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 The American Critical Archives
GENERAL E D I T O R : M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College

1. Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Joel

Myerson
2. Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by James W.
Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray
3. Ellen Glasgow: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Dorothy M. Scura
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by John L.
Idol, Jr., and Buford Jones
5. William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by M. Thomas Inge
 Herman Melville
The Contemporary Reviews

Edited by
Brian Higgins
University of Illinois at Chicago

Hershel Parker
University of Delaware

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521121156

© Cambridge University Press 1995

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1995

This digitally printed version 2009

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Herman Melville: the contemporary reviews / edited by Brian Higgins,
Hershel Parker,
p. cm. — (American critical archives)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-521-41423-7
1. Melville, Herman, 1819—1891—Criticism and interpretation.
2. American fiction—19th century—Book reviews. I. Higgins,
Brian, 1943- . II. Parker, Hershel. III. Series.
PS2387.H434 1995
813'.3—dc20 94-24175
CIP

Title pages of Melville's books reproduced courtesy The Newberry Library.

ISBN 978-0-521-41423-4 hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-12115-6 paperback
 Contents
Series Editor's Preface Page vii
Introduction ix
Typee(1846) 1
Omoo (1847) 83
Mardi (1849) 191
Redburn(1849) 253
White-Jacket (1850) 293
Moby-Dick (1851) 351
Pierre (1852) 417
Israel Potter (1855) 453
The Piazza Tales (1856) 467
The Confidence-Man (1857) 485
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) 507
Clarel(1876) 529
John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces (1888) 543
Billy Budd (posthumous) 547
Index 553
Series Editor's Preface
The American Critical Archives series documents a part of a writer's career that
is usually difficult to examine, that is, the immediate response to each work as
it was made public on the part of reviewers in contemporary newspapers and
journals. Although it would not be feasible to reprint every review, each volume
in the series reprints a selection of reviews designed to provide the reader with
a proportionate sense of the critical response, whether it was positive, negative,
or mixed. Checklists of other known reviews are also included to complete the
documentary record and allow access for those who wish to do further reading
and research.
The editor of each volume has provided an introduction that surveys the
career of the author in the context of the contemporary critical response.
Ideally, the introduction will inform the reader in brief of what is to be learned
by a reading of the full volume. The reader then can go as deeply as necessary
in terms of the kind of information desired—be it about a single work, a period
in the author's life, or the author's entire career. The intent is to provide quick
and easy access to the material for students, scholars, librarians, and general
readers.
When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a com-
prehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases England,
as the writers' careers were in progress. The volumes open a window on the
patterns and forces that have shaped the history of American writing and the
reputations of the writers. These are primary documents in the literary and
cultural life of the nation.

