Melville as a Reader and Student of Byron

HE EVIDENCE for Melville's continued interest in the works and personality of Byron is very strong indeed. Even if we set aside as unimportant juvenilia the Fragments from a Writing Desk' with their affected Byronism and Orientalism, we still have references and allusions extending from I846 to I862, with one mention of Byron in the pages of Clarel2 in I876. That most of these references were more than conventional, as they sometimes seem to be in such potboilers as Redburn and White-Jacket,3 is shown by their occurrence in letters and journals not intended for public eyes. In I846, in the first flush of his success following the publication of Typee, Melville wrote to an autograph seeker: You remember someone woke one morning and found himself famous. Melville certainly knew Byron's well-known remark as given in Moore's Life.4 In a gloomy hour in Brussels Melville quoted Childe Harold's Pilgrimage from memory.5 And the numerous references to Byron in the Journal Up the Straits were of such a nature that they could not all have come from guidebooks.6 In I862 we again find Melville quoting Byron, apparently from memory, in a letter to his brother Thomas.7

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• The Hint Of Style

  Open Access•Colin D Dewey•Leviathan•2007

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