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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2012
In what is by now among the more famous personal histories in American studies, by 1852 Herman Melville was facing bankruptcy and personal ruin after the financial failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre. Under the guidance of the new editor of Putnam's Magazine, Charles Briggs, Melville turned to writing magazine fiction. Building upon work that seeks to show how Melville in his short stories negotiated the terrain between the riotous world of the popular press and the sanctified realm of high art, this article looks at a frequently neglected work by Melville from 1854, “The Fiddler,” as a response to this personal crisis. I show how Melville's story resurrects a forgotten transatlantic history (the life of the Irish actor Master William Henry West Betty) as a means to explore his own search for an aesthetic that could adequately serve both the demands of the spectacular world of antebellum publishing and his own high literary ambitions.
1 Post-Lauria, Sheila, Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 152Google Scholar.
2 Whilst Putnam's published works anonymously, other journals, like Robert Bonner's New York Ledger, openly flaunted their access to celebrity authors like Fanny Fern. Indeed, Bonner proudly announced that Fern was to be paid $1,000 for the rights to serialize Ruth Hall in his periodical (Post-Lauria). Harper's adopted a mixed approach to publishing, with some works attributed to named authors and others published anonymously. “The Fiddler” appears in the same issue of Harper's as a serialized chapter of The Newcomes that is directly attributed to W. M. Thackeray. As John M. J. Gretchko has noted, this led to the historical misattribution of the story to Fitz-James O'Brien. This was remedied in the 1960s when the Newbury Library and Northwestern University Press undertook to produce “authoritative” editions of Melville's works. See Gretchko, John M. J., “Fiddling with Melville's ‘The Fiddler’,” Melville Society Extracts, 104 (1996)Google Scholar.
3 Another approach taken by antebellum authors was to seek success on the lyceum lecture circuit before publishing in the magazines. The most significant figure in this regard must certainly have been Ralph Waldo Emerson. As R. Jackson Wilson suggests in “Emerson as Lecturer: Man Thinking, Man Saying,” in Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Emerson's cultural and class status depended on accounts of his lectures that noted his “sincerity” when lecturing in the lyceum. Melville would try this route himself in the late 1850s, attaining moderate, though short-lived, success.
4 Post-Lauria, 128.
5 See Lehuu, Isabelle, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Culture in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
6 As John Evelev notes in Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 5, new magazines like Putnam's were often accused of mounting an “attack on traditional professional status.”
7 Lehuu, 4.
8 See Berthold, Dennis, “Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville's ‘The Two Temples’,” American Literature, 71, 3 (1999)Google Scholar; and Olson, Charles, Call Me Ishmael (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967)Google Scholar.
9 Herman Melville, “The Fiddler,” in idem, The Complete Shorter Fiction (London: Everyman's Library, 1997), 261. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.
10 Gupta, R. K., “Hautboy and Plinlimmon: A Reinterpretation of Melville's ‘The Fiddler’,” American Literature, 43, 3 (Nov. 1971), 437CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 See Levine, Lawrence W., Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
12 Denning, Michael, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1998)Google Scholar.
13 It is this purpose to which Melville puts Shakespeare in other works as well. This sense of being able to play to both elite and lower-class audiences serves Melville both in Moby-Dick and in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in which Shakespeare, appearing vicariously as embodied in Hawthorne, functions as the ideal artist in which to locate a hope for national unification.
14 Plotz, Judith, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 272Google Scholar.
15 It is interesting to note that despite Wordsworth's famous remarks in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, that modern consciousness was motivated by a kind of “extraordinary incidents” and escapism, Bettymania remained for him a largely legitimate response to the boy's unique talent.
16 Playfair, Giles, The Prodigy: The Strange Life of Master Betty (London: Secker and Warburg Ltd, 1967), 120Google Scholar.
17 Hazlitt and Northcote quoted in Ibid., 79.
18 Anon., The Young Roscius (New York: Robert M'Dermut, 1806), 16 Giles Playfair's biography of Betty is based around his readings of accounts from many different newspapers from various regions of Britain and America.
19 Varty, Anne, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain: “All Work, No Play” (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Ibid., 14.
21 Halttunen's, KarenConfidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar is a classic study of the ironies implicit in the middle-class search for sincerity.
22 Hadley, Elaine, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Market Place 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 33Google Scholar.
23 Hadley, 33.
24 Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 4.
25 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 200Google Scholar.
26 The irony of the Astor Place riot was that the Young America group, associated with Duyckinck and famed for their defence of radical democracy, found itself on the side of the Whig elite because of their collective dislike of Forrest's performance style.
27 Lawson, Andrew, Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), xviv, xviiGoogle Scholar.
28 Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot (New York: H. M. Ranney, 1849), 5, 6.
29 Herman Melville, “The Two Temples,” in idem, The Complete Shorter Fiction (London: Everyman's Library, 1997), 303. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.
30 Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings, 168.
31 Lawson, 5.
32 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in idem, Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 38.
33 Post-Lauria, 165.
34 As Bryan Waterman has discussed in his book Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), New York writing in the early republic was often designed for salon circulation and discussion and possessed a resistance to the wider marketplace. This is even true of Washington Irving's early work for Salmagundi, which was largely satirical and not aimed at audiences outside New York City.
