ghostwriting in the 19th century

Washington Irving

Maybe "collaborative writing" is the better term, after all, since it embraces the "as told to" class of narratives, together with numerous other modes of literary teamwork.  In Melville's youth a famous and perhaps instructive product of collaborative writing was Washington Irving's Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), reputedly based on the manuscript journal (lost) that Benjamin L. E, Bonneville (1796-1878) sold to Irving for $1,000.

Benjamin L. E. Bonneville

Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen officially edited the journals of Lewis and Clark (Philadelphia, 1814). Unofficially, the 1804-1806 expedition was already famous through the published account of Patrick Gass and popular counterfeits by "Hubbard Lester" and others, all more or less ghostwritten.

Benjamin Morrell's dramatic Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Sea (1832) was ghostwritten by Samuel Woodworth. 

In the nineteenth-century (as now), would-be authors and publishers routinely employed experienced professionals to make entertaining, salable books out of rough first-hand narratives.  The use of professional writers and editors for tasks we now call "ghostwriting" was generally taken for granted.  Nonetheless, some readers might prefer an unpolished original.  One anonymous reviewer in the New York Literary World liked J. Quinn Thornton's Oregon and California in 1848 all the better for its unassuming style:

The incidents which we have glanced at in the aggregate will be found in Mr. Thornton's volumes related in a simple unaffected manner, though with little of the art of the trained writer. Yet upon the whole we would not have the book altered, though it were to pass through the hands of the most accomplished magazinist. Narratives of this kind are valuable, as they bear the authentic marks of the author's personality. We know, then, how to appreciate his facts—but let the same facts be related by a Captain Marryatt, or other adept in book-making, and we lose a proper guide to their valuation. There is sufficient personality thus infused into Mr. Thornton's story to put us in communication with the man. We learn his tastes and education; we know the books he has read, and even the sermons which he has listened to. We see the miscellaneous education, the good heart and clear head of the best specimen of the western Colonist—the Judge, Governor, or Member of Congress of the new settlement. He has not the literary tastes and condensation of the educated circles of the metropolis; on the contrary, he is somewhat diffuse, but the man is there, simple, sagacious, and in earnest—and the man, on such a spot, is more essential than the author.  (Literary World, March 3, 1849)

The reference to "Captain Marryatt" alludes to plagiarisms by English novelist Frederick Marryat--for example unattributed borrowings, in Marryat's Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet (1843), from earlier newspaper printings of portions of  G. W. Kendall's Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition (1844) and Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies (1844).

In his 1960 doctoral dissertation "Melville as a Magazinist," Norman E Hoyle conjectured that the 1849 Literary World reviewer who favored Thornton's plain "unaffected" style of writing over that of a "trained writer" was Herman Melville.

Melville himself was nominated by Nathaniel Hawthorne to ghostwrite the account of Matthew Perry's 1853 voyage to Japan.  As Christopher Benfey tells it:

When Commodore Perry returned to the United States, he expected a hero’s welcome, but Washington had other things to think about, including the threat of civil war. Commodore Perry decided he needed better PR, and asked Nathaniel Hawthorne if he would consider writing a book about the opening of Japan, with Perry as hero. Hawthorne was tempted. As he wrote in his journal on December 28, 1854, "It would be a very desirable labor for a young literary man, or for that matter, an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan." But Hawthorne had other books on his mind, and suggested that Perry ask Herman Melville, who knew something about the Pacific, to write the book. Perry, stupidly, decided to write the book himself. Herman Melville’s book on the opening of Japan remains one of the great might-have-beens in American literature. ("Herman Melville and John Manjiro")

But Commodore Perry did get help.  After Hawthorne politely declined, the job of ghostwriting, or rather collaboratively writing, the official narrative of the Japan expedition went to Francis Lister Hawks.