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Year 1891 (MDCCCXCI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Tuesday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar.

Events[link]

January–March[link]

January 21: Hawaii, Queen Lili'Uokalani.

• January 1 – Paying of old age pensions begins in Germany.
• January 16 – The Chilean Civil War breaks out.
• January 20 – Jim Hogg becomes the first native Texan to be governor of that state.
• January 29 – Liliuokalani is proclaimed Queen of Hawaii.
• January 31 – The Portuguese republican revolution breaks out in the northern city of Porto.
• February 14 – In the FA Cup Quarter Final, a goal is deliberately stopped by handball on the goal line. An Indirect free kick is awarded, since the Penalty kick was proposed that year but not implemented. This event probably changes public opinion on the penalty kick, which was seen as 'an Irishman's motion' before (see William McCrum).
• February 15 – AIK is founded.
• February 21 – Springhill, Nova Scotia suffers a serious mining disaster.
• March 3 – The International Copyright Act of 1891 is passed by the Fifty-first United States Congress.
• March 9–March 12 – A powerful storm off England's south coast sinks 14 ships.
• March 14 – In New Orleans, a lynch mob storms the Old Parish Prison and lynches 11 Italians arrested but found innocent of the murder of Police Chief David Hennessy.
• March 15 – Jesse W. Reno patents the first escalator at Coney Beach.
• March 17 – The British steamship SS Utopia, carrying Italian migrants to New York, sinks in the inner harbor of Gibraltar after collision with the battleship HMS Anson, killing 564.^[1]
• March 18 – Official opening of the London-Paris telephone system.^[2]

April–June[link]

May 5: Tchaikovsky opens Carnegie

• April 1
  • The Wrigley Company is founded in Chicago.
  • The London-Paris telephone system is opened to the general public.^[2]
• April 5 – Census in the United Kingdom. 15.6 million people live in cities of 20,000 or more in England and Wales. Cities of 20,000 or more account for 54% of the total English population.
• May – Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claims to be the Promised Messiah (The second coming of Jesus) and the Mahdi awaited in Islam.
• May 1 – Troops fire on a workers' May Day demonstration in support of the 8-hour workday in Fourmies, France, killing 9 and wounding 30.
• May 1 – The first Fascio dei lavoratori (Workers League) is founded by Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida in Catania, (Sicily).
• May 5 – The Music Hall in New York (now known as Carnegie Hall) has its grand opening and first public performance, with maestro Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky as the guest conductor.
• May 11 – Otsu Incident: Tsesarevich Nikolay Alexandrovich (the future Czar Nicholas II) of Russia survives an assassination attempt while visiting Japan.
• May 15 – Pope Leo XIII issues the encyclical Rerum Novarum, resulting in the creation of many Christian Democrat Parties throughout Europe.
• May 20 – Thomas Alva Edison's prototype kinetoscope is first displayed at Edison's Laboratory, for a convention of the National Federation of Women's Clubs.
• May 31 N.S. (May 19 O.S.) – In the Kuperovskaya district of Vladivostok, a grand ceremonial inauguration of construction work on the Trans-Siberian Railway is carried out by the Tsesarevich Nikolay Alexandrovich and a religious service held.
• June 1 – The Johnstown Inclined Plane opens in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
• June 16 – John Abbott becomes Canada's third prime minister.
• June 21 – First long-distance transmission of alternating current by the Ames power plant near Telluride, Colorado, by Lucien and Paul Nunn.
• June 25 – Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes appears in The Strand Magazine for the first time.^[2]

May 20: Edison's kinetoscope.

July–September[link]

• July 30 – The Springboks rugby union team of South Africa play their first international test match against the Lions team of the British Isles and win by 4-0.
• August 27 – France and Russia conclude a defensive alliance.
• September 14 – The first penalty kick is awarded in a football (soccer) match; John Heath scores it for the Wolverhampton Wanderers.
• September 28 – The C.A. Peñarol is founded in Montevideo under the name of the CURCC (Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club).

October–December[link]

• October – Eugène Dubois finds the first fragmentary bones of Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated Homo erectus), or 'Java Man', at Trinil on the Solo River.^[3]
• October 1 – In California, Stanford University opens its doors.
• October 27 – An 8.0 earthquake strikes the village of Utsuzumi in rural Gifu, Japan, killing over 7,000 across the region and creating a 3-meter-tall surface fault that is still visible.
• November 11 – The Jindandao Incident breaks out in the Juu Uda League, Inner Mongolia, massacred tens of thousands of Mongols before being suppressed by government troops in late December.
• November 28 – The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers was organized.

October 1 Stanford University opens its doors.

• December 22 – Asteroid 323 Brucia becomes the first asteroid discovered using photography.

