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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 18, 1851
London, England
175 years ago
Moby-Dick, the novel by Herman Melville, first published in London as The Whale on October 18, 1851, and in New York under its familiar title the following month.
On October 18, 1851, the London publisher Richard Bentley issued a three-volume novel called The Whale in an edition of five hundred copies. Its author, Herman Melville, was a thirty-two-year-old American known for entertaining tales of adventure in the South Seas. The American edition followed from Harper and Brothers in New York on November 14, with a title Melville had changed at the last minute: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.
The London edition was botched. Bentley's editors cut passages they thought irreverent toward religion or royalty, and through some mishap the epilogue was left out. Since the epilogue explains how the narrator survives the sinking of the ship, British reviewers reasonably asked how a story could be told in the first person by a man who had apparently drowned with everyone else. Several of those puzzled reviews were reprinted in America and colored the book's reception there.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Herman Melville, the American novelist and former sailor whose masterpiece earned him almost nothing and who spent nineteen years working as a customs inspector on the New York docks.
Melville knew his subject. He had shipped out on the whaler Acushnet in 1841, deserted in the Marquesas Islands, and spent nearly four years at sea. He also knew the story of the whaleship Essex, rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific in 1820, and the sailors' legends of a ferocious white whale called Mocha Dick. He began the book as another sea adventure. Then, under the influence of Shakespeare and of his new friend and neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom the novel is dedicated, he rewrote it into something far stranger.
The finished book is part adventure, part tragedy, part encyclopedia of whaling, and part philosophical meditation. Captain Ahab, who has lost a leg to the white whale, bends the crew of the Pequod to his private vengeance and destroys them all. Whole chapters are given over to the anatomy of whales, the color white, and the craft of rendering blubber. Readers expecting a yarn did not know what to make of it. The novel sold only about three thousand copies in Melville's lifetime, fewer than his early travel books, and his next novel fared worse.
By the late 1850s his career as a popular author was over. In 1866 he took a job as a customs inspector in New York and held it for nineteen years, writing poetry in private. When he died in 1891, a few obituaries noted the passing of a once-known writer of sea stories. The revival began around the centenary of his birth in 1919. A biography appeared in 1921, his unpublished manuscript Billy Budd was printed in 1924, and a generation of critics and novelists who had lived through a world war found in Moby-Dick a modern book written seventy years too early. It has been regarded as a summit of American literature ever since, and its opening sentence is among the most famous in the language.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Moby-Dick is widely regarded as the greatest American novel. Its ambition, its range of styles, and its treatment of obsession, fate, and the limits of knowledge have influenced writers from William Faulkner to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy.
Its history is a caution about contemporary judgment. The book was a commercial and critical failure that ended its author's career. Reputations made in a writer's lifetime are a poor guide to what will last.
It preserves a vanished world. American whaling was one of the great global industries of the nineteenth century, lighting the lamps of the world. Melville's detailed account is one of the best records of how that dangerous trade was actually carried out.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 18, 1851, a London publisher brought out a strange novel about a whale, with the ending missing. It baffled reviewers, sold about three thousand copies, and finished its author as a professional writer. He died forgotten, a retired customs inspector. Thirty years later the world decided he had written a masterpiece.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Call me Ishmael.”
— Herman Melville, opening line of Moby-Dick (1851)
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's years at sea, the true story of the whaleship Essex, the novel's failure in 1851, and its rediscovery in the twentieth century?
