peddlers of the rod: melville's “the lightning-rod man” and the antebellum periodical...

Peddlers of the Rod:Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man” and the Antebellum

Periodical Market

JOSHUA MATTHEWSUniversity of Iowa

THOU, that in tempests artOur sure Protector!—now, in the calm air,Gladly we hail thee,—and with thankful heartConfess thy guardian care.

“To a Lightning Rod”The Western Monthly Magazine1

Herman Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man” concludes with an oddthreat made by the title character, a lightning-rod salesman. Afterentering the narrator’s home, the salesman attempts to convince the

narrator to purchase a lightning rod. His performance, intended to produceanxiety in his potential customer, acts out the safety instructions he advisesthe narrator to take. But the narrator—a rural mountain dweller—resists,exclaiming in language consistent with the theological tenor of their conversa-tion, “Who has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your indulgencesfrom divine ordinations? The hairs of our heads are numbered, and the daysof our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of myGod. False negotiator, away!” Then comes an odd threat from the salesman:“Impious wretch! . . . I will publish your infidel notions.”2

The threat to publish the narrator’s refusal to buy a lightning rod istroubling for prior critical readings of the story. Categorizing “The Lightning-Rod Man” as a religious allegory, critics have decontextualized the storyfrom nineteenth-century cultural discourses concerning lightning rods andefforts to market them in the lightning-rod advertising of American printculture. These allegorical readings assume that lightning rods signify onlyreligious themes. As Ben Kimpel contends, with a strong degree of certainty,

C© 2010 The AuthorsJournal compilation C© 2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

1 “To a Lightning Rod,” The Western Monthly Magazine, and Literary Journal 4 (August 1835): 122.2 Herman Melville, “The Lightning-Rod Man,” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces: 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Herschel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. (Evanston and Chicago:Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 124; hereafter cited as NN PT.

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J O S H U A M A T T H E W S

“obviously there is some allegory here.”3 Sean Silver, agreeing with Kimpel,views the peddler’s rod as something far more than a lightning rod becausethe story’s dialogue “orbit[s] into vocabularies not properly about lightning-rods, . . . [and] the sale of the rod never seems to turn on questions appropriateto the purchase of a lightning-rod; questions of voltage differentials and elec-trical resistance, of conductivity and the strange logic of electric ‘fluid’ neverquite come up.”4

Yet the salesman’s threat to publish the homeowner’s refusal to buy alightning rod suggests that “The Lightning-Rod Man” responds to contempo-rary print culture. The threat implies that the narrator’s refusal will engenderthe scorn of a local or national readership already convinced of the truthfulnessof the peddler’s sales pitch about lightning rods. The possibility of such amedia scandal opens up important questions that allegorical readings of “TheLightning-Rod Man” have not addressed. Specifically, why does the salesmanthink that the publication of the narrator’s rejection would condemn thenarrator in the eyes of some unknown reading public? After all, who wouldreally care about someone not buying or using a lightning rod?

The answers lie in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American dis-courses on lightning rods, of which Melville was well aware. By August 1854,when Putnam’s Monthly published the “The Lightning-Rod Man,” lightningrods had long been a subject of national discussion. Ever since BenjaminFranklin began promoting his invention to colonial homeowners and theRoyal Society of London, lightning rods had been marketed in numerous printvenues in numerous ways. Not only were lightning rods commonly sold door-to-door (at least by the 1840s), but periodicals for decades had also hypedthe lightning rod as a necessary technology of safety and security. Magazinesas diverse in readership and content as Scientific American, Prairie Farmer,and The Christian Watchmen advocated for lightning rod use throughout theUnited States. In these periodicals, lightning-rod marketing discourse, typifiedin Melville’s tale, was intertwined with discourses of science and theology.5

3 Ben D. Kimpel, “Two Notes on Melville,” American Literature 16 (1944): 30. For furtherexamples of criticism that reads “The Lightning-Rod Man” as allegory, see Marvin Fisher, “‘TheLightning-Rod Man’: Melville’s Testament of Rejection,” Studies in Short Fiction 7 (1970): 433-38;Douglas L. Verdier, “Who Is the Lightning-Rod Man?” Studies in Short Fiction 18 (1981): 273-79;and Hershel Parker, “Melville’s Salesman Story,” Studies in Short Fiction 1.2 (1964): 154-58.4 Sean Silver, “The Temporality of Allegory: Melville’s ‘The Lightning-Rod Man,”’ Arizona Quar-terly 62 (2006): 2.5 Several magazines, originating from different locales and with a variety of readerships, havebeen used as samples throughout this article. In fact, a study could trace the construction of light-ning rod safety discourse in only, say, Christian magazines, New York newspapers, or Scientific