Date unknown[link]

• Brahmin teacher and nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak begins agitation for Indian home Rule.
• New Scotland Yard becomes the HQ of the London Metropolitan Police.
• James Naismith invents basketball.
• The Tobacco Protest occurs in Iran.
• Oba Ovonramwen seizes the throne of Benin.
• The Australian Labor Party is founded.
• Seattle University is established.
• Drexel University is founded as the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry.
• The Auckland University Students' Association is founded.
• Maria Skłodowska (later Marie Curie) enters the Sorbonne University.
• Nikola Tesla invents the Tesla coil.
• Michelin patent the removable pneumatic bicycle tire.^[4]
• Skansen is established as the world's first open air museum by Artur Hazelius on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm, Sweden.

Births[link]

January–June[link]

• January 1 – Charles Bickford, American actor (d. 1967)
• January 2 – Charles P. Thompson, American actor (d. 1979)
• January 7 – Zora Neale Hurston, Harlem Renaissance writer (d. 1960)
• January 8 – Walther Bothe, German physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics (d. 1957)
• January 22 – Antonio Gramsci, Italian Communist writer and politician (d. 1937)
• January 24 – Walter Model, German field marshal (d. 1945)
• January 27 – Ilya Ehrenburg, Russian writer (d. 1967)
• February 9 – Ronald Colman, English actor (d. 1958)
• February 11 – J.W. Hearne, English cricketer (d. 1965)
• February 13 – Grant Wood, American painter (d. 1942)
• February 17 – Abraham Fraenkel, German-born Israeli mathematician and recipient of the Israel Prize (d. 1965)
• February 21 – Sean Heuston, Irish rebel (d. 1916)
• February 27 – David Sarnoff, Russian-born American broadcasting pioneer (d. 1971)
• March 3 – Fritz Rumey, German World War I fighter ace (d. 1918)
• March 9 – Jose P. Laurel, Philippine President (d. 1959)
• March 10 – Sam Jaffe, American actor (d. 1984)
• March 19 – Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States (d. 1974)
• March 24 – Rudolf Berthold, German fighter pilot (d. 1920)
• March 26 – Will Wright, American actor (d. 1962)
• March 29 – Yvan Goll, French lyricist and dramatist (d. 1950)
• April 2 – Max Ernst, German painter (d. 1976)
• April 7 – Ole Kirk Christiansen, founder of the Lego group (d. 1958)
• April 13 – Nella Larsen, American novelist (d. 1964)
• April 15 – Wallace Reid, American actor (d. 1923)
• April 17 – George Adamski, Polish-born alleged UFO traveler (d. 1965)
• April 23 – Sergei Prokofiev, Soviet composer (d. 1953)
• May 7 – Harry McShane, Scottish socialist (d. 1988)
• May 10 – Mahmoud Mokhtar, Egyptian sculptor (d. 1934)
• May 15
  • Mikhail Bulgakov, Russian writer (d. 1940)
  • Fritz Feigl, Austrian-born chemist (d. 1971)
• May 16 – Richard Tauber, Austrian tenor (d. 1948)
• May 18 – Rudolf Carnap, German philosopher (d. 1970)
• May 19 – Oswald Boelcke, German World War I pilot (d. 1916)
• May 22 – Eddie Edwards, American jazz trombonist (d. 1963)
• May 23 – Pär Lagerkvist, Swedish writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1974)
• May 24 – William F. Albright, American archeologist and Biblical scholar (d. 1971)
• June 2 – Takijirō Ōnishi, Japanese admiral (d. 1945)
• June 3 – Jim Tully, vagabond, pugalist, noted American writer (d. 1947 heart disease)
• June 9 – Cole Porter, American composer and songwriter (d. 1964)
• June 20 – John A. Costello, second President of Ireland (d. 1976)
• June 21 – Hermann Scherchen, German conductor (d. 1966)
• June 28 – Esther Forbes, American Writer (d. 1967)
• June 30 – Man Mountain Dean, American professional wrestler (d. 1953)

July–December[link]

