Documentary Note on Melville's Marginalia in James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems

Melville received this copy of James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night on January 21, 1885, according to a letter he addressed to the presenter, James Billson, on the following day (Correspondence 485-486). The volume remained within the Melville family following Herman Melville's death in 1891 and was among books presented by Melville's descendants to Harvard University in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Marginalia in the volume on pages 7, 71, and 133 correspond to Melville's characteristic patterns of marking and present no special problems for attribution. Pencil emendations to the text on pages 11 (an inserted t), 38 and 178 (deletion marks) do not correspond as well to instances of emendation in other volumes owned by Melville. Whereas it is possible they are in the hand of Billson or another reader, the variations are not significant enough to disqualify them from consideration as Melville's, and they are attributed to him in the apparatus to this digital edition.

Publication: 2012, 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), 2:689-690 (Cowen's dissertation was completed in 1965). Transcribed in a surrogate format at Melville's Marginalia Online, 2007.

Selected studies that cite this copy: William B. Dillingham, Melville and His Circle: The Last Years (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).