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"The Hint Of Style": Byron, John Hookham Frere, and Melville's Marginalia in William Tennant's Anster Fair

During Allan Melvill’s visit to Scotland, the Reverend Robert Swan presented Melvill, soon to become Herman Melville’s father, with a copy of Anster Fair: A Poem (1812), by the scholar and poet William Tennant (1784-1848), resident of Anstruther, in county Fife, the Melville ancestral home (see Fig. 1). The gift inscription is dated “May 20th 1818.” Decades later, and opposite his father’s name, Melville unobtrusively recorded on the verso of the title page the autograph “Herman Melville / N.Y. 1875.” A modern reader of Anster Fair will find passages reminiscent of Melville’s own writing, chiefly the easy juxtaposition of lofty and lowly subjects for satiric or warmly humorous effect. The poem also employs the kind of carnivalesque description and digressive narrative familiar to mock-epic that Melville would adopt in Mardi and The Confidence-Man, among other works. But the physical evidence for his having actually read the poem is limited to his marginalia, which appear on only a few early stanzas, and an inscription opposite the title page noting the poem’s stanzaic form. Despite these few markings in a relatively unknown volume, the quality of the marginalia adds significantly to the documentary record of Herman Melville’s intellectual development and to our growing understanding of his education in poetics and literary aesthetics. The most striking annotation is the note on the fly leaf that links Melville’s reading of the book to his knowledge of Byron. Byron was always with Melville, who memorized lengthy passages of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a boy, made allusions to Byron’s life and works throughout his career, and often quoted him in correspondence. The fly-leaf annotation reveals Melville’s recognition of Byron’s literary relationship with diplomat and writer John Hookham Frere (1769-1846); it helps us place Melville in conversation with their work and clarify Melville’s understanding of the literary criticism current in the 1860s and 1870s. The marginalia in Anster Fair: A Poem reveal a scholarly Melville, a poet and critic confident in his knowledge and authoritatively addressing Tennant’s text. I transcribe