56 L E V I A T H A N

P E D D L E R S O F T H E R O D

The basic sales scenario in “The Lightning-Rod Man” was already famil-iar to contemporary readers, who encountered lightning rod sales pitches bothin person and in print. This widespread cultural awareness almost certainlyhelped the story achieve its instant and long-term popular appeal. Accordingto one contemporary reviewer, “The Lightning-Rod Man” garnered “greatattention when originally published in Putnam’s.”6 And as Harrison Hayfordnotes, it was “the one Melville tale regularly in print and available to the publicthroughout the remainder of his lifetime.”7

“The Lightning-Rod Man,” then, comments on the contemporary cul-tural discourses of lightning rods. By mimicking a familiar sales scenarioand often reprinted sales pitches, Melville reconfigures a commonplace tex-tual marketing scheme. The story is Melville’s comment on contemporarylightning-rod marketing and consumption, which for decades had been di-rectly associated with political and religious issues. Essentially an ironizedlightning-rod advertisement in the pages of Putnam’s Monthly, “The Lightning-Rod Man” satirizes two American types—the rural democrat and the door-to-door salesman. By opposing these two characters, Melville critiques therhetoric of consumer marketing in commercial periodicals, while commentingon political and religious divisions in American culture.

The Name Writ By Every Storm-Cloud’s Fire

The origins of nineteenth-century discourses on lightning rods ap-pear in the mid-eighteenth century, beginning with a key figure,Ben Franklin, to whom the salesman’s rhetoric in “The Lightning-

Rod Man” directly alludes. As supposedly the first American invention, thelightning rod helped gain Franklin international acclaim in his lifetime andwas a source of national pride and occasion for rhetorical boasting for Amer-ican nationalists, an invention frequently used to demonstrate the genius ofAmerica. Melville knew Franklin’s writings on electricity well. Allan Emeryhas shown that the “The Lightning-Rod Man” borrows heavily from Franklin’sExperiments and Observations on Electricity.8 This compilation of Franklin’sprivate letters to fellow scientists and the Royal Society in London, published

American. The wide range of periodicals studied demonstrates that lightning-rod marketing andadvocacy was widespread in American antebellum print culture.6 “Monthly Literary Record,” United States Democratic Review (September 1856): 170-72.7 NN PT 600. Hayford’s justification for this statement is the fact that “The Lightning-Rod Man”was collected in the second volume of William E. Burton’s Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor in 1857,which was reprinted several times up through 1898.8 Allan Moore Emery, “Melville on Science: ‘The Lightning-Rod Man,”’ The New England Quarterly56 (1983): 555-59.

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in 1753, develops his theories of electricity and promotes his invention andwas widely read in the United States throughout the nineteenth century.

The references to Franklin in “The Lightning-Rod Man” correspond toother uses of Franklin in fictional pieces composed and published at the sametime. In August 1854, “The Lightning-Rod Man” appeared directly beforeChapters 4-6 of Israel Potter, which had just begun serialization in Putnam’sthe month before. In Chapter 6, Israel visits a seventy-two year old Franklin,who resides in Paris and wears a skull-cap and gown “embroidered withalgebraic figures like a conjuror’s robe.” Surrounding Franklin are books oflearning, maps of Europe and the American “Desert,” and other synecdochesof Enlightenment science. During their conversation, Franklin tutors Israel onthe benefits of modesty in fashion and appetite, and offers bits of self-helpadvice taken from Franklin’s Autobiography. Here, as a sort of diplomat guru,the magnanimous Franklin provides what turns out to be useless guidance tohis fellow countryman in an alien land.

Melville’s satire counters other contemporary constructions of Franklin.Typically, in American print culture, Franklin was considered a hallowedfigure, the world-renowned American genius of electricity and inventor ofthe lightning rod. In such constructions Franklin was a benevolent Savior-Protector of the nation, the great American whose rod tamed a terrible forceof nature. For instance, in Joel Barlow’s Columbiad, not only does Franklinresist and defy a ferocious thunderstorm and catch the “fire” of “conflictingfulminants,” but Barlow also claims that lightning rods will always signifyFranklin’s reputation throughout the world and will “teach mankind to wardthe bolts of fate.”9 Similarly, for Lucius Lyon, author of A Treatise on LightningConductors, the first American book on lightning rods (published in 1853 byG.P. Putnam & Co.), Franklin was a “mortal genius” who had discovered how“to bring [lightning] down in chains, to disarm its fury, and to convert it intoa useful, and even a friendly element.” Thus, for Lyon, lightning conductorswere to be “diffus[ed] over the whole globe,” and that diffusion would giveFranklin’s name immortality.10 A sonnet in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1857 echoedthese sentiments and declared that each and every lightning rod signifies theimage of Franklin, “Columbia’s noble son . . . / Whose name is writ by every