• July 2 – Karin Kock-Lindberg, Swedish politician (d. 1976)
• July 5 – John Howard Northrop, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1987)
• July 27 – Jacob van der Hoeden, Dutch-Israeli veterinary scientist (d. 1968)
• July 29 – Bernhard Zondek German-born Israeli gynecologist, developer of first reliable pregnancy test (d. 1966)
• August 2 – Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky, Russian literary historian, linguist (d. 1971)
• August 11 – Stancho Belkovski, Bulgarian architect and lecturer (d. 1962)
• August 21 – Emiliano Mercado del Toro, Puerto Rican, longest-lived war veteran ever and last verified person born in 1891 (d. 2007)
• August 25 – David Shimoni, Russian-born Israeli poet and writer (d. 1956)
• September 3 – Bessie Delany, African American physician and author (d. 1995)
• September 12 – Pedro Albizu Campos, advocate of Puerto Rican independence (d. 1965)
• September 14 – William F. Friedman, American cryptographer (d. 1969)
• September 16
  • Karl Dönitz, German admiral and briefly President of Germany (d. 1980)
  • Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Austrian-born German World War II spy (d. 1972)
  • Julie Winnefred Bertrand, Canadian supercentenarian (d. 2007)
• September 26 – Charles Munch, French conductor and violinist (d. 1968)
• September 28 – Myrtle Gonzalez, American film and stage actress (d. 1918)
• October 12 – Fumimaro Konoe, Prime Minister of Japan (d. 1945)
• October 20 – James Chadwick, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1974)
• October 24 – Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic (d. 1961)
• October 25 – Father Coughlin, antisemetic radio host and Catholic priest (d. 1979)
• November 2 – David Townsend, American art director (1935)
• November 10 – Carl Stalling, American musician (d. 1972)
• November 14 – Frederick Banting, Canadian physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1941)
• November 15
  • Vincent Astor, American philanthropist (d. 1959)
  • Erwin Rommel, German field marshal (d. 1944)
• November 28 – Gregorio Perfecto, Filipino jurist & politician (d. 1949)
• November 29 – Julius Raab, former Chancellor of Austria (d. 1964)
• December 9 – Maksim Bahdanovič, Belarussian poet (d. 1917)
• December 10 – Nelly Sachs, German writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1970)
• December 14 – Katherine MacDonald, American silent screen actress (d. 1956)
• December 17
  • Karl Emil Schäfer, German World War I fighter ace (d. 1917)
  • Hu Shih, Chinese liberal (d. 1962)
• December 19 – Edward Bernard Raczynski, former President of Poland (d. 1993)
• December 26 – Henry Miller, American writer (d. 1980)

Date unknown[link]

• W. Alton Jones, American industrialist and philanthropist (d. 1962)

Deaths[link]

January–June[link]

• January 5 – Emma Abbott, American opera singer (b. 1849)
• January 16 – Léo Delibes, French composer (b. 1836)
• January 21 – Calixa Lavallée, Canadian composer (b. 1842)
• February 13 – David Dixon Porter, American admiral (b. 1813)
• February 14 – William Tecumseh Sherman, American general (b. 1820)
• March 15
  • Théodore de Banville, French writer (b. 1823)
  • Sir Joseph Bazalgette, English civil engineer (b. 1819)
• March 29 – Georges Seurat, French painter (b. 1859)
• April 2 – Ahmed Vefik Pasha, Turkish statesman (b. 1823)
• April 7 – P. T. Barnum, American showman (b. 1810)
• April 9 – George Cavendish-Bentinck, British Conservative politician (b. 1821)
• April 24 – Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Prussian field marshal (b. 1800)
• April 25 – Nathaniel Woodard, educationalist (b. 1811)
• May 4 – Professor James Moriarty, fictional criminal mastermind of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short story The Final Problem (b. unknown)
• May 8 – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Russian-born author and theosophist (b. 1831)
• June 6 – John A. Macdonald, first Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1815)
• June 23 – Samuel Newitt Wood, American Politician (b. 1825)

July–December[link]

• July 4 – Hannibal Hamlin, Vice President of the United States (b. 1809)
• August 12 – James Russell Lowell, American poet and essayist (b. 1819)
• August 14 – Sarah Childress Polk, First Lady of the United States (b. 1803)
• August 29 – Pierre Lallement, French inventor of the bicycle (b. 1843?)
• September 7 – Lorenzo Sawyer, 9th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California (b. 1820)
• September 11 – Antero de Quental, Portuguese poet (b. 1842)
• September 15 – Ivan Goncharov, Russian author (b. 1812)
• September 28 – Herman Melville, American novelist (b. 1819)
• September 30 – Georges Ernest Boulanger, French general and politician (b. 1837)
• October 6
  • Charles I of Württemberg (b. 1823)
  • Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish nationalist leader (b. 1846)
• October 15 – Gilbert Arthur a Beckett, English writer (b. 1837)
• October 23 – Ambrosius of Optina, Russian Orthodox saint (b. 1812)
• November 6 – J. Gregory Smith, Vermont governor (b. 1818)
• November 10 – Arthur Rimbaud, French poet (b. 1854)
• December 5 – Pedro II, Brazilian deposed emperor (b. 1826)
• December 31 – Samuel Ajayi Crowther, 1st African Anglican bishop; linguist and legendary missionary (b. 1809)

References[link]

Léo Delibes, photo from the collection of Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität

	Divertissement - Pizzicato Divertissement - Pizzicato from Sylvia — 3081 KB
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	En avril (for three-part children's choir) Performed by l'Atelier Vocal des Herbiers
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Clément Philibert Léo Delibes (21 February 1836 – 16 January 1891) was a French composer of ballets, operas, and other works for the stage. His most notable works include ballets Coppélia (1870) and Sylvia (1876) as well as the operas Le roi l'a dit (1873) and Lakmé (1883).

