Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [561]
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, Melville’s ferocious judgment on marketplace civilization, was brought out in 1857 by a small New York house that folded shortly thereafter. The title borrowed the label affixed to swindler William Thompson, and many of its characters were modeled on New Yorkers. More to the point, The Con-fidence-Man was set on a symbolic Mississippi riverboat, which represented a commodity culture, peopled by highly mobile strangers, of which Manhattan was the epitome (in “Bartleby” Melville referred to “the Mississippi of Broadway”). One trickster after another peddles bogus products—stocks, patent medicines, plots in a real estate development called “the New Jerusalem”—in a sardonic satire on the prevailing chicanery and manipulation of urban encounters. More darkly still, Melville indicts a civilization where all human exchange, including language itself, has become deeply corrupted.
Moody, depressed, and increasingly dependent on drink, Melville took a trip abroad. On his return he tried lecturing to make money. He first proposed a sarcastic talk on the “daily progress of man towards a state of intellectual & moral perfection, as evidenced in the history of 5th Avenue & 5 Points,” but in the end opted for safer subjects like the South Sea islands. Abandoning prose altogether, Melville tried poetry, only to have Charles Scribner decline to publish his poems on the grounds they wouldn’t pay. As the 1850s wound down, the frustrated professional writer, largely dependent on Elizabeth’s family, began casting about for a job in the New York Custom House. His long slow slide into obscurity had begun.
“MY CITY!”
Both Walt Whitman and Herman Melville spent many hours standing in the Battery, gazing at the bay, but apparently they never met. Nor did the two men, though exact contemporaries, see their city the same way. Melville, a patrician on the way down, regarded it with an embittered eye, while Whitman, an artisan on the way up, became its exuberant celebrant.
Walter Whitman was born in 1819, two months before Herman Melville, in West Hills, Long Island. The Whitmans, English Quakers, had long been substantial farmers and landholders. So were the Dutch Van Velsors, and as a boy Walter often accompanied his maternal grandfather delivering produce to Brooklyn, a forty-mile wagon ride over tortuous roads. Walter’s father, apprenticed as a carpenter, raised houses as well as crops, and in 1823 he took his pregnant wife, Louisa, and their three children to seek his fortune in booming Brooklyn. He fared poorly. An old-fashioned artisan, he was shunted aside by contractors who hired unskilled and poorly paid laborers to throw up prefabricated dwellings. Over the next decade, the hard-pressed family shuttled repeatedly around the Brooklyn waterfront in search of affordable housing.
Young Walter was occasionally sent to Saint Ann’s Sunday school, but mainly for its free lunch, the elder Whitman having been a friend of Tom Paine and a follower of Fanny Wright. From 1825 to 1830 Walter attended Brooklyn’s only public school, on Adams and Concord, until family finances forced him, at age eleven, to seek employment. He worked for a time as an office boy at a Fulton Street law firm, then was apprenticed as a printer to the editor of the Long Island Patriot. In 1833 his family, defeated by the city, moved back to farm country. Walter stayed on, learning his trade, exploring Brooklyn, ferrying across to New York’s theaters.
In 1835, now a journeyman printer, Whitman moved to Manhattan. After a year spent in setting type, he too retreated to Long Island in the difficult aftermath of the Great Fire. Between 1836 and 1841 he started up and sold offa penny paper, set type for a Jamaica weekly, participated in politics as a Loco Foco