Documentary Note on Melville's Marginalia in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Autobiography, Vol. 2.

Melville acquired this copy of Volume 2 of Goethe's Autobiography, including his Letters from Switzerland and Travels in Italy, in 1849, while in London to arrange for the publication of White-Jacket. As his autograph inscription on the front free endpaper shows, Melville purchased the volume on 25 December from Henry George Bohn's establishment at York Street, Covent Garden. In his list of "Books obtained in London" (Journals 144-45), he recorded paying "3" shillings each for "Autobiography of Goethe" and "Letters from Italy," a conflation of the titles of the two additional sections included in the second volume. The first volume of this pair is unlocated. Melville may have read the second volume on at least two separate occasions: the Autobiography soon after purchase in 1850, and later the Travels in Italy portion some time after his visit to that country in 1856 during his tour of the Near East and Europe. Goethe's discussion of the "Demonic" (157-159) has been linked to Melville's conception of Ahab in Moby-Dick and his characterization of Pierre Glendenning's artistic ambitions in Pierre. There is also evidence of source use in Travels in Italy, especially the sections "Rome" and "Naples." Melville marked passages describing statues, paintings and scenery mentioned in his 1856-57 Journal, discussed in his lectures on "Statues in Rome" and "Travel," and made use of in his unpublished poem "Naples in the Time of Bomba."

Volume 2 is in its original binding, but with significant damage to the spine. It was presumably among the volumes sold to book dealers when Melville's library was dispersed by his wife Elizabeth, following his death in 1891. It came into the hands of collectors sometime in the first half of the twentieth century and was given as a gift to Dr. Henry A. Murray by his father, along with a copy of Volume 1 of the Autobiography that replaced Melville's original copy in the pair he purchased in 1849. Murray suspected that the first volume was not part of the original pair when he donated it to the Berkshire Athenaeum, in May, 1972. As he then noted, that volume lacks Melville's autograph and does not contain any of Melville's characteristic marginalia, leading him to conclude: "This pair of books … was too trustfully and imprudently purchased from a New York book-seller many years ago." As Harrison Hayford subsequently demonstrated, the copy of Volume 1 includes publisher's advertisements for books printed later than the Volume 2 imprint. Vol. 1 contains pencil and ink markings in an unidentified hand also present in Vol. 2. on the following pages: 38, 63, 64, 66, 68, 92, 94, and 158. All other marginalia in the copy conform to Melville’s hand and patterns of marking, and present no special problems for attribution.

Publication: 2014, Melville's Marginalia Online. First transcribed in full by Walker Cowen, Melville's Marginalia, 2 vols., Harvard Dissertations in American and English Literature (New York: Garland, 1987), 1:563-583 (Cowen's dissertation was completed in 1965).

Selected studies that cite this copy: Robert Milder, "Nemo Contra Deum . . . : Melville's and Goethe's 'Demonic,'" in Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, ed. G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue Univeristy Press, 1981): 205-44. James McIntosh, "Melville's Copy of Goethe's Autobiography and Travels," in Studies in the American Renaissance (1984): 387-407. Harrison Hayford, "Melville's German Streak," in A Conversation in the Life of Leland R. Phelps, ed. Frank L. Borchardt and Marion C. Salinger (Duke University, Center for International Studies: Durham, North Carolina, 1987), reprinted in Melville’s Prisoners (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003): 96-108.