Overlooked Books: April Fool! Lies and Tricks from Irving, Poe, and Melville

Monday, March 31, 2025

By:

James Wunsch

“In the spring,” wrote Tennyson, “a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” What the poet forgot to mention was that for one day a year in springtime, thoughts may turn from love to pulling off a hoax. (Remember, dear reader, a distinction can yet be made between courtship and the con game.) Thus on April Fools' Day, we appropriately recall certain famed NYSL members and friends who distinguished themselves as students and practitioners of tomfoolery.

Of our illustrious members, among the earliest hoaxers was Washington Irving (shown here as a glamorous young writer). Living with his mother on William Street in 1809, young Irving hoped to make a name for himself as a popular writer. He was already confident enough, having written several well-received pieces for the Salmagundi, a journal which he published with his older brother and their literary pals, The Lads of Kilkenny. (The group that first dubbed New York Gotham, the mythical city of lunatics.)

In that antic spirit, Irving wrote a parody of The Picture of New-York (1807) a well-researched but tedious history by Columbia professor Samuel Latham Mitchell. But however diverting his prose might be, Irving wondered who would want to read his book about the Dutch governors of old New Amsterdam. So Irving set up a hoax to lure readers. Under a notice titled “Distressing,” the New York Evening Post (October 26, 1809) reported the “great anxiety” attending the disappearance of an elderly gentleman, Knickerbocker by name, “probably not in his right mind.” In an update a few days later, The Post reported a “fatigued and exhausted” chap fitting the description of Knickerbocker spotted by the side of the Albany Road in The Bronx. Finally a November 16th announcement in The Post advised that if old Knickerbocker failed to return to the Independent Columbia Hotel on Mulberry Street, that a manuscript found in his room “a very curious kind of written book,” would be sold to satisfy unpaid room and board. Three weeks later, Inskeep & Bradford published A History of New-York: From The Beginning of The World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty: Containing Among Many Surprising and Curious Matters, the Unutterable Ponderings of Walter the Doubter, the Disastrous Projects of William the Testy and the Chivalric Achievements of Peter the Headstrong––the Three Dutch Governors of New Amsterdam: Being the Only Authentic History That Ever Hath Been or Ever Will Be Published: By Diedrich Knickerbocker. The public took delight in both the hoax and the book whose publication proved more profitable than any other written by an American at the time.

An early 20th century edition of Knickerbocker's History, illustrated by (Library member) Maxfield Parris

Irving later secured his place as the nation’s preeminent man of letters with publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which included the famous stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The book was so popular in England - Lord Byron claimed he knew the stories by heart - that some wondered whether the eponymous “Geoffrey Crayon” was really an American. "The doubts which her ladyship has heard on the subject,” wrote Irving, “seem to have arisen from the old notion that it is impossible for an American to write decent English."

First edition title page of Edgar Allan Poe's TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE

Young scribblers now dreamed of becoming the next Washington Irving, but it was hard to emulate a writer so deft at playing avuncular storyteller, mock historian, and satirist. In 1839, at the request of a largely unknown author, Washington Irving wrote a blurb for the young man’s first published book of stories. But even with Irving’s endorsement, Edgar Allan Poe earned nothing from the publication of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Five years later, hoping to establish himself as an editor and critic, Poe headed for New York, but Irving, by then U.S. Minister to Spain, could be of no help. Finding himself flat broke, Poe dashed off a fantastic 5000-word story for The Sun detailing how an eight-passenger airship, blown off course from Wales, had in a mere three days completed history’s first trans-Atlantic crossing, landing safely on an island off the coast of South Carolina. According to Poe, hundreds of New Yorkers, desperate for the “extra” being scalped in the streets, besieged the offices of The Sun.

The report of this near-riot suggests only that Poe had little difficulty piling one hoax upon another. Apparently few took notice of the “balloon hoax,” which the paper retracted within two days. And while he desperately needed the $50 paid by The Sun, what Poe really craved “…doted on, idolized [and] would drink [to] the very dregs of the glorious intoxication” was fame.

And fame would come soon enough. Seeking to escape the city’s noise and filth, Poe, his languishing wife, and her mother retreated six miles uptown to take lodging at a farmhouse at 84th Street, just west of the Bloomingdale Road (Broadway). After completing his poem “The Raven,” Poe woke up to find himself a literary star. From England, Elizabeth Barrett wrote that the macabre poem produced “a fit of horror” as friends were“ taken by its fear and…music.” Out in Illinois, Springfield attorney Abe Lincoln committed “The Raven” to memory. Poe attained the celebrity which he craved, but how could he support his family on the $9 earned from the sale of “The Raven”? Though overwhelmed by requests for public appearances, his readings did not pay enough to meet expenses.

