Documentary Note on Melville's Marginalia in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.

The date of acquisition for Herman Melville’s copy of The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth is not known. Melville's pencil notation on the bottom half of the printer’s imprint shows that he included this volume among the books he carried with him in 1860, during his voyage aboard the Meteor that year. But lines from Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" parodied by Melville in "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo" (Harper’s Monthly, December, 1853) are marked in this copy, and Heffernan and Parker make arguments for still earlier years of possession based on parallel passages in Pierre (1852) and The Excursion. The remnants of a date range in an annotation of a passage in The Excursion (421) indicate that Melville continued to read Wordsworth in the decades after the American Civil War. Presumably the book remained in his possession until his death in 1891. The volume was identified as Melville’s in 1976 by Rev. Henry Bertels, S.J., within the library of the Woodstock Theological Center, now housed at Georgetown University, in Washington D.C. Tipped in to the volume before the title-page is a clipped advertisement for Melville’s White-Jacket with the inscription "This copy of Wordsworth, belonged to Herman Melville, the author." Along with the notation "(Autograph!)" at the top of the page, the inscription likely dates to the book's period among private owners and sellers before it entered the collection of Woodstock Theological Center.

At some point prior to its identification as Melville’s personal copy, the volume was rebound in the burgundy library standard buckram binding displayed in the present digital edition. In this process the pages were trimmed, removing some annotations in their entirety and substantial portions of others, including Melville’s signature at the top margin of the title page. The volume is also missing a single leaf, containing a portion of section 8 and the entirety of sections 9 through 11 of Wordsworth's "Ode. Intimations of Immortality" (page 389, displayed here from a different copy of the Poetical Works housed at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania). Damage to the hinges at this point of the volume indicates the page and its unprinted verso were lost or removed rather than omitted in production. (Melville comments on Wordsworth's controversial lines in section 10 of the lost content on p. 199 in his copy of William Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets [Sealts No. 263b]). The volume was rebound again in 2011 during preservation, with a new spine and boards displayed here in an image supplied by Woodstock Theological Center.

All of the annotations are demonstrably in Melville’s hand and the marginalia conform to his characteristic style of marking and appear to be uniform throughout, with the exception of the pencil lines in the table of contents. The unique appearance of these lines, alongside queries and checkmarks that conform more closely with Melville's hand, raises the possibility that they were inscribed by a different reader. Yet the identical positioning of all three types of marks on pages xvii (outside the printed page border) and xxiii (within the border), suggests all were inscribed by the same hand. Since several of the lines also mark individual poems that Melville annotated in the body of the text (see his marking of "Michael" at [xvii] and 87), the lines are attributed to Melville in this digital edition.

Publication: 2010, Melville's Marginalia Online.

Selected studies that cite this copy: Thomas F. Heffernan, “Melville and Wordsworth,” American Literature, 49.3 (Nov., 1977): 338-351. Hershel Parker, “Melville and the Berkshires: Emotion-Laden Terrain, ‘Reckless Sky-Assaulting Mood,’ and Encroaching Wordsworthianism,” in American Literature: The New England Heritage, ed. James Nagel and Richard Astro (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 65-80.