M. THOMAS INGE
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 Introduction
Herman Melville collected and scrutinized the reviews of his books, especially
in his early career, when he commented on them frequently in his letters and in
his first journal. In May 1846, three months after the publication of his first
book, Typee, a partly autobiographical, partly fictionalized account of his ad-
ventures in the Marquesas Islands, Melville wrote to his brother Gansevoort in
London (unaware that he had died more than two weeks earlier): "I need not
ask you to send me every notice of any kind that you see or hear of."x The
following September he listed for John Murray, his English publisher, the En-
glish reviews he had seen, and he asked Murray to send him any additional
ones he came across [Correspondence, 66). Melville's eagerness to see as many
of his reviews as possible reflects his awareness of their power. He had been
forced to agree to expurgate the American edition of Typee after the Presby-
terian paper the Evangelist began a crusade against its condemnation of mis-
sionary activities in Hawaii. The reviews of his second book would determine
whether or not he would have a literary career: After that book, Omoo, was
published in 1847, he said he would "follow it up" with a third only if it suc-
ceeded (Correspondence, 87). From the start, his reviews affected the sales of
each book he published, and frequently they also influenced the nature of the
next book he wrote. Early in 1852, his reputation damaged by some of
the reviews of his sixth book, The Whale or Moby-Dick (1851), he satirized
his reviewers in a section he added to one of his major works, Pierre. In 1852,
the reviews of Pierre so wrecked his reputation that his next manuscript, The
Isle of the Cross, finished in May 1853, was (as far as we know) never pub-
lished. After a few more years of struggling to maintain his career, earning more
money as a magazine writer than from the three books he published from 1855
through 1857, he gave up trying to earn a living by writing fiction. In 1860, he
hoped to publish a volume called Poems, but his reputation was so poor that
at least two publishers turned the manuscript down, and it was never pub-
lished; we do not know what poems were in it, only that they were not long
poems. In the light of this history, to speak of Melville's contemporary reviews
as "influencing" his career is to employ a gross understatement.
Typee (published by John Murray in February 1846 under the title Narrative
of a Four Months' Residence Among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas
Islands; or, A Peep at Polynesian Life and the following month by Wiley and
Putnam in New York with the title Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, During
a Four Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas) delighted most review-
ers on both sides of the Atlantic. The favorable British response contributed to
the book's success in America: The two-part review in the Athenceum was re-
printed in New York in the Anglo American and in Boston in LittelVs Living
Age, which also reprinted the Spectator review, and a number of American
reviewers commented on the book's popularity among their British counter-
parts. Critics warmed to the book's narrative of hairbreadth escapes, its scenes
of indolent sensual life amidst the groves and complaisant natives of a South
Sea island paradise, and what was perceived as its freshness and vigor of style;
still, some reviewers were put off by its occasional "sea freedoms" or troubled
by its praise of "savage life" and disparagement of Western civilization and
Christian missionaries. The issue of the book's authenticity quickly emerged,
moreover: Although many reviewers accepted it as an essentially truthful first-
hand account of actual events, even if some incidents had been exaggerated,
"embellished," or "heightened for effect," others thought they detected the
hand of a ghostwriter in the narrative or thought the adventures wholly imagi-
nary; still others decided that Melville out of personal bias had willfully exag-
gerated the happy state of the Typees and grossly misrepresented the Protestant
missionaries in his incidental comments on their behavior in the Hawaiian Is-
lands. The reviewer for the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer (17 April
1846) judged the book in "all essential respects" a fiction, "a piece of Mun-
chausenism—from beginning to end." Melville might have visited the Marque-
sas Islands, and there might have been foundation for some parts of the narra-
tive, but many of the incidents were "utterly incredible." As a book of travels,
