Jimmy Rose

Herman Melville (1819–1891)
From Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Billy Budd, & Uncollected Prose

Interesting Links

“Walking Tour: Herman Melville's Downtown New York City” (Elizabeth Kray, Academy of American Poets)

“Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne first meet” (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Fiddler,” Herman Melville
• ““The Deacon’s Masterpiece: or the Wonderful ‘One-Hoss-Shay,’” Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “Rip Van Winkle,” Washington Irving
• “Peter,” Willa Cather

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“Broadway and Trinity Church” (looking south from Liberty Street; Grace Church in the distance), 1830, watercolor by John William Hill (1812–1879). New York Public Library.

In 1831, Oliver Wendell Holmes published what would become one of his best-known poems, “The Last Leaf,” describing an old man he used to see around town:

They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,
And looks at all he meets
Sad and wan,
And he shakes his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said,
“They are gone.”

The elderly man had become something of an eccentric figure, dressed in his “old three-cornered hat / And the breeches, and all that.” A half century later, in an afterword for a limited illustrated edition of the poem, Holmes revealed the identity of the townsman who inspired it:

The Poem was suggested by the sight of a figure well known to Bostonians of the [early 1830s], that of Major Thomas Melvill, “the last of the cocked hats,” as he was sometimes called. The Major had been a personable young man, very evidently, and retained evidence of it in “the monumental pomp of age”—which had something imposing and something odd about it for youthful eyes like mine. He was often pointed at as one of the “Indians” of the famous “Boston Tea-Party” of 1774. His aspect among the crowds of a later generation reminded me of a withered leaf which has held to its stem through the storms of autumn and winter, and finds itself still clinging to its bough while the new growths of spring are bursting their buds and spreading their foliage all around it.

Thomas Melvill was Herman Melville’s grandfather, and Oliver Wendell Holmes was Melville’s neighbor in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Melville must have known of the poem, which was ubiquitous within a few years of its publication, and of its association with his grandfather. Although the story “Jimmy Rose” is set in New York rather than Boston, both “The New Leaf” and Melville’s own memories of his grandfather almost certainly served as inspirations. In the poem, Holmes writes that his “grandmamma” said Major Melvill’s “cheek was like a rose / In the snow”; in Melville’s story, “the most touching thing of all” about Jimmy Rose “were those roses in his cheeks”—a characteristic repeated several times. Jimmy becomes an old relic who has lost the fame of his youth, and he grows “somewhat musty, smacking of cocked hats and small clothes”; the italicized phrase, occasionally used by writers to describe veterans of the Revolutionary era, is one Melville would use again, at a later date, to describe his grandfather’s costume.

William Dillingham, in his study Melville’s Short Fiction 1853–1856, first detailed the similarities between the poem and the story and between Melville’s grandfather and Jimmy Rose. Yet, Dillingham points out, Jimmy is not only “a man whom time has passed by” but also a bankrupt, and Herman Melville “had known both types in his own family.” His father, Allan Melville, was a wealthy merchant whose career ended with insolvency. Likewise, his uncle Thomas Melvill, Jr., had been a success in France before a series of reversals forced him to return to Massachusetts and eke out a living on the family farm in Pittsfield, “reduced as a refugee, to humble employment in a region far from the gilded Versailles,” as Herman would later put it.

In the summer of 1850, Melville and his wife rented his late uncle’s lodgings from the new owners, who had renamed the place “Broadhall.” (The estate adjoined Arrowhead, the property purchased by Melville later that year with funds provided by his father-in-law.) The scholar Merton M. Sealts has pointed out that Melville’s descriptions of his uncle’s farmhouse are similar in wording to passages about the interior of Jimmy Rose’s home in downtown New York. “Though in [the story] the ‘great old house’ described in the opening paragraphs is given an urban rather than a rural setting,” notes Sealts, “its identity with Broadhall is unmistakable.” Other scholars have pointed out how the “lower wards” around Jimmy’s place “in C———— Street” resemble the neighborhood of Melville’s childhood home in New York, located at 55 Courtlandt Street (later Cortlandt Street, and currently the site of the World Trade Center).

In this story, then, Herman Melville was “probing his own life, . . . his familial past,” writes Dillingham. “The old house is a composite of Melville homes, and Jimmy Rose is a composite of Melville’s father, uncle, and grandfather.” But Jimmy is one of two characters featured in the story: his downfall and later life is witnessed and narrated by yet another old man, William Ford, who exhibits both an ambivalence toward Jimmy’s pathetic, bygone glory and an anxiety that he, too, will become “the last leaf.”

Notes: The first sentence of “Jimmy Rose” echoes the opening of the first chapter of Moby-Dick (1851): “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely— . . .”

Nikolaus I, Prince Esterházy, was an eighteenth-century Hungarian prince remembered for his ornate style and clothing and for his patronage of the composer Joseph Haydn. Cosmo the Magnificent is Melville’s conflation of the fourteenth-century Italian banker Cosimo de’ Medici and his fifteenth-century grandson Lorenzo de’ Medici, also known as Lorenzo the Magnificent.

The compliment Jimmy “plagiarizes” when he flatters the general was allegedly made by Napoleon when he presented two jeweled pistols to Moreau: “The beauty of the pistols was greatly admired. ‘They appear very apropos.’ observed the First Consul, as he presented them to Moreau; and then turning to the Minister without alluding to their original object, he said, ‘but, Citizen Minister, here is a grand omission: Cause some of the victories gained by General Moreau to be engraven upon them. Do not order them all to be engraved, for it would be necessary to take off too many of the diamonds.’” (The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, by Willem Lodewyk Van-Ess, 1810).

