The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville's last novel, was a critical and commercial failure when it was published in 1857. Critics panned it as an unreadable book. The reviewer in the New York Dispatch finished it “wondering what on earth the author has been driving at.” The London Literary Gazette called it “a book professing to inculcate philosophical truths through the medium of nonsensical people talking nonsense.” The London Illustrated Times commented: 'We can make nothing of this masquerade, which, indeed, savours very much of a mystification. We began the book at the beginning, and, after reading ten or twelve chapters, some of which contained scenes of admirable dramatic power, while others presented pages of the most vivid description, found, in spite of all this, that we had not yet obtained the slightest clue as to the meaning (in case there should happen to be any) of the work before us.'