Sources and Symbols for Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Shroeder
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Literary Borrowings ◽  
The City

Melville criticism seems fated to a slow and uncertain growth. We have come a long way, to be sure, beyond the author who dismissed Melville as one among “several minor writers resident in the city or state of New York.” But one chief fault we seem not to have corrected: it is perhaps not over-rash to say that this criticism learns only reluctantly from what it has already accomplished. We know, for instance, that Melville's literary borrowings in such a work as Moby-Dick are worth close scrutiny; we also know that the allegory and the symbol lurk everywhere in Melville's pages. But our knowledge is not regularly put to use as a hypothetical principle for the examination of other works. Now I suggest that there is still a good bit to be done with these tools alone, and in this present paper I mean to try to do a part of it. I propose to identify and follow out certain of the sources and symbols which went into one of Melville's least-known works, The Confidence-Man.

The Confidence-Man: His Guises

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
The City

Critics have found Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man more difficult to classify than any other of his books. Melville himself refers to the narrative as “our comedy,” and at one point signals his reader that he is passing “from the comedy of thought to that of action.” He creates an unusual thematic setting by reducing the dimensions of his characters and by curtailing the scale of their actions. The shallowness of the confidence man, unfitting him for the profound pathos or even tragedy of Moby Dick or Pierre, prepares him eminently for the role of the comic racketeer, the city slicker, horn-swoggling and bamboozling the country (and city) yokels. Certainly we do not cry, perhaps we don't even laugh, but surely we smile, if a little grimly, as the confidence man swindles victim after victim in the course of his adventures, relying frequently on the innate weaknesses in human nature—the desire to get something for nothing, the willingness to traffic in the misery of others. But the confidence man exploits generous and noble impulses, too, and this apparent mockery of traditional values gives the book a complexity and at times an ambiguity that cause many readers to abandon it, bewildered.

Additional Unrecorded Reviews of Melville's Books

1975 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Burton R. Pollin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Full Text ◽  
Golden Rule ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
The Times

The editors of Moby-Dick as Doubloon sagely remark: ‘ Everything written about the book in 1851–1852, when reviews were affecting Melville's audiences and probably himself, is inherently more interesting than everything written in, say, 1951–1952 ’, This view is adequate reason for presenting the full text of over a dozen uncollected, unnoted reviews of Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Red-burn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man, appearing in ten journals of the period: in Philadelphia, the Dollar Newspaper and The Spirit of the Times; in New York, Fisher's National Magazine and Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, Holden's Dollar Magazine, The Golden Rule, The Home Journal, and Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine; in Syracuse, the Literary Union; and in Boston, the Boston Weekly Museum. Five of these titles appear in books and articles devoted to other Melville reviews. The most interesting review is that in the Literary Union, which is unusually ingenious in its presentation of very perceptive comments. In view of the number and diverse nature of the reviews and notices, it seems preferable to group them by journal titles, with brief introductory comments for each, rather than by date or the titles of Melville's novels.

Hospitals: N.Y. Appellate Court Denies Move to Privatize Public Hospital

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-203
Author(s):  
Robert Chatham
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Public Health System ◽  
Municipal Hospital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Benefit ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Benefit Corporation ◽  
The City

The Court of Appeals of New York held, in Council of the City of New York u. Giuliani, slip op. 02634, 1999 WL 179257 (N.Y. Mar. 30, 1999), that New York City may not privatize a public city hospital without state statutory authorization. The court found invalid a sublease of a municipal hospital operated by a public benefit corporation to a private, for-profit entity. The court reasoned that the controlling statute prescribed the operation of a municipal hospital as a government function that must be fulfilled by the public benefit corporation as long as it exists, and nothing short of legislative action could put an end to the corporation's existence.In 1969, the New York State legislature enacted the Health and Hospitals Corporation Act (HHCA), establishing the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) as an attempt to improve the New York City public health system. Thirty years later, on a renewed perception that the public health system was once again lacking, the city administration approved a sublease of Coney Island Hospital from HHC to PHS New York, Inc. (PHS), a private, for-profit entity.

“An Unquestionable Source?”

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-179
Author(s):  
John Cyril Barton
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Old World ◽  
Spanish Inquisition ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Benito Cereno ◽  
The Town ◽  
Parallel Action

This essay is the first to examine Melville’s “The Town-Ho’s Story” (Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick [1851]) in relation to W. B. Stevenson’s then-popular-but-now-forgotten British travel narrative, Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825). Drawing from suggestive circumstances and parallel action unfolding in each, I make a case for the English sailor’s encounter with the Spanish Inquisition in Lima as important source material for the Limanian setting that frames Melville’s tale. In bringing to light a new source for Moby-Dick, I argue that Melville refracts Stevenson’s actual encounter with the Inquisition in Lima to produce a symbolic, mock confrontation with Old-World authority represented in the inquisitorial Dons and the overall context of the story. Thus, the purpose of the essay is twofold: first, to recover an elusive source for understanding the allusive framework of “The Town-Ho’s Story,” a setting that has perplexed some of Melville’s best critics; and second, to illuminate Melville’s use of Lima and the Inquisition as tropes crucial for understanding a larger symbolic confrontation between the modern citizen (or subject) and despotic authority that plays out not only in Moby-Dick but also in other works such as Mardi (1849), White-Jacket (1850), “Benito Cereno” (1855), Clarel (1876), and The Confidence-Man (1857), wherein the last of which the author wrote on the frontispiece of a personal copy, “Dedicated to Victims of Auto da Fe.”

Bringing the Real World of Science to Children: A Partnership of the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Compulsory Education ◽  
Development Program ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Museum ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Influence on the New York School of Painting: The “Unapprehended Inspiration” of Newman and Rothko

1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-89
Author(s):  
Ross Woodman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
New York School ◽  
The World ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The City

As members of the New York School of painters, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko announced not only the passing away of an entire creation but also the bringing forth of a new one. Though unaware that they were living and painting in the City of the Covenant whose light would one day rise from darkness and decay to envelop the world even as their painting of light consciously arose from the void of a blank canvas, Newman’s and Rothko’s work may nevertheless be best understood as a powerful first evidence of what Bahá’u’lláh called “the rising Orb of Divine Revelation, from behind the veil of concealment.” Their work may yet find its true spiritual location in the spiritual city founded by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on his visit to New York in 1912.

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