Boy of Learning, Bard of Tropes

That would be Bartleby, see:

Bar / Bard
T / Tropes
Le / Learning
By / Boy  

Wouldn't that be wild if Melville grabbed Bartleby's name Anagram-Style from a line in
"Chatterton's Will":

For had I never known the antique lore,
I ne'er had ventur'd from my peaceful shore,
To be the wreck of promises and hopes,
A Boy of Learning, and a Bard of Tropes  (The Poetical Works, vol 2)

What got me looking into Boy-Bard or better, Bard-Boy Chatterton was the fine inspiring article by Maryhelen C. Harmon, "Melville's 'Borrowed Personage':  Bartleby and Thomas Chatterton" over at Bartleby, the Scrivener the University of Kansas site edited by Haskell Springer.  Originally published in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 33 (First Quarter 1987): 35-44.

Harmon shows fascinating correspondences not only between Bartleby and Chatterton as inscrutable  scriveners but also between narrators, Melville's smooth Wall Street lawyer and Chatterton's annoyingly smug biographer.

Yes Melville owned and marked The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton. Sealts Number 137 in the Catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online. Harmon makes a great connection, most provocative. I'm way behind but would be glad to know of any discussion anywhere that engages or develops or even comments on Harmon's argument.  Robert Sandberg is there already, good.

Who else?

security in tortoises

In that key letter to the Harpers of November 24, 1853 might Melville be channeling the optimism of his transplanted Peruvian tortoise hunters?  Retrospectively, even though publication of "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow" in Putnam's was a good four months away.  Or prospectively if you run with security prospective as metaphor.  Either way, however much or little he had written so far about Hunilla, the verbal similarities hint of a close identification with her predicament. 

Writing as hunting?  as in "hunt the flying herds of themes" perhaps, "the finest line" says George Monteiro in the first of Melville's manuscript Camoens poems.  Buffaloes there, tortoises here.

Melville to the Harpers in November 1853:

Meanwhile, it would be convenient, to have advanced to me upon it $300. — My acct: with you, at present, can not be very far from square. For the above-named advance — if remitted me now — you will have security in my former works, as well as security prospective, in the one to come, (The Tortoise-Hunters) because if you accede to the aforesaid request, this letter shall be your voucher, that I am willing your house should publish it, on the old basis — half-profits. 

--The Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960) pages 164-165.

Hunilla, Felipe, and Truxill on Norfolk Isle likewise look to tortoises as future security.  Melville wanted cash for literary tortoise hunters; his tortoise hunters want a ride home:

Still, they thought they had, in another way, ample pledge of the good faith of the Frenchman. It was arranged that the expenses of the passage home should not be payable in silver, but in tortoises; one hundred tortoises ready captured to the returning captain's hand. These the Cholos meant to secure after their own work was done, against the probable time of the Frenchman's coming back; and no doubt in prospect already felt, that in those hundred tortoises— now somewhere ranging the isle's interior —they possessed one hundred hostages.
-- Putnam's Monthly Magazine - April 1854

adding Norman E. Hoyle to Agatha/Hunilla bibliography

How did I miss this one?  Must add now to the bibliography in progress:

Hoyle, Norman E. "Melville as a Magazinist."  Unpublished doctoral dissertation. 
Duke University, 1960.

Melville was always incredibly unreliable about projected publication dates.  It is unlikely, however, that even he would have made such a commitment without having a substantial amount of material already at hand.  If material was available, it was probably the result of his hard writing the previous winter, a by-product or even an outgrowth of the Agatha story.  The most fully developed sketch of "The Encantadas" (seemingly the final outcome of the "Tortoise" book) tells of Hunilla, a Chola woman who had gone to Norfolk Isle with her husband and brother to hunt tortoises and had been isolated there after her companions were killed in a fishing accident.  Like Agatha Hatch, she displays great patience, endurance, and "resignedness."  (Melville as a Magazinist, 107-108)

Hoyle's footnote 40 cites textual examples showing Hunilla's patience, endurance, and resignedness.  Impressively, Hoyle figured Melville must have had a good portion of the proposed book done, "already at hand"--WITHOUT KNOWING of Melville's November 24, 1853 letter to the Harpers, in which Melville in fact did claim to have "now in hand, and pretty well on towards completion" the manuscript for a book of "Tortoise Hunting Adventure."  Hoyle had to infer Melville's progress from the later letter of February 14, 1854, as excerpted in Jay Leyda's Melville Log (1.484).

