User:Alcmaeonid/sandbox

Manhattan
Herman Melville was born at 6 Pearl Street in New York City on August 1, 1819. His parents, Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill, were members of two patrician American families. Both of his grandfathers were heroes of the American Revolution. On the paternal side Major Thomas Melvill was an honored participant in the Boston Tea Party; on the maternal General Peter Gansevoort was a hero of the Battle of Saratoga. Like the titular character in Pierre, Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent."

Allan Melvill spent a good deal of time abroad as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. Over the next several years he would sustain a series of business reversals he described as "irretrievable calamities" steadily falling deeper and deeper into debt. The situation was worsened by the changing environment of lower Manhattan which compelled the family to move to more expensive neighborhoods uptown. In September of 1825 six-year-old Herman and his older brother Gansevoort entered the New-York Male High School (Columbia Preparatory School). Its strict sometimes abusive methods had a decidedly negative effect on a shy and sensitive boy who struggled to master the basics. He quickly fell under the shadow of his outgoing precocious brother, the latter referred to by his parents as "a more than ordinary genius". By contrast his father wrote of Melville as "very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension". In the family home was an extensive library from which his father would read aloud from the large "leather-bound volumes, their spines embossed with gold lettering". He would also make up stories of his own about "monstrous waves at sea, mountain high; of masts bending like twigs", stoking young Herman's imagination. The next year Melville contracted scarlet fever, permanently weakening his eyesight.

Albany
Overextended financially and emotionally unstable, the senior Melvill tried to recover from his setbacks by moving his family to Albany in 1830 and going into the fur business. The new venture was unsuccessful; the embargo of the War of 1812 had ruined businesses that traded with Great Britain and Canada. He was forced to declare bankruptcy. He died soon afterward, when Herman was 12, and left his family penniless. After her husband Allan died, between 1832 and 1834, Maria added an "e" to the family surname — seemingly at the behest of her son Gansevoort.

Although Maria had well-off kin and expected some inheritance from her mother's estate, the process was slow. Her kin were apparently concerned with protecting their own interests rather than settling their mother's estate so that Maria's young family would be more secure. Melville attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, and again from October 1836 to March 1837, where he studied the classics.