Moby-Dick

Ishmael is the narrator, shaping his story with use of many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings.[7] Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing of the book: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught."[8] Scholar John Bryant calls him the novel's "central consciousness and narrative voice."[9] Walter Bezanson first distinguishes Ishmael as narrator from Ishmael as character, whom he calls "forecastle Ishmael", the younger Ishmael of some years ago. Narrator Ishmael, then, is "merely young Ishmael grown older."[7] A second distinction avoids confusion of either of both Ishmaels with the author Herman Melville. Bezanson warns readers to "resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael."[10]

According to critic Walter Bezanson, the chapter structure can be divided into "chapter sequences", "chapter clusters", and "balancing chapters". The simplest sequences are of narrative progression, then sequences of theme such as the three chapters on whale painting, and sequences of structural similarity, such as the five dramatic chapters beginning with "The Quarter-Deck" or the four chapters beginning with "The Candles". Chapter clusters are the chapters on the significance of the color white, and those on the meaning of fire. Balancing chapters are chapters of opposites, such as "Loomings" versus the "Epilogue," or similars, such as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles".[11]

Scholar Lawrence Buell describes the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters[note 1] as structured around three patterns: first, the nine meetings of the Pequod with ships that have encountered Moby Dick. Each has been more and more severely damaged, foreshadowing the Pequod's own fate. Second, the increasingly impressive encounters with whales. In the early encounters, the whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the massive assembling of whales at the edges of the China Sea in "The Grand Armada". A typhoon near Japan sets the stage for Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick.[12]

The third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it can be divided into two subpatterns. These chapters start with the ancient history of whaling and a bibliographical classification of whales, getting closer with second-hand stories of the evil of whales in general and of Moby Dick in particular, a chronologically ordered commentary on pictures of whales. The climax to this section is chapter 57, "Of whales in paint etc.", which begins with the humble (a beggar in London) and ends with the sublime (the constellation Cetus). The next chapter ("Brit"), thus the other half of this pattern, begins with the book's first description of live whales, and next the anatomy of the sperm whale is studied, more or less from front to rear and from outer to inner parts, all the way down to the skeleton. Two concluding chapters set forth the whale's evolution as a species and claim its eternal nature.[12]

Some "ten or more" of the chapters on whale killings, beginning at two-fifths of the book, are developed enough to be called "events". As Bezanson writes, "in each case a killing provokes either a chapter sequence or a chapter cluster of cetological lore growing out of the circumstance of the particular killing," thus these killings are "structural occasions for ordering the whaling essays and sermons".[13]

Buell observes that the "narrative architecture" is an "idiosyncratic variant of the bipolar observer/hero narrative", that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other, with Ishmael the observer and narrator.[14] As the story of Ishmael, remarks Robert Milder, it is a "narrative of education".[15]

Bryant and Springer find that the book is structured around the two consciousnesses of Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab as a force of linearity and Ishmael a force of digression.[16] While both have an angry sense of being orphaned, they try to come to terms with this hole in their beings in different ways: Ahab with violence, Ishmael with meditation. And while the plot in Moby-Dick may be driven by Ahab's anger, Ishmael's desire to get a hold of the "ungraspable" accounts for the novel's lyricism.[17] Buell sees a double quest in the book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick, Ishmael's is "to understand what to make of both whale and hunt".[14]

One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres. Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travel account, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry.[18] He calls Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary genre "a Nabokovian touch".[19]

A significant structural device is the series of nine meetings (gams) between the Pequod and other ships. These meetings are important in three ways. First, their placement in the narrative. The initial two meetings and the last two are both close to each other. The central group of five gams are separated by about 12 chapters, more or less. This pattern provides a structural element, remarks Bezanson, as if the encounters were "bones to the book's flesh". Second, Ahab's developing responses to the meetings plot the "rising curve of his passion" and of his monomania. Third, in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael interprets the significance of each ship individually: "each ship is a scroll which the narrator unrolls and reads."[13]

Bezanson sees no single way to account for the meaning of all of these ships. Instead, they may be interpreted as "a group of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical analogues, a masque of the situation confronting man, a pageant of the humors within men, a parade of the nations, and so forth, as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Whale".[20]

