A, B, C

12

At the New York Library Society on February 3, 1848, Poe had hoped for hundreds to support his new magazine, The Stylus. It was the same month in the same year in which France would erupt in a revolution that, for a few brief months, would result in universal male suffrage and the hope for even more reforms, and which, in the weeks following it, America would celebrate that victory almost as joyfully as Paris, with fireworks from Washington, D.C., to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and where, at his Pittsfield home, The Arrowhead, Melville was rushing through Mardi and Redburn so he could get started on Moby-Dick. Initially he’d planned to have a happy ending, say some critics, but all too shortly, within the year, the advances of the Revolution of 1848 had been rescinded — and Moby-Dick (1851) was rewritten with the tragic conclusion we know today, possibly on some level a response to the great historical disappointment, suggests the critic C. L. R James (in his brilliant reading of the novel Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, Herman Melville and the World We Live In [1952; reprint 1978]), written while James himself was “detained”—like Cervantes, like Thomas Paine, like Thoreau, like Gramsci — in James’s case on Ellis Island, in the first years of the 1950s.