Two stray notes on “Moby-Dick”

A curious advertisement

The Whale, as the novel was first called, was published as a classic three-decker in London on October 18, 1851, the American edition a month later on the fourteenth. As there was no international copyright agreement, Herman Melville indulged in a complicated jig of shifts and dodges to prevent piracy—British and American copyrights had to be obtained separately. One of the dodges was to bring the British edition out first but follow so rapidly with the American that the latter was published before it could be hijacked by pirate-printers. The book was therefore first typeset in America (and possibly “plated,” that is, made into stereotype plates)—indeed, Melville paid for the setting, as he hadn’t yet negotiated a contract with Harper & Brothers, his American publisher.

“This sea novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad.”

In early September Melville dispatched the proof sheets to London, where they were rapidly edited and the type reset. American spellings were altered to British, and the publisher Richard Bentley or a quite prudish publisher’s “reader” (acting as copy editor) cut or rewrote passages offensive to British sensibility. Out went droll disparagement of British royalty and the British in general; out went mild blasphemy or simple irreverence, such as the sport Melville made of the torments of the afterlife (“hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling”). One whole chapter had to go. For reasons that remain unclear, the long list of “extracts,” really a wearying run of epigraphs that stands at the head of the American edition, appeared at the tail of The Whale.

The Harper brothers (there were four) published the book in one fat volume, by which time Melville had changed the title to Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Though Melville’s brother Allan claimed it would be a “better selling title,” the editors of the Northwestern-Newberry edition (the fifteen-volume set of Melville’s works published by Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library) suggest that Harpers might not have wanted to publish The Whale two years after the Reverend Henry T. Cheever’s The Whale and His Captors. Perhaps, instead, Melville feared the novel might be mistaken for a work of natural history.

The London reviews were rapid in coming, some of them devastating:

This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. . . . The style of [Melville’s] tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed. . . . We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book.

This sea novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad.

Other critics were slightly less negative:

In all Mr. Melville’s previous works, full of original genius as they are, there was to be found lurking a certain besetting sin of extravagance. . . . He allows his fancy not only to run riot, but absolutely to run amuck, in which poor defenceless Common Sense is hustled and belaboured in a manner melancholy to contemplate. Mr. Melville is endowed with a fatal facility for the writing of rhapsodies. Once embarked on a flourishing topic, he knows not when or how to stop.

Here, however—in “The Whale”—comes Herman Melville, in all his pristine powers—in all his abounding vigour—in the full swing of his mental energy, with his imagination invoking as strange and wild and original themes as ever, with his fancy arraying them in the old bright and vivid hues, with that store of quaint and out-of-the-way information—we would rather call it reading than learning—which he ever and anon scatters around, in, frequently, unreasonable profusion, with the old mingled opulence and happiness of phrase, and alas! too, with the old extravagance, running a perfect muck throughout the three volumes, raving and rhapsodising in chapter after chapter—unchecked.

The great majority of the London reviews, however, were lavishly positive, though Melville never saw them, as Bentley never sent him a packet of clippings:

High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous: all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes.

Of all the extraordinary books from the pen of Herman Melville this is out and out the most extraordinary. Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber? Yet few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod’s whaling expedition.

Critics reviewing Moby-Dick struggled to compare to known models a book sui generis—that is, to expectations. How do you describe an elephant, or a whale, to those who have never seen one?

One distinction between the The Whale and Moby-Dick had a material effect on reviews like that in TheSpectator: the absence in the British edition of the Epilogue, which contained the critical information that Ishmael, the narrator, had survived the sinking of the Pequod. Absent that, the narrator seemed to have died before the tale ended, violating the hoary rules of fiction. It’s unclear whether the section was idiotically dropped by the publisher or disappeared through some mishap in the London setting. Far less probably, Melville might have considered an epilogue necessary only after the revised proof sheets had been dispatched to England.

The Whale’s reception there, it has long been recognized, was broadly and at times wildly favorable. The current (2020) census on the blog Melvilliana lists 116 reviews, both English and American, of which seventy-nine are favorable, twenty unfavorable, and seventeen mixed. Unfortunately, only the dreadful ones in TheAthenæum and TheSpectator, extracted above, were reprinted in America.

The harsh criticism of Melville’s period may be almost as disconcerting to a modern reader as the shiftiness of publishers.

Richard Bentley used snippets from the early London notices to publicize the book. From mid-October through mid-December, advertisements were placed in at least six newspapers, sometimes more than once. The discovery of such ads is important but perhaps never to be complete, because runs of Victorian newspapers have not always survived intact, and some reviews otherwise lost may have left evidence in the snippets chosen. At least six ads cite a review in the Morning Herald very different from the one formerly known; and this additional review was found only recently by Scott Norsworthy, reporting in Melvilliana that it was published on November 17, 1851. Two other ads quote a review from a source identified merely as “Evening paper”: “The raciest thing of the kind that was ever produced. The author’s ink must be the black liquor of the cuttle-fish, and his pen drawn from the wing of the albatross.” (One ad quotes only the first sentence.)

The latter review was long untraced, in part because of the deliberate vagueness of the citation. It was finally identified in Melvilliana as having been drawn from a review in the London Globe (October 20, 1851). Why did Bentley think it necessary to disguise the paper’s name? So far as I can tell, no one has remarked on the reputation of this source, a reputation that may explain the publisher’s sleight of hand.

This and the other reviews of October 20 in the Morning Herald and TheMorning Post were thought until recently to be the first notices; but the indefatigable Mr. Norsworthy has since discovered that the Globe review had appeared three days earlier, also in the Morning Herald—on October 17, the day before the book’s London publication. Bentley nonetheless credited the snippets as from “Evening paper,” as the Globe was, so either he missed the insertion in the Herald or the critic was double dealing, getting paid for the same copy twice. The latter seems unlikely, as any duplicity would have spoiled the prospect of further commissions. Perhaps Bentley arranged for both insertions and for his own reasons credited the “Evening paper”—the reprinting of reviews was not unknown and relative circulation may have played its part, if the Globe was the more popular. Still, reviews in the Morning Herald might now be treated to more scrutiny, on the chance that it was also part of a seamy underside to London publishing.

Less than a decade before The Whale was published, a piece appeared in the literature column of TheIllustrated London News (July 22, 1843) under the heading “The Puff System.” It began, “It may not be deemed incompatible with the character of a Family Newspaper to have occasional recourse to disquisition upon literary topics of the day as seem to be susceptible of strong interest in the public mind.” The subject at hand was called by the reporter

The Puffing System—a system as insidious, unwholesome, and extended in ramification as any other of the undermining sources of corruption by which a combination of imposture, ingenuity, and mental depravity have wrought deception upon society and polluted the springs of public taste. This puffing system has been of a peculiar and poisonous growth.

The article goes on to mention a recent trial at the Magistrates Court, in which an aggrieved book publisher, one Mr. Colburn (probably Henry Colburn), sued the Atlas. The weekly journal had exposed this “puffing system,” in which newspapers indulged in the “system of paragraphing—that is, of passