Herman Melville (1819 – 1891) was an author of the American Renaissance, or Romantic, period. Born in New York City, he was the third child of a merchant dealing in imported French goods. Shortly after the death of his father in 1832, his schooling came to an abrupt end and Melville worked as a schoolteacher before going to sea, signing on for a voyage on a merchant vessel to Liverpool in 1839. He then joined the crew of a whaler, but a year and a half into the voyage, in 1842, he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands and spent a month living among the natives. His first novel, Typee (1846) was purportedly based on his experiences in the South Pacific. The book was hugely successful, and was quickly followed by a sequel, Omoo in 1847. The same year Melville, now a successful novelist, married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw. They would have four children, all born between 1849 and 1855.
Despite the success of his first two novels by 1849 Melville was financially pressed, and Mardi and Redburn were both published in London, with limited success. Mardi was poorly received critically, with complaints that the novel was so thematically dense as to be incomprehensible. Melville objected to these criticisms and defended the work, which he believed would grow to be appreciated over time. White-Jacket was published by Richard Bentley in London on February 1, 1850, and in New York by Harper & Brothers on March 21, 1850. Melville referred to it and Redburn as “two jobs which I have done for money—being forced to it as other men are to sawing wood.” But White-Jacket, based on Melville’s brief service in the U.S. Navy, was his most influential work during his lifetime, with graphic descriptions of the practice and consequences of flogging that led directly to congressional legislation banning the practice on naval vessels.
Melville is known today primarily for his iconic whaling novel, Moby Dick (1851), the story of the death-struggle between Captain Ahab and “the great white whale,” which appears on many lists of “greatest books ever written” and is generally considered an essential part of the Western Canon. Ironically, when the novel was published it was a monumental flop and signaled the end of Melvilles’s career as a novelist. The original London printing of five hundred copies was never reprinted, eventually being sold off at a discount in cheap bindings, and the publisher actually suffered a loss amounting to about half of the £150 ($703) advance paid to Melville. The book sold only about 3,200 copies in the U.S. in the forty years between its publication and Melville’s death, 2,300 of them in the first year.
Copyright laws of the times required an American work to be published first in Britain in order to obtain British copyright protection. With previous novels Melville had forwarded copy typeset by his American publisher to his British publisher. But for reasons that have never been explained, Moby Dick was still unfinished when due in London and given the dismal results of two of his three most recent novels, and the fact that he owed his American publisher about $700 for advances against sales that never came, he had no American publisher as yet. He had the manuscript typeset himself, but was again late in forwarding corrected copy to London. Delays in completing and correcting the text have sometimes been attributed to Melville’s move from New York to a farm at Pittsfield, where he became friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne, or to his supposed decision to greatly expand the novel when nearly complete, but neither explanation is truly satisfactory. He continued making changes after submitting the final copy, even changing the title, with the result that the London edition was published as The Whale with the American edition published as Moby Dick, or, The Whale. There are noticeable differences between the British and American editions, but with the corrected copy for the British edition long since lost it is impossible to know with certainty how much of this was due to Melville’s continued tinkering and how much was due to the British publisher.
The most obvious difference is that the British edition was published without the Epilogue, with the result that British reviewers ridiculed what appeared to be a massive first-person narrative told by a character who had not in fact survived to tell the tale. Why the Epilogue was omitted remains a mystery, but the most likely explanation is that the printer simply lost track of it in the flurry of late revisions, including the last-minute decision to move the “Etymology” and “Extracts” sections from the front to the back of the book, a change made only in the British edition.
The omission of the Epilogue and the disastrous reception by British critics and reviewers is sometimes given as the reason for the book’s failure in the U.S., but while this may have contributed to the dismal performance of Moby Dick, it almost certainly was only a minor cause. American critics and reviewers may have been familiar with the British fiasco, but the American reading public was not. With the book re-titled and the Epilogue included it seems a stretch to claim the American public declined to buy the book because of the defects in the British printing. Other British criticisms were carried over to the U.S., however, including the idea that the book was a poorly crafted fusion of a non-fiction work describing the Nantucket whaling industry and an adventure tale about a whaling voyage gone terribly wrong. In fact, whether Moby Dick started out to be a straightforward adventure that grew, out of control, into a massive treatment of the whaling industry has been hotly debated among modern scholars. There is little real evidence to suggest that the book ended up being anything substantially different than what it started out to be, an adventure story intended as a tribute to, and detailed treatment of, the whaling industry.
