Melville and Dowse in East Cambridge

When Herman Melville visited East Cambridge in 1860, he knew that stories about the frenzied pursuit of white whales did not travel very well.  His total earnings from U.S. sales of Moby-Dick, which had first appeared in 1851, came to much less than he had realized from any of his previous books.  By the late 1850s his literary career was in disarray, and his health was precarious.

To replenish his meager finances, he decided to offer public lectures, joining what was known at the time as the lyceum circuit.  His hope was to regale receptive audiences on the wonders of travel.   Surely, as a world traveler himself, he could excite some interest in exotic destinations around the world.  Although published twelve years before, Melville was still widely known as the author of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and thus as “the man who lived among the cannibals.”  So, for three years, he pursued this plan, delivering sixteen lectures (in 1857-58) on “Statues in Rome,” ten lectures (in 1858-59) on “The South Seas,” and finally three lectures (in 1859-60) on “Traveling: Its Pleasures, Pains, and Profits.”  The third and last lecture on travel – Melville’s final appearance on the lecture platform – was delivered in Cambridgeport – yes, our Cambridgeport – on February 21, 1860.

            Apparently, it was not a happy experience, since he immediately escaped overseas, seeking to restore his health.  I feel confident that the lecture would have drawn a substantial crowd from the Esplanade, had we been around at the time.  Yet public lecturing did not have a good reputation during those years.  Emerson had tried it, with more success than Melville.  It’s even thought that Emerson was the intended speaker in Cambridgeport, and Melville was a late substitute.  I can’t confirm that.  What’s known is that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes – Justice Holmes’s father and Emerson’s friend – had a low opinion of public lecturing, and his view was fairly typical for the time.  In any event, it’s agreed by impartial observers that Melville was no match for the voice and manner of professional speakers.

            Then we need to consider the message itself.  What does it take to be a good traveler?  Melville advises: “One must be young, care-free, and gifted with geniality and imagination, for if without these … he may as well stay at home.”  That’s not very encouraging, is it?  Among the pains (discomforts, annoyances) of travel, Melville mentions the affliction of insects, the bother associated with passports, and the persecutions and extortions of guides.  Only regarding profits does Melville strike a contemporary and positive note.  Travel, he says, reduces racial prejudice and broadens one’s appreciation of diversity, which is “often essential to healthy life.”  An apt message, perhaps, just before the outbreak of the Civil War.

            But why dwell on Melville’s troubled visit to East Cambridge?  The connection I’m interested in is a bit indirect.  Melville’s lecture in Cambridgeport was sponsored by the Dowse Institute.  That’s a story in itself.  Thomas Dowse was one of the great benefactors of the Massachusetts Historical Society, whose current home (since 1899) is on Boylston Street in Boston, at the edge of the Fenway.  The irony is that Dowse was of such lowly origins that the MHS never considered him for membership.

            According to the MHS website, Dowse was born in Charlestown in 1772.  “Injured in a fall from an apple tree at age six, and later afflicted by rheumatic fever, Dowse was a sickly and lame child who turned to books for occupation and amusement,” the website says.  Lacking formal schooling, Dowse followed his father’s vocation and became a tanner and leather dresser, eventually establishing his own business in – of all places – Cambridgeport.  Not so incidentally he was also a lifelong collector of books, which he kept initially in his three-story house near Central Square.  In 1855, this collection was appraised as “the richest and fullest in English literature of any owned by a private individual in New England.”

            Like many of us in academia who hope to find a suitable home for our books – those of us who still possess real books – Dowse searched for a place to deposit these “dearest earthly objects of his affections … his guides in youth, his support in manhood, his solace in old age.”  He had only two conditions: the books must remain forever in one room, and they must be read only in that room.  The president of the MHS, Robert Winthrop, readily agreed to these terms in July 1856.  If you are a member of MHS, you are welcome to peruse Dowse’s 4,665 volumes at your leisure.  They are also accessible through ABIGAIL, the MHS online catalog.

            In addition to the books, Dowse bequeathed several other items: a botanic garden to Harvard College, a high school to the town of Sherborn, and to the city of Cambridge a fund to be used for providing public lectures on literary and scientific subjects “of the highest character.”  The list of notable Dowse lecturers in the 19th century included Edward Everett (1811), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1821), and of course Herman Melville (1860).  Dowse died in Cambridgeport on November 4, 1856.

Ken Winston