Léo Delibes was born in Saint-Germain-du-Val, now part of La Flèche (Sarthe), France, in 1836. His father was a mailman, his mother a talented amateur musician. His grandfather had been an opera singer. He was raised mainly by his mother and uncle following his father's early death. In 1871, at the age of 35, the composer married Léontine Estelle Denain. His brother Michel Delibes migrated to Spain; he was the grandfather of Spanish writer Miguel Delibes.

Starting in 1847, Delibes studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire as a student of Adolphe Adam. A year later he began taking voice lessons, though he would end up a much better organ player than singer. He held positions as a rehearsal accompanist and chorus master at the Théâtre Lyrique, as second chorus master at the Paris Opéra (in 1864), and as organist at Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot (1865–71). The first of his many operettas was Deux sous de charbon, ou Le suicide de Bigorneau ("Two sous-worth of coal"), written in 1856 for the Folies-Nouvelles.

A ceremonial cantata, Algers, for Napoleon III on the theme of Algiers, brought him to official attention; a collaboration with Léon Minkus resulted, in which his contribution of an act's worth of musical numbers for a ballet La source (1866) brought him into the milieu of ballet. Delibes achieved true fame in 1870 with the success of his ballet Coppélia; its title referred to a mechanical dancing doll that distracts a village swain from his beloved and appears to come to life. His other ballet is Sylvia (1876). It has been suggested that he also wrote the ballet music for Gounod's "Faust" which had been inserted ten years after the original performance of the opera.^[1]

Delibes also composed various operas, the last of which, the lush orientalizing Lakmé (1883), contains, among many dazzling numbers, the famous coloratura showpiece known as the Légende du Paria or Bell Song ("Où va la jeune Indoue?") and The Flower Duet ("Sous le dôme épais"), a barcarolle that Patricia Rozema made famous in her film "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing" and later used by British Airways commercials. At the time, his operas impressed Tchaikovsky enough for the composer to rate Delibes more highly than Brahms—although this may seem faint praise when one considers that the Russian composer considered Brahms "a giftless bastard."^[2]

In 1867 Delibes composed the divertissement Le jardin animé for a revival of the Joseph Mazilier/Adolphe Adam ballet Le corsaire. He wrote a mass, his Messe brève, and composed operettas almost yearly and occasional music for the theater, such as dances and antique airs for Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse, the play that Verdi turned into Rigoletto. Some musicologists believe that the ballet in Gounod's Faust was actually composed by Delibes.

Delibes died in in Paris in 1891, at the age of 54. He was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. Delibes' work is known to have been a great influence on composers such as Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns and Debussy. His ballet Sylvia was of special interest to Tchaikovsky, who wrote of Delibes' score: ". . . what charm, what wealth of melody! It brought me to shame, for had I known of this music, I would have never written Swan Lake."

Excerpt from Delibes' score: The first few measures of Pizzicato from Sylvia

Works[link]

• List of compositions by Léo Delibes
  • List of operas and operettas by Delibes
  • List of ballets by Léo Delibes

References[link]

Notes

Cited sources

• Ballet Notes (2001). "Léo Delibes". Retrieved June 25, 2005.
• Allmusic (2001). Leo Delibes Retrieved July 1, 2005.

External links[link]

• Free scores by Delibes at the International Music Score Library Project
• Free scores by Léo Delibes in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Ballet Notes: "Léo Delibes"

Herman Melville
Herman Melville, 1870
Born	(1819-08-01)August 1, 1819 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	September 28, 1891(1891-09-28) (aged 72) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, teacher, sailor, lecturer, poet, customs inspector
Nationality	American
Genres	Travelogue, Captivity narrative, Sea story, Gothic Romanticism, Allegory, Tall tale
Literary movement	Romanticism, and Skepticism; precursor to Modernism, precursor to absurdism and existentialism
Signature

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, becoming a bestseller), and after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the "Melville Revival" in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America.

Biography[link]

Early life, education, and family[link]

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819,^[1] the third of eight children of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. After her husband Allan died (& between 1832 & 1834), Maria added an "e" to the family surname — seemingly at the behest of Melville's brother Gansevoort.^[2] Part of a well-established and colorful Boston family, Melville's father spent a good deal of time abroad as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. The author's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, an honored participant of the Boston Tea Party who refused to change the style of his clothing or manners to fit the times, was depicted in Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "The Last Leaf". Herman visited him in Boston, and his father turned to him in his frequent times of financial need.

