Israel Potter

Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile

Novel by Herman Melville, published in installments in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, July 1854 through March 1855, and in book form by G. P. Putnam in New York in March 1855, and in a pirated edition by George Routledge in London in May 1855. Loosely based on a pamphlet (108-page) autobiography that Melville had acquired in the 1840s, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (Providence, 1824).

Israel Potter (1744-1826) was a real person, born in Cranston, Rhode Island, a veteran of the Battle of [Bunker Hill], a sailor in the Revolutionary navy, a prisoner of the British, and escapee in England, a secret agent and courier in France, and a 45-year exile from his native land as a laborer, pauper, and peddler in London.

Melville’s account includes Potter’s encounters with King [George III], [Horne Tooke], and [Benjamin Franklin] (real), and with [Ethan Allen] and [John Paul Jones] (fictional). The repeated mischances of the long-suffering but eternally optimistic Israel, and the many opportunities afforded by his name to suggest (often ironically) the parallel destinies of the ancient [Hebrews] and the scion of the infant republic, make the work both comical and darkly foreboding.

The work is much shorter than the major novels (about 60,000 words), but significantly longer than the great stories--Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno--written during the same period and collected in The Piazza TalesLink title the following year. The novel shows Melville comfortable in his narrative powers and indulging his considerable talents for sly characterization, episodic action, and unsettling understatement. It is one of his easiest books to read, which is all the more surprising in that it was followed by perhaps his most difficult prose work, The Confidence-ManItalic text, in 1857.

The full text of Melville’s Israel Potter is online here.