Posts Tagged ‘Moby-Dick’
“Traveling booksellers balanced the need to garner sales with the specter of artful deception”*…
We noted in a post last month the extraordinary market in the 19th century U.S. for subscription books (a direct-sales approach to publishing with a long history); even after subscriptions subsided, their infrastructure– sales teams that contained an appreciable number of women– was used to sell books in locations too remote for bookstores. Livia Gershon reviews the risks and rewards of life on the road as a traveling bookseller…
In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the rise of public libraries, many people in remote parts of the United States got their hands on new books thanks to traveling salespeople. As literature scholar and archivist Jolie Braun writes, drawing on three memoirs from this era, women in that line of work had some distinct advantages but also faced serious hardships, both physical and social.
The booksellers visited homes and businesses with sample books, took orders, and then later delivered the books and collected payment. Braun writes that popular volumes included Bibles, farming and health manuals, biographies, and fiction. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and the works of Mark Twain were popular choices. Many books published using this “subscription” model sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
While the vast majority of book peddlers were men, some publishers recruited women with the idea that they would be well suited to sell books on health and hygiene to female readers, and also that customers would find them sympathetic.
In an 1868 account of her work selling books across northern Illinois and Indiana, Annie Nelles Dumond described taking up the work out of necessity. She wrote that, seeking to escape a difficult childhood, she married young to a man who turned out to already have a wife and children. A second husband abandoned her. So Dumond sought ways to support herself.
When she began selling books, she wore a mourning bonnet. She acknowledged that this was deceptive but wrote that it was “almost necessary to my self-preservation that my past should not be known.”
Dumond described pride in her work’s “dissemination of light and knowledge among the masses.” By contrast, in an 1874 book on her own work as a bookseller, J. W. Likins of central California wrote that, despite knowing it was “honorable and legitimate” employment, “it seemed to me very much like begging.”
Likins, who took the job to support her family after her husband became too ill to work, wrote that some potential customers seemed curious or pitying. But a few men were angry to see a woman out on her own, demanding that she go home to take care of her family or incorrectly assuming that she was a suffragist.
More disturbingly, in a third autobiographical account Braun considers, published in 1881, a northern California peddler named Harriet Wasson Styer described a man telling her that, if she were his sister, he would murder her rather than allow her to canvass.
But much of Styer’s account suggested a fascinating experience. She recounted traveling to lumber camps and mining towns, admiring the wild landscapes, and coping with bed bugs and dirty stagecoaches.
Braun notes that all three peddlers were well aware that they were doing something many people believed was improper for a lady, but they took on the work out of a combination of necessity and a chance for adventure…
“The Women Who Sold Books Door to Door,” from @liviagershon.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Building a Library in Wartime Paris” (“how librarians brought books to U. S. troops during World War I”)
* John Jude Garcia, American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855
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As we get a foot in the door, we might send grateful birthday greetings to Herman Melville; he was born on this date in 1819. A writer, he is best known for Moby-Dick (1851), Typee (1846), and his posthumously published (1924) novella Billy Budd, Sailor. The efforts of the booksellers described above notwithstanding, Melville was not well known to the public at the time of his death in 1891. But the centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival; Moby-Dick is now, of course, considered one of the Great American Novels.
“Anything down there about your souls?”*…
Andrew Delbanco on the difficulty, to date, of capturing Herman Melville’s central importance in a biography…
The fact is that Herman Melville is a singularly unyielding subject for literary biography. “One portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another,” as he says of the whale, “but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness…[because] there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like.” The dim record of Melville’s life simply disappears into the glare of his work, and the best one can hope for is to glimpse a few moments of convergence between them…
By what alchemy did an apparently unremarkable boy become the genius who broke open the conventional form of the novel and pushed the American language far beyond where any previous practitioner had taken it? Where did he acquire his knowledge of evil that made him seem mad to his contemporaries, but prescient of our own blasted century?…
On the problem of understanding Melville’s work via his life: “The Great Leviathan.”
* Queequeg, Moby-Dick, Chapter 19
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As we wonder about white whales, we might recall that it was on this date in 1855 that David Livingstone became the first European to see (what we now call) Victoria Falls in what is now Zambia-Zimbabwe.