Peter Gansevoort, 1794 portrait by Gilbert Stuart

The maternal side of Melville's family was Hudson Valley Dutch. His maternal grandfather was General Peter Gansevoort, a hero of the Battle of Saratoga; in his gold-laced uniform, the general sat for a portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart, which is described in Melville's 1852 novel, Pierre, for Melville wrote out of his familial as well as his nautical background. Like the titular character in Pierre, Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent."^[3]

Allan Melvill sent his sons to the New York Male School (Columbia Preparatory School). Overextended financially and emotionally unstable, Allan tried to recover from his setbacks by moving his family to Albany in 1830 and going into the fur business. The new venture, however, was unsuccessful; the War of 1812 had ruined businesses that tried to sell overseas and he was forced to declare bankruptcy. He died soon afterward, leaving his family penniless, when Herman was 12.^[4] Although Maria had well-off kin, they were concerned with protecting their own inheritances and taking advantage of investment opportunities rather than settling their mother's estate so Maria's family would be more secure with Herman's younger brother, Thomas Melville, who eventually became a governor of Sailors Snug Harbor.

Melville attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, and again from October 1836 to March 1837, where he studied the classics.^[5]

Early working life[link]

Melville's roving disposition and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a "boy"^[6] (a green hand) on a New York ship bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, and returned on the same ship. Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) is partly based on his experiences of this journey.

Herman Melville, c. 1846-47.

The three years after Albany Academy (1837 to 1840) were mostly occupied with teaching school, except for the voyage to Liverpool in 1839. From 1838 to 1847, he resided at what is now known as the Herman Melville House in Lansingburgh, New York.^[7] Near the end of 1840 he once again decided to sign ship's articles. On January 3, 1841, he sailed from Fairhaven, Massachusetts on the whaler Acushnet,^[8] which was bound for the Pacific Ocean. He was later to comment that his life began that day. The vessel sailed around Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific. Melville left little direct information about the events of this 18-month cruise, although his whaling romance, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, probably gives many pictures of life on board the Acushnet. Melville deserted the Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands in July 1842.^[9] For three weeks he lived among the Typee natives, who were called cannibals by the two other tribal groups on the island—though they treated Melville very well. Typee, Melville's first novel, describes a brief love affair with a beautiful native girl, Fayaway, who generally "wore the garb of Eden" and came to epitomize the guileless noble savage in the popular imagination.

Melville did not seem to be concerned about repercussions from his desertion from the Acushnet. He boarded an Australian whaleship, the Lucy Ann, bound for Tahiti; took part in a mutiny and was briefly jailed in the native "Calabooza Beretanee". After release he spent several months as beachcomber and island rover (Omoo in Tahitian) eventually crossing over to Moorea. He then signed articles on yet another whaler for a six-month cruise (November 1842 − April 1843) and left that ship in Honolulu. While in Hawaii he became a controversial figure for his vehement opposition to the activities of Christian missionaries seeking to convert the native population. After working as a clerk for four months, he joined the crew of the frigate USS United States, which reached Boston in October 1844. These experiences were described in Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket, which were published as novels mainly because few believed their veracity.

Melville completed Typee in the summer of 1845, though he had difficulty getting it published.^[10] It was eventually published in 1846 in London, where it became an overnight bestseller. The Boston publisher subsequently accepted Omoo sight unseen. Typee and Omoo gave Melville overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer, and he often entertained by telling stories to his admirers. As writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper".^[10] The novels, however, did not generate enough royalties for him to live on. Omoo was not as colorful as Typee, and readers began to realize Melville was not just producing adventure stories. Redburn and White-Jacket had no problem finding publishers. Mardi was a disappointment for readers who wanted another rollicking and exotic sea yarn.

Marriage and later working life[link]

Herman Melville's home, Arrowhead, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Lemuel Shaw, on August 4, 1847; the couple honeymooned in Canada.^[11] They had four children: two sons and two daughters. In 1850 they purchased Arrowhead, a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, now a museum. Here Melville lived for 13 years, occupied with his writing and managing his farm. While living at Arrowhead, he befriended the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Lenox. Melville was tremendously inspired and encouraged by his new relationship with Hawthorne^[12] during the period that he was writing Moby-Dick (dedicating it to Hawthorne^[13]), though their friendship was on the wane only a short time later, when he wrote Pierre there. However, these works did not achieve the popular and critical success of his earlier books. Indeed, The New York Day Book on September 8, 1852, published a venomous attack on Melville and his writings headlined HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY. The item, offered as a news story, reported, "A critical friend, who read Melville's last book, 'Ambiguities," between two steamboat accidents, told us that it appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman. We were somewhat startled at the remark, but still more at learning, a few days after, that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink."^[14] Following this and other scathing reviews of Pierre by critics, publishers became wary of Melville's work. His publisher, Harper & Brothers, rejected his next manuscript, Isle of the Cross, which has been lost. On April 1, 1857, Melville published his last full-length novel, The Confidence-Man. This novel, subtitled "His Masquerade", has won general acclaim in modern times as a complex and mysterious exploration of issues of fraud and honesty, identity and masquerade, but when it was published, it received reviews ranging from the bewildered to the denunciatory.^[15]

To repair his faltering finances, Melville listened to the advice of friends and decided to enter what was for others the lucrative field of lecturing. From 1857 to 1860, he spoke at lyceums, chiefly on Roman statuary and sightseeing in Rome.^[16] Turning to poetry, he gathered a collection of verse that failed to interest a publisher. In 1863, he and his wife resettled, with their four children, in New York City. After the end of the American Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, (1866) a collection of over 70 poems that generally was ignored by the critics, though a few gave him patronizingly favorable reviews. In 1866, Melville's wife and her relatives used their influence to obtain a position for him as customs inspector for the City of New York (a humble but adequately paying appointment), and he held the post for 19 years. In a notoriously corrupt institution, Melville soon won the reputation of being the only honest employee of the customs house.^[17] But from 1866, his professional writing career can be said to have come to an end.

