Ten YUGE WINS for Melvilliana in 2024
Greetings from the Minnesota bank of beautiful Lake Pepin, otherwise known as the Mississippi River.
🏆 #1. As you probably heard by now, November of the present year 2024 came with a bang of a W = WIN for Melvilliana and the free world. I'm talking, obviously, about the exciting discovery of the long-lost Chilton copy of A Visit from St. Nicholas ("'Twas the night before Christmas....") in the handwriting of its author, Clement C. Moore. The very existence of this rare and valuable manuscript had been forgotten when I called attention, five years ago, to the facsimile reproduction of the first page in the January 1875 issue of St. Nicholas: A Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls.
Recovery of the Chilton copy brings the total number of extant manuscripts (that we know about) to five. Only four were generally acknowledged at the time of my blog post back in December 2019.
I was thrilled to learn from Peter Klarnet, Senior Specialist for manuscript and printed Americana at Christie's, that the Chilton copy turned up this year in excellent condition, along with a signed note from Moore and supporting documents that definitively establish the provenance of this particular manuscript version. As reported in the New York Times and on Spectrum News NY1, the Chilton copy was acquired by distinguished collector Adrian Van Sinderen before his death in 1963, and since then has been held by family members.
Now offered for private sale by Christie's, the newly discovered Chilton copy of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" is presented with fine images and enticing descriptive details, here:
For me, the unexpected and highly gratifying discovery or re-discovery of the Chilton manuscript has to be the biggest win for Melvilliana in 2024. And to think I almost deleted my original 2019 post about it, after being told the 1875 facsimile in St. Nicholas was most likely a poor reproduction of the known copy owned by the Huntington Library.
Listed below are nine more YUGE WINS racked up on Melvilliana this year, so many wins you might get tired of all the winning before the ball drops at midnight.
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🏆 #2 is my discovery that James Clarke Welling took over the regular column of "Notes on New Books" in the Washington National Intelligencer in late 1850 or early 1851 which means that Welling wrote the splendid review of Moby-Dick long and wrongly attributed in previous Melville scholarship to William Allen Butler. Friends, do you know how hard it is to legit correct Hugh Hetherington, Perry Miller, AND Hershel Parker on a matter of fact?!
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/james-c-welling-his-notes-on-new-books.html
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html
Wait, there's more! Number two comes with a bonus win at no extra charge. Although Butler in reality never reviewed Moby-Dick, he did contribute the friendly notice of Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, not counted in the published inventory by Gary Scharnhorst, Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism Before 1900 (The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1988).
🏆 #3 is my highly satisfying find of the Cincinnati Daily Times review of Melville's 1858 lecture on "Statues in Rome":
In the 1950's Merton M. Sealts, Jr. and professional librarians duly searched then-available archives but never found it. Not recorded in the 1987 Northwestern-Newberry edition Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others. To my mind, the coolest thing here is the unique record of something Melville said about the sculpted visage of Tiberius. Only this one review of "Statues in Rome" in the Cincinnati Daily Times finds Melville drawing directly from his journal, word-for-word, in the descriptive phrase "intellect without manliness."
🏆 #4 began with my humble attempt to compose a requested footnote on pelican-beach and ended up disclosing the probable source-text for Melville's Civil War poem "In the Prison Pen (1864)." So what? So the pitiable meagreness exhibited by Melville's prisoner does not necessarily indicate his physical death, but rather his severely emaciated condition as one of the "living skeletons" released from rebel prisons, so described by the United States Sanitary Commission in the 1864 Narrative of Privations and Sufferings.
🏆 #5 broke new ground with a cluster of posts on the newspaper syndication of Herman Melville's poem "The Admiral of the White" in 1885. As uncovered on Melvilliana, Allen Thorndike Rice arranged for the simultaneous publication of Melville's poem in more U. S. newspapers than we knew, including the Cincinnati Times-Star and St. Paul Sunday Pioneer Press.
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/01/syndicated-in-cincinnati-and-beyond.html
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/01/more-on-thorndike-rice-and-his-1885.html
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/02/abridged-admiral-of-white-in-st-paul.html
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/02/1885-check-endorsed-by-herman-melville.html
In the coming New Year 2025 I hope somebody will verify the promised appearance of "The Admiral of the White" in one or more of the following newspapers: the Chicago Times, Detroit Press, and Philadelphia Post.
🏆 #6. Hershel Parker in a footnote for the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick correctly if a bit vaguely identified "the carved Roman slave" referenced in Chapter 126, The Life-Buoy as that
"famous statue, which is in the Tribune of the Uffizi Museum, in Florence, Italy."
More specifically named L'Arrotino, the Knife-Grinder, as discussed in this blog post from February 2024:
Besides the added precision, what makes #6 really great is my discovery of another, formerly popular but now forgotten name for this famous work of art.