The Library's 19th-century building on Broadway at Leonard Street

Seeking support from well-heeled patrons, Poe turned to the NYSL, where in delivering lectures on “Poets and Poetry in America,” he took delight in skewering those who might have been helpful. As The New York Herald reported, more than one member of the assembled “literati…appeared to wince under the severity of his remarks, which were not few.”

Little wonder that Poe failed to gain support for his proposed acquisition of a literary journal, but he was fascinated by those who, one way or another, managed to ingratiate themselves with others for personal gain. The “diddler,” he explained in an essay, focused on “his pocket and yours.” He was a small-change operator, and if tempted into magnificent speculation, the diddler “…loses his distinctive features and becomes what we term ‘financier.’” In “Raising the Wind: or Diddling Considered As One of the Exact Sciences” (1843), Poe offered an extensive list of the ways in which one might separate a man from his money.

On July 8, 1849 The New York Tribune reported the arrest of one such character, William Thompson, who would engage a well-dressed “gentleman” in the street and then ask: “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” And more times than one might imagine, the gentleman would hand over the watch. The perceptive reporter explained that the scam was based on self-doubt, that is, in the gentleman’s belief that Thompson was “some old acquaintance not at that moment recollected” who could be trusted. But whatever the mindset of the victim, the scam ultimately hinged on his confidence that a stranger could be trusted. The Tribune called William Thompson a “ confidence-man,” a neologism that displaced “diddler.”

Whether Herman Melville read the con-man story is not clear. That summer in New York, he was busy dashing off what he considered two potboilers - Redburn: His First Voyage and White Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War. He then became immersed in Moby Dick (taking thirteen months to return the two NYSL volumes he had borrowed for research.) Moby Dick flopped, as did the novels that followed. What the public wanted was not a study of whale-obsessed Ahab, but stories of dashing young midshipmen, or what had made Melville so popular in the first place - his recollections of deserting his ship to live among Polynesian savages, cannibals, and easy-going beauties. But after Moby Dick, Melville refused to write potboilers. When delivering lectures to help support his family, he mumbled from notes on ancient history rather than regaling an audience about his youthful South Sea adventures. When asked to deliver a lecture, Melville would settle for “fifty dollars and my expenses” which he abbreviated as FAME.

The title page of an early edition of Melville's THE CONFIDENCE-MAN

On April Fools' 1857, Melville published The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a novel having little in common with his other books. Here we find ourselves not at sea, but aboard the Fidèle ("Trust"), a gaudy, overcrowded steamboat making its way down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans. Melville reveled in describing the anxious passengers coming and going to towns along the river: “men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters and still keener hunters after all these hunters.” A world of knaves and fools. The focus is on individuals, but who were they? Was there one confidence-man wearing different masks, or many? Jesus, the Devil, or the benign transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his disciple Henry David Thoreau? Did Poe make a cameo appearance? In dozens of articles written since the Melville revival of the 1920s, scholars have tried to make sense of the story but to no avail. There is no story - only those sardonic conversations written in Melville’s exuberant language between the con-man and his mark:

An “Herb Doctor” advises a despairing man that his wracking cough cannot be cured until the patient embraces herbal medicine in the full confidence that if you “get nature…you get well.” At half-a-dollar a vial, with a box holding six, the money is handed over for the patented “Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator.”
Very late one night a ragged boy appears from nowhere and convinces an elderly man that the only way to enjoy a good night’s sleep in your state-room or to traverse the boat safely during the day is to purchase portable door and window locks, a money belt, and a counterfeit bill detector. With the transaction completed, the old man wonders whether the boy’s mother knows what late hours he keeps. Probably not, is the response. This voyage is about cutting deals and nothing more.
At the beginning of the novel, a barber aboard the Fidèle is seen opening his shop, and towards the end, “the cosmopolitan,” aka Frank Goodman, is getting a shave. With his ostensibly deep-seated belief in the integrity of the individual, Goodman demands that the barber take down a shop sign that reads “no trust.” The barber refuses. In fashioning doctored appearances “…with hair dyes, cosmetics, false moustaches, wigs and toupees,” the barber has come to question personal integrity. “What think you,” he asks “when behind a careful curtain, [the barber] shaves the thin dead stubble off a head, and then dismisses it to the world, radiant in curling auburn?” Goodman persists, signing a contract warranting that he will make good on any losses incurred by the barber for taking down the sign. The sign is taken down, and Goodman, of course, walks out without paying.

The venturesome may board Fidèle at Stack 6. Reader, what have you got to lose?

April Fool!

After earning a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago, Jim Wunsch served on the staff of the New Jersey General Assembly and the Regional Plan Association, a private non-profit metropolitan planning agency. He later taught high school social studies in The Bronx and history at Empire State College (SUNY), where he is professor emeritus.