

A "neat discriminating & appreciative" review of Thomas De Quincey's Essays on Philosophical Writers and Other Men of Letters in the Churchman, Vol. 23 (February 11, 1854) is ascribed to Duyckinck in a letter from William Gilmore Simms; collected in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms Volume 3, 1850-1857, edited by Mary C. Simms Oliphant and T. C. Duncan Eaves (University of South Carolina Press, 1954) page 280. In Volume 24 the new Literature department of the Churchman opened with a lavish two-part review (March 4 and 11, 1854) of The U. S. Grinnell Expedition in search of Sir John Franklin by Elisha Kent Kane (Harper & Brothers, 1854). I'm not sure why or how Evert A. Duyckinck decided to review that particular title, but he definitely knew a guy with expertise in the genre of nautical exploration and adventure. 🤔 Did he dare ask Herman Melville for help? 

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 "Literature" section of the New York Churchman when conducted by Evert A. Duyckinck. In the Churchman for March 11, 1854, Duyckinck 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 Duyckinck observed that "Putnam's Monthly for April continues Mr. MELVILLE"S Encantadas...."

Also while "under the entire charge and control" of Evert Duyckinck, the Literature department of the Churchman (May 6, 1854) gave a shout-out to Melville in the 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).

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.  

Reviewing Peck, Duyckinck directly quotes from Redburn Chapter 28.

As shown already, H. N. Hudson resigned his position as chief editor in September 1854. High quality book reviews, many concerned with non-fiction narratives of travel and exploration, continued to appear in the Churchman under the editorial watch of Hudson's successor, Thomas Ramsay. Apparently Evert Duyckinck stayed on for much if not all of 1855 as head of the Literature department. 

The 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. Back then, William Walton edited the Churchman. On Walton's watch, the Churchman had 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."

Hudson's 1847 review of Festus very likely influenced Melville's critique of Transcendentalism in Pierre (1852), as James Duban argues in Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination (Northern Illinois University Press, 1983) at pages 172-176. John Stafford in The Literary Criticism of Young America (University of California Press, 1952) at page 102 recalls how

"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. 

Related posts 

• H. N. Hudson, 1847 letter to Evert A. Duyckinck
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/04/h-n-hudson-1847-letter-to-evert.html

• Duyckinck wrote reviews for the CHURCHMAN https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/08/duyckinck-wrote-reviews-for-churchman.html

PIERRE reviewed in Richmond WATCHMAN AND OBSERVER

As previously shown on Melvilliana

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/02/moby-dick-reviewed-in-richmond-virginia.html

Moby-Dick received a perceptive though frequently negative review in the Richmond, Virginia Watchman and Observer (December 11, 1851), a Presbyterian weekly newspaper conducted by the Reverend Benjamin Gildersleeve. 

A similarly guarded but nonetheless insightful response to Melville's next book, Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities appeared in the Richmond Watchman and Observer on August 19, 1852. This item is not collected in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). Found on genealogybank.com and accessible also via the Virginia Chronicle Digital Newspaper Archive. 

Richmond Watchman and Observer - August 19, 1852
via genealogybank.com

PIERRE, OR THE AMBIGUITIES—by Herman Melville. New York. Harper & Brothers. 1852. 12 Nos., pp. 495. Through Nash & Woodhouse.

If Mr. Melville had called his work the Ambiguities, it would have more nearly expressed our estimate of its character. It has the same cloudy, obscure aiming at something in the mist, and yet that mist often sunlit with crimson and gold, that characterises some of his recent works. There is a heated and unhealthy atmosphere pervading the book, that stifles and fevers the mind, and leaves an unpleasant impression upon it, even when there is nothing specially objectionable on which we can lay our fingers. On the whole, the book has made on us an unfavorable impression, in spite of the occasional passages of surpassing beauty that it contains, which have a dreamy loveliness that is peculiar to the pen of that strange child of genius.