Later years[link]

Melville spent years writing a 16,000-line epic poem, Clarel, inspired by his earlier trip to the Holy Land. His uncle, Peter Gansevoort, by a bequest, paid for the publication of the massive epic in 1876. But the publication failed miserably, and the unsold copies were burned when Melville was unable to afford to buy them at cost.

The grave of Herman Melville and his wife

As his professional fortunes waned, Melville's marriage was unhappy. Elizabeth's relatives repeatedly urged her to leave him, and offered to have him committed as insane, but she refused. In 1867, his oldest son, Malcolm, shot himself, perhaps accidentally. While Melville worked, his wife managed to wean him off alcohol, and he no longer showed signs of agitation or insanity. But recurring depression was added to by the death of his second son, Stanwix, in San Francisco early in 1886. Melville retired in 1886, after several of his wife's relatives died and left the couple legacies that Mrs. Melville administered with skill and good fortune.

As English readers, pursuing the vogue for sea stories represented by such writers as G. A. Henty, rediscovered Melville's novels, he experienced a modest revival of popularity in England, though not in the United States. Once more he took up his pen, writing a series of poems with prose head notes inspired by his early experiences at sea. He published them in two collections, each issued in a tiny edition of 25 copies for his relatives and friends: John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891).

One of these poems further intrigued him, and he began to rework the headnote to turn it into first a short story and then a novella. He worked on it on and off for several years, but when he died in September 1891, he left the piece unfinished, and not until the literary scholar Raymond Weaver published it in 1924 did the book – which is now known as Billy Budd, Sailor – come to light.

Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate.^[18] He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. A common story says that his New York Times obituary called him "Henry Melville", implying that he was unknown and unappreciated at his time of death, but the story is not true. A later retrospective article did appear on October 6 in the same paper referring to him as "the late Hiram Melville", but this appears to have been a typesetting error.^[19]

Obituary notice in the New York Times

From about age 35, Melville ceased to be popular with a broad audience because of his increasingly philosophical, political and experimental tendencies. His novella Billy Budd, Sailor, unpublished until 33 years after the author's death, was later turned into a play, an opera by Benjamin Britten and a film by Peter Ustinov.

In Herman Melville's Religious Journey, Walter Donald Kring detailed his discovery of letters indicating that Melville had been a member of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. Until this revelation, little had been known of his religious affiliation. Hershel Parker in the second volume of his biography makes it clear that Melville became a nominal member only to placate his wife. Melville despised Unitarianism and its associated "ism", Utilitarianism. (The great English Unitarians were Utilitarians.) See the 2006 Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man for more detail on Melville and religion than in Parker's 2002 volume.

Publications and contemporary reactions[link]

Title page of the first U.S. edition of Moby-Dick, 1851

Most of Melville's novels were published first in the United Kingdom and then in the U.S. Sometimes the editions contain substantial differences with Melville acceding to his different publishers' requirements for different audiences.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale has become Melville's most famous work and is often considered one of the greatest literary works of all time. It was dedicated to Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.^[13] It did not, however, make Melville rich. The book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher, Harper & Brothers. Melville also wrote Billy Budd, White-Jacket, Israel Potter, Redburn, Typee, Omoo, Pierre, The Confidence-Man and many short stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" and "Benito Cereno," and works of various genres.

Melville is less well known as a poet and did not publish poetry until later in life. After the Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, which did not sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later.^[20] Again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic length verse-narrative Clarel, about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite obscure, even in his own time. Among the longest single poems in American literature, Clarel, published in 1876, had an initial printing of only 350 copies. The critic Lewis Mumford found a copy of the poem in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut"—in other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years.^[21]

His poetry is not as highly critically esteemed as his fiction, although some critics place him as the first modernist poet in the United States; others would assert that his work more strongly suggest what today would be a postmodern view.^[22] A leading champion of Melville's claims as a great American poet was the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, who issued a selection of Melville's poetry prefaced by an admiring and acute critical essay. According to Melville scholar Elizabeth Renker "a sea change in the reception of the poems is incipient."^[23] In reference to the poem Clarel, poetry critic Helen Vendler remarked: "What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame'".^[24]

Critical response[link]

Contemporary criticism[link]

Melville was not financially successful as a writer, having earned just over $10,000 for his writing during his lifetime.^[25] After the success of travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas and stories based on misadventures in the merchant marine and navy, Melville's popularity declined dramatically. By 1876, all of his books were out of print.^[26] In the later years of his life and during the years after his death he was recognized, if at all, as only a minor figure in American literature.