Scholar Nathalia Wright sees the meetings and the significance of the vessels along other lines. She singles out the four vessels which have already encountered Moby Dick. The first, the Jeroboam, is named after the predecessor of the biblical King Ahab. Her "prophetic" fate is "a message of warning to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and vindicated by the Samuel Enderby, the Rachel, the Delight, and at last the Pequod". None of the other ships has been completely destroyed because none of their captains shared Ahab's monomania; the fate of the Jeroboam reinforces the structural parallel between Ahab and his biblical namesake: "Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him" (I Kings 16:33).[21]

F. O. Matthiessen, in 1941, declared that Melville's "possession by Shakespeare went far beyond all other influences" in that it made Melville discover his own full strength "through the challenge of the most abundant imagination in history".[49] This insight was then reinforced by the study of Melville's annotatations in his reading copy of Shakespeare, which show that he immersed himself in Shakespeare when he was preparing for Moby-Dick, especially King Lear and Macbeth.[50] Reading Shakespeare, Matthiessen observes, was "a catalytic agent", one that transformed his writing "from limited reporting to the expression of profound natural forces".[51]

The creation of Ahab, Melville biographer Leon Howard discovered, followed an observation by Coleridge in his lecture on Hamlet: "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself. ... thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances".[52] Coleridge's vocabulary is echoed in some phrases that describe Ahab. Ahab seemed to have "what seems a half-wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature", and "all men tragically great", Melville added, "are made so through a certain morbidness; "all mortal greatness is but disease". In addition to this, in Howard's view, the self-references of Ishmael as a "tragic dramatist", and his defense of his choice of a hero who lacked "all outward majestical trappings" is evidence that Melville "consciously thought of his protagonist as a tragic hero of the sort found in Hamlet and King Lear".[53]

Matthiessen demonstrates the extent to which Melville was in full possession of his powers in the description of Ahab, which ends in language "that suggests Shakespeare's but is not an imitation of it: 'Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!' The imaginative richness of the final phrase seems particularly Shakespearean, "but its two key words appear only once each in the plays ... and to neither of these usages is Melville indebted for his fresh combination."[54] Melville's assimilation of Shakespeare, Matthiessen concludes, gave Moby-Dick "a kind of diction that depended upon no source",[55] and that could, as D.H. Lawrence put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life".[56] The prose is not based on anybody else's verse but on "a sense of speech rhythm".[57]

Matthiessen finds debts to Shakespeare, whether hard or easy to recognize, on almost every page. He points out that the phrase "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch.32) echoes the famous phrase in Macbeth: "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."[49] Matthiessen shows that Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the "Quarter-Deck" (Ch.36), is "virtually blank verse, and can be printed as such":[49]

But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat,
That thing unsays itself. There are men
From whom warm words are small indignity.
I mean not to incense thee. Let it go.
Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—
Living, breathing pictures painted by the sun.
The pagan leopards—the unrecking and
Unworshipping things, that live; and seek and give
No reason for the torrid life they feel![58]

In addition to this sense of rhythm, Matthiessen shows that Melville "now mastered Shakespeare's mature secret of how to make language itself dramatic".[57] He had learned three essential things, Matthiessen sums up:

• To rely on verbs of action, "which lend their dynamic pressure to both movement and meaning."[57] The effective tension caused by the contrast of "thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds" and "there's that in here that still remains indifferent" in "The Candles" (Ch. 119) makes the last clause lead to a "compulsion to strike the breast", which suggests "how thoroughly the drama has come to inhere in the words;"[59]
• The Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds was not lost on him ("full-freighted");
• And, finally, Melville learned how to handle "the quickened sense of life that comes from making one part of speech act as another—for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or the coining of 'placeless', an adjective from a noun."[60]

Since the publication of Moby-Dick 1851, critics have continued to notice parallels between it and the work of Thomas Carlyle, particularly Sartor Resartus (1833–34), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841) and the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, which Melville read while writing the novel.[61] Professor James Barbour and biographer Leon Howard write that "Carlyle's rhetoric is reflected" in much of the dialogue of Ahab and Ishmael, while Melville uses Sartor's philosophical concepts of "an emblematic universe" and a "weaver god" "almost in Carlyle's words".[62] Alexander Welsh argues that Carlyle figured "largely in the undertaking of Moby Dick", noting that the "figure of the sheep in 'The Funeral' . . . is taken directly from Carlyle", specifically the essay "Boswell's Life of Johnson" (1832) and that the "language of herring and whales, fleets and commodores" may have been borrowed from Sartor.[63] According to Paul Giles, Sartor "furnished Melville with a prototype for his playful iconoclastic style in Moby-Dick", particularly in its narrative strategy and romantic ironic paradoxes.[64] The "shared use of the clothing metaphor" is also inspired by Sartor.[65]