as a "statement of facts," it had "no merit whatever." Its accounts of missionary
behavior and of French imperialism in the South Pacific were not reliable, ow-
ing to "the spirit of fiction" in which the whole book was written.
The book's questionable authenticity had caused Melville problems from the
time he first tried to publish it, for Harper and Brothers of New York rejected
it on the grounds that "it was impossible that it could be true and therefore
was without real value."2 Presumbly in this version, as in the book as published,
Melville had departed drastically from facts by exaggerating the three weeks
he had spent among the Typees into four months. His brother Gansevoort, as
Secretary to the American Legation in London, subsequently offered the manu-
script to John Murray, who like the Harpers harbored doubts about its authen-
ticity, suspecting it of being the work of a "practised writer"3 rather than a
novice. Even before Murray made any decision on the manuscript, Melville had
begun adding to it, eking out his own recollections with material he plundered
from other travelers' published accounts of their visits to the South Seas. De-
spite—or perhaps because of—several degrees of duplicity in his presenting the
book as "unvarnished truth," Melville was outraged by reviewers' claims that
parts of the book were inventions (although they never challenged him on the
precise points where he was most vulnerable: the brevity of his stay in the is-
lands and his expropriation of material from other books). He was particularly
agitated by the review in the Courier and Enquirer: a few days after its appear-
ance, he arranged to insert into the Albany Argus (21 April 1846) his statement
"to the public," that Typee "is a true narrative of events which actually oc-
curred to him." In May the New York Evening Mirror and Morning News
carried similar statements, at Melville's request, vouching for the book as a
"genuine history of actual occurrences." Later that month, still upset by what
he referred to as the "obnoxious review" in the Courier and Enquirer, he sent
his acquaintance Alexander W. Bradford, coeditor of the American Whig Re-
view, a rejoinder he had written, couched so as "to make it appear as if written
by one who had read the book & beleived it." He was worried that "unless
something of this kind appears the success of the book here as a genuine narra-
tive will be seriously impaired." Melville felt "heartily vexed," he told Bradford,
that the "intelligent Editors" of a publication like Chambers' Edinburgh Jour-
nal should "endorse the genuineness of the narrative" while "so many num-
skulls on this side of the water should heroically avow their determination not
to be 'gulled' by it" {Correspondence, 38). When the "true and veritable" Toby,
Richard Tobias Greene, surfaced in Buffalo and in the Commercial Advertiser
of that city testified to the "entire accuracy" of Typee for the time that he and
Melville were together, Melville exulted to Evert A. Duyckinck, his editor at
Wiley and Putnam, that Toby's resurrection could not "but settle the question
of the book's genuineness" {Correspondence, 50). To John Murray he sent
three newspaper accounts of Greene's appearance ("N.Y. Courier & Enquirer,
N.Y. Morning News, & Albany Argus") as "strange" and "convincing" proof
of the truth of Typee {Correspondence, 55).
The composition, publication, and reception of Typee established the pat-
tern for Melville's subsequent books, especially during his early career: What
Melville offered a publisher was seldom quite what he labeled it in his letters,
and his works as presented to the general public were rarely quite what they
purported to be. From Typee onward Melville deliberately deceived readers by
presenting other people's observations as his own (gradually refining his plun-
derings into private jokes at the expense of the plundered). Just as the question
of whether Typee was fact or fiction troubled his English publisher and some
reviewers, so the problem of how to classify his books would frequently vex
reviewers during the remainder of his literary career. The popular success of
Typee and his next book, Omoo, a partly autobiographical account of his ad-
ventures in Tahiti and Eimeo, established him in reviewers' minds as a writer
of lively narratives of adventure, a label that dogged him through the rest of
his career. From the outset he aroused the animosity of some reviewers; later
he would alienate many more. His own vexation with skeptical and self-
righteously religious reviewers of Typee was the beginning of an ultimate scorn
for what he called in Pierre the "whole infinite company of infinitesimal
critics."