early sources for Melville's "Chola Widow" sketch

Chart of the Galapagos by James Colnett
via Library of Congress

I'm having fun re-reading and re-thinking The Sources and Genesis of Melville's "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow", the 1978 American Literature article by Robert Sattelmeyer and James Barbour. JSTOR has it online--for a price, without institutional access--but luckily I can look at the PDF also courtesy of my local library and ELM. Now that we have the 1847 newspaper story of "A Female Crusoe," the influence of the 1853 account of a "Female Robinson Crusoe" proposed by Sattelmeyer and Barbour needs to be reassessed. Only the 1847 story describes the separation of a young Indian couple, early united:

In the last boat, which was embarking with the last of this people, (some six or eight perhaps in number,) to convey them to the vessel, which was to carry them from the home of their nativity forever, was one of the tribe, small in stature, not far advanced in years, and his dusky mate, then in the bloom of life. The order had been given to shove from the shore; the oars had dipped in the wave, the boat was rising on the foaming surf, then breaking on the beach with awful roar, when, with the impulse of the moment as it were, this young and blooming bride of the red man, the imprint of whose footstep had been the last left on the sands of her island home, waved an adieu to her chosen mate, plunged into the abyss, “strove through the surge,” and, in another moment, stood alone on the shores of her native land. She turned, to give the last lingering look to her departing help-mate; and then, gathering around her form her flowing mantle, wet by the ocean wave, in an instant disappeared forever from the sight of her astonished and sorrowing companions. --A FEMALE CRUSOE

Melville in the "Chola Widow" sketch describes Hunilla's mate as

"her young new-wedded husband Felipe." --April 1854 Putnam's Monthly

Hunilla looks helplessly on as her husband and brother are wrecked and killed while fishing off shore.  Felipe's body washes ashore, as does the corpse of the lone woman's husband in the
1847 newspaper story.

As source-material for Melville's Hunilla sketch, the female Crusoe story itself is not, as Sattelmeyer and Barbour argue, the "final link" or "culmination" in the conjectured (admittedly) compositional process. Very possibly the later 1853 article supplied or inspired additional details (the dogs, for example). But their sequence is backward. Or inverted, something like that. Sattelmeyer and Barbour have Agatha as inspirational "germ" and the "female Robinson Crusoe" as "final link" to the Hunilla sketch, but now we know Melville could have started plotting in 1847 to make literary use of the "female Crusoe" story.

So it looks more like the Agatha theme from 1852 complemented a story or idea for a story already in progress, conceivably brewing since 1847.   

Sattelmeyer and Barbour proposed two additional sources for Melville's "Chola Widow" sketch. Both are early, and the first one Melville is known to have charged to his account with the Harpers on April 10, 1847. Hey, same day that he acquired Darwin's journal account of the Beagle voyage! For Sketch Eighth, the early sources identified by Sattelmeyer and Barbour are

1) Benjamin Morrell's ghostwritten  Narrative of Four Voyages (Sealts number 372 in the catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online) where suggestive details used in the "Chola Widow" sketch appear in the chapter that will go on to deal with the "Gallapagos Islands," "Elephant Tortoises," and "Alexander Selkirk, or Robinson Crusoe."

"While standing in for the island of St. Felix, my attention was arrested by the appearance of a flag or signal from the top of the island ; which, on approaching nearer, I concluded to be a sailor's shirt fastened to a pole."

In the "Chola Widow" sketch, Melville has reconfigured the plight and rescue of Morrell's five abandoned seal hunters.  Morrell's dissolute Van Doras is the prototype of Melville's "joyous" French captain who leaves the Cholos trusting in tortoises for "ample pledge" of his "blithesome promise" to return.

 He left with them sufficient water and provisions to last three weeks, pledging himself to be back in a fortnight, and take them off. They went cheerfully to work, and faithfully performed the duties assigned them for fourteen days, at the expiration of which they began to look out for the return of the vessel ; but they looked in vain.--Benjamin Morrell's Narrative

and 2) David Porter's Journal of a Cruise provided--as Sattelmeyer and Barbour (405) also show--suggestive details used in describing the scattered bones and tortoise shells around Hunilla's hut.