Jonathan Arac sees in Moby-Dick "a direct appropriation" of Carlyle's "Hero". "Ahab", writes Arac, "is very much a Carlylean hero", which Carlyle's "romantic image of Cromwell helped Melville to create". Carlyle's portraits of Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare in "The Hero as Poet", the third lecture of On Heroes, "offered models that helped Melville to develop as a reader and to achieve the definition of himself as a writer that made Moby-Dick possible."[66]

Melville also borrowed stylistic qualities from Renaissance Humanists such as Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. Melville's biographer Hershel Parker notes that during the composition of Moby-Dick, Melville read Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Rabelais and adopted not only their poetic and conversational prose styles, but also their skeptical attitudes towards religion.[67] Browne's statement "I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an ob altitudo"[68] mirrors both in ethos and poetics Ishmael's "I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it."[69]

Ishmael also mirrors the epistemological uncertainty of Renaissance humanists. For instance, Browne argues that "where there is an obscurity too deepe for our reason...[reason] becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtilties of faith... I believe there was already a tree whose fruit our unhappy parents tasted, though in the same chapter, when God forbids it, 'tis positivley said, the plants of the field were not yet growne."[70] Ishmael similarly embraces paradox when he proclaims "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."[71]

Scholars have also noted similarities between Melville's style and that of Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy. Scholar William Engel notes that "Because Melville had Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy at his side, this encyclopedic work will serve as a conceptual touchstone for analyzing his looking back to an earlier aesthetic practice."[72] Additionally, Melville's biographer Hershel Parker writes that "in 1847, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy served as Melville's sonorous textbook on morbid psychology" and then "in 1848 [Melville] bought Michel de Montaigne's works, where he read the Essays, finding there a worldly wise skepticism that braced him against the superficial pieties demanded by his time." Finally, Melville then read Thomas Browne's Religio Medici which Melville adored, describing Browne to a friend as "a kind of 'crack'd archangel.'"[73]

Moby-Dick draws on Melville's experience on the whaler Acushnet, but is not autobiographical. On December 30, 1840, Melville signed on as a green hand for the maiden voyage of the Acushnet, planned to last for 52 months. Its owner, Melvin O. Bradford, like Bildad, was a Quaker: on several instances when he signed documents, he erased the word "swear" and replaced it with "affirm". But the shareholders of the Acushnet were relatively wealthy, whereas the owners of the Pequod included poor widows and orphaned children.[74]

The model for the Whaleman's Chapel of chapter 7 is the Seamen's Bethel on Johnny Cake Hill. Melville attended a service there shortly before he shipped out on the Acushnet, and he heard a sermon by Reverend Enoch Mudge, who is at least in part the inspiration for Father Mapple. Even the topic of Jonah and the Whale may be authentic, for Mudge contributed sermons on Jonah to Sailor's Magazine.[75]

The crew was not as heterogenous or exotic as the crew of the Pequod. Five were foreigners, four of them Portuguese, and the others were American either at birth or naturalized. Three black men were in the crew, two seamen and the cook. Fleece, the black cook of the Pequod, was probably modeled on this Philadelphia-born William Maiden.[76] A first mate, actually called Edward C. Starbuck was discharged at Tahiti under mysterious circumstances.[77] The second mate, John Hall, is identified as Stubb in an annotation in the book's copy of crew member Henry Hubbard, who also identified the model for Pip: John Backus, a little black man added to the crew during the voyage.[78] Hubbard witnessed Pip's fall into the water.[79]

Ahab seems to have had no model, though his death may have been based on an actual event. Melville was aboard The Star in May 1843 with two sailors from the Nantucket who could have told him that they had seen their second mate "taken out of a whaleboat by a foul line and drowned".[80]

Melville's copy of Natural History of the Sperm Whale, 1839

In addition to his own experience on the whaling ship Acushnet, two actual events served as the genesis for Melville's tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820, after a sperm whale rammed her 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the western coast of South America. First mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.[81]

The other event was the alleged killing in the late 1830s of the albino sperm whale Mocha Dick, in the waters off the Chilean island of Mocha. Mocha Dick was rumored to have 20 or so harpoons in his back from other whalers, and appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity. One of his battles with a whaler served as subject for an article by explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine.[82] Melville was familiar with the article, which described:

This renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers, was an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature ... a singular consequence had resulted — he was white as wool![82]

Significantly, Reynolds writes a first-person narration that serves as a frame for the story of a whaling captain he meets. The captain resembles Ahab and suggests a similar symbolism and single-minded motivation in hunting this whale, in that when his crew first encounters Mocha Dick and cowers from him, the captain rallies them:

As he drew near, with his long curved back looming occasionally above the surface of the billows, we perceived that it was white as the surf around him; and the men stared aghast at each other, as they uttered, in a suppressed tone, the terrible name of MOCHA DICK! "Mocha Dick or the d----l [devil]', said I, 'this boat never sheers off from any thing that wears the shape of a whale."[82]

Mocha Dick had over 100 encounters with whalers in the decades between 1810 and the 1830s. He was described as being gigantic and covered in barnacles. Although he was the most famous, Mocha Dick was not the only white whale in the sea, nor the only whale to attack hunters.[83]

While an accidental collision with a sperm whale at night accounted for sinking of the Union in 1807,[84] it was not until August 1851 that the whaler Ann Alexander, while hunting in the Pacific off the Galápagos Islands, became the second vessel since the Essex to be attacked, holed, and sunk by a whale. Melville remarked, "Ye Gods! What a commentator is this Ann Alexander whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster."[85]

While Melville had already drawn on his different sailing experiences in his previous novels, such as Mardi, he had never focused specifically on whaling. The 18 months he spent as an ordinary seaman aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841–42, and one incident in particular, now served as inspiration. During a mid-ocean "gam" (rendezvous at sea between ships), he met Chase's son William, who lent him his father's book. Melville later wrote:

I questioned him concerning his father's adventure; ... he went to his chest & handed me a complete copy ... of the Narrative [of the Essex catastrophe]. This was the first printed account of it I had ever seen. The reading of this wondrous story on the landless sea, and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck, had a surprising effect upon me.[86]

The book was out of print, and rare. Melville let his interest in the book be known to his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, whose friend in Nantucket procured an imperfect but clean copy which Shaw gave to Melville in April 1851. Melville read this copy avidly, made copious notes in it, and had it bound, keeping it in his library for the rest of his life. [87]

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick contains large sections—most of them narrated by Ishmael—that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot, but describe aspects of the whaling business. Although a successful earlier novel about Nantucket whalers had been written, Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman (1835) by Joseph C. Hart,[88] which is credited with influencing elements of Melville's work, most accounts of whaling tended to be sensational tales of bloody mutiny, and Melville believed that no book up to that time had portrayed the whaling industry in as fascinating or immediate a way as he had experienced it.

Melville found the bulk of his data on whales and whaling in five books, the most important of which was by the English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale, Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), a book of reputed authority which Melville bought on July 10, 1850.[89] "In scale and complexity," scholar Steven Olsen-Smith writes, "the significance of [this source] to the composition of Moby-Dick surpasses that of any other source book from which Melville is known to have drawn."[90] According to scholar Howard P. Vincent, the general influence of this source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings.[91] Melville followed Beale's grouping closely, yet adapted it to what art demanded, and he changed the original's prosaic phrases into graphic figures of speech.[92] The second most important whaling book is Frederick Debell Bennett, A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, from the Year 1833 to 1836 (1840), from which Melville also took the chapter organization, but in a lesser degree than he learned from Beale.[92]

The third book was the one Melville reviewed for the Literary World in 1847, J. Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846), which may have given Melville the first thought for a whaling book, and in any case contains passages embarrassingly similar to passages in Moby-Dick.[93] The fourth book, Reverend Henry T. Cheever's The Whale and His Captors (1850), was used for two episodes in Moby-Dick but probably appeared too late in the writing of the novel to be of much more use.[93] Melville did plunder a fifth book, William Scoresby, Jr., An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery (1820), though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the Greenland whale rather than the sperm whale. Although the book became the standard whaling reference soon after publication, Melville satirized and parodied it on several occasions—for instance in the description of narwhales in the chapter "Cetology", where he called Scoresby "Charley Coffin" and gave his account "a humorous twist of fact": "Scoresby will help out Melville several times, and on each occasion Melville will satirize him under a pseudonym." Vincent suggests several reasons for Melville's attitude towards Scoresby, including his dryness and abundance of irrelevant data, but the major reason seems to have been that the Greenland whale was the sperm whale's closest competitor for the public's attention, so Melville felt obliged to dismiss anything dealing with it.[94]

In addition to cetological works, Melville also consulted scattered literary works that mention or discuss whales, as the opening "Extracts" section of the novel demonstrates. For instance, Thomas Browne's essay "Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale" from his Pseudodoxia Epidemica is consulted not only in the extracts, but the chapter titled "Cetology."[95] Ishmael notes that "Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne."[96] Browne's playful examination of whales that values philosophical interpretations over scientifically accurate examinations helped shape the novel's style. Browne's comment that "the [Sperm-Whale's] eyes but small, the pizell [penis] large, and prominent" [97] likely helped shape the comical chapter concerning whale penises, "The Cassock."

