"Mrs. Morewood had freely hinted that his [Herman Melville's] New York friends thought him crazy, and the most intimate of them, Duyckinck, had commented upon Moby-Dick [in the Literary World] like a missionary on Typee and had reprinted the review in the Dollar Magazine." (Leon Howard)
"A significant event around the same time of the Moby-Dick debacle was Duyckinck’s acquisition of Holden’s Dollar Magazine in early 1851. This magazine was the opposite of what the early Young America movement had stood for, embracing no issue of substance and devoted merely to commercial success and reading of a browsing nature." (Widmer, Young America)
"To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!"
(Melville's Pierre to the fictionalized Evert Duyckinck)
"For Melville to portray Duyckinck in this manner, exploiting their personal correspondence, was to break the friendship…."
(Higgins and Parker, Reading Melville's Pierre)
Revision to the August 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" inserts new references to a "fling" at "dollar dealing sinners," with a new excuse for the "fling": calm down, it was "only a love tap."
Friend.—You are a monomaniac, by Jove! incapable of argument, or even conversation.
"I detest argument! it is the favorite resort of fools, to convince—themselves.
"I am only in a mood ; buoyant and bitter; tameless as the Arab coursing his native desert; free as yonder soaring eagle! it's this wild mountain air! Let us have a fling at the world,—the poor dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens—"
Friend.—But you began by a fling at me—
"Only a love tap, Friend; my way of argument.
(Scenes and Adventures in the Army)
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