Introduction to “Melville’s England / England’s Melville”

This special issue of Leviathan arose from the 2017 International Melville Society Conference held at King’s College London on the Strand. Among other things, this venue offered an opportunity to consider the myriad set of relations that existed between Melville’s writing and England (Melville’s own preferred term for what we now refer to as the United Kingdom). This issue of Leviathan zeroes in on some of the ways that conference participants considered these relationships. Each of these essays combines co-extensive analyses of biography, literary influence, and intellectual legacy to draw a textured picture of how England shaped Melville and, then, how Melville shaped England.

Just ten minutes’ walk away from his lodgings on Craven Street, the conference location was and is surrounded by the vestigial traces of Melville’s London during his short but important visit to the capital in 1849. Melville travelled radially along the Strand from out of Craven Street to discover book-shops, taverns, river views, lecture theaters, and, most charmingly, the very first American bowling alley in England. (It appears he had a talent for the sport.) Across the way from the main entrance of the venue, near an oddly out-of-place church right in the middle of the road, would have been the site of Stibbs’ Bookshop, which Melville frequented with avidity. Beyond that, now succeeded by the utilitarian arc of Aldwych, was the infamously depraved Holywell Street, demolished with characteristic relish by the Victorians, where he, aptly enough, purchased Rousseau’s Confessions. Next to the conference site, just two minutes further south, and closer to the Thames, is Temple, a place, evidently, of much carousing and Dickensian goodwill for Herman. The Edinboro Castle, a fine place for a pot of stout, apparently, would likely have been right in the vicinity too. For Melvilleans in London this history permeates the air but remains only in fragments, glimpses, and implications, annihilated by some combination of nineteenth-century modernization, war, and the grip of contemporary finance capitalism.

In 2017, to insert Melville self-consciously back into this world was, for me, to encounter a strange tension between the mundane, significant, and the ineluctably lost. To imagine him on those streets, going about the dull day-to-day business of selling his book, seeing the spots on what was a relatively conventional tourist schedule, and socializing here and there, mostly with now-forgotten names, was to humanize a figure who had, eerily, existed outside of time, less flesh and blood and more spiritual abstraction. A figure who had always seemed to exist elsewhere—whether the Massachusetts countryside, the islands of the South Pacific, or New York—came home to me as I imagined taking in similar if transfigured sights as he did.

Yet, at the same time, as I looked on the streets with new eyes, those short months of 1849 started to vibrate with a strange historical intensity, as though they were not just one transformative moment in Melville’s writing, but the central transformation in his career. Between White-Jacket and Moby-Dick, Melville traversed some qualitative intellectual and aesthetic threshold and, right there in the middle, was his trip to London (and beyond into Europe). The world about King’s seemed to thrum with a different sort of life as a result.

There was the site where Melville plucked a crucial influence from off the shelf, Thomas Browne, or else an Elizabethan dramatist; there, right in the midst of a heaving Trafalgar Square, was the exact site where he must have sponge-like absorbed a view that he would soon use as a metaphor; up there, on the fourth floor of Craven Street, was where he must have shed a tear for Gansevoort, peering over the stinking Thames. My students, poor unfortunates, now have to put up with my Melville-on-the-Strand tour each academic year, as do some of my more tolerant friends, seemingly quite happy to humor me.

Two of the essays in this special issue consider in depth some of the odd mix of the ordinary and the conceptually significant that characterized...