"Hundreds go and come at my word; none are my "equals," so none are my social friends."
-- First installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 1851; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857).
| Southern Literary Messenger Vol. 17 June 1851 |
Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksnyder.... in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal.
-- Moby-Dick chapter 33 The Specksynder
"It may result from our profession, that the mind has these fits of morbid activity, as if to revenge itself for seasons of neglect."
In the March 1853 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons admits to having experienced mental "fits of morbid activity." The Captain thinks of these passing "fits" as vengeful reactions of "the mind" to the dullness of military life and routines. The whole sentence quoted above was deleted in revision. No reference to "these fits" or morbid states of "the mind" occur in the book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia, 1857).
Deleted expressions "these fits"; "the mind" and "morbid" states (activity/effect) all occur in the magazine and book versions of Melville's tale, "Benito Cereno":
Melville's Benito Cereno, October 1855 Putnam's Magazine:
"His mind wanders. He was thinking of the plague that followed the gales," plaintively sighed the servant; "my poor, poor master!" wringing one hand, and with the other wiping the mouth. "But be patient, Señor," again turning to Captain Delano, "these fits do not last long; master will soon be himself." -- also The Piazza Tales (New York, 1856) page 132.
Benito Cereno, November 1855 Putnam's Magazine:
"Well, well; these long calms have a morbid effect on the mind, I've often heard, though I never believed it before."
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| via medievalbooks |
BABBALANJA.—Your Highness, even in his calmer critic moods, Lombardo was far from fancying his work. He confesses, that it ever seemed to him but scrawled copy of something within, which, do what he would, he could not completely transfer. "My canvas was small,” said he; “crowded out were hosts of things that came last. But Fate is in it.” And Fate it was, too, your Highness, which forced Lombardo, ere his work was well done, to take it off his easel, and send it to be multiplied. "Oh, that I was not thus spurred!” cried he; but like many another, in its very childhood, this poor child of mine must go out into Mardi, and get bread for its sire.”
-- Mardi: and a Voyage Thither Vol. 2, Some Pleasant, Shady Talk in the Groves.
In a dialogue on writing from the first installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border (June 1851), the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons marvels at the incredibly rapid production and mass circulation of popular novels by means of the modern steam-powered printing press. To illustrate the staggering increase in productive capacity enabled by modern technology, he imagines (by way of contrast) English workers in the industrial cities of Birmingham and Manchester trying to manufacture or "multiply" Last of the Barons, the 1843 novel by Edward Bulwer Lytton. At best, copying by hand, the most industrious English factory workers might reproduce "one week's supply" of books in manuscript.
Could all the private wealth of England,— could all the hands of Birmingham and Manchester multiply the "Last of the Barons," for instance as in the days of the polished and literary Greeks,—in manuscript—to equal one week's supply! Published in London—and in two months a wanderer in the Rocky Mountains will pass the sultry noon, poring over its pages! Oh! Steam! —
June 1851 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; also in Part II of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia, 1857) page 233.
How Melvillean is the narrator's conceit of factory workers or "hands" (children mostly, in those days) being tasked with publishing literary works by making handwritten copies? Very.
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| Detail, 1850 letter from Herman Melville - NYPL Digital Collections |
Can you send me about fifty fast-writing youths, with an easy style and not averse to polishing their labors? If you can, I wish you would, because since I have been here I have planned about that number of future works & cant find enough time to think about them separately. -- Herman Melville, December 1850 letter to Evert Duyckinck.
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "1850-1851" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 - 1851. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/af5f4110-1793-0133-6506-58d385a7bbd
Transcribed in The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960). https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84865/page/n155/mode/2up
Katie McGettigan calls this 1850 conceit "Melville's imagined fiction factory." Introducing her 2017 book on Melville's "aesthetic engagement with the material text," McGettigan points out that "Melville figures himself as a manufacturer" and thus conveys "a sense of dash and daring, a desire for the speed and scope that textual production on an industrial scale would offer, and a reveling in the superfluity of production." Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text (University of New Hampshire Press, 2017) page 17.
Just six months after the "imagined fiction factory" in Melville's correspondence, Scenes Beyond the Western Border premiered in the June 1851 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger with more such "reveling in the superfluity of production":
... Published in London—and in two months a wanderer in the Rocky Mountains will pass the sultry noon, poring over its pages! Oh! Steam!
Only for the most patient and attentive of future readers (you know who you are) ...
SCENES BEYOND THE WESTERN BORDER - SEPTEMBER 1851
One hour I read the National Intelligencer, full of sanguine Whiggery--grave, dignified, with an occasional streak of cream in an ocean of milk and water. In the next, I am attentively perusing the abusive, yet vigorous, the self-important Globe, which has got a way of late of frequently stumbling upon truths.
https://books.google.com/books?id=61IFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA570&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
MOBY-DICK - 1851
If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebræ to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. -- Chapter 80 The Nut
PIERRE - 1852
Pierre while in the stage, had formerly been drawn into an attentive perusal of the work on "Chronometricals and Horologicals;"
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.187124/page/n445/mode/2up
REDBURN - 1849
For months previous I had been poring over old New York papers, delightedly perusing the long columns of ship advertisements, all of which possessed a strange, romantic charm to me.
http://www.online-literature.com/melville/redburn/1/