This may have been the book’s greatest flaw in the mind of the reading public, for with the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, the discovery of gold in California and the westward expansion and the Compromise of 1850, public attention was focused westward. The mountain men, the plainsmen, western pioneers, riverboats, wagon trains, and even railroads became objects of widespread fascination. Most of the public probably had little interest in reading long passages, seemingly unrelated to what had promised to be an adventure yarn about a whaling voyage, describing whales and the equipment and practices of whaling in great detail, especially with whaling increasingly viewed as part of an older, and soon to be bygone, era. The failure of Moby Dick may have been, at least in part, a result of bad timing.
Pierre (1852), an almost surreal tale suggestive of a possibly incestuous relationship, a household consisting of a man and three women, murder and suicide, failed to revive Melville’s literary fortunes, and was instead a critical and financial disaster. Short stories written for various magazines from 1853 to 1856, including the much-analyzed “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) were collected as The Piazza Tales (1856) and in 1857 Melville published another failed novel, the “experimental” The Confidence Man. Having secured a position as a Customs Inspector in New York, Melville would continue to brood over the “mystifying” failure of what he had expected to be his magnum opus, Moby Dick, and to write poetry, but with little success, much of it published only in short run editions he financed himself after his retirement from the customs service in 1886.
Largely forgotten in the U.S. during the last thirty years of his life, with Moby Dick and many of his other works out-of-print, Melville’s name and reputation were maintained throughout the British Empire by the inclusion of Typee and Omoo in London publisher John Murray’s “Home and Colonial Library,” a collection of works by various authors sold as a set. Eventually this lingering presence led to a brief re-discovery of Melville’s work, and he had nearly completed a draft of Billy Budd, commenced in 1888, and was in discussions for a planned biography when he died of coronary disease in 1891. A collection of Melville’s works was published, but generated little interest outside the New York literary “elite.” Almost twenty years would pass before Melville’s work again gained prominence.
It was not until the rise of the modernist movement, with its advocacy of “art for art’s sake,” that Moby Dick was seized upon as a great literary classic. The disjointed nature of the narrative, disregard for a strict temporal timeline, and sometimes jarring and distracting mixture, without any attempt at blending, of episodes of fact and fiction, once regarded as serious flaws, came to be viewed as great literary innovations. Like much of Dostoyevsky’s work, Moby Dick went from being criticized as undisciplined, haphazard and poorly crafted to being hailed as “ahead of its time.” It is amusing to note, however, that despite its enthusiastic embrace by literary experts and scholars, to this day many honest readers admit to having “skipped a lot of that stuff about whales” when reading Moby Dick.
Around the same time as the rehabilitation of Moby Dick was underway, biographer Raymond M. Weaver discovered the unfinished Billy Budd manuscript among Melville’s papers in 1919. His widow had attempted to edit the work after his death, but was unable to decipher Melville’s intentions, or even determine the intended title. Published in London in 1924, the book, actually a novella, was immediately proclaimed a masterpiece. A 1928 U.S. version followed, but it soon became apparent that Melville’s notes had been misinterpreted on several key points, and the manuscript had been poorly transcribed, leading to seriously flawed early editions. After years of painstaking work by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., a new edition was published in 1962, differing substantially from earlier editions and now regarded as the definitive version of the story.
With Moby Dick’s rise to prominence Melville’s works came under increasing academic study, and it has become clear in modern times that his books were based on his personal experiences to a much lesser extent than was originally represented. Scholars have uncovered numerous sources which Melville used in writing Typee and Omoo, as well as Moby Dick, and it appears that Melville’s own somewhat limited experiences — one month living with native inhabitants in the South Pacific, and eighteen months aboard before deserting less than half-way through the voyage of the whaler on which he served — provided him with the basis of his tales, but he relied extensively on stories he heard from others and written sources, published and unpublished, for details, background, and numerous incidents and characters which he then couched in autobiographical or purely fictional terms.
Moby Dick included elements of Melville’s experience on the whaling ship Acushnet, but two actual events contributed enormously to the tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820, rammed by a large sperm whale 2,000 miles west of South America. First mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the incident his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, a book with which Melville was quite familiar, actually having met Chase and his son and obtained a copy of the book, which he filled with annotations and marginal notes.