Scholars have concluded that Melville composed Moby-Dick in two or even three stages.[98] Reasoning from biographical evidence, analysis of the functions of characters, and a series of unexplained but perhaps meaningful inconsistencies in the final version, they hypothesize that reading Shakespeare and his new friendship with Hawthorne, in the words of Lawrence Buell, inspired Melville to rewrite a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure into "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions".[99]

The earliest surviving mention of what became Moby-Dick is a letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850:[100]

About the "whaling voyage"—I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; — & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.[101]

Bezanson objects that the letter contains too many ambiguities to assume "that Dana's 'suggestion' would obviously be that Melville do for whaling what he had done for life on a man-of-war in White-Jacket".[102] Dana had experienced how incomparable Melville was in dramatic storytelling when he met him in Boston, so perhaps "his 'suggestion' was that Melville do a book that captured that gift".[102] And the long sentence in the middle of the above quotation simply acknowledges that Melville is struggling with the problem, not of choosing between fact and fancy but of how to interrelate them. The most positive statements are that it will be a strange sort of a book and that Melville means to give the truth of the thing, but what thing exactly is not clear.[102]

Melville may have found the plot before writing or developed it after the writing process was underway. Considering his elaborate use of sources, "it is safe to say" that they helped him shape the narrative, its plot included.[103] Scholars John Bryant and Haskell Springer cite the development of the character Ishmael as another factor which prolonged Melville's process of composition and which can be deduced from the structure of the final version of the book. Ishmael, in the early chapters, is simply the narrator, just as the narrators in Melville's earlier sea adventures had been, but in later chapters becomes a mystical stage manager who is central to the tragedy.[104]

Less than two months after mentioning the project to Dana, Melville reported in a letter of June 27 to Richard Bentley, his English publisher:

My Dear Sir, — In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.[105]

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family had moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, at the end of March 1850.[106] He met Melville on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend that included, among others, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and James T. Fields.[107] Melville wrote an unsigned review of Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in The Literary World on August 17 and 24.[108] Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading".[102] In the essay, Melville compares Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repeats of the word "genius", the more than two dozen references to Shakespeare, and in the insistence that Shakespeare's "unapproachability" is nonsense for an American.[102]

Arrowhead, the house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in which Melville worked on Moby-Dick

The most intense work on the book was done during the winter of 1850–1851, when Melville had changed the noise of New York City for a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The move may well have delayed finishing the book.[109] During these months, he wrote several excited letters to Hawthorne, including one of June 1851 in which he summarizes his career: "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."[110]

This is the stubborn Melville who stood by Mardi and talked about his other, more commercial books with contempt. The letter also reveals how Melville experienced his development from his 25th year: "Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould."[111]

Buell finds the evidence that Melville changed his ambitions during writing "on the whole convincing", since the impact of Shakespeare and Hawthorne was "surely monumental",[99] but others challenge the theories of the composition in three ways. The first raises objections on the use of evidence and the evidence itself. Bryant finds "little concrete evidence, and nothing at all conclusive, to show that Melville radically altered the structure or conception of the book".[112] and scholar Robert Milder sees "insufficient evidence and doubtful methodology" at work.[113] A second type of objection is based on assumptions about Melville's intellectual development. Bryant and Springer object to the conclusion that Hawthorne inspired Melville to write Ahab's tragic obsession into the book; Melville already had experienced other encounters which could just as well have triggered his imagination, such as the Bible's Jonah and Job, Milton's Satan, Shakespeare's King Lear, Byron's heroes.[104] Bezanson is also not convinced that before he met Hawthorne, "Melville was not ready for the kind of book Moby-Dick became",[102] because in his letters from the time Melville denounces his last two "straight narratives, Redburn and White-Jacket, as two books written just for the money, and he firmly stood by Mardi as the kind of book he believed in. His language is already "richly steeped in 17th-century mannerisms", characteristics of Moby-Dick. A third type calls upon the literary nature of passages used as evidence. According to Milder, the cetological chapters cannot be leftovers from an earlier stage of composition and any theory that they are "will eventually founder on the stubborn meaningfulness of these chapters", because no scholar adhering to the theory has yet explained how these chapters "can bear intimate thematic relation to a symbolic story not yet conceived".[114]