Looking again into Porter I find another borrowing for Melville's Hunilla sketch in the section on Payta, birthplace of Melville's heroine ("A Chola, or half-breed Indian woman, of Payta in Peru").  Nearing Payta, Porter sees

"two rafts or catamarans, steering by the wind...." --Journal of a Cruise

In describing these log rafts (from Guayaquil, to Porter's astonishment) Porter emphasizes their poor ("clumsy") construction and "frail" appearance:

 there can be no stronger proof of the mildness of this ocean, so justly, in this part, deserving the name of the Pacific, than the fact, that the loss of those vessels, frail as they are, is very uncommon. --Journal of a Cruise

Information from the sailors of the catamaran persuades Porter to skip Payta and head for "the Gallipagos Islands." In the Hunilla sketch, Melville has Felipe and Truxill "too hastily" construct the same type of raft, which Melville also calls a catamaran, that Porter criticized as structurally unsound and dangerous except in the mildest seas:

 ... they, too hastily, made a catamaran, or Indian raft, much used on the Spanish main, and merrily started on a fishing trip, just without a long reef with many jagged gaps, running parallel with the shore, about half a mile from it. By some bad tide or hap, or natural negligence of joyfulness (for though they could not be heard, yet by their gestures they seemed singing all the time) forced in deep water against that iron bar, the ill-made catamaran was overset, and came all to pieces, when, dashed by broad-chested swells between their broken logs and the sharp teeth of the reef, both adventurers perished before Hunilla's eyes. --Encantadas, Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow

In writing "The Encantadas" Melville got back to one of his oldest trustiest source-books, David Porter's Journal of a Cruise. Sketch Eighth too is more indebted to Porter than we knew. And close by Melville had Morrell's Narrative of Four Voyages, obtained in April 1847, and probably the story of "A Female Crusoe," first published January 7, 1847 in the Boston Atlas and reprinted March 27, 1847 in Littell's Living Age. Old old old sources.

So when DID Melville compose the "Chola Widow" sketch? Earlier, rather than later in 1853? In November 1853 he wrote the Harpers proposing a new book of "Tortoise Hunting Adventure." Wanted $300, said it was "now in hand, and pretty well on towards completion." I'm not sure if Hunilla was the heroine of that uncompleted book, but I know she was a tortoise hunter.

Related posts:

• Agatha and Hunilla bibliography
• 1847 report of Female Crusoe
• security in tortoises
• Encantadas concluded in Putnam's too soon
• Melville's friendly critic at the Springfield Republican
• Northeast and sequestered
• Reprintings of 1853 news

1847 report of "A Female Crusoe"

via Islapedia

This 1847 story concerns the same woman and same island of San Nicolas described in the 1853 newspaper account of "A Female Robinson Crusoe" that Robert Sattelmeyer and James Barbour found and excerpted in their 1978 American Literature article The Sources and Genesis of Melville's "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow."

Oh! how thrilling to learn as I just now did a name for her, though late bestowed in Spanish: Juana Maria. The story of this Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island also inspired Scott O'Dell's 1960 children's book Island of Blue Dolphins. Update 10/21/2018: Islapedia gives the story with helpful links to versions and research in a variety of media:

Juana Maria, Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island

In the 1847 story the unnamed Indian woman chooses her lonely fate and does not want to be "rescued." In 1853 she was supposedly glad to leave, according to the updated newspaper report. The 1847 story is full of pathos, strong on the themes of self-exile, loneliness, horror of civilization, and silence. Much of the pathos derives from the separation of husband and wife, in consequence of the woman's fateful decision to swim back to shore rather than leave her native island. The husband-wife relationship, central to Melville's tale of Hunilla and her deep grief, is not mentioned in the 1853 account, whereas the 1847 story devotes considerable attention to the plight of the lost life-companion, even taking up the husband as "hero" of the story. The 1847 depiction of the husband's death may have informed Melville's treatment of the fatal accident that killed Hunilla's husband Felipe. Like Felipe, the female Crusoe's husband is presented as the victim of a fatal accident; and as in Melville's tale, his body washes up on the beach. The image of the pining husband's "stretched out" corpse washed up on the shore, may have influenced Melville's darkly romantic depiction of the dead Felipe as a still-faithful lover:

"his body was found on the beach a stiffened corse, stretched out, and bleaching, as it were, in the white foam of the surf which was thrown about his lifeless remains as the mighty wave broke on the shore."  (A Female Crusoe, 1847)

Felipe's body was washed ashore... But Felipe's body floated to the marge, with one arm encirclingly outstretched. Lockjawed in grim death, the lover-husband softly clasped his bride, true to her even in death's dream. 
(Encantadas, Sketch Eighth, Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow)

Melville would have recognized in the poetical language of "stiffened corse, stretched out, and bleaching" a borrowing from Winter Scenes in The Seasons by James Thomson.