Related post

• MOBY-DICK reviewed in Richmond Watchman and Observer
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/02/moby-dick-reviewed-in-richmond-virginia.html

ISRAEL POTTER reviewed in the New York TIMES

Bonhomme Richard and Serapis
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

The book version of Herman Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile received an unusually long and lovely review in the New York Times on April 30, 1855, published there with other "Notices of New Books." Before now, only a snippet of this glowing notice was readily available to Melville fans and scholars, as briefly quoted by Jay Leyda in the good old Melville Log (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) Volume 2, at page 501: 

"... Melville often, with a few words, selected with marvelous aptness, gives us a finer and more life-like description than most men create out of long chapters and thick books ..."

Leyda's short excerpt, dated April 30, 1855 in the Melville Log, derives from an otherwise unidentified newspaper clipping saved in Albany by Herman's cousin "Kate" and now in the Gansevoort-Lansing collection of the New York Public Library. Located I would guess in Catherine Gansevoort Lansing's "Scrapbook of clippings about Herman Melville and other literary men."

This long-lost item is not collected or mentioned in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). Transcribed in full below from the New York Daily Times of April 30, 1855.

New York Daily Times - April 30, 1855
via genealogybank.com

ISRAEL POTTER—HIS FIFTY YEARS OF EXILE.

By Herman Melville. New-York: G. P. PUTNAM & CO.

Publishing a book of this sort in the successive numbers of a monthly, is like carrying to one a rose leaf by leaf—where fragrance in such small installments can scarcely be appreciated. These Chapters of Mr. POTTER's experience, written down by the facile pen of MELVILLE, were among the chief attractions of Putnam's Monthly during the last year, but we were by no means impressed so pleasantly with them while they were the fragments of a serial, as now that the severed petals are regathered upon their proper stem, and bound handsomely, as it were, in a fitting sepal. It is a book to begin reading at night, when work is done, and to finish the next night. The meditations on it during the intervening day are pleasant. and the night's dreams will wander over a new track.

Israel Potter was a Yankee boy, who loved too young and ran away from his father because the old gentleman headed him off from the intended marriage. He was a private, and an effective one, at Bunker's Hill; and afterwards, while on board a brigantine appointed to intercept supplies going to the British quarters in Boston, is captured and carried to England. Then follow crowds of incidents, escapes from the hulks and from guard-rooms, wanderings over the land, and driftings hither and thither, new arrests and new escapes. He gets into all sorts of positions in his desire to escape detection in the enemy's country. He is lackey to mean men, the confidant of great ones, and at one time private gardener to the King, whom he called "Mister," and respectfully addressed as "Sir." These interviews of his with famous men furnish opportunities for episodes that are the finest portions of the book. The narration of his imprisonment in the private room of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN in Paris, gives us some pages of wholesome and homsespun philosophy not unlike or unworthy of Poor RICHARD. Another scene introduces us to the famous author of the Diversions of Parley.

Another chapter shows us old ETHAN TICONDEROGA ALLEN, as he bore it to be manacled and insulted by cowardly captors. Israel, by the fortunes of war, was a long time under the command of that buccaneering hero and American Naval officer PAUL JONES, and was in the Bonhomme Richard when he fought the great battle with the Serapis. This deadly encounter is sketched briefly, and with few lines. But MELVILLE often, with a few words, selected with marvelous aptness, gives us a finer and more life-like description than most men create out of long chapters and thick books; as one with a single crayon who knows how to handle it, sketches a better portrait than many dainty painters make out of their collection of finest colors, and after very tedious sittings.

The author is so brief about the forty years that roll over and almost crush the inborn Yankee cheerfulness out of his hero, that we wonder whether he really lacked the MSS. that contained the outlines of his story while he was sinking from the damp basement to the mouldy cellar, and from that to the muddy sewer, or whether the engagement with the publisher was "for only so many pages," of which the heroic took the lion's share. Then it grieved us at first that the tired old man could not have found one friend at least in the Housatonic country to sit down and chat with as his sun was sinking. But we remember that out of the magazines and in the world, wanderers, after fifty years of exile, seldom find a warm hearth or a familiar face to cheer them. So we must take it out in grieving that it is so, or be reconciled to authors that so make it.

The New York Times was then edited by co-founder Henry J. Raymond.