Dandy Doodles

Details

Before the word "dandy" acquired a negative connotation, the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy" used it ironically to mock the unsophisticated pretensions of colonial Americans. Embracing the epithet, Yankee Doodle was a short-lived humor magazine, an "American version of Punch" based in New York. Melville wrote anonymously for the publication in the summer of 1847, then-edited by his friend Cornelius Mathews.

Melville's best-known contribution to Yankee Doodle was the mock-journalistic serial on General (later President) Zachary Taylor: "Authentic Anecdotes of 'Old Zack.'" Among other things, the essay characterizes "Old Zack" as a sort of ineffectual dandy with a vanity for mending his own pants ("Taylor Retailored"?). More broadly, the essay satirizes the journalism of the day, exaggerating Taylor into a Baron Munchausen-type character, ala the "authentic" specimens of P.T. Barnum.

In "Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1," the narrator is a vain dandy who boasts of being "the envy of the beaux, the idol of the women and the admiration of the tailor."

"A Thought on Book-Binding" is Melville's review of a novel by James Fennimore Cooper (or more accurately, a review of its cover) which insists that "books are men" and "should be appropriately appareled." It serves as a sort of spiritual addendum to "Wonder and Wen": the comically confused characters of Melville's Pierre who had abandoned (more-or-less) "the ignoble pursuit of tailoring for the more honorable trade of the publisher." (Pierre, 17.1)

For this meetup, we will discuss these "dandy doodles" (Melville's short sketches on the theme of dandyism):