The most obvious of quoted poets in the 1847 report is of course Cowper on Selkirk.

In Melville's "Encantadas" fiction, the narrator's view of Hunilla as "heroine" subtly corrects or complements the respect reserved in the 1847 newspaper account for the husband as "hero":

"....from her mere words little would you have weened that Hunilla was herself the heroine of her tale."  (Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow)

From the Boston Atlas, Thursday, January 7, 1847:

 

A FEMALE CRUSOE.

[Communicated for the Atlas.]

Off the coast of Alta California, about two degrees distant, bearing nearly west from Point San Pedro, which is in the latitude of 33 43 N. and longitude 118 14 W., will be found a small island, called by the Spaniards Saint Nicholas. This island was formerly inhabited by an inoffensive, indolent race of Indians, who subsisted almost entirely upon fish, which they caught from the rocks, and muscles, which they found in the sands of the beach. They were a listless, quiet race of beings, who seldom had communication with others of the human family, and who had but few wants, and fewer cares.

About the year eighteen hundred and eighteen or twenty, the Russians, from their settlements at the North, landed on this Island a party of Kodiac Indians, for the purpose of hunting the sea otter, which, at that period, abounded in those waters. This party remained on the island for more than two years: and were the means of sowing the seeds of disease and contention amongst its unsuspecting and unsophisticated inhabitants.

Some ten or twelve years after the departure of the Kodiacs, this tribe had become diminished to about twenty or thirty individuals, when the Governor of the department of California sent over a small vessel and removed them to the main.

In the last boat, which was embarking with the last of this people, (some six or eight perhaps in number) to convey them to the vessel, which was to carry them from the home of their nativity forever, was one of the tribe, small in stature, not far advanced in years, and his dusky mate, then in the bloom of life. The order had been given to shove from the shore; the oars had dipped in the wave, the boat was rising on the foaming surf, then breaking on the beach with awful roar, when, with the impulse of the moment as it were, this young and blooming bride of the red man, the imprint of whose footstep had been the last left on the sands of her island home, waved an adieu to her chosen mate, plunged into the abyss, “strove through the surge,” and, in another moment, stood alone on the shores of her native land. She turned, to give the last lingering look to her departing help-mate; and then, gathering around her form her flowing mantle, wet by the ocean wave, in an instant disappeared forever from the sight of her astonished and sorrowing companions.

The vessel weighed anchor, spread her canvass, and, in forty-eight hours, this remnant of the inhabitants of San Nicholas were landed on Point San Pedro, houseless and forlorn.

From that period to the present—if she be not dead, or has not left within the past eighteen months—has resided alone, on the Isle of San Nicholas, this female Crusoe, the monarch of all she surveys. She preferred to part even with her chosen mate, and sever every human tie that could be binding, rather than leave the home of her birth—that lonely little Isle, that had been to her a world, which she cared not to exchange for the abode of civilized man, with all its promised luxuries.

Since our Crusoe became sole monarch of the Isle, San Nicholas has been visited perhaps ten or twelve different times, by different individuals; but there she has continued to be found, with none to dispute her right—alone, solitary and forsaken.

Her dress, or covering, is composed of the skins of small birds, which she kills with stones, and sews them together with a needle of bone and the light sinews of the hair seal, sometimes found dead amongst the rocks. Her only food is a shell fish, which the surf sometimes throws on to the beach. She never remains long in one spot; but is constantly wandering around the shores of the Island, sleeping, which she seldom does, in small caves and crevices in the rocks.

During the few last years, it has been very difficult to obtain any communication with her. At the approach of the white man she flees, as from an evil spirit; and the only way to detain her, is by running her down, as you would the wild goat of the mountain, or the young fawn of the plains.

Those who have seen her at the latest period, report that she makes only a wild noise, altogether inhuman; and, when taken and detained against her will, becomes frightened and restless; that the moment she is liberated, she darts off, and endeavors to secrete herself in the wild grass, or amongst the rocks which hang over the never ceasing surf.