9 Joel Barlow, The Columbiad, ed. William K. Borttorff and Arthur L. Ford, in The Works of JoelBarlow (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), 2.706-7.10 Lucius Lyon, A Treatise on Lightning Conductors; Compiled from A Work on Thunderstormsby S.W. Harris, F.R.S. and Other Standard Authors (New York: George P. Putnam, 1853), 188-89. Lyon’s book was published by Putnam a few months before Putnam’s Monthly published“The Lightning-Rod Man,” suggesting that neither Putnam himself nor his publishing venturesnecessarily advocated Melville’s attitude towards lightning rods.



storm-cloud’s fire / And heard in thunder which the soul appals.”11 As inventorof the lightning rod, Franklin was figured as a national demigod who had andwould continue to command worldwide reverence for helping to protect livesand property.

Despite this lofty image, Franklin in his own lifetime was not abovemarketing and popularizing his invention. In fact, more than his printing press,stove, or political achievements, Franklin’s scientific connections and promo-tional skills gained him international celebrity.12 His rhetoric on behalf oflightning-rod use became standard copy in the marketing of the lightning rodfor over a century after its invention. Franklin used sensationalized anecdotesof lightning-caused catastrophes to promote lightning-rod use in the Americancolonies and in Europe. The story of the destruction of St. Bride’s Church inLondon, hit by lightning and destroyed by the subsequent fire in 1764, wasone of his more effective anecdotes, instigating the spread of lightning rods inEngland.13 It also provided an opportunity for Franklin to condemn opponentsof lightning rods. Responding to a friendly letter on the St. Bride’s churchincident from a Yale science professor, who expresses amazement at the “forceof prejudice” against lightning rods, Franklin wryly states that “it is perhapsnot so extraordinary that unlearned men, who commonly compose our churchvestries, should not yet be acquainted with, and sensible of the benefits ofmetal conductors,” which “preserve our houses.” Moreover, Franklin says,prejudice prevails among clergy and “men of extensive science and ingenuity”even where ample evidence has been demonstrated against the “inutility” oftheir ideas.14 For Franklin, the destruction of St. Bride’s Church demonstratedthat Americans who had taken his lightning-rod advice were much wiser thantheir English counterparts. Because of the “great number of houses furnishedwith iron rods in North America,” he claims, “not one so guarded has beenmaterially hurt with lightning” (Experiments 395).

11 William Alexander, “Sonnet—Franklin,” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine (February 1857):160.12 John Adams declared that Franklin’s name would forever receive “extensive and universalcelebrity” for the invention of lightning rods. For Adams, what was important was that Franklin’sfame went beyond scientific and aristocratic circles. “When they [the common people] spoke ofhim, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.” See The Works of John Adams, ed.C.F. Adams (Boston: Little Brown and Co, 1856), 1.660.13 Trent Mitchell, “The Politics of Experiment in the Eighteenth Century: The Pursuit of Audienceand the Manipulation of Consensus in the Debate over Lightning Rods,” Eighteenth-Century Studies31 (1998): 314.14 Bernard I. Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments andObservations on Electricity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1941), 393; hereafter citedas Experiments.



One of Franklin’s more roundabout promotional efforts was to issuesafety instructions that induced fear of lightning and therefore created afelt need to alleviate the perceived fear in some way. He gave these safetyinstructions in detail, not only in The Pennsylvania Gazette but in Poor Richard’sAlmanack and in private letters circulated amongst Royal Society members, afact that attests to the wide diffusion of his lightning-rod marketing throughdifferent social and economic class boundaries. In a letter to Royal Societymembers, Franklin offers the following instructions (repeated by Melville’slightning-rod salesman) for storm scenarios where persons are caught insidehouses without rods installed:

A person apprehensive of danger from lightning, happening during the timeof thunder to be in a house not so secured [by a lightning rod], will do wellto avoid sitting near the chimney, near a looking-glass, or any gilt pictures orwainscot; the safest place is in the middle of the room, (so it be not undera metal lustre suspended by a chain) sitting in one chair and laying the feetup in another. It is still safer to bring two or three mattresses or beds intothe middle of the room, and folding them up double, place the chair uponthem. . . . But where it can be had, a hamock or swinging bed, suspendedby silk cords equally distant from the walls on every side, and from theceiling and the floor above and below, affords the safest situation a personcan have in any room whatever; and what indeed may be deemed quite freefrom danger of any stroke of lightning. (Experiments 391-92)

