"The Hint Of Style": Byron, John Hookham Frere, and Melville's Marginalia in William Tennant's Anster Fair

“The Hint Of Style”: Byron, John Hookham Frere, and Melville’s Marginalia in William Tennant’s Anster Fair COLIN D. DEWEY Cornell University D uring Allan Melvill’s visit to Scotland, the Reverend Robert Swan presented Melvill, soon to become Herman Melville’s father, with a copy of Anster Fair: A Poem (1812), by the scholar and poet William Tennant (1784-1848), resident of Anstruther, in county Fife, the Melville ancestral home (see Fig. 1). The gift inscription is dated “May 20th 1818.” Decades later, and opposite his father’s name, Melville unobtrusively recorded on the verso of the title page the autograph “Herman Melville / N.Y. 1875.” A modern reader of Anster Fair will find passages reminiscent of Melville’s own writing, chiefly the easy juxtaposition of lofty and lowly subjects for satiric or warmly humorous effect. The poem also employs the kind of carnivalesque description and digressive narrative familiar to mock-epic that Melville would adopt in Mardi and The Confidence-Man, among other works. But the physical evidence for his having actually read the poem is limited to his marginalia, which appear on only a few early stanzas, and an inscription opposite the title page noting the poem’s stanzaic form. Despite these few markings in a relatively unknown volume, the quality of the marginalia adds significantly to the documentary record of Herman Melville’s intellectual development and to our growing understanding of his education in poetics and literary aesthetics. The most striking annotation is the note on the fly leaf that links Melville’s reading of the book to his knowledge of Byron. Byron was always with Melville, who memorized lengthy passages of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a boy, made allusions to Byron’s life and works throughout his career, and often quoted him in correspondence. The fly-leaf annotation reveals Melville’s recognition of Byron’s literary relationship with diplomat and writer John Hookham Frere (1769-1846); it helps us place Melville in conversation with their work and clarify Melville’s understanding of the literary criticism current in the 1860s and 1870s. The marginalia in Anster Fair: A Poem reveal a scholarly Melville, a poet and critic confident in his knowledge and authoritatively addressing Tennant’s text. I transcribe C
2007 The Authors Journal compilation C
2007 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 25 C O L I N D . D E W E Y Figure 1. Title page of Melville’s copy of William Tennant’s Anster Fair. Melville supplied the author’s name in pencil. Published with permission of the Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. 26 L E V I A T H A N “ T H E H I N T O F S T Y L E ” Melville’s markings to his first edition of Anster Fair here fully and for the first time, with photo-reproductions made available by Katherine Reagan, Curator of Rare Books, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, and with thanks to Susan Jaffe Tane, whose donation to Cornell University of her collection of Melville materials brought the book to light.1 A GIFT TO ALLAN MELVILL FROM HIS FRIEND I n 1818, the year before Herman Melville was born, his father Allan was traveling in Europe scouting goods for the import trade. Before pursuing his main purpose in France, he was in Scotland on other family business. Allan’s father, Major Thomas Melvill, was at that time the closest surviving relative to the late General Robert Melvill, of noble Scottish lineage, and formerly governor of Grenada, the Grenadines, Dominica, St. Vincent, and Tobago. As Hershel Parker reports, “The value of the estate, Thomas Mevill had heard, amounted to one hundred thousand pounds. He gave Allan the responsibility of making inquiries in Scotland before proceeding to his business in France.”2 Either claiming a share in the estate or renewing the relationship with the Scottish Melvilles would have had important consequences for Allan’s...