Every endeavor has been made, and every inducement offered, by different individuals, to prevail upon her to leave the Island, but in vain. The only home she appears to desire, is her own little isle. Her last hope, if she has any, is, to finish her journey alone. She has no wish now, to hear again the sweet music of speech. Its sounds are no longer music to her ear—and, as for civilized man, his tameness is shocking even to her dormant senses.

To all appearance, she is strong, healthy, and content to be alone. What can reconcile her to her lot, who can conjecture?   Humanity may hope that contentment many continue to be hers, to the last hour; for she is destined to lie down and die alone, on the cold shore of her isolated home, with no one to administer to her last wants, and none to cover her cold body, when the spirit shall have left the clay.

But the story of our Crusoe’s chosen mate, the companion of her early life, has yet to be told. He saw her for the last time, as we have stated, when she stood alone on the shores of her own Isle; when the boat with himself and his companions was dashing through the wild surf, that broke in uninterrupted succession against the rocks which encircled the resting place of his fathers, and which he was then leaving forever. With the remnant of the family from San Nicholas, our hero was landed at San Pedro, and there left, with the others who had accompanied him, to find a home in that land of strangers.

San Pedro, it may be known, is a bleak, barren, bluff point, running out into the blue waters of the Pacific, on which no verdure is to be seen, and but one solitary abode of man, rising amidst the desolation which surrounds it. The Pueblo de los Angelos is situated ten leagues distant, with one farm house between the one on the point and those of the town. The mission of San Gabriel lies yet farther on, some three or four leagues; where, at that time, might be found perhaps three or four hundred converted Indians.

But our hero, as he may be called, never left the beach on which he was first landed. Alone and friendless, there he remained; an isolated being, till life ceased to animate his frame. True it is, that several times he was induced, and once or twice forced, to venture as far as the Pueblo, and even the mission of San Gabriel; but he always, as soon as at liberty, returned and resumed his old station on the beach, or fixed himself on the rocks which hung around the Point. And there he might always be seen, a solitary outcast, as it were, and more constantly when the sun was going down, with his eyes gazing on that celestial orb as it sunk into the western horizon, a direction which he well knew pointed to the lost but never forgotten home of his nativity.

With difficulty he sustained the want of nature by fishing about the rocks, gathering muscles, and sometimes receiving a scanty pittance of corn from the house on the Point, or a few pence from a passing stranger.

He studiously avoided, as far as possible, all intercourse with his fellow man, and sought to live and die in solitude; and so did he continue to live a life which manifestly appeared a burthen to him, till one morning, as the sun arose, not two years past, his body was found on the beach a stiffened corse, stretched out, and bleaching, as it were, in the white foam of the surf which was thrown about his lifeless remains as the mighty wave broke on the shore.

It is presumed his death was accidental—that whilst searching for shell fish, in the night, amongst the cliffs, he must have fallen from an eminence, and thus terminated his solitary existence. --Boston Atlas Thursday, January 7, 1847 (accessible at GenealogyBank).

Reprinted many times, for example in the Philadelphia Public Ledger on January 16, 1847:

Sat, Jan 16, 1847 – Page 1 · Public Ledger (Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) · Newspapers.com

Below, more reprintings from the Boston Atlas:

New York Evening Express (January 8, 1847) --accessible at FultonHistory
Buffalo Commercial Advertiser (January 14, 1847)
New Bedford Mercury (January 15, 1847)

New York Tribune (January 18, 1847) Accessible via The Library of Congress-Chronicling America:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1847-01-18/ed-1/seq-4/

Batavia, New York Spirit of the Times (January 19, 1847)  PDF file at FultonHistory
Rondout [New York] Freeman (February 6, 1847)
Edgefield [South Carolina] Advertiser (February 10, 1847).
Windsor Vermont Journal (September 10, 1847)
Huntington, New York Long Islander January 21, 1848; and



Littell's Living Age 12 (March 27, 1847): 594-595.