These instructions are something of a joke; the “gilt pictures or wainscot”and the elaborate silk structure subtly mock aristocratic tastes. Nevertheless,these instructions would later be taken at face-value by nineteenth-centuryperiodicals, which reprinted them to promote public safety and market light-ning rods at the same time. Franklin tended often to hype the dangers ofthunderstorms and induce anxiety about the invasion of lightning into homes,well knowing the psychological effects of this kind of lightning rhetoric. Ina letter written three years earlier than the one above, Franklin argues that,despite the infrequency of thunderstorms in England relative to North Americaand despite the probability that only one in every 100,000 homes will likelybe destroyed by lightning, people in England should be made aware of thegreat benefits of lightning rods. He reasons, ultimately, that the “advantage” oflightning rods is not just to secure lives and property, but “to make us easy,”keeping all people from having “painful apprehensions” of terror from the skies(Experiments 374-75). Thus, immediately upon its invention, the lightning rodwas a marketed, technological commodity that required a good deal of craftedpromotion and exploitation of fear, and Franklin was its central promoter.



“Hark!—Dreadful!—Will you order? Will you buy?”

In nineteenth-century America, marketers of lightning rods followedFranklin’s lead in exploiting existing anxieties about lightning and thun-derstorm safety. Periodical and newspaper stories of sensational lightning

accidents reinforced these anxieties, leading to the marketing of lightning rodsas insurance against property loss and death. Often these disaster anecdoteswould appear in the first paragraphs in articles on lightning safety, serving aspreludes to instructions and expert advice on what kind of rods were best tobuy and, perhaps most importantly, from whom to buy them.

Franklin’s lightning safety instructions from the 1750s continued to cir-culate with great authority through different venues, emanating from differentlocations in the United States. In March of 1834, The Cultivator, an agriculturalperiodical printed in Albany, New York, advised young men on the benefits oflightning safety.15 Written by the pseudonymous “Dick on Knowledge,” thesafety article, “On the Utility of Knowledge in Preventing Diseases and FatalAccidents,” warns of common accidents such as falling down wells or beingstruck by lightning. These accidents are obviously common, Dick says, becausehe has “frequently read [of them] in newspapers and magazines.” Dick alsoadvises that the key to keeping from getting struck by lightning indoors is toavoid “gilt mirrors or picture frames, bell-wires . . . and all metallic substances.”But the safest place, he adds in an obvious echo of Franklin, is in the middle ofthe room, on top of a chair set on a mattress or bed.16

Similarly, the Cincinnati Weekly Herald and Philanthropist recommendedin an 1844 article “a few plain, practical directions” for readers in need of acourse on lightning safety. Beginning with the fact that numerous buildings aredestroyed and many people are killed each year by lightning, the article furtheradvises readers which particular kinds of rods will protect buildings and per-sons. It then gives advice on what to do in a situation without lightning rods:“[I]f your house is protected by a good conductor, you are safe in any part . . . .[But if] there be no conductor, keep at a distance from the fireplace, the walls,and windows.” The only safe position in the latter case is seated in a chair inthe middle of the room. The article concludes by giving instructions on how toresuscitate an electrocuted victim, just in case lightning happens to strike the

15 For a short but complex history of The Cultivator, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of AmericanMagazines: 1741-1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 443.’ In his early years,Melville resided in Albany and, as Merton Sealts notes, read several Albany-based newspaperand periodicals, including perhaps The Cultivator. See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 87-88.16 “Young Men’s Department: On the Utility of Knowledge in Preventing Diseases and FatalAccidents,” The Cultivator (March 1834): 20; hereafter cited as “Young Men’s.”



house anyway.17 Thus, the repetition of the threat that domestic space couldbe invaded—one implicit in Franklin’s safety instructions—remained a sellingpoint for periodicals.

With Franklin’s safety instructions as performance cues, Melville’s sales-man in “The Lightning-Rod Man” employs this selling point to promote hisrods and win over potential customers. The salesman invites the narrator toenact his safety instructions, combining questions that presume his customer’signorance with commands that attempt to get the customer to act and ulti-mately to buy:

[The narrator:] “Let me close yonder shutters; the slanting rain is beatingthrough the sash. I will bar up.”

[The salesman:]”Are you mad? Know you not that yon iron bar is a swiftconductor? Desist.”

“I will simply close the shutters, then, and call my boy to bring me a woodenbar. Pray, touch the bell-pull there.”

“Are you frantic? That bell-wire might blast you. Never touch bell-wire in athunderstorm, nor ring a bell of any sort.”

“Nor those in belfries? Pray, will you tell me where and how one may be safein a time like this? Is there any part of my house I may touch with hopes ofmy life?”