Melville revival[link]

A confluence of publishing events in the 1920s brought about a reassessment now commonly called "the Melville Revival". The two books generally considered most important to the Revival were Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic and his 1924 edition of Melville's last great but never quite finished manuscript, Billy Budd, which Melville's granddaughter gave to Weaver when he visited her for research on the biography. The other works that helped fan the Revival flames were Carl Van Doren's The American Novel (1921), D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Carl Van Vechten's essay in The Double Dealer (1922), and Lewis Mumford's biography, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision (1929).^[27] In 1945, the Melville Society was formed as a nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating Melville’s literary legacy.^[28] Jay Leyda, better known for his work in film, spent more than a decade gathering documents and records for the day by day Melville Log (1951). In the same year Newton Arvin published the critical biography Herman Melville, which won the nonfiction National Book Award.

In the 1960s, Northwestern University Press, in alliance with the Newberry Library and the Modern Language Association, established ongoing publication runs of Melville's various titles.^[29] This alliance sought to create a "definitive" edition of Melville's works. Titles republished under the Northwestern-Newberry Library include Typee, Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, Omoo, Israel Potter, Pierre or the Ambiguities, Confidence-Man, White Jacket or the World in a Man-of-War, Moby Dick, Mardi and a Voyage Thither, Redburn, Clarel, as well as several volumes of Melville's poems, journals, and correspondence.

Themes of gender and sexuality[link]

Herman Melville, 1860

Although not the primary focus of Melville scholarship, there has been an emerging interest in the role of gender and sexuality in some of Melville's writings.^[30][31][32] Some critics, particularly those interested in gender studies, have explored the existence of male-dominant social structures in Melville's fiction.^[33] For example, Alvin Sandberg claimed that the short story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" offers "an exploration of impotency, a portrayal of a man retreating to an all-male childhood to avoid confrontation with sexual manhood" from which the narrator engages in "congenial" digressions in heterogeneity.^[34] In line with this view Warren Rosenberg argues the homosocial "Paradise of Bachelors" is shown to be "superficial and sterile."^[32] David Harley Serlin observes in the second half of Melville's diptych, "The Tartarus of Maids," the narrator gives voice to the oppressed women he observes: "As other scholars have noted, the "slave" image here has two clear connotations. One describes the exploitation of the women's physical labor, and the other describes the exploitation of the women's reproductive organs. Of course, as models of women's oppression, the two are clearly intertwined."^[35] In the end the narrator is never fully able to come to terms with the contrasting masculine and feminine modalities. Issues of sexuality have been observed in other works as well. Rosenberg notes Taji, in "Mardi", and the protagonist in "Pierre" "think they are saving young "maidens in distress" (Yillah and Isabel) out of the purest of reasons but both are also conscious of a lurking sexual motive."^[32] When Taji kills the old priest holding Yillah captive, he states "remorse smote me hard; and like lightning I asked myself whether the death deed I had done was sprung of virtuous motive, the rescuing of a captive from thrall, or whether beneath the pretense I had engaged in this fatal affray for some other selfish purpose, the companionship of a beautiful maid."^[36] In "Pierre" the motive for his self-sacrifice for Isabel is admitted: "womanly beauty and not womanly ugliness invited him to champion the right."^[37] Rosenberg argues "This awareness of a double motive haunts both books and ultimately destroys their protagonists who would not fully acknowledge the dark underside of their idealism. The epistemological quest and the transcendental quest for love and belief are consequently sullied by the erotic."^[32]

Melville fully explores the theme of sexuality in his major poetical work "Clarel." When the narrator is separated from Ruth, with whom he has fallen in love, he is free to explore other sexual (and religious) possibilities before deciding at the end of the poem to participate in the ritualistic order marriage represents. In the course of the poem "he considers every form of sexual orientation - celibacy, homosexuality, hedonism, and heterosexuality - raising the same kinds of questions as when he considers Islam or Democracy."^[32]

Some passages and sections of Melville's works demonstrate his willingness to address all forms of sexuality, including the homoerotic, in his works. Commonly given examples from Moby Dick are the interpretation of male bonding from what is termed the "marriage bed" episode involving Ishmael and Queequeg, and the "Squeeze of the Hand" chapter describing the camaraderie of sailors extracting spermaceti from a dead whale.^[38] Billy Budd's physical attractiveness is described in quasi-feminine terms: "As the Handsome Sailor, Billy Budd's position aboard the seventy-four was something analogous to that of a rustic beauty transplanted from the provinces and brought into competition with the highborn dames of the court." Some critics argue that "Ahab's pursuit of the whale, which they suggest can be associated with the feminine in its shape, mystery, and in its naturalness, represents the ultimate fusion of the epistemological and sexual quest."^[32]