Buell finds that theories based on a combination of selected passages from letters and what are perceived as "loose ends" in the book not only "tend to dissolve into guesswork", but he also suggests that these so-called loose ends may be intended by the author: repeatedly the book mentions "the necessary unfinishedness of immense endeavors".[99]

The British edition, set by Bentley's printers from the American page proofs with Melville's revisions and corrections, differs from the American edition in over 700 wordings and thousands of punctuation and spelling changes.[123]

Excluding the preliminaries and the one extract, the three volumes of the British edition came to 927 pages[129] and the single American volume to 635 pages.[130] Accordingly, the dedication to Hawthorne in the American edition—"this book is inscribed to"—became "these volumes are inscribed to" in the British.[131] The table of contents in the British edition generally follows the actual chapter titles in the American edition, but 19 titles in the American table of contents differ from the titles above the chapters themselves. This list was probably drawn up by Melville himself: the titles of chapters describing encounters of the Pequod with other ships had—apparently to stress the parallelisms between these chapters—been standardized to "The Pequod meets the ...," with the exception of the already published 'The Town-Ho's Story'.[132]

For unknown reasons, the "Etymology" and "Extracts" were moved to the end of the third volume.[133] An epigraph from Paradise Lost, taken from the second of the two quotations from that work in the American edition, appears on the title page of each of the three British volumes. Melville's involvement with this rearrangement is not clear: if it was Bentley's gesture toward accommodating Melville, as Tanselle suggests,[133] its selection put an emphasis on the quotation Melville might not have agreed with.

The largest of Melville's revisions is the addition to the British edition of a 139-word footnote in Chapter 87 explaining the word "gally". The edition also contains six short phrases and some 60 single words lacking in the American edition.[134] In addition, about 35 changes produce genuine improvements, as opposed to mere corrections: "Melville may not have made every one of the changes in this category, but it seems certain that he was responsible for the great majority of them."[135]

The British publisher hired one or more revisers who were, in the evaluation of scholar Steven Olsen-Smith, responsible for "unauthorized changes ranging from typographical errors and omissions to acts of outright censorship".[136] According to biographer Robertson-Lorant, the result was that the British edition was "badly mutilated".[137] The expurgations fall into four categories, ranked according to the apparent priorities of the censor:

1. Sacrilegious passages, more than 1,200 words: Attributing human failures to God was grounds for excision or revision, as was comparing human shortcomings to divine ones. For example, in chapter 28, "Ahab", Ahab stands with "a crucifixion in his face" was revised to "an apparently eternal anguish";[138]
2. Sexual matters, including the sex life of whales and even Ishmael's worried anticipation of the nature of Queequeg's underwear, as well as allusions to fornication or harlots, and "our hearts' honeymoon" (in relation to Ishmael and Queequeg).[139] Chapter 95, however, "The Cassock", referring to the whale's genital organ, was untouched, perhaps because of Melville's indirect language.
3. Remarks "belittling royalty or implying a criticism of the British": This meant the exclusion of the complete chapter 25, a "Postscript" on the use of sperm oil at coronations;[140]
4. Perceived grammatical or stylistic anomalies were treated with "a highly conservative interpretation of rules of 'correctness'".[141]

These expurgations also meant that any corrections or revisions Melville had marked upon these passages are now lost.

The final difference in the material not already plated is that the "Epilogue", thus Ishmael's miraculous survival, is omitted from the British edition. Obviously, the epilogue was not an afterthought supplied too late for the edition, for it is referred to in "The Castaway": "in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself."[142] Why the "Epilogue" is missing is unknown. Since nothing objectionable was in it, most likely it was somehow lost by Bentley's printer when the "Etymology" and "Extracts" were moved.[143]

After the sheets had been sent, Melville changed the title. Probably late in September, Allan sent Bentley two pages of proof with a letter of which only a draft survives which informed him that Melville "has determined upon a new title & dedication—Enclosed you have proof of both—It is thought here that the new title will be a better selling title". After expressing his hope that Bentley would receive this change in time, Allan said that "Moby-Dick is a legitimate title for the book, being the name given to a particular whale who if I may so express myself is the hero of the volume".[144] Biographer Hershel Parker suggests that the reason for the change was that Harper's had two years earlier published a book with a similar title, The Whale and His Captors.[145]

