George J. Adler

George J. Adler (1821, Leipzig, Kingdom of Saxony – August 24, 1868, New York, New York) was a philologist and linguist.

Early years Adler was born to John J. Adler and a mother whose name is unknown in Germany in 1821. He arrived in the United States in 1833, with his parents, who settled in New York city, where the boy attended the public schools and entered the university of the city of New York, from which he was graduated valedictorian in 1844.

Adler was known to Herman Melville, whom he met on a sea journey to Europe in October 1849. This was shortly before Melville wrote Moby Dick. Melville wrote of that encounter: "He is author of a formidable lexicon (German and English); in compiling which he almost ruined his health. He was almost crazy, he tells me, for a time. He is full of the German metaphysics, and discourses of Kant, Swedenborg, etc."

Melville spent many hours talking to Adler, talking of "Fixed Fate, Free will, foreknowledge and the absolute", said Melville, "his philosophy is Coleredgian [sic], he accepts the scriptures as divine, and yet leaves himself free to inquire into nature. He does not take it that the Bible is absolutely infallible and that anything opposed to it in Science must be wrong. He believes that there are things out of God and independent [sic] of him – things that would have existed were there no God – such as that two and two make four; for it is not that God so decrees mathematically, but that in the very nature of things, the fact is thus."

Further, Leon Howard points out that Adler may well serve as the model for Bartleby in Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener, a story of Wall Street.

"On 25 August Melville was excused from work for the funeral of George Adler, whose body was buried at the rapidly filling Trinity Cemetery, after a funeral at St. Michael's Church. Melville was one of only a handful of mourners at the funeral. When he was earning no money, in late 1859 or early 1860, and before Lizzie inherited money, Melville had subscribed for a copy of Adler's translation of a book on Provençal poetry – the test of friendship. Most of the intervening years Adler had remained confined at Bloomingdale's Asylum. Duyckinck was there at the funeral, riding from St. Michael's with the Dr. Houghton who was conducting part of the service. It was a sorry affair, a man of genius living in confinement and dying almost unmourned, Duyckinck recorded in a letter to his son George. "Herman Melville, [F. W.] Downer with me & two others were at the funeral, and Dr. [D. Tilden] Brown of the asylum in whose face and mien you may read the secret of Adler's regard for him." At least the staff physician had been one of the mourners."

Last years His mind became impaired during the last years of his life, and he died at Bloomingdale asylum of New York City, on August 24, 1868.