XI
 Melville's eagerness to see as many reviews of his work as possible continued
after the appearance of Omoo (published in London in March 1847 by John
Murray and in New York the following month by Harper and Brothers). He
had "much curiosity" to see how the book would be "received by the sagatious
Critics of the English press," he wrote to John Romeyn Brodhead, who was
acting as his English agent; he asked Brodhead to have someone collect and
send to him, "in their original form, whatever notices may appear" (Corre-
spondence, 85)—a request he repeated to John Murray (Correspondence, 87).
The reception of Omoo in both England and the United States was at first
similar to that of Typee: Reviewers, for the most part, relished the racy account
of adventures in Tahiti and Eimeo, the vivid descriptions of the islands and
natives, and the narrator's good humor and felicitous style, even if they found
the book's material not so fresh as that in Typee, since the Society Islands had
been more extensively written about than the Marquesas. But the book's even
more extensive expose of the behavior of Christian missionaries drew still more
vociferous attacks than Typee had faced. In June, even while acknowledging
Melville as a "born genius," Horace Greeley in his New York Weekly Tribune
declared both Typee and Omoo "unmistakably defective if not positively dis-
eased in moral tone." Greeley thought that the "penchant for bad liquors" and
the "hankering after loose company not always of the masculine order" dis-
played in Omoo would prevent Melville's "apparently candid testimony with
regard to the value, the effect and the defects of the Missionary labors among
the South Sea Islanders from having its due weight with those most deeply
interested." Gadfly reformer that he was, Greeley was prepared to believe that
Christianizing "savages" without "a change in their Social condition and hab-
its—a change from idleness and inefficiency to regular and well directed in-
dustry" was folly. The following month, in a long, scathing notice in the July
American Whig Review, G. W. Peck professed, like Greeley, to be able now to
identify the lurking, insidious immorality of Typee; he deplored the "cool,
sneering wit" and "perfect want of heart in Omoo," as well as the "cool, delib-
erate art" with which in both books Melville broke off his "voluptuous pic-
tures" so as to "stimulate curiosity and excite unchaste desire" without of-
fending decency. Unlike Greeley, Peck maintained that Melville, as one who did
nothing among the islanders "but amuse himself with their peculiarities and
use them for his appetites," was not a credible witness against the missionaries.
Although, like Greeley, some other reviewers for the secular press were pre-
pared to accept the validity of Melville's account of the missionaries, reviewers
for the Protestant religious press vehemently protested its falseness, to the point
that thereafter Melville's reputation was never free from the charge of irrever-
ence toward Christianity. The moral objections to Typee (at first only a minor
element amid the general praise) multiplied after the publication of Omoo, set-
ting the stage for the ultimate condemnation on religious grounds of two of his
greatest books, Moby-Dick and Pierre.
 Melville's vexation at Greeley's unflattering estimate of the subversive moral
tone of Omoo (and, in retrospect, Typee) and at Peck's diatribe surfaced in a
letter to Duyckinck in July 1847. Comparing the reception of Omoo by some
"sensible" English reviewers with "its treatment here," he wrote, "begets ideas
not very favorable to one's patriotism" (Correspondence, 95). To John Murray,
Melville also expressed "gratification at the reception" the book had been
"honored with in England," although it was difficult to conceal his "surprise &
diversion at the solemn incredulity respecting the author which would seem to
obtain so widely" (Correspondence, 98). Blackwood's had decided that Omoo
was a "skillfully concocted Robinsonade, where fictitious incident is inge-
niously blended with genuine information." The London Times had said that
Omoo was no less charming and no more authentic than the fictional Typee;
quite as fascinating as Robinson Crusoe, it was "twenty times less probable."
In both the United States and England, doubts about the authenticity of Typee
had persisted among other reviewers, even after Toby's resurrection, although
American reviewers were more willing to accept Omoo as a factual account of
Melville's rovings and firsthand observations.
The skepticism of reviewers of Typee and Omoo (and that of John Murray,
who had pestered him for "documentary evidence" that he had been in the
Marquesas) became decisive in Melville's determination not to pursue his plan
of making his third book a "bona-fide narrative" of his "adventures in the
Pacific, continued from 'Omoo.'" He claimed in his letter of 25 March 1848
to Murray that "the reiterated imputation of being a romancer in disguise has
at last pricked me into a resolution to show those who may take any interest in
the matter, that a real romance of mine is no Typee or Omoo, & is made of
different stuff altogether." This had been the "main inducement" in his change
of plan, although there were others (Correspondence, 105-6). The resulting
"Romance of Polynisian Adventure," as Melville labeled the book for Murray
(despite the publisher's known aversion to romances), marked a radical change
in Melville's concept of himself—from whaler, deserter, and beachcomber, a
man with no special training in observation and no special capacity for medi-
tating upon what he saw (as he had portrayed himself in Typee and Omoo) to
earnest truth seeker and prospectively one of the great writers of the world. His
narrator's companions on his literary voyage in his third book (Mardi, 1849)
were no longer a circle of lounging sailors but a patently allegorical crew of
conversationalists, which included Babbalanja the philosopher, Mohi the histo-
rian, and Yoomy the poet. From delighting his readers with racy anecdotes
of South Sea vagabondizing, Melville had shifted to delighting himself with a
multiplicity of learned allusions and recondite speculations. In his intellectual
exaltation, he came to write many chapters in which he played out his own
preoccupations in apparent disregard of any potential audience. Perhaps he