“There is; but not where you now stand. Come away from the wall. The cur-rent will sometimes run down a wall, and—a man being a better conductorthan a wall—it would leave the wall and run into him. Swoop! That musthave fallen very nigh. That must have been globular lightning.”

“Very probably. Tell me at once, which is, in your opinion, the safest part ofthis house?”

“This room, and this one spot in it where I stand. Come hither.”(NN PT 121-22)

Both the salesman’s authoritative pronouncements and the homeowner’sscientific ignorance are satirized here. The salesman’s repeated imperatives,“Desist” and “Come,” attempt to parley his safety instructions into a saleby getting his potential customer to enact the instructions. As scientificallyauthorized directives meant for a presumably ignorant populace, these instruc-tions work both as prescriptive rhetoric founded in scientific discourse and ascatalysts for getting consumers to buy lightning rods. For the salesman andfor nineteenth-century periodicals, the two aims of this rhetoric (public safetyinstruction and sales) are practically indistinguishable.

Of course, beneath the salesman’s performance is a discourse of safetythat aims to generate a perceived need, which when filled simultaneously

17 “Lightning Rods,” The Cincinnati Weekly Herald and Philanthropist (August 28, 1844): 4.



produces both confidence and anxiety in lightning-rod consumers. Contraryto Franklin’s assertion that the rod will “make us easy,” the act of buyingand installing a rod does not necessarily alleviate customer apprehensions.Since lightning rods attract lightning, a user could never feel “safe” until hispurchase was tested, though, of course, the test site was the very propertymeant to be protected. Yet, given the number of accidents attributed to faultyor improperly-rigged rods in nineteenth-century periodicals, even after the firstlightning strike, lightning-rod users could not rest easy. Repeated strikes coulddamage rods, unbeknownst to the property owner, or grounded systems couldbe ungrounded by accident. For lightning-rod peddlers and users alike, therod’s protection was perfect, except when it was not.

This tension between safety and its attendant risks manifests itself underthe surface of most lightning safety articles. In 1823, for example, the AmericanJournal of Science and Arts claimed that everyone knew how “notorious” the de-struction of barns from lightning strikes was. Given that widespread problem,the magazine editor recommends that every barn and low building be outfittedwith a lightning rod. The obvious reason is that a rod “it is believed, would,in many cases, prove a perfect security.”18 This sentence’s passive constructionand the clause “in many cases” slip in between the editor’s confident assurancethat lightning rods provide “perfect security” for all barns. The weight of thearticle hangs on the notion of the perfect protection that rods achieve, but therhetorical qualifiers belie this notion.

Like others previously mentioned, the American Journal of Science andArts article built its message on the supposed common knowledge that light-ning accidents were widespread. The Christian Register, a Unitarian circularprinted in Boston, presents a different approach in a short 1823 article on light-ning rods and the ignorance of church-going folk.19 Opening with the reportof an incident in Connecticut in which two people were killed by lightningduring a church service, the article chastises those who trust “superstition”over the known fact that “had the church . . . been furnished with a goodconductor, it would in all human probability have escaped uninjured, and thelives of two people been spared.” Because Providence created the world withimmutable laws, humans may discover those laws and protect themselves—orsuffer the consequences. Therefore, as the article further states, “it is certainas any principle in philosophy, that a good conductor affords perfect securityto buildings against the effects of lightning,” thus leading to the conclusion

18 “Peculiar liability of Barns to be struck by lightning,” American Journal of Arts and Sciences (May1821): 345.19 The Christian Register, over the course of its run, could boast of publishing the leading Unitariantheologians of the nineteenth century (Mott 138).



that every house should have a lightning rod affixed to it.20 The reach of thisanecdote and its moral about “perfect security” were not limited to readers ofthe Christian Register, but instead covered urban and rural audiences as wellas those readers who desired scientific information or mere entertainment.Receiving the story from an unknown Connecticut source, the article wasfirst printed in a New York Evening Post editorial before being reprinted inthe New York Statesman, before being taken from the Statesman and reprintedwith modifications in the Christian Register. Thus, what Meredith McGill callsthe “culture of reprinting” helped disseminate an effective anecdote to a widenetwork of readers, one that proclaimed the universal need for everyone toown and implement lightning rods.21 The Christian Register increased thestakes, however, by stating that lightning strikes are providential, and thathuman reason, using the “principles” of “philosophy,” can easily concludethat lightning rods are the best means of dealing with the “immutable laws” ofnature during thunderstorms. As in this example, theological doctrines wereoften important components of lightning-rod promotion.