Changing the title was not a problem for the American edition, since the running heads throughout the book only showed the titles of the chapters, and the title page, which would include the publisher's name, could not be printed until a publisher was found. In October Harper's New Monthly Magazine printed chapter 54, "The Town-Ho's Story", with a footnote saying: "From The Whale. The title of a new work by Mr. Melville".[144] The one surviving leaf of proof, "a 'trial' page bearing the title 'The Whale' and the Harper imprint,"[146] shows that at this point, after the publisher had been found, the original title still stood. When Allan's letter arrived, no sooner than early October, Bentley had already announced The Whale in both the Athenaem and the Spectator of October 4 and 11.[147] Probably to accommodate Melville, Bentley inserted a half-title page in the first volume only, which reads "The Whale; or, Moby Dick".[146]

The British printing of 500 copies sold fewer than 300 within the first four months. In 1852, some remaining sheets were bound in a cheaper casing, and in 1853, enough sheets were still left to issue a cheap edition in one volume. Bentley recovered only half on the £150 he advanced Melville, whose share from actual sales would have been just £38, and he did not print a new edition.[148] Harper's first printing was 2,915 copies, including the standard 125 review copies. The selling price was $1.50, about a fifth of the price of the British three-volume edition.[130]

About 1,500 copies were sold within 11 days, and then sales slowed down to less than 300 the next year. After three years, the first edition was still available, almost 300 copies of which were lost when a fire broke out at the firm in December 1853. In 1855, a second printing of 250 copies was issued, in 1863, a third of 253 copies, and finally in 1871, a fourth printing of 277 copies, which sold so slowly that no new printing was ordered.[148] Moby-Dick was out of print during the last four years of Melville's life, having sold 2,300 in its first year and a half and on average 27 copies a year for the next 34 years, totaling 3,215 copies.

Melville's earnings from the book add up to $1,260: the £150 advance from Bentley was equivalent to $703, and the American printings earned him $556, which was $100 less than he earned from any of his five previous books.[149] Melville's widow received another $81 when the United States Book Company issued the book and sold almost 1,800 copies between 1892 and 1898.[149]

Twenty-one reviews appeared in London, and later one in Dublin.[151] The British reviewers, according to Parker, mostly regarded The Whale as "a phenomenal literary work, a philosophical, metaphysical, and poetic romance".[5] The Morning Advertiser for October 24 was in awe of Melville's learning, of his "dramatic ability for producing a prose poem", and of the whale adventures which were "powerful in their cumulated horrors."[153] To its surprise, John Bull found "philosophy in whales" and "poetry in blubber", and concluded that few books that claimed to be either philosophical or literary works "contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod's whaling expedition", making it a work "far beyond the level of an ordinary work of fiction".[154] The Morning Post found it "one of the cleverest, wittiest, and most amusing of modern books", and predicted that it was a book "which will do great things for the literary reputation of its author".[154]

Melville himself never saw these reviews, and Parker calls it a "bitter irony" that the reception overseas was "all he could possibly have hoped for, short of a few conspicuous proclamations that the distance between him and Shakespeare was by no means immeasurable."[155]

One of the earliest reviews, by the extremely conservative critic Henry Chorley[137] in the highly regarded London Athenaeum, described it as

[A]n ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.

According to the London Literary Gazette and Journal of Science and Art for December 6, 1851, "Mr. Melville cannot do without savages, so he makes half of his dramatis personae wild Indians, Malays, and other untamed humanities", who appeared in "an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric, outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive".[156] Most critics regretted the extravagant digressions because they distracted from an otherwise interesting and even exciting narrative, but even critics who did not like the book as a whole praised Melville's originality of imagination and expression.[157]

Because the English edition omitted the epilogue describing Ishmael's escape, British reviewers read a book with a first-person narrator who apparently did not survive.[5] The reviewer of the Literary Gazette asked how Ishmael, "who appears to have been drowned with the rest, communicated his notes to Mr. Bentley".[156] The reviewer in the Spectator objected that "nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish."[158] The Dublin University Magazine asked "how does it happen that the author is alive to tell the story?" [158] A few other reviewers, who did not comment upon the apparent impossibility of Ishmael telling the story, pointed out violations of narrative conventions in other passages.

