{"id":1389,"date":"2019-03-06T17:07:22","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T17:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1389"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:25:52","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:25:52","slug":"graham-thompson-herman-melville-among-the-magazines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2019\/03\/06\/graham-thompson-herman-melville-among-the-magazines\/","title":{"rendered":"Graham Thompson,\u00a0Herman Melville Among the Magazines<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Graham Thompson,\u00a0Herman Melville Among the Magazines<\/em><\/h1>\n\n
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Katherine Scheil<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Herman<\/a><\/svg><\/span><\/a><\/div><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Graham Thompson. Herman Melville Among the Magazines. <\/em>Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. 272p. ISBN 978-1-62534-324-6. US$ 32.95 (Paper). ISBN 978-1-62534-323-9. US$ 90 (Cloth).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In an 1851 letter to Evert Duyckinck, Herman Melville describes taking a sleigh ride to the town of Dalton, Massachusetts to purchase fine paper from one of the five mills in operation there. He points to the watermark in the letter paper as proof of the journey, remarking \u201c\u2018about 5 miles from here, North East. I went there and got a sleigh-load of this paper. A great neighborhood for authors, you see, is Pittsfield,\u2019\u201d (2). Graham Thompson refers to this anecdote several times in his new book, Herman Melville Among the Magazines (2018). For Thompson, the vignette helps justify the project of his book, assuring readers that his attention to the original magazine context for Melville\u2019s short stories is not one critic\u2019s imposition upon a writer\u2019s catalog but a scrutiny born out of the author\u2019s own predilections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book details the practices and priorities of an evolving US periodical culture by elaborating Melville\u2019s \u201cembeddedness\u201d (8\u201313) within it. The method foregrounds Thompson\u2019s expert command of the author\u2019s correspondence, publishing relationships, and bibliography. The book takes a \u201cwriter\u2019s eye\u201d (7) view with accounts of Harper\u2019s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam\u2019s Monthly focalized through Melville\u2019s transactions with the attendant circle of publishers, editors, and printers. Readers may be disappointed that through this lens, the magazine format appears interesting thanks to Melville\u2019s engagement with it, rather than inherently so. Granted, there is a strong record of work on nineteenth-century US periodicals already, which Thompson makes generous use of in his account. Hester Blum, David Dowling, Jared Gardner, Trish Loughran, Meredith McGill, and Sheila Post-Lauria are just a few of his interlocuters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is at its best when analyzing Melville\u2019s writing through themes of materiality. Chapter One recovers the author\u2019s pleasure in paper and first-hand knowledge of the papermaking industry. Thompson describes the machines and manufacturing processes Melville would have observed while touring Massachusetts\u2019s factories. Drawing on these details, Thompson argues we must decouple paper from print culture to understand \u201cThe Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.\u201d He reads the diptych as a \u201cpaean to the possibilities of paper before it enters an economy of print\u201d (53), challenging previous interpretations of the pairing as an allegorical reproach to the new industrialized conditions for authorship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapter Two argues Melville remixed existing genres to suit magazine conventions and the tastes of editors through readings of \u201cCock-a-Doodle-Doo!,\u201d \u201cThe Encantadas,\u201d and \u201cBartleby, the Scrivener.\u201d Chapter Three addresses the formation of Putnam\u2019s, Melville\u2019s relationships with the magazine\u2019s owners and editors, and the power struggles within those ranks during the magazine\u2019s January 1853\u2013September 1857 run. Chapter Five refigures Melville\u2019s process of composing Israel Potter and \u201cBenito Cereno\u201d as a mode of editorship, based in the author\u2019s revisions to and arrangements of diverse source materials for these texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fourth chapter most directly fulfills the book\u2019s promise to return Melville\u2019s stories to their original magazine contexts. The August 1853 issue of Putnam\u2019s printed an essay by Thomas Mayo Brewer on the priorities of the Smithsonian, Melville\u2019s \u201cThe Lightning Rod Man,\u201d and an excerpt from Israel Potter in sequence. By highlighting the vision of science in society that each piece presents, Thompson routes analysis of Melville\u2019s contributions through Brewer\u2019s essay to extol the author\u2019s engagement with mid-century debates about scientific knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herman Melville Among the Magazines <\/em>will be of interest to scholars of Melville and anyone curious about the possibilities of a biographical approach to book history. Thompson\u2019s study succeeds in returning priority to \u201cthe imaginative acts of authorial creation that bring texts into existence in the first place\u201d (19).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Katherine Scheil, University of Minnesota<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The book details the practices and priorities of an evolving US periodical culture by elaborating Melville\u2019s \u201cembeddedness\u201d (8\u201313) within it. The method foregrounds Thompson\u2019s expert command of the author\u2019s correspondence, publishing relationships, and bibliography. The book takes a \u201cwriter\u2019s eye\u201d (7) view with accounts of Harper\u2019s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam\u2019s Monthly focalized through Melville\u2019s transactions with the attendant circle of publishers, editors, and printers. \u261b \u261e<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1896,1942,1947],"class_list":["post-1389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-19th-century","tag-north-america","tag-periodicals-news"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1389"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5699,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389\/revisions\/5699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}