The Piazza Tales

The Piazza Tales is a collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June.

The collection includes what have long been regarded as three of Melville's most important achievements in the genre of short fiction, "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", and "The Encantadas", his sketches of the Galápagos Islands.

Melville had originally intended to entitle the volume Benito Cereno and Other Sketches, but settled on the definitive title after he had written the introductory story.

[citation needed] From after Melville's rediscovery to the end of the twentieth century, the short works that attracted the most critical attention were "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno" and "The Encantadas," with "The Piazza" a little behind those.

[14] In March 1855, Putnam sold the magazine to Dix and Edwards due to dwindling subscriptions, Briggs left, and George William Curtis became editor.

Briggs said he rejected it because: "My editorial experience compels me to be very cautious in offending the religious sensibilities of the public, and the moral of the Two Temples would array against us the whole power of the pulpit.

[22] The front and back covers were ornamented by a border of rules and rosettes, and the spine displayed the title and the names of the author and publishers stamped in gold.

In addition to numerous biblical and mythological references, which Sealts calls "a familiar Melvillean pattern", the story alludes to Emerson's poem "The Problem", Don Quixote, and Paradise Lost, and explicitly namechecks Edmund Spenser.

Merton Sealts, a leading scholar on Melville's short fiction, notes that in "Bartleby" knowing references to current events occur, and says that the supporting characters of Turkey, Nippers, and the errand boy Ginger Nut "could easily have come from the pen of Dickens, Lamb, or Irving.

The story is set in 1799 off the coast of Chile, where the Massachusetts captain of merchant ship Bachelor's Delight, Amasa Delano, sees the Spanish slaveship San Dominick in apparent distress.

"The Encantadas" consists of ten sketches, "based primarily on recollections of Melville's visit to the Galápagos Islands during his whaling years," elaborated with material from several books, including works by Charles Darwin and Amasa Delano.

[34] These are influences of a general nature and cannot be identified to single works, or as Sealts puts it, Melville "not infrequently followed the lead of others in terms of plotting, characterization, and technique of narration.

[38] A month after the collection was published, Melville's old friend Richard Tobias Greene, on whom Toby in Typee was based, wrote him a letter expressing how the Encantadas sketches "had called up reminiscences of days gone by".

[41] For Warner Berthoff, Melville's short works of the mid-1850s show a grasp of his subject matter not previously in his possession, not even in Moby-Dick: "a clarity of exposition and a tonic firmness and finality of implication".

[44] In line with other writers of short stories of the time like Poe, Melville's narrative structures stimulate readers to look beyond their initial readings to understand more.

[45] Writing in the twenty-first century, Bryant makes essentially the same point when he notes that "carefully modulated ironies" are put to such use that "the brightness of sentiment and geniality would be made to reveal its darker edges: deception, sexuality, alienation, and poverty.

"[46] For Robert Milder, in the best of the short stories these different levels of meaning are fused "in a vision of tragedy more poignant than Moby-Dick's or Pierre's because it is more keenly responsive to the lived human condition.

"[47] The collection met with short, cursory reviews only, which Branch attributes to the "general attitude" that the "author of Typee should do something higher and better than Magazine articles," as the New York Times wrote.

On 9 July 1856, the Springfield Republican compared the collection to Hawthorne's best work, "marked by a delicate fancy, a bright and most fruitful imagination, a pure and translucent style and a certain weirdness of conceit.

"[53] Also taking the stories together, the United States Democratic Review for September 1856 wrote that "All of them exhibit that peculiar richness of language, descriptive vitality, and splendidly sombre imagination which are the author's characteristics.

[56] In 1926, during the so-called "Melville Revival," "Benito Cereno" became the first of any of his short fiction to appear in a separate edition when the Nonesuch Press published the Piazza Tales text, illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer.

[60] Sealts also found that interpretations of the short stories have, over time, shifted their focus from metaphysical to epistemological concerns and from general ethical considerations to "more immediate political and social implications," such as reading "Benito Cereno" in the context of the heated debate over slavery leading up to the Civil War.

[61] Many scholarly studies have looked at how Melville drew inspiration from: his own observation of contemporary life, his knowledge of literature, and his familiarity with more specialized sources, including travelogues of the Pacific and articles in periodicals.