Other reviewers accepted the flaws they perceived. John Bull praised the author for making literature out of unlikely and even unattractive matter, and the Morning Post found that delight far outstripped the improbable character of events.[159] Though some reviewers viewed the characters, especially Ahab, as exaggerated, others felt that it took an extraordinary character to undertake the battle with the white whale. Melville's style was often praised, although some found it excessive or too American.[160]

Some sixty reviews appeared in America, the criterion for counting as a review being more than two lines of comment.[161] Only a couple of reviewers expressed themselves early enough not to be influenced by news of the British reception.[150] Though Moby-Dick did contain the Epilogue and so accounted for Ishmael's survival, the British reviews influenced the American reception. The earliest American review, in the Boston Post for November 20, quoted the London Athenaeum's scornful review, not realizing that some of the criticism of The Whale did not pertain to Moby-Dick. This last point, and the authority and influence of British criticism in American reviewing, is clear from the review's opening: "We have read nearly one half of this book, and are satisfied that the London Athenaeum is right in calling it 'an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact'".[162] Though the Post quoted the greater portion of the review, it omitted the condensed extract of Melville's prose the Athenaeum had included to give readers an example of it. The Post deemed the price of one dollar and fifty cents far too much: "'The Whale' is not worth the money asked for it, either as a literary work or as a mass of printed paper".[163]

The New York North American Miscellany for December summarized the verdict in the Athenaeum. The reviewer of the December New York Eclectic Magazine had actually read Moby-Dick in full, and was puzzled why the Athenaeum was so scornful of the ending. The attack on The Whale by the Spectator was reprinted in the December New York International Magazine, which inaugurated the influence of another unfavorable review. Rounding off what American readers were told about the British reception, in January Harper's Monthly Magazine attempted some damage control, and wrote that the book had "excited a general interest" among the London magazines.[164]

The most influential American review, ranked according to the number of references to it, appeared in the weekly magazine Literary World, which had printed Melville's "Mosses" essay the preceding year. The author of the unsigned review in two installments, on November 15 and 22, was later identified as publisher Evert Duyckinck.[165] The first half of the first installment was devoted to an event of remarkable coincidence: early in the month, between the publishing of the British and the American edition, a whale had sunk the New Bedford whaler Ann Alexander near Chile.[166]

In the second installment, Duyckinck described Moby-Dick as three books rolled into one: he was pleased with the book as far as it was a thorough account of the sperm whale, less so with it as far as the adventures of the Pequod crew were considered, perceiving the characters as unrealistic and expressing inappropriate opinions on religions, and condemned the essayistic rhapsodizing and moralizing with what he thought was little respect of what "must be to the world the most sacred associations of life violated and defaced."[167] The review prompted Hawthorne to take the "unusually aggressive step of reproving Duyckinck" by criticizing the review in a letter to Duyckinck of December 1:[168]

What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points.[169]

The Transcendental socialist George Ripley published a review in the New York Tribune for November 22, in which he compared the book favorably to Mardi, because the "occasional touches of the subtle mysticism" was not carried on to excess but kept within boundaries by the solid realism of the whaling context.[170] Ripley was almost surely also the author of the review in Harper's for December, which saw in Ahab's quest the "slight framework" for something else: "Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life."[171] Among the handful of other favorable reviews was one in the Albion on November 22 which saw the book as a blend of truth and satire.[172]

Melville's friend Nathaniel Parker Willis, reviewing the book in November 29 Home Journal, found it "a very racy, spirited, curious and entertaining book ... it enlists the curiosity, excites the sympathies, and often charms the fancy".[171] In December 6 Spirit of the Times, editor William T. Porter praised the book, and all of Melville's five earlier works, as the writings "of a man who is at once philosopher, painter, and poet".[171] Some other, shorter reviews mixed their praise with genuine reservations about the "irreverence and profane jesting", as the New Haven Daily Palladium for November 17 phrased it. Many reviewers, Parker observes, had come to the conclusion that Melville was capable of producing enjoyable romances, but they could not see in him the author of great literature.[173]

Reviewers who actually did read the book "found much to praise," Robertson-Lorant writes, but conservative reviewers did not like it. A friend of Duyckinck's, William Allen Butler, protested in the National Intelligencer against "the querulous and cavilling innuendoes" and the "irreverent wit," while the Boston Post called it "a crazy sort of affair."[174]