“A Monograph I promised, and a Monograph this shall be”*…
Virginius Dabney wrote the American South’s great postmodern novel. Too bad he did it in 1866…
I found Virginius Dabney in the usual way: which is to say, by accident. I was pawing through a box of antiquarian books when one old volume fell open and a centerfold fell out. Not that: it was a centerfold of sheet music. I cradled the book in my hand and examined the title page
The Story of Don Miff,
As Told by His Friend John Bouche Whacker:
A Symphony of Life.
Edited by Virginius Dabney.
It appeared to be a novel, but as I idly flipped through it, more centerfolds flopped out: sheet music again. I thought for a moment that someone had jammed them in there, but no, they were bound in. Then I began to notice the title of each section of the book. Symphony of Life Movement One. Symphony of Life Movement Two. Symphony of…
The book had a publication date of 1886, just the period I tend to favor, and it bore the imprint of J. B. Lippincott Company, a major publisher. Yet I’d never heard of it or its author. And what was more, most—but not all—of the parts in the orchestral score inserted into the book were blank. The whole thing seemed rather curious. Then I started reading, and it got curioser and curioser.
Don Miff is… well, first let me state that I am reasonably sure that I am correct when I say that Don Miff is the only nineteenth-century novel that is addressed to a tenth-generation descendant living in the twenty-third century. Or that this descendant is Asian-American—because, as the narrator muses, even as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was coming into force, perhaps “under the contempt expressed for them as inferiors there lurks a secret, unrealized sense of their real superiority?” And even this grandson faces a superior force to himself: women. With mechanization removing the advantages of physical force, Dabney predicts, men and their wearisome violence will become obsolete. Only a few men will be “preserved here and there in zoological gardens of the wealthy and the curious, along with rare specimens of the bison of the prairie, skeletons of the American Indian and the dodo…”—and there his tenth-removed grandson will be exhibited to the inquisitive stares of numberless crowds of women. “You will rue the day when your ancestors, mistaking might for right, excluded woman from that haven of rest, the ballot-box.”
It is to this twenty-third-century Asian-American grandson, a living exhibit in a peaceful matriarchy, that the great Southern novel of 1886 is addressed.
…
Dabney, making his morning commute as a deputy collector at the Customs House downtown, had collapsed unconscious on a bench after climbing the stairs to the El line at Eighteenth and Third. His grown son Noland was by his side, and called for help, but it was too late. Virginius Dabney was due to turn fifty-nine soon, and already lucky to be alive after a previous stroke. But this time, his luck ran out…
Colleagues stood up and recalled how, even though he had only been working there for nine months before dying, old Virginius was one of the most genial men to ever hold the job: a true Southern gentleman. Some of the may have known that, before then, he’d been an editor at the Commercial Advertiser, and that before that he’d run the New-York Latin School for many years. A few might have even have heard that once, eight or nine years ago, their deputy collector had written… something or other.
And that is where history closes its book upon our author. There is no biography of Virginius Dabney: no critical studies of his work, no scholarly papers on the man. Search any database and you will find innumerable hits on “Virginius Dabney,” but these are of his namesake grandson—a Richmond Times-Dispatch editor who won a Pulitzer in 1948 for writing against segregation on city transit lines. Of his dear old granddad, there is nothing.
Why? How could such a forward-looking book have been ignored?
Think back upon one of Dabney’s immediate predecessors at the Customs House. He, too, had written a curious book years before—and, like Dabney, had soon been largely forgotten, and left to toil in obscurity in the downtown warehouses by the late 1880s. His great book was out of print and would stay that way for decades. When he died, he got an even shorter obituary than Dabney did. Apparently nobody cared as much around the Customs House for Mr. Herman Melville.
If we wonder why Don Miff is forgotten, we might also ask—why did it take seventy years for Moby-Dick to be recognized as a masterpiece? Until the 1920s, it was out of print in the United States, and appreciated in the United Kingdom primarily as a maritime tale. It was not until the excavation of Melville by Lewis Mumford and his fellow critics, and the rise of Modernism, that—oh, look! A masterpiece!
Which, of course, it is… now…
Read Emily Dickinson next to other then-famous poets of her time—Tupper, say, or even Longfellow—and her contemporaries look staggeringly old-fashioned. Dickinson is new, spare, prophetic. It is tempting, reading her mysterious and yet intensely personal lines, to think to yourself: My god, it’s as if she knew the future of poetry. But the truth is precisely the opposite; it is because we know the future that the way we read her work is irrevocably altered. The point is not that Emily Dickinson saw the future, but rather, that the future saw her. She appeals to our own aesthetic, and fits in with our notion of a suitable lineage. Had our economic, aesthetic, and political world turned out differently—if, say, heroic socialist odes were the fashion—then Emily Dickinson would have been just another crazy lady in Amherst.
