Herman Melville–Allan Melvill father–son relationship

The father-son relationship between Herman Melville and Allan Melvill joined an imaginative inheritance to a rupture in family life. Allan’s imported pictures and antiques introduced his son to the whale before Herman went to sea, while bankruptcy and death removed the stability of the home at a formative age. The connection thus survives in the account both as a source of vocation and as the prelude to hardship.

Family and Inheritance

The Melvills belonged to the middle class. Allan, whose surname was later given an added e as a claim to Scottish ancestry, imported fancy goods. His European journeys brought home French antiques and engravings that his children examined on Saturday afternoons. The household’s material culture made distant places and adventures present in domestic life: the father returned from travel with objects for his children to look at, and one of those objects would leave a lasting impression on Herman.

The family inheritance extended beyond Allan. Herman’s paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, had taken part in the protest against British taxes by tipping tea into Boston Harbour; the family preserved a phial of tea leaves in his honour. His maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, had defended Fort Stanwix during the 1777 siege. These stories placed the children among celebrated family histories, but the maritime strand was especially vivid. Allan’s brother, Captain John D’Wolf II, had once struck a whale while sailing from the Kamchatka Peninsula. The impact stopped his vessel; the whale surfaced, spouted, beat its flukes, and disappeared, leaving the crew frightened. D’Wolf was the first captain Herman had met, and was later lost at sea. The household’s knowledge of the sea therefore arrived through family stories as well as through Allan’s pictures.

The Whale in the Home

Among Allan’s engravings was an image of an enormous whale, harpoons lodged in its body as boats pursued it. Herman later connected that picture with a vague sense that he was destined to become a great voyager. The significance of Allan’s role lies less in any stated advice than in this transmission through an image: a scene of pursuit and danger, brought into the family home among the imported objects over which the children pored, entered the son’s imagination before his own sea experience.

The engraving also gave Herman a point of comparison when he eventually encountered the ocean. On his first voyage, aboard the St Lawrence, he saw strange shapes in the water through a Newfoundland fog. They were not the continent-inundating monsters of his father’s pictures. The difference between the imagined whale and the uncertain forms at sea marks a movement from inherited image toward lived encounter. The evidence does not show Allan guiding that voyage; it shows how an image associated with him helped furnish the imaginative horizon from which Herman set out.

Household Collapse

As the family grew, the Melvills moved uptown through increasingly grand houses, eventually reaching 675 Broadway, in the Bond Street neighbourhood. Herman and his siblings were taught by a governess. Scarlet fever damaged his eyesight and made reading difficult, but the household still appeared secure until 1830, when Allan was declared bankrupt. The family then had to leave for Albany, the state capital on the Hudson River.

Two years later Allan died, aged forty-eight, in a maniacal fever. He left Maria with debts and eight children to care for. The account presents this death not simply as a family bereavement but as the end of the stability that had surrounded Herman’s childhood: the move after bankruptcy had already unsettled the household, and Allan’s death left its practical burdens with his wife and children. The account describes twelve-year-old Herman as cast adrift at this formative point, without the sense of security he most needed.

Aftermath and Significance

After his father’s death, Herman left school and worked in a bank, but could not settle. He later taught, worked on his uncle’s farm, and travelled west hoping to become a surveyor on the new canals. In St Louis he reached the frontier, then returned to New York City; an attempt to find work as a lawyer’s clerk failed because of his poor handwriting. The account links these unsettled efforts to adversity and disappointment, before describing his turn toward a life at sea. Allan’s death is not presented as the sole cause of every later choice, but it stands at the point where childhood security gives way to a succession of uncertain occupations and departures.

The relationship is therefore preserved through two contrasting inheritances. Allan’s whale engraving helped give Herman an early image of voyaging, while Allan’s bankruptcy and death brought the family’s secure domestic world to an end. In the account of Herman’s beginnings, the father is both the source of an imaginative prompt and the absent figure at the threshold of his son’s precarious independence.