References to Chase’s book and the sinking of the Essex appear in the text of Moby Dick, and Melville included an excerpt in a rather lengthy footnote, but less obvious is the influence of the claimed killing, in the late 1830s, of the albino sperm whale Mocha Dick, in the waters off Chile near the island of Mocha. Mocha Dick, something of a legend among whalers, was reputed to have survived over 100 encounters with whalers between 1810 and the 1830s. Described as being gigantic and covered with barnacles, he was said to have twenty protruding harpoons embedded in his back from his many encounters with whalers, and appeared to have actually attacked more than one ship intentionally. An article by explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker Magazine described an encounter with the white whale in a first-person narrative that framed a story of a whaling captain resembling Ahab and engaged in a determined hunt for that particular whale. Melville was indisputably familiar with this article, and may also have heard tales of Mocha Dick, the legendary white whale, in the course of his sea voyages. In Chapter 45, “The Affidavit,” he discusses the existence of several such widely-known whales by name but makes no mention of Mocha Dick or his albinism, while discussing Chase’s tale at length.
Some of the characters were based on real seamen Melville had known, or heard stories about. A first mate named “Starbuck” had served on an earlier voyage of the Acushnet, and another member of the Acushnet crew, Henry Hubbard, identified Stubb and Pip, characters in Moby Dick, as specific crewmembers of the Acushnet. Hubbard also described the incident in which Pip falls from a boat into the ocean as real, with Hubbard asserting that he was actually in the same boat when the episode occurred. The owner of the Pequod bears a striking resemblance to the owner of the Acushnet, and although no specific model for Ahab has ever been identified, his death may have been based on the actual fate of the second mate of the Nantucket, pulled from a boat tangled in a line and drowned, a tale which Melville may have heard from two crewmembers of the Nantucket with whom he sailed on a ship called The Star in 1843.
Criticized by contemporaries as haphazardly or carelessly structured, some modern commenters have asserted that its very lack of a definable structure is a major factor in making Moby Dick a literary classic. Attempts to analyze the book as a tragedy, a romance, an adventure or an epic have all encountered elements which cannot be reconciled with the structure under study. The book contains elements structured and styled as essay, myth, and encyclopedia, with chapters written in both narrative and non-narrative forms. Similarly, the language used in the book defies classification, containing detailed allusive, nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological, alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic, and allegorical elements. Scholars have also pointed out the variety of genres through which the novel is presented, identifying sermons, dreams, travelogues, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, epic poetry and prose poetry as being represented at various points.
One area of general consensus is that the book should be read with consideration of the dual quests of Ahab and Ishmael, Ahab seeking to destroy the whale and dealing with his sense of angry isolation and being orphaned with violence and anger, Ishmael seeking to understand the whale and the hunt, and dealing with similar feelings through contemplation and meditation. Another point of general agreement is that the dominant thematic elements are Melville’s epistemological views and transcendentalist philosophy, with Melville suggesting that reality is determined by perception, that we shape what exists by the way in which we personally see it. So for Ahab, the whale is not simply a physical object, but is perceived as what he has made of it. This theme is pervasive, but is perhaps most clearly evident in Chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” with each member of the crew perceiving the coin differently, in a way shaped by his own experiences and personality.
For the modern reader, the convoluted history and complex analytical theories behind Moby Dick may get in the way of enjoying the novel for its own sake. Taking Moby Dick at face value, it is an interesting tale, rich with diverse characters and evocative themes like friendship, class and social status, good and evil, isolation and community, the existence of God, obsession and human perception of events and objects. A vivid depiction of life aboard ship in the nineteenth century and perhaps the most detailed and accessible existing picture of what was, for a time, the single most important industry in the United States, second only to agriculture in its role in the national economy, the non-fiction aspects of the book may actually be more interesting to readers today, for whom it is now an historical novel. If at times the text seems stilted or antiquated, as might be expected from any work from this era, it is equally true that at times the text attains a soaring, almost lyric tone.
A reader may or may not notice details that experts point to as evidence of the genius of the book, for example the fact that, as the Pequod draws closer to Moby Dick and the final confrontation, and encounters a series of ships which have already met the white whale, each of those ships has sustained increasingly serious loss and damage inflicted by Moby Dick. There is no shortage of commentary, readily available, to point out such details and assist the reader who wishes to study the book at many different levels, as Moby Dick is one of the world’s most analyzed, summarized and commented upon books.
But even the most casual reader cannot fail to appreciate the unforgettable characters, compelling storylines and vivid depictions of whales, whalers and whaling, and the obsession-driven quest after the great white whale upon which Ahab leads, and the crew follows, to their doom. And this, without anything more, makes Moby Dick essential reading.
Biographical and analytical commentary courtesy of and © 2014-2015 Summit Classic Press, reprinted by permission.