APPENDIX
Herman Melville first conceived of retelling the tale of Israel Potter, the “Revolutionary beggar,” in 1849 after coming upon a tattered copy of the original book. When he finally wrote his own account in 1854, he drew as well on the narratives of Ethan Allen and Nathaniel Fanning, who had served under John Paul Jones, and he had himself visited London.
While the real Israel Potter devoted half of his personal history to his years in London following the Revolutionary War, Melville retold these events in a few brief concluding chapters to his own volume, Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile. Melville’s chapters are reproduced from the 1855 first edition to give a comparative view of the tragedy of Potter’s life as seen by himself and by Herman Melville, a quarter of a century later.