The other name of the Knife-Grinder perfectly explains Melville's choice of words in the Life-Buoy chapter, when Ishmael depicts startled sailors as "transfixedly listening" and then compares them in that regard to the statue of a Roman slave known as THE LISTENING SLAVE.
As I write this on New Year's Eve 2024 the Melville Electronic Library still misidentifies "the carved Roman slave" of chapter 126 The Life-Buoy as the famous “Dying Gaul” or “Dying Gladiator." Let's hope they read this and get it right in 2025!
🏆 #7 potentially adds another illustrated book of travel and adventure in the Middle East by William Henry Bartlett to the three already listed in the catalog of books owned and borrowed by Herman Melville at Melville's Marginalia Online. That would be Footsteps of Our Lord and His Apostles, “From the library of Herman Melville,” offered by bookseller Noah Farnham Morrison of "Noah's Ark" in Elizabeth, New Jersey the year before Allan Melville's daughters (Mrs. Maria G. Morewood and Katherine G. Melville) sold Arrowhead and unspecified books from Herman Melville’s library in 1927.
🏆 #8 reveals the exact date (February 16, 1868) and place (the regimental armory then located on the corner of Hall Place and Seventh street) Herman Melville gifted "a beautiful portrait of the late private" Malcolm Melville to the New York State Militia unit in which his deceased son had proudly served.
Strong finishers who persevere to the end of #8 are rewarded with this fun fact not down in Jay Leyda's great Melville Log or any Melville biography, yet nonetheless true: Malcolm Melville's good friend and fellow member of Company B George O. Starr later became world-famous as the managing director of Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth.
🏆 #9 locates a late, casual allusion to Moby-Dick in Charles G. Whiting's newspaper tribute to Louis Moreau Gottschalk, published shortly after Gottschalk's death in Rio de Janeiro. Signed "C. G. W." the reminiscence in the Springfield MA Daily Republican (January 29, 1870) refers specifically to Chapter 54: The Town-Ho's Story. After the Civil War and rumors of a scandalous romance in San Francisco, the brilliant New Orleans-born pianist had left the United States for South America, touring in Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. As Whiting chose to put it, echoing one of Ishmael's supposed listeners/drinking companions at the "Golden Inn" in Lima, Peru, Gottschalk
"found more luxurious rest in the city of the Incas, whose wickedness has become a proverb,--"Corrupt as Lima,"--or among the orange groves around Rio Janeiro."
Although widely regarded as an invented proverb, something Melville made up, the repeated expression "Corrupt as Lima" in Moby-Dick derives from one of Melville's stone-cold favorite source-books, A Visit to the South Seas Volume 1 (New York: John P. Haven, 1831) by Charles S. Stewart:
"Lima is said to be the most corrupt city on the continent—so much so that along the whole coast, I am told, the name alone is a proverb of sin."
🏆 #10 corrects an exceedingly rare misreading by Herman Melville's best biographer Hershel Parker in his published transcription from the letter that Herman's older sister Helen Melville wrote from Lansingburgh, New York to younger sister Augusta Melville (then in Bath, a town in Steuben County, New York) on October 10, 1841.
Helen tells of socializing with Lemuel Shaw and family in Lenox, Berkshire County, Massachusetts. As triumphantly shown in this the tenth major WIN for Melvilliana in 2024, Charles Cromwell Ingham not Henry Inman was "the portrait painter" then making "a professional visit" to the Sedgwicks in Lenox.
Skeptical readers who harbor any doubts about its being all that YUGE of a win are invited to transcribe one or more letters in the awesome collection of Augusta Melville papers, digitized and accessible online courtesy of The New York Public Library Digital Collections. And to ponder the remarkable fact that right before the arrival of 1841, that same year in which Herman Melville's sister Helen and brother Gansevoort partied with "the portrait painter" C. C. Ingham, this very same artist had drawn St. Nicholas coming down the chimney. On New Year's Eve!
The New York Mirror of January 2, 1841 featured an amazing engraving based on Ingham's commissioned portrait of St. Nicholas at his work. Printer and publisher Daniel Fanshaw explained how it came about:
"... having a very great reverence for the good old Saint who so often made our hearts jump with joy when we were boys, we prevailed upon our friend Ingham to give us a sketch of him, just as he saw him one bright, frosty, moonlight night, as he was returning home late from a party of friends."
So much winning! If you're not yet sick of it, truck on by Melvilliana on Substack and check out the second chapter of my work in progress:
Thank you for reading and Happy New Year everyone!!!! 🥳🎉🍾
Great work ! Thrilling that the fifth manuscript of Twas now located. Interesting how it was safe and sound but hidden away all these years in a major collector’s collection.