hoped readers would cheerfully surrender themselves to the maelstrom of
Mardi as he himself had recently surrendered to outlandish, esoteric, idiosyn-
cratic writers of the past such as Francois Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne, and
Robert Burton. In his first prolonged encounter with the "primal chaos" of the
creative process, Melville deluded himself that he had become infinitely su-
perior to literary critics—newspaper and periodical reviewers—who were not
even asses, but mules ("so emasculated, from vanity, they can not father a true
thought"), and further deluded himself that he had become a surgeonlike self-
critic, a remorseless sifter and rejecter of the dross in his own writing (Mardi,
Chapter 180). While acknowledging that genius is full of trash, he was plainly
assuming that he had divested himself of his own trash. Many reviewers of
Mardi thought otherwise.
In neither his letters nor his account of his alter ego in Mardi, the writer
Lombardo, who had written as he himself had done (not building himself in
with plans but writing "right on," and getting "deeper and deeper into him-
self"), did Melville give any indication of understanding how severely he might
affront the goodwill of many readers, admirers of Typee and Omoo, who
would take up the new book expecting to be entertained with South Sea adven-
tures and find their expectations dazzlingly rewarded—until the abrupt appear-
ance of the lovely and quite unbelievable Yillah. A recently discovered reader's
report for the English publisher Richard Bentley, to whom Melville offered the
manuscript after Murray had declined it, shrewdly forecast the disappointment
and chagrin of many potential readers. Although the author had written the
first third of the work "to seduce the reader into reading the rest," the report
maintained, "the reader will loudly complain that the work does not turn out
to be what, after reading no small quantity, he had a right to expect." Bentley's
reader added, "I fancy not one in a score will discover what it's all about."4
When the book was published, by Bentley, despite his reader's warnings, in
three volumes in March 1849 and by Harper and Brothers in New York the
following month in two volumes, reviewers frequently expressed just the kind
of disappointment Bentley's reader had prophesied, perhaps none more tren-
chantly than the reviewer for Saroni's Musical Times, who complained that he
had been "flattered with the promise of an account of travel, amusing, though
fictitious," then "compelled to pore over an undigested mass of rambling meta-
physics" and immersed in a "fathomless sea of Allegory," full of "monstrous
Types, Myths, Symbols and such like fantastic weeds." Other irritated reviewers
derided the strange "compound" nature of Mardi, its bewildering mixture
of literary genres and shifting intentions seemingly influenced by an array of
authors, including Francois Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton,
Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Carlyle. Reviewers frequently lavished high praise
on parts of the book that had charmed them, and some found the book as a
whole an "onward development" of Melville's art, but even admirers were of-
ten baffled by its "apparent want of motive" (Holdens), its "confusion, rather
than fusion" (Graham's).
 The reviews of Mardi and the book's low sales were a major setback for
Melville's ambitions as an author and led to his lengthiest known comments
on the reception of any of his books. For the benefit of his father-in-law, Judge
Lemuel Shaw, Melville affected an air of bluff unconcern, which must have
belied acute feelings of disappointment, if not humiliation, as well as sharp
anxieties about his professional and personal future. "I see that Mardi has been
cut into by the London Atheneum, and also burnt by the common hangman in
the Boston Post," he wrote to Shaw, who as a Boston resident had probably
seen the contemptuous review in the Post. "However," Melville continued, "the
London Examiner & Literary Gazette; & other papers this side of the water
have done differently. These attacks are matters of course, and are essential to
the building up of any permanent reputation—if such should ever prove to
be mine" (Correspondence, 130). For Richard Bentley, his English publisher,
Melville had an elaborate explanation of the book's failure: "The critics on
your side of the water seem to have fired quite a broadside into 'Mardi,'" he
acknowledged, "but it was not altogether unexpected." The book was "of a
nature to attract compliments of that sort from some quarters," it had been
judged "only as a work meant to entertain," and "its having been brought out
in England in the ordinary [three-decker] novel form must have led to the disap-
pointment of many readers." Besides, Melville continued, "the peculiar
thoughts & fancies of a Yankee upon politics & other matters could hardly be
presumed to delight that class of gentlemen who conduct your leading journals;
while the metaphysical ingredients (for want of a better term) of the book, must
of course repel some of those who read simply for amusement." The book
would reach those for whom it was intended (Melville's version of Milton's "fit
audience," though "few"), and he had "already received assurances" that
Mardi, "in its higher purposes," had "not been written in vain" (Correspon-
dence, 131-32).
Melville had put hisfingeron some of the causes of the book's unpopularity,
but, explain its failure and take consolation as he might, he plainly recognized
the only course open to him if he wished to salvage his career as a professional
author: He could not just stoically ignore the broadsides of reviewers (British
or American), and he could not high-mindedly discount readers "who read
simply for amusement," whatever his personal preferences. He announced to
Bentley, "I have now in preparation a thing of a widely different cast from
'Mardi':—a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experi-
ence—the son of a gentleman on his first voyage to sea as a sailor—no meta-
physics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes &c ale." It would be wise, Melville
thought, "to put it forth in a manner, admitting of a popular circulation" (Cor-
respondence, 132). After his marriage to Elizabeth Shaw in August 1847, Mel-
ville had confessed to John Murray that "circumstances paramount to every
