Traveling from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to Albany, New York one November to spend Thanksgiving with his family, Herman Melville, at eighteen, had time to reflect on his personal situation. Born in New York City on 1 August 1819, he had enjoyed a comfortable boyhood, but reverses in his father's business during Herman's adolescence had forced the family to relocate to Albany, where his father fared no better. Overambitious schemes and overextended credit took their toll. He died a broken man, leaving his wife Maria and their seven children to fend for themselves. Herman was twelve. His teenage brother Ganesvoort went into business upon their father's death and proved successful until the Depression of 1837 drove him into bankruptcy. To help the family, Herman had left Albany a few months before Thanksgiving this year to teach school in rural Massachusetts.

During the holiday, an uncle gave Herman a copy of John Preston's incongruously titled teachers' manual, Every Man His Own Teacher, which supplied the mathematics exercises his students sorely needed. Melville observed that some of them had traveled through their arithmetic “with so great swiftness that they can not recognize objects in the road on a second journey: and are about as ignorant of them as though they had never passed that way before” (W, XIV, p. 8). Preston emphasized the nobility of teaching, an endeavor the literary genius typically disdained. The comparison between teaching and writing had the opposite of its intended effect on Melville.