127. The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville

Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857) — his last published novel, and written when he was notably short of confidence after the poor reception of Moby-Dick — concerns a trickster who, in various guises, fleeces the passengers on a Mississippi steamboat. It was based on the exploits of a real-life swindler of late-1840s New York, one Samuel Thompson. Remarkably, Thompson was the first person to whom the epithet ‘confidence man’ was ever applied (giving us the words ‘con-man’, ‘con-trick’, etc). According to newspaper reports of the time, his method was to claim former acquaintance with his victim and then ask for their ‘confidence’ with the notorious words: ‘Are you really disposed to put any confidence in me?’ In the novel this became: ‘Could you now, my dear, under such circumstances, by way of experiment, simply have confidence in me?’ If the answer was yes, the inevitable response came: ‘Prove it. Let me have twenty dollars.’

Consulted:
Reynolds, MS: ‘The Prototype for Melville’s Confidence-Man’, Publications of the Modem Language Association of America 86, No. 5., October 1971.