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.In the FivePoints area Dickens visited, the city s very first tenement, abrewery converted into apartments in 1837, was the setting foran average of one murder per night over a three-year period(Lankevich 72).Gangs called the Dead Rabbits, the BoweryBoys, and the True Blue Americans dominated the streets,making the area difficult to police.The average population den-sity in the neighborhoods below Canal Street was 272 peopleper block by 1850.The waves of European immigrants to New York in the mid-19th century imparted to the city a pair of contrasting yetequally applicable images, images that were to govern the lit-erary discourses devoted to the city forever after.The crowdedtenements, on the one hand, helped to give rise to a notion ofthe city as a dark labyrinth in which only the strong survive anda sense of radical alienation and disillusionment prevail.On theother hand, the strength of the hope for a better life that immi-grants brought with them, as well as the sheer cultural diversityof the place, helped give rise to an alternative, utopian notion ofNew York as a place of extraordinary promise and opportunity,a place in which people could experience a sense of connectionwith one another on a scale not possible elsewhere.New York sliterary history following the first vast waves of immigrants is inlarge part a record of the way these two images of the city com-mingle with and critique one another.Nowhere do these 48 NEW YORKopposed images of the city receive fuller, subtler, or more influ-ential expression than in the works of Herman Melville andWalt Whitman perhaps the two greatest writers the city everproduced.HERMAN MELVILLEMelville was born August 19, 1819, in a house on PearlStreet, the second son of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melville.Allan came from a good Boston family whose roots went backto Scottish nobility.Allan s father Thomas was a Princeton grad-uate who d taken part in the Boston Tea Party and fought atBunker Hill.Maria came from a family of wealthy Dutchpatroons from Albany.Like Allan s father, Maria s was a hero ofthe Revolution Peter Gansevoort, who had defended FortStanwix against the British.After Herman was born the familychanged addresses frequently from Pearl to Courtland, fromCourtland to Bleeker, from Bleeker to Broadway in accor-dance with the successes and failures of Allan s dry goods busi-ness.Allan went bankrupt in 1830, forcing the family to retreatto the Gansevoort stronghold in Albany.Herman was just 13when his father died in 1832, at the age of 50, of pneumonia.Herman eventually took an engineering degree at LansingburghAcademy.His failure to get a position drove him to sign on as acabin boy on the St.Lawrence, a merchant ship from New Yorkbound for Liverpool, in 1839.In 1841 he shipped on thewhaler Acushnet for the South Seas; there he jumped ship andjoined the U.S.Navy before returning to the States to start acareer as an author in 1843.He lived in New York on FourthAvenue between 1847 and 1850, and then again, having foundwork in the Customs House, from 1863 until his death in 1891at 104 East 26th Street.The two works of fiction by Melville in which New York fig-ures most significantly are a novel, Pierre, published in 1852,and a masterpiece of a short story entitled Bartleby, theScrivener, published in Putnam s magazine in 1853.Bothworks carry in them the disillusionment Melville experienced in PARADISE AND INFERNO 49the wake of the commercial failure of Moby-Dick, his magnumopus, which had been published in 1851.That both works areset in New York not only suggests that Melville had his father sbusiness failure on his mind, but also that the city was begin-ning to come into the reputation it holds today, as America smost important arena of literary and commercial activity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.In the FivePoints area Dickens visited, the city s very first tenement, abrewery converted into apartments in 1837, was the setting foran average of one murder per night over a three-year period(Lankevich 72).Gangs called the Dead Rabbits, the BoweryBoys, and the True Blue Americans dominated the streets,making the area difficult to police.The average population den-sity in the neighborhoods below Canal Street was 272 peopleper block by 1850.The waves of European immigrants to New York in the mid-19th century imparted to the city a pair of contrasting yetequally applicable images, images that were to govern the lit-erary discourses devoted to the city forever after.The crowdedtenements, on the one hand, helped to give rise to a notion ofthe city as a dark labyrinth in which only the strong survive anda sense of radical alienation and disillusionment prevail.On theother hand, the strength of the hope for a better life that immi-grants brought with them, as well as the sheer cultural diversityof the place, helped give rise to an alternative, utopian notion ofNew York as a place of extraordinary promise and opportunity,a place in which people could experience a sense of connectionwith one another on a scale not possible elsewhere.New York sliterary history following the first vast waves of immigrants is inlarge part a record of the way these two images of the city com-mingle with and critique one another.Nowhere do these 48 NEW YORKopposed images of the city receive fuller, subtler, or more influ-ential expression than in the works of Herman Melville andWalt Whitman perhaps the two greatest writers the city everproduced.HERMAN MELVILLEMelville was born August 19, 1819, in a house on PearlStreet, the second son of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melville.Allan came from a good Boston family whose roots went backto Scottish nobility.Allan s father Thomas was a Princeton grad-uate who d taken part in the Boston Tea Party and fought atBunker Hill.Maria came from a family of wealthy Dutchpatroons from Albany.Like Allan s father, Maria s was a hero ofthe Revolution Peter Gansevoort, who had defended FortStanwix against the British.After Herman was born the familychanged addresses frequently from Pearl to Courtland, fromCourtland to Bleeker, from Bleeker to Broadway in accor-dance with the successes and failures of Allan s dry goods busi-ness.Allan went bankrupt in 1830, forcing the family to retreatto the Gansevoort stronghold in Albany.Herman was just 13when his father died in 1832, at the age of 50, of pneumonia.Herman eventually took an engineering degree at LansingburghAcademy.His failure to get a position drove him to sign on as acabin boy on the St.Lawrence, a merchant ship from New Yorkbound for Liverpool, in 1839.In 1841 he shipped on thewhaler Acushnet for the South Seas; there he jumped ship andjoined the U.S.Navy before returning to the States to start acareer as an author in 1843.He lived in New York on FourthAvenue between 1847 and 1850, and then again, having foundwork in the Customs House, from 1863 until his death in 1891at 104 East 26th Street.The two works of fiction by Melville in which New York fig-ures most significantly are a novel, Pierre, published in 1852,and a masterpiece of a short story entitled Bartleby, theScrivener, published in Putnam s magazine in 1853.Bothworks carry in them the disillusionment Melville experienced in PARADISE AND INFERNO 49the wake of the commercial failure of Moby-Dick, his magnumopus, which had been published in 1851.That both works areset in New York not only suggests that Melville had his father sbusiness failure on his mind, but also that the city was begin-ning to come into the reputation it holds today, as America smost important arena of literary and commercial activity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]