The present catches up to the past: “The Lost Symphony,” from the wonderful Paul Collins (@PaulCollinsPDX) and the good old days of The Believer– eminently worth reading in full.
* Virginius Dabney
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As we look back, we might recall that it was on this date in 1726 that Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships— much better known as Gulliver’s Travels— was first published. A satire both of human nature and of the “travelers’ tales” literary subgenre popular at the time, it was (unlike Don Miff) an immediate hit (John Gay wrote in a 1726 letter to Swift that “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery”). It has, of course, become a classic.
“It takes only one drink to get me drunk…..the trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth”*…
High school health classes, it turns out, have been around since the 16th century. That’s when a school rector in Bavaria, writing under the name Vincent Obsopoeus, published a poetic guide to responsible drinking, geared toward young men who—then as now—didn’t appear to know their limits. “Can it really be true?” asks “Drunkenness” herself in the book’s lyrical preface, written by a friend. “Should I really believe this book can teach people how to rationally lose control?”
Obsopoeus (pronounced “OB-so-PAY-us”) published this treatise, in Latin, in 1536. In April 2020, Princeton University Press published a new English translation by Michael Fontaine, a professor of classics at Cornell University. Entitled How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing, Fontaine’s translation speaks not only to the text’s historical moment, but to our very own, as alcohol sales have soared on account of the COVID-19 quarantine.
Nonetheless, says Fontaine, it’s important to read Obsopoeus with his time and place in mind. Though the popular imagination often pictures ancient Greece and Rome as decadent playgrounds of drunken excess, binge-drinking wasn’t actually culturally normative in those societies. For one thing, drinkers in those days tended to mix water with their wine. Moreover, their wine was less alcoholic than ours to begin with, as a lack of fungicides meant a shorter time for grapes on the vine.
Instead, Fontaine writes in his introduction, “binge and bro culture—so familiar to Americans—started not in classical Greece or Rome but in Germany five hundred years ago.” The reasons, in his analysis, have to do with the end of the Crusades. Young men were still being educated and trained to become knights, but that path was becoming increasingly obsolete, and men began seeking other outlets for their aggression. It was in that context, he writes, that “hardcore drinking” emerged as “a mark of he-man prowess …” It didn’t help that vineyards accounted for four times as much German land as they do now. Even doctors and hospital patients were allowed to drink nearly two gallons of wine per day…
From a school master concerned about the rise of binge-drinking bros; read on for: “Tips for Responsible Drinking, From 16th-Century Germany.”
* George Burns
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As we listen for history’s rhymes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1851 that Harper & Brothers published Herman Melville‘s novel, Moby Dick; it had appeared in the U.K. about a month earlier as The Whale. Based on Melville’s experience aboard a whaler and dedicated to Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, the book received mixed reviews and sold poorly. It is now, of course, considered a classic– the peak of the American Renaissance.
Alcohol loomed large in life on the Pequod (and in the prior lives of some of his fellow sailors that Ishmael recounts)– perhaps nowhere more dramatically that in Chapter 36, in which Ahab fills a pewter chalice with booze “hot as Satan’s hoof” and orders his harpooneers Queequeg, Tashtego, and Dagoo to detach the barbs of their harpoons and hold them upside down so the sockets can be filled with more “fiery waters.” The three men raise their harpoon goblets and drink as Ahab chants, “Death to Moby-Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to his death!”
“So may the outward shows be least themselves”*…
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Further our our recent look at movie posters that move, Henning Lederer: “How would these great book covers from the past look like when set in motion? Here we go…”
“Covers”
* Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
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As we celebrate cerebration, we might recall that it was on this date in 1851 that Harper & Brothers published Herman Melville‘s novel, Moby Dick; it had appeared in the U.K. about a month earlier as The Whale. Based on Melville’s experience aboard a whaler and dedicated to Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, the book received mixed reviews and sold poorly. It is now, of course, considered a classic– the peak of the American Renaissance.
The (altogether-unanimated) title page of first American edition
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