Law and literature[link]

In recent years, Billy Budd has become a central text in the field of legal scholarship known as law and literature. In the novel, Billy, a handsome and popular young sailor impressed from the merchant vessel Rights of Man to serve aboard H.M.S. Bellipotent in the late 1790s, during the war between Revolutionary France and Great Britain and her monarchic allies, excites the enmity and hatred of the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart. Claggart devises phony charges of mutiny and other crimes to level against Billy, and Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere institutes an informal inquiry, at which Billy convulsively strikes Claggart because his stammer prevents him from speaking. Vere immediately convenes a drumhead court-martial, at which, after serving as sole witness and as Billy's de facto counsel, Vere then urges the court to convict and sentence Billy to death. The trial is recounted in chapter 21, the longest chapter in the book, and that trial has become the focus of scholarly controversy: was Captain Vere a good man trapped by bad law, or did he deliberately distort and misrepresent the applicable law to condemn Billy to death? ^[39]

Legacy[link]

Plaque outside 104 East 26th street, New York

On May 12, 1985, the New York City Herman Melville Society gathered at 104 East 26th Street to dedicate the intersection of Park Avenue south and 26th Street as Herman Melville Square. This is the street where Melville lived from 1863 to 1891 and where, among other works, he wrote Billy Budd.^[40]

In 2010 it was announced that a new species of extinct giant sperm whale, Livyatan melvillei was named in honor of Melville. The paleontologists who discovered the fossil are all fans of Moby-Dick and wanted to dedicate their discovery to Melville.^[41][42]

Selected Bibliography[link]

• Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)
• Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
• Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849)
• Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)
• White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850)
• Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
• Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)
• "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853) (short story)
• "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" (1854) (novella, possibly incorporating a short rewrite of the lost Isle of the Cross^[43])
• "Benito Cereno" (1855)
• Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855)
• The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)
• Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) (poetry collection)
• Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) (epic poem)
• John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) (poetry collection)
• Timoleon (1891) (poetry collection)
• Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (unfinished, 1891) [Published Posthumously] (1924)

References and further reading[link]

• Adler, Joyce (1981). War in Melville's Imagination. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-0575-8. 
• Arvin, Newton (2002). Herman Melville. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3871-3. 
• Bryant, John (1986). A Companion to Melville Studies. Westport: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23874-X. 
• Bryant, John (1993). Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507782-2. 
• Chamberlain, Ray (1985). Monsieur Melville. City: Coach House Pr. ISBN 0-88910-239-2. 
• Delbanco, Andrew (2005). Melville, His World and Work. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40314-0. 
• Edinger, Edward (1985). Melville's Moby Dick: An American Nekyia (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts). New Haven: Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-70-0. 
• Garner, Stanton (1993). The Civil War World of Herman Melville. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-0602-5. 
• Goldner, Loren (2006). Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man. Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer. Cambridge: Queequeg Publications. ISBN 0-9700308-2-7. 
• Gretchko, John M. J. (1990). Melvillean Ambiguities. Cleveland: Falk & Bright. 
• Hardwick, Elizabeth (2000). Herman Melville. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-89158-4. 
• Hayford, Harrison (2003). Melville's Prisoners. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-1973-0. 
• Johnson, Bradley A. (2011). The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville: Aesthetics, Politics, Duplicity. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-61097-341-0. 
• Levine, Robert (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55571-X. 
• Martin, Robert (1986). Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1672-8. 
• Miller, Perry (1956). The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville. New York: Harvest Book. 
• Parker, Hershel (1996). Herman Melville: A Biography. Volume I, 1819–1851. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-5428-8. 
• Parker, Hershel (2005). Herman Melville: A Biography. Volume II, 1851–1891. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-8186-2. 
• Renker, Elizabeth (1998). Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-5875-5. 
• Robertson-Lorant, Laurie (1996). Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers. ISBN 0-517-59314-9. 
• Rogin, Michael (1983). Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-50609-X. 
• Rosenberg, Warren (1984). "'Deeper than Sappho': Melville, Poetry, and the Erotic". Modern Language Studies 14 (1). 
• Spark, Clare L. (2001). Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (rev.ed. paperback 2006 ed.). Kent: Kent State University Press. ISBN 0-87338-888-7. 
• Sullivan, Wilson (1972). New England Men of Letters.. New York: Atheneum. ISBN 0-02-788680-8. 
• Szendy, Peter (2009). Prophecies of Leviathan. Reading Past Melville.. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 978-0-8232-3154-6. 
• Weisberg, Richard (1984). The Failure of the Word: The Lawyer as Protagonist in Modern Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-04592-1. 

Notes[link]

External links[link]

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