Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, the third of eight children. His father, Allan Melvill (the family changed the spelling of the last name around 1838) was of unsteady temperament but a prosperous importer and merchant in New York City. His mother, Maria Gansevoort, was a devoutly religious, somewhat critical woman from a colonial family of social standing in Albany. When Allan’s fur and hat business began to fail, he moved it to Albany without success. The father died in 1832, bankrupt and apparently insane. The family moved to Lansingburgh in 1837 in an attempt to cut expenses.
Herman had a troubled childhood. A bout with scarlet fever at the age of seven left his eyesight permanently damaged, and, following his father’s death, the family was so poor that Herman’s education was sporadic. He studied the classics in Albany and trained to be a surveyor while in Lansingburgh but had to curtail his education to earn money for the family. Despite his weak eyes, Melville was an avid reader and delighted in finding, in his late twenties, an edition of Shakespeare with print large enough to accommodate him. But his real education was at sea. He could say, with Ishmael, “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