Related posts:

• early sources for Melville's Chola widow sketch

• Agatha and Hunilla bibliography

• Norman E. Hoyle on Agatha and Hunilla

• Security in Tortoises

• 1853 news from Pittsfield 

• Friendly critic at Springfield Republican

Agatha and Hunilla, beginnings of a bibliography

Many commentators have noticed thematic and other parallels between representations of Agatha in Melville's Agatha letters to Hawthorne and Hunilla in the eighth sketch of The Encantadas. In his 1951 biography, Leon Howard observed that

"Through the character of Hunilla, in the eighth of his sketches, Melville at last managed to get his admiration for a strong patient widow into print."
--Leon Howard - Herman Melville, page 210

Howard went on to wonder if "Melville had hoped to let the Hunilla story carry the narrative burden of his book." That question in 1951 appeared "impossible to determine," but it is remarkable that Howard even ventured to raise the conjecture that Hunilla, like Agatha, might once have been envisioned as the heroine of a book-length work.

This of course was decades before Hershel Parker's momentous find in the NYPL Augusta Papers of two 1853 references to "Isle of the Cross" in letters from Herman Melville's cousin Priscilla to his sister Augusta.

Below, the start of a bibliography of published criticism linking the Agatha and Hunilla stories...

Agatha and Hunilla

 

Bergmann, Hans. God in the Street: New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville. Philadelpha: Temple University Press, 1995. From Bergmann's discussion of "The Chola Widow" in Chapter 7 ("Key: 'Bartleby, the Scrivner'") pages 174-5:

One cannot help thinking that whatever the fate of "The Isle of the Cross," Melville's "Agatha" writing may have been part of what became "The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles," published in Putnam's in March, April, and May 1854.... "Sketch Eighth" of "The Encantadas," "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow," is most easily imagined as part of "The Isle of the Cross" project in that the principal image for Norfolk Island is the "rude cross" (155) that the Chola Widow has put up as memorial for her dead husband Felipe....

... What the "Agatha" story suggests, and the "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow" enacts, is the theme that "uncomplaining submission" is the admirable human reaction to the horror of a world in which God is silent.

Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr. The Method of Melville's Short Fiction. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1975. See 18; and 115-116.

Dillingham, William B. Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856.  Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1977.

"Like all else in 'The Encantadas,' the story of Agatha—warmly humane and basically optimistic in outlook—was metamorphosed in the crucible of Melville’s suffering into dark and barren tragedy." --William B. Dillingham, Melville's Short Fiction - page 101

Ekner, Reidar.  "The Encantadas and Benito Cereno: On Sources and Imagination in Melville."  Moderna Språk 60.3 (1966): 258-273.

Fredricks, Nancy. "Melville and the Woman's Story." Studies in American Fiction
Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 1991. Reprinted in Herman Melville: New Edition, ed. Harold Bloom (Infobase Publishing, 2008).

"It is not clear whether Melville ever did write Agatha's story. A variant of the tale appears in "The Encantadas" in the story of Hunilla, the Chola woman and turtle hunter who witnesses the drowning of her husband and survives alone for years on a remote, uninhabited island."  --Nancy Fredricks, Melville and the Woman's Story in Harold Bloom, ed., Herman Melville: A New Edition, page 116. A revised version of this passage appears in chapter 9 of Nancy Fredricks' book Melville's Art of Democracy (University of Georgia Press, 1995), with "turtle hunter" deleted.

Hayford, Harrison. "The Significance of Melville's 'Agatha' Letters."  ELH 13.4 (December 1946): 299-310.  In a footnote, Hayford makes the connection to Hunilla:

“It is possible that Agatha would have belonged not with Billy Budd but rather with Bartleby and Hunilla, creations of the following year…”  (304 fn 13)

Howard, Leon.  Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951. 210.

Hoyle, Norman E. "Melville as a Magazinist." Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Duke University, 1960. See pp. 107-108 for prescient discussion of Agatha and Hunilla.

Kelley, Wyn. Herman Melville: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 108-110.

Lacy, Patricia. The Agatha Theme in Melville's Stories. The University of Texas Studies in English 35 (1956): 96-105.

Lee, A. Robert. "Voices Off and On: Melville's Piazza and Other Stories." In The Nineteenth-Century  American Short Story.  London and Totowa, N.J.:  Barnes and Noble, 1986.  76-102; see 89.

López Liquete, Maria Felisa. "When Silence Speaks: The Chola Widow"  In Melville and Women, ed. Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell Springer.  Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006.  213-228.

"The Harpers also supposedly rejected 'The Agatha Story,' which relates directly to Sketch Eighth, as well as 'The Tortoise Hunters,' which relates to 'The Encantadas.'"
(227, fn8)

Ra'ad, Basem L. "'The Encantadas' and 'The Isle of the Cross': Melvillean Dubieties, 1853-54. American Literature 63 (June 1991): 316-323.

Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 338.

This sketch ["Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow"] seems to incorporate both the Agatha story and "The Isle of the Cross."  (338)

Sattelmeyer, Robert, and James Barbour. "The Sources and Genesis of Melville's 'Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow.'" American Literature 50 (November 1978): 398-417. Sattelmeyer and Barbour introduce and discuss newspaper accounts from late 1853 concerning a "Female Robinson Crusoe"; as hinted here, Sattelmeyer and Barbour do not mention an even earlier report of the same "Female Crusoe" (before she was "found" again in 1853), originally published in the Boston Atlas and reprinted in Littell's Living Age 12 (March 27, 1847): 594-595. The 1847 and 1853 stories are different reports, I now realize, about the same woman on the same island of Saint or San Nicholas--elusive with no wish to leave the island in 1847, but lately discovered and "rescued" in 1853. More on all that later, hopefully. For the earlier newspaper account, see this Melvilliana exclusive

•  1847 report of A Female Crusoe  

See also the post on early sources for Melville's Chola Widow sketch for more thoughts on the Sattelmeyer and Barbour article.

Sealts, Merton M., Jr. "Historical Note" in Melville's The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860.  Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987. Sealts observes

"echoes of the 'patience, & endurance, & resignedness' Melville associated with Agatha in much of the fiction he was to write over the next three years" including "above all, Hunilla...." (483)

"Security in tortoises."  http://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/security-in-tortoises.html

Smith, Herbert F. "Melville's Master in Chancery and His Recalcitrant Clerk." American Quarterly 17 (Winter 1965): 734-741.

Watson, Charles N., Jr. “Melville’s Agatha and Hunilla: A Literary Reincarnation.” English Language Notes 6 (December 1968): 114-118. 

Wheeler, K. M. 'The Half Shall Remain Untold': Hunilla of Melville's Encantadas. Journal of the Short Story in English 52 (Spring 2009).

Related posts:

• Isle of the Crux
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/03/isle-of-crux.html
  

• Melville's "Agatha" letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/10/melvilles-agatha-letters-to-nathaniel.html
  

• Reprintings of 1853 Pittsfield news
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/06/re-printings-of-1853-pittsfield-news.html
  

• Hunilla's lonely pregnancy
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2014/08/hunillas-lonely-pregnancy.html
  

• Early sources for Melville's Chola Widow sketch 
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/early-sources-for-melvilles-chola-widow.html
  

• 1847 report of a Female Crusoe
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/1847-report-of-female-crusoe.html
  

Henry Melvill's thousand fibres and sympathetic threads, proved

 

Lots of blogs and internet collections of famous quotations still credit the wrong Melvill(e) with the beautiful inspiring thought that

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”

• Placemakers
• kool kwotes
• brainyquote
• Goodreads

&c &c &c

Some time back we identified London preacher Henry Melvill as the true author of those fine words--fine and deservedly famous, yet in context, so sobering--about the ties that intricately bind us together as human beings. Old news then, and far-gone Melvilliana fans might even recall the source of the quotation: Melvill's sermon "Partaking in Other Men's Sins" which he delivered Tuesday Morning, June 12, 1855 at St Margaret's Church, Lothbury.

Well the other day I managed to figure out again how to use my antique scanner. So now, in the service of Truth and Justice to the memory of the Reverend Henry Melvill, let us amaze and confound all doubters with unassailable visual proofs from my own treasured copy of
The Golden Lectures, for 1855:

From Henry Melvill's Sermon on "Partaking in Other Men's Sins"
Penny Pulpit No. 2,365 / The Golden Lectures (London, 1855): 454-5

"a thousand fibres ... invisible threads" quotation source in
Henry Melville's Golden Lectures (London, 1855), 454

 

Later I found it at Google Books, too:

• Henry Melvill's 1855 Golden Lectures at Google Books

https://books.google.com/books?id=lt8EAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA300&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

Gather 'round, I feel a sermon comin' on me. And the topic will be sin....

Related posts:

• The finest thing Herman Melville never said
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2011/09/finest-thing-herman-melville-never-said.html

• Pseudo-Melville and Fake Fanon, prophets of woke utopia
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/12/pseudo-melville-and-fake-fanon-prophets.html