Adding Providence to the lightning-rod discussion was one way ofmaking it weightier, but another was to depict the results of lightning accidentsgraphically. Magazines occasionally used images of lightning strikes as supple-ments to the text to reinforce the discourse of lightning safety and visuallyrestate its tensions. The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowl-edge supplemented its authoritative 1835 article on lightning conductors—theauthor uses the Franklinian moniker “A Practical Electrician”—with severalimages based on woodcuts. The first of these (see Fig. 1) depicts the numerousangles at which lightning can attack houses. Entering through chimneys,windows, and foundations via surrounding trees, bolts of lightning framesand besieges the home in a way resembling Franklin’s characterization oflightning as a domestic invader. To protect against this invader, the “PracticalElectrician” describes what to look for when buying lightning rods and howto attach them to houses, interspersing anecdotes of his own inspections ofsupposedly well-remembered lightning accidents. His concluding anecdoterelates an accident in which an infant was killed in its mother’s arms, despitetwo lightning rods being attached to the house they were sitting in. (Oddly, themother was not hurt.) The Electrician assures the reader that lightning did notstrike the house’s rods, but instead entered the house horizontally, a problem

20 “Lightning Rods,” Christian Register ( July 4, 1823): 188; hereafter cited as Christian Register.21 Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) 1-2.



Figure 1. Image from “Lightning Conductors,” The American Magazine of Useful and EntertainingKnowledge (May 1, 1835): 405.

that could have been avoided with a repositioning of the affixed rods.22 Beneaththis story, concluding the article, is an image of a devastated house with halfits side knocked out, roof torn up, and windows smashed.

In “The Lightning-Rod Man,” the salesman uses lightning anecdotes topromote his own particular rod over other types of rods that are supposedlyof poorer quality. When the narrator questions the salesman about a lightningaccident in a town called Criggan, the salesman responds that, yes, one of hisrods was involved in the accident, but that the accident was merely due toan ignorant wiring job performed by the salesman’s “workman.” When thenarrator further persists, asking if the salesman was responsible for the recentdeath of a Canadian girl, the reply is a firm marketing pitch:

“No. And I hear that [in Canada], iron rods only are in use. They should havemine, which are copper. Iron is easily fused. Then they draw out the rod soslender, that it has not body enough to conduct the full electric current. Themetal melts; the building is destroyed. My copper rods never act so. ThoseCanadians are fools . . . . Mine is the only true rod. Look at it. Only one dollara foot.” (NN PT 120-21)

22 “Lightning Conductors,” The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (May 1,1835): 405-9.



With its nationalism and religious fervor (“the only true rod”), thisresponse hinges on large rhetorical distinctions created from small real-worlddifferences—the material substance of lightning rods (copper or iron). Thesedistinctions distance the pitched product from any possible scrutiny of its pastor future performance. Making material distinctions was a common rhetoricalploy for nineteenth-century magazines articles, which assigned fault for failedrods to poor construction, either in height or in the particular metal used. ForMelville’s lightning-rod salesman, these debates over which material lightningrods should be made of are easily converted into rhetorical selling-points.

In fact, for many periodicals, as for Melville’s salesman, the underlyingpurpose of the discourse of lightning safety was explicitly economic. Perhapsnothing demonstrates this better than the mixing of information, editorialcontent, and advertising in periodical articles promoting religious sentimentor disseminating scientific information. Oftentimes periodicals included anec-dotes and safety instructions to induce people to purchase lightning rods froma specific manufacturer. Articles sometimes inserted contact information forlightning-rod salesmen or manufacturers into paragraphs that discussed howto install rods or what kind of rods work best. Even periodicals as prestigiousand diverse in readership as Scientific American and Prairie Farmer were notabove such stealth sales tactics. A July issue of the 1852 Scientific Americanopens with the repeated truism that lightning kills many people each year,and then segues into a discussion of the best rod to buy. Readers are toldfrom whom and where to buy lightning rods: “Cooper and Hewitt, 17 BurlingSlip, New York City.” The article declares that Cooper and Hewitt’s rods havenever been known to fail, that “any person of ordinary capacity” can installa lightning rod, and that rods fall in an inexpensive price range between fiftycents and one dollar.23

Perhaps not surprisingly, lightning rods were more than mere safetydevices. Their use also indicated divisions in socioeconomic class and, asone periodical put it, “local intelligence.” Numerous periodical articles conde-scended to the general public, playing up a community’s ignorance of lightningsafety as a sign of that community’s lack of education and cultivation. In1834, The Cultivator declared that most lightning accidents are due to theignorance of the populace, in either incorrectly rigging rods to homes or notusing them at all (“Young Men’s” 20). Similarly, the Boston Cultivator in 1843,reprinting an article from The Hartford Observer, listed the basic “principles ofelectricity” because a “large portion of the community . . . need instruction inthe simplest elements of the science.” Readers of this Boston Cultivator article,

