- end_line
- 140
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:25.200Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 84
- text
- INTRODUCTION TO THE EDITION OF 1892
By Arthur Stedman
Of the trinity of American authors whose births made the year 1819 a
notable one in our literary history,--Lowell, Whitman, and Melville,--it
is interesting to observe that the two latter were both descended, on
the fathers’ and mothers’ sides respectively, from have families of
British New England and Dutch New York extraction. Whitman and Van
Velsor, Melville and Gansevoort, were the several combinations which
produced these men; and it is easy to trace in the life and character
of each author the qualities derived from his joint ancestry. Here,
however, the resemblance ceases, for Whitman’s forebears, while worthy
country people of good descent, were not prominent in public or private
life. Melville, on the other hand, was of distinctly patrician birth,
his paternal and maternal grandfathers having been leading characters in
the Revolutionary War; their descendants still maintaining a dignified
social position.
Allan Melville, great-grandfather of Herman Melville, removed from
Scotland to America in 1748, and established himself as a merchant
in Boston. His son, Major Thomas Melville, was a leader in the famous
‘Boston Tea Party’ of 1773 and afterwards became an officer in the
Continental Army. He is reported to have been a Conservative in all
matters except his opposition to unjust taxation, and he wore the
old-fashioned cocked hat and knee-breeches until his death, in 1832,
thus becoming the original of Doctor Holmes’s poem, ‘The Last Leaf’.
Major Melville’s son Allan, the father of Herman, was an importing
merchant,--first in Boston, and later in New York. He was a man of much
culture, and was an extensive traveller for his time. He married Maria
Gansevoort, daughter of General Peter Gansevoort, best known as ‘the
hero of Fort Stanwix.’ This fort was situated on the present site of
Rome, N.Y.; and there Gansevoort, with a small body of men, held in
check reinforcements on their way to join Burgoyne, until the disastrous
ending of the latter’s campaign of 1777 was insured. The Gansevoorts, it
should be said, were at that time and subsequently residents of Albany,
N.Y.
Herman Melville was born in New York on August 1,1819, and received
his early education in that city. There he imbibed his first love of
adventure, listening, as he says in ‘Redburn,’ while his father ‘of
winter evenings, by the well-remembered sea-coal fire in old Greenwich
Street, used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea,
mountain high, of the masts bending like twigs, and all about Havre
and Liverpool.’ The death of his father in reduced circumstances
necessitated the removal of his mother and the family of eight brothers
and sisters to the village of Lansingburg, on the Hudson River. There
Herman remained until 1835, when he attended the Albany Classical School
for some months. Dr. Charles E. West, the well-known Brooklyn educator,
was then in charge of the school, and remembers the lad’s deftness in
English composition, and his struggles with mathematics.
The following year was passed at Pittsfield, Mass., where he engaged in
work on his uncle’s farm, long known as the ‘Van Schaack place.’ This
uncle was Thomas Melville, president of the Berkshire Agricultural
Society, and a successful gentleman farmer.
- title
- Chunk 1