One of the narrator’s acquaintances suggest they go to “the Coffee-house” and arrange “a sleighing party to Cato’s.” The former establishment was probably Tontine Coffee House, the birthplace of the New York Stock Exchange, which from 1817 to 1834 had been converted into a tavern (and later a hotel). Cato’s Tavern, owned by Cato Alexander, was more than four miles to the north (now 54th Street and 2nd Avenue). Alexander, who had been freed from slavery, probably in 1799, opened his tavern in the early 1800s and served a largely white, often upscale clientele; in 1860, it was remembered as “the fashionable out of town resort for the young men of the day. . . . In sleighing times, it was almost impossible to obtain accommodation for the crowds that frequented the house.” Bad loans and investments forced Alexander to sell his building in the mid-1840s. In 1852 he opened an oyster saloon downtown, at 556 Broadway (in present-day SoHo); it closed within a year.

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A time ago, no matter how long precisely, I, an old man, removed from the country to the city, having become unexpected heir to a great old house in a narrow street of one of the lower wards, once the haunt of style and fashion, full of gay parlors and bridal chambers; but now, for the most part, transformed into counting-rooms and warehouses. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Deacon’s Masterpiece: or the Wonderful “One-Hoss-Shay”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)
From American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Freneau to Whitman

Interesting Links
Audio (6 minutes, YouTube): Eddie Albert reads “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” (from the 1962 Caedmon LP Great American Poetry)

Biography: Oliver Wendell Holmes (NNDB)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Birds of Killingworth,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• “Curfew Must Not Ring To-Night,” Rose Hartwick Thorpe

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Two illustrations by American artist Howard Pyle (1853–1911), drawn for the 1892 edition of The One-Hoss Shay, with Its Companion Poems and reissued in color in 1905.

While attending medical school in 1831–32, twenty-two-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes stayed in a Boston boarding-house. His experiences in communal living inspired two essays he submitted to New England Magazine, each published under the title “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” and each conveying the fictionalized dialogue of boarding-house residents at mealtime. The stories were well received but soon forgotten; Holmes later referred to them as “crude products of [an] uncombed literary boyhood.” He never allowed them to be reprinted: “I find it hard to pardon the boy’s faults, others would find it harder.”

Although he anonymously published a collection of poems in 1836, Holmes spent the next quarter-century establishing himself as a highly regarded physician, medical researcher, and (from 1847 to 1853) dean of the Harvard Medical School. His second book, alliteratively titled Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence (1855), was considered a landmark in the field of obstetrics—but hardly a work to insure an enduring legacy to the American public. For a short period he delivered well-received lectures on the English poets but found that the out-of-the-way country stops on the lecture circuit wearied him. Approaching fifty (what he called the “five-barred gate”), he worried that he had reached that period of life when “a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.”

Everything changed in 1857 when James Russell Lowell, a fellow professor at Harvard, was hired as the editor of a new magazine, and he in turn insisted that his friend Holmes become one of its founding contributors. Initially hesitant, Holmes agreed and even suggested the magazine’s name, The Atlantic Monthly. Holmes then lit on the idea that would make him famous: reviving the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table as a monthly column. Far more mature in style and content than the essays from a quarter-century earlier, each piece is written as a table conversation monopolized by the unnamed Autocrat, with interruptions (including poetry, stories, and jokes) from other residents—including the Professor, the Landlady’s Daughter, the Schoolmistress, the Poet, the Old Gentleman, the Divinity-Student, “the young fellow called John,” and others. The new and improved “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” appeared in the debut issue of The Atlantic (November 1857) and immediately became the most popular feature in a magazine that boasted works by such celebrities as Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow. The first twelve installments were collected at the end of 1858 in book form, selling over 10,000 copies in three days and going through several printings and editions during the following decades.

In the eleventh installment, which appeared in the September 1858 issue, “the Professor” shares with his fellow residents “a rhymed problem” titled “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” describing a one-horse chaise built to last a hundred years. The poem became famous in its own right and was published separately in 1892 as an illustrated book, for which Holmes wrote the following preface:

“The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” is a perfectly intelligible conception, whatever material difficulties it presents. It is conceivable that a being of an order superior to humanity should so understand the conditions of matter that he could construct a machine which should go to pieces, if not into its constituent atoms, at a given moment of the future. The mind may take a certain pleasure in this picture of the impossible. The event follows as a logical consequence of the presupposed condition of things.

There is a practical lesson to be got out of the story. Observation shows us in what point any particular mechanism is most likely to give way. In a wagon, for instance, the weak point is where the axle enters the hub or nave. When the wagon breaks down, three times out of four, I think, it is at this point that the accident occurs. The workman should see to it that this part should never give way; then find the next vulnerable place, and so on, until he arrives logically at the perfect result attained by the deacon.

A semi-farcical ode to Yankee ingenuity and New World rationality, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” would be interpreted by later critics as Holmes’s satirical allegory of the demise of Calvinism. Curiously enough, the poem’s fame was such that one-hoss shay became a term used in economics and statistics, designating “a capital asset that exhibits neither input decay nor output decay during its lifetime.”

Notes: A few historical references are packed into the second verse of the poem. Georgius Secundus . . . from the German hive refers to King George II of England, who was of the German House of Hanover. Most of the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake on November 1, 1755. Earlier that year, on July 9, British forces commanded by Edward Braddock were ambushed by French and Canadian forces in Pennsylvania; over half were killed and Braddock himself was mortally wounded. The third stanza mentions various parts of a horse-drawn chaise, including the felloe (rim of a wheel) and the thill (the shaft connecting to the horse).

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