23 See “Lightning Rods for Houses,” Scientific American 7.43 ( July 10,1852): 344.



many of whom (so the article tells them) already possess the knowledge ofthese principles, are directed to inform their neighbors—the ignorant “largeportion of the community”—to share their knowledge so that lightning rodswill be used more safely and frequently.24

Class condescension occurs in “The Lightning-Rod Man” as well. Thesalesman belittles the narrator for the narrator’s lack of knowledge as he triesto sell him the rod. When the narrator refuses to move away from his fireplace,the salesman replies, “Are you so horridly ignorant, then . . . as not to know,that by far the most dangerous part of a house, during such a terrific tempestas this, is the fire-place?” Two of the salesman’s later questions begin “Knowyou not . . .?” in further attempts to point out his customer’s ignorance (NN PT119, 121).

Thus, lightning-rod use could be tied to civic or communal enlighten-ment. The writer of the previously mentioned 1823 Christian Register articlenotes that towns and cities literally display their cultural status by the numberof buildings rigged with lightning rods. “One may judge in part,” the writerstates, “of the intelligence and character of a city or district by the number ofrods, which point toward heaven. Where they abound, the traveler withoutmuch hesitation may expect to find a philosophical people” (Christian Register188). But “philosophical people” could also mean anxious, wealthy people. Asthe Horticulturalist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste joked in 1852, NewEngland houses “worth [over] 500 dollars” erected so many rods on housetopsthat they looked like Napoleon’s army at a presentation of bayonets.25 Thuslightning rod use could be as much about conspicuous consumption as safety.Many rods tended to be expensive and ornate, as is the case with the rod offeredby Melville’s salesman. His is a copper rod inserted into a “neat wooden staff”with “two balls of greenish glass, ringed with copper bands,” which would bedecorative enough to make a statement on any housetop. As an object thatprotects lives and property, as well as one that clearly symbolizes social status,who then—nineteenth-century periodicals might ask—wouldn’t want to buy alightning rod?

The Publication of Infidel Notions

The multiple publishing venues that constructed lightning-rod useand safety as necessary and intelligent practices present a possibleanswer to this article’s opening question: namely, what is the point

24 Professor Olmstead, “Protection from Lightning,” Boston Cultivator 1843 ( June 10): 177.25 “Brown Houses and Lightning Conductors,” Horticulturalist and Journal of Rural Art and RuralTaste (May 1, 1852): 203.



and significance of the salesman’s threat in Melville’s story? This threat topublish the narrator’s anti-rod “infidel notions,” which are the narrator’sreasoned rejections of the salesman’s sales pitch, relies upon the salesman’strust in the authoritative weight of a commercial print culture’s discourse ofthe lightning rod. Given the periodical market’s general insistence that allAmericans purchase and use lightning rods, the “publication” or outing of thenarrator’s rejection of the lightning rod threatens to make him a social outcastamong the general public. The salesman’s threat, then, is potent. After all,nineteenth-century American print culture embraced the lightning rod asa marketable item, and Melville’s “Lightning-Rod Man” encapsulates thatembrace.

The salesman, who embodies various periodical marketing strategies,also represents the ways that periodicals functioned as material objects.Like Melville’s salesman, periodicals entered into domestic space; they pre-sented authoritative sales pitches that combined religion, science, and fear-mongering, and they promoted the consumption of lightning rods. In contrast,given his violent rejection of the salesman and his rod—“I seized it; I snappedit; I dashed it; I trod it”—the narrator of “The Lightning-Rod Man” is an aber-ration in print culture. He is a dissenting voice speaking within a marketingmedium against the domination of marketing in that very medium—not onlyagainst the discourse of safety but also against the knowledge, rhetoric, andsocial status that owning a lightning rod supposedly brings to consumers. Ashis story first appeared in the periodical medium, Melville’s anti-advertisementfor lightning rods not only subverts consumerism but is a thinly-veiled send-upof contemporary print culture.

In line with his anti-consumerism, Melville’s rugged, mountain-dwellingnarrator has an egalitarian streak.26 The narrator is a backwoods American, aquasi-Jacksonian Democrat whose fierce independence spurns any authorita-tive position, including that of the condescending lightning-rod man, whomhe throws out of his home. By playing on this conflict, Melville sets upboth characters for ironical comparison later in the story. The oppositionbetween the two begins from the start as the narrator greets the salesman withimmediate sarcasm:

26 Other critics have considered the narrator only from a theoretical or autobiographical perspec-tive. Stephen Frye argues that the narrator is Bakhtinian, a “heterogenous mixture of perspectives”who uses multiple modes of expression. See “Bakhtin, Dialogics, and the Aesthetics of Ambiguityin The Piazza Tales,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 1 (1999): 48. Eric Wertheimer,however, sees the narrator as a reflection of Melville’s view of private property, which coincideswith Melville’s shaky financial position in the early 1850s. See “Jupiter Underwritten: Melville’sUnsafe Home,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58 (2003): 177-79.