other consideration" forced him to regard his "literary affairs in a strong pecu-
niary light" (Correspondence, 99). With the birth of his first son in April 1849,
his need to consider the pecuniary rewards of his "literary affairs" had become
even more pressing.
He had self-indulgently lingered over Mardi for eighteen months; he ground
out his next two books, Redburn and White-Jacket, in a total of four months
during the spring and summer of 1849, in an effort to recover his reputation
and shore up his shaky economic foundation. Redburn and White-Jacket he
described to his father-in-law as "two jobs," which he had "done for money—
being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood," claiming that "no reputa-
tion that is gratifying to me, can possibly be achieved by either" (Correspon-
dence, 138). He disparaged Redburn as a "thing" he knew "to be trash" and
wrote "to buy some tobacco with" and found the serious reviews of the book
he encountered during his visit to London in the fall of 1849 to be merely
"laughable."5 In England and the United States, nonetheless, both books did
much to restore his literary reputation, as well as temporarily relieve his finan-
cial situation. A number of English and American reviewers found the intro-
duction of Harry Bolton a major flaw in Redburn, and one or two English
reviewers disputed the authenticity of some of the Liverpool scenes, but other-
wise reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic almost unanimously approved the
convincing accounts of life before the mast in the two books and the attacks
on naval abuses in White-Jacket. Most of the reviewers who compared the two
books with Mardi welcomed Melville's return to the narrative of adventure and
firsthand observation.
The hostile reviews of Mardi, nevertheless, carried more weight with Mel-
ville than any subsequent praise of Redburn or White-Jacket. In December
1849, from London, Melville wrote to Evert Duyckinck:
In a little notice of "The Oregon Trail" I once said something "critical"
about another man's book—I shall never do it again. Hereafter I shall no
more stab at a book (in print, I mean) than I would stab at a man. . . . Had
I not written & printed "Mardi", in all likelihood, I would not be as wise
as I am now, or may be. For that thing was stabbed at (I do not say
through)—& therefore, I am the wiser for it. (Correspondence, 149)
The lingering effect of the attacks on Mardi can be seen again a year later in
another letter Melville wrote to Duyckinck, in December 1850, when he had
resumed work on his next book, Moby-Dick, after moving from New York
City to the farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that he named Arrowhead. Al-
though he spoke exuberantly of the fifty or so works he had planned since he
had moved to the Berkshires in October, he added, "I dont know but a book
in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer
from criticism" (Correspondence, 174). Several months later, with Moby-Dick
still unfinished, Melville's memory of the way Mardi had been "stabbed at"
and his acute awareness of his still-precarious financial situation lay behind his
embittered assessment of his predicament in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne:
"What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, alto-
gether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my
books are botches" (Correspondence, 191). He could no longer produce the
uncomplicated narratives of adventure expected of him by admirers of Typee
and Omoo. (Even in Redburn and White-Jacket he had not "repressed" himself
much, he told Judge Shaw [Correspondence, 138-39].) Instead, in his unfin-
ished manuscript, he was boldly combining adventurous whaling narrative with
encyclopedic cetological lore and with elements of Gothic romance and Shake-
spearean tragedy, while employing a uniquely rich prose influenced by a re-
markable range of authors, including the translators of the King James Bible,
Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, John Milton, Thomas De Quincey, and
Thomas Carlyle. Even this, the work now generally considered to be his master-
piece, was botched, Melville implied to Hawthorne, and like Mardi, might
not pay.
A few significant variations between the first English and American editions
account for conspicuous differences in the ways British and American reviewers
responded to the new work. In mid October 1851, Melville's English publisher,
Bentley, brought out The Whale in three volumes; the following month, in New
York, Harper and Brothers published the book in a single volume as Moby-
Dick (the title chosen at the last minute, too late to get it in the English edition).
The two editions differed in other respects: For some reason, in The Whale the
"Extracts" appeared at the end of the work (not at the beginning as in Moby-
Dick), and the "Epilogue" was not included. Bentley or one of his readers had
also excised or modified most passages that might be considered blasphemous
or otherwise irreverent (to British royalty as well as to God) or sexually sugges-
tive. As a result, British reviewers of The Whale had little cause to complain
about the "sneers at revealed religion" or the "irreverence or profane jesting"
that frequently offended American reviewers of Moby-Dick. Some British re-
viewers, however, objected to Melville's violation of literary conventions (a
three-volume novel published by Bentley was expected to be a love story), and
(since the third volume lacked the "Epilogue") several complained of his viola-
tion of the commonsense rule that first-person narrators should survive the
events they depict (a fault of which he was not in fact guilty). The British re-
views in general were more thoughtful and sophisticated than the American. In
"Hawthorne and His Mosses," written during the composition of Moby-Dick,
Melville had declared: "There are hardly five critics in America; and several of
them are asleep."6 The American reviews of Moby-Dick show that he was
scarcely exaggerating. Many reviews that praised the book were little more than
perfunctory tributes to its thrilling scenes of sea life and its wealth of informa-
tion about the whale fishery.
Melville himself may have forestalled one perceptive and potentially influen-
tial American review when he contented himself with private enjoyment of
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