Documentary Note on Melville's Marginalia in The New Testament and The Book of Psalms.

A note in his hand on its front free endpaper indicates that Melville received this copy of The New Testament and The Book of Psalms from his paternal aunt Jean Wright, a resident of Boston, at an undetermined date in 1846. (Jean Wright's maiden name "Melville" was later added to the front note by Elizabeth Shaw Melville, possibly after Melville's death in 1891.) Herman Melville's presence in Boston is established for two different periods that year, March 4 to 12 and November 28 to December 7 (Leyda 205-206, 229). On the same or a different occasion, Melville's aunt presented him with a copy of Thomas Jefferson's 1801 presidential installment address (Sealts No. 296a). Melville's transcription of excerpts from Thomas Carlyle's translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Travels on the front and rear flyleaves (as identified independently by Duban and Spark) perhaps dates to 1850, when he borrowed Evert A. Duyckinck's copy of that work (Sealts No. 230). His front free endpaper inscription "C. H. 2" reveals Melville brought the book on his second voyage around Cape Horn to the Pacific Ocean in 1860 aboard the Meteor, captained by his brother Thomas Melville—his first voyage around the cape having occurred in 1841 during his early whaling voyage aboard the Acushnet. Finally, Melville's note from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History (Sealts No. 488) on 2.020 of this copy indicates he may have consulted it on or after acquiring Stanley's book on April 4, 1870. The copy of The New Testament and The Book of Psalms remained in the possession of the Melville family following Melville's death in 1891 and was among books donated to Harvard University by Melville’s descendants in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Marginalia in Melville's copy of The New Testament and The Book of Psalms correspond to his handwriting and characteristic patterns of marking and present no special problems for attribution. Substantial evidence has been obliterated or removed from the copy in the forms of erased annotations, scissored top and bottom margins, and one instance of erased markings (Melville's extensive striking out of verse 19 in Revelation 22). The identity of the person or persons who performed the erasure and margin removal is unknown. If they were not made by Melville himself at some point before his death, retention of the copy by Elizabeth Melville would indicate they were performed by one or more surviving family members.

Publication: 2011, Melville's Marginalia Online. First transcribed by Walker Cowen, Melville's Marginalia, 2 vols., Harvard Dissertations in American and English Literature (New York: Garland, 1987), 1:321-352 (Cowen's dissertation was completed in 1965).

Selected studies that cite this copy: Nathalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1949). Mark Heidmann, "The Markings in Melville's Bibles," Studies in the American Renaissance (1990): 34-98. Clare Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006). James Duban, "'Visible Objects of Reverence': Quotations from Goethe in Melville's Annotated New Testament," Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 9.2 (June 2007): 1-23. Brian Yothers, "One's Own Faith: Melville's Reading of The New Testament and Psalms, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 10.3 (2008): 39-59.