“Sir . . . have I the honor of a visit from that illustrious God, Jupiter Tonans?So stood he in the Greek statue of old, grasping the lightning-bolt. If you behe, or his viceroy, I have to thank you for this noble storm you have brewedamong our mountains.” (NN PT 119)

Sarcasm turns into wily resistance when the salesman commands the narratorto position his body according to Franklin’s safety instructions and removehimself from the hearthstone, the fireplace being the most dangerous placeto be in a thunderstorm. Complying at first, the narrator steps back “invol-untarily” onto the hearthstone with “the erectest, proudest posture” he canmuster, and with sarcastic defiance complains, “Mr. Jupiter Tonans, I am notaccustomed to be commanded in my own house.”

Melville then ironically compares the characters via one of Franklin’spolitically- and theologically-charged arguments about the effectiveness oflightning rods. Both characters share the same conviction that the lightningrod tames the fury of the heavens, but for different reasons. This argumentis foregrounded in one of the story’s key exchanges, in which the narratorresponds favorably to the salesman’s statement that lightning actually strikesupwards into the sky:

[Narrator:] “Something you just said, instead of alarming me, has strangelyinspired confidence.”[Salesman:] “What have I said?”You said that sometimes lightning flashes from the earth to the clouds.”“Aye, the returning-stroke, as it is called; when the earth, being overchargedwith the fluid, flashes its surplus upward.”“The returning-stroke; that is, from earth to sky. Better and better.”

(NN PT 122)

For the peddler, this argument about the physics of lightning is a marketingtool, but the egalitarian narrator appreciates the idea because of the symbolicanti-authoritarianism of the rod’s function. The rod is potentially a tool ofpolitical revolution; it conveys lightning into the ground so that the earth canthrust it back at heaven. The rod’s owner effectively strikes back at a higherauthority. In this one political sense, the salesman’s merchandise is attractiveto the individualistic, backwoods narrator; it reaffirms his confidence despitethe salesman’s authoritative and demagogic fear-mongering.

Yet the narrator does not appreciate nor agree with the rod’s revolution-ary power when applied to theological matters. The narrator’s final rejectionof the rod occurs, in part, because of the religious implications of the sales-man’s spiel. While the narrator agrees with the rod’s political symbolism, hevehemently disagrees that it can ever thwart the “supernal bolt” of the “Deity.”Here again, the narrator takes a countercultural position against lightning-rod



periodical rhetoric, which often touched upon theological questions generatedfrom the spread of lightning rods. Was the use of lightning rods a thwarting ofGod’s will? Most Christian magazines typically argued for the practical benefitof saving property. For example, an 1844 article published in the Quakermagazine The Friend argued against those who believe it blasphemous to uselightning rods, claiming that Jesus Christ himself did not “neglect such meansas prudence required to secure his personal safety.”27 Yet Melville’s narratorcounters these theological arguments, pointing out that the rainbow, whichfollows the thunderstorm, is as symbolically potent as a lightning bolt, sinceit reminds everyone that the “Deity will not, of purpose, make war on man’searth” (NN PT 124). The salesman’s rhetoric is too limited for the narrator; itneglects God’s optimistic promises while hyping the harsh judgments of theheavens. Although the narrator is receptive to the idea that the lightning rodsymbolizes democratic revolution, he rejects the possibility that it somehowrepresents God’s wrath.

For readers of Putnam’s Monthly, then, “The Lightning-Rod Man” fea-tured an exchange between two cultural positions—the God-confident, back-woods democrat and the authoritarian, God-fearing lightning-rod salesman—both of which resonated with the political and religious concerns of contem-porary readers. The story’s interaction with American print culture allows thecharacters to be viewed in light of the political and religious ramificationsof lightning-rod rhetoric. Given the dynamic interplay of its two characters,“The Lightning-Rod Man” comments on its own appearance in the periodicalmarket. As a product for readers to consume, the story brings business toPutnam’s and earns money for its writer, but this periodical product alsocritiques the rhetoric of consumer marketing in the periodical business, whichpromoted fear in order to sell lightning rods, and which, as the narrator saysof the lightning-rod salesman, “still travels in storm-time, and drives a bravetrade with the fears of man” (NN PT 124).

27 See E. L. “Lightning Rods,” The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal (March 23,1844): 207.


peddlers of the rod: melville's “the lightning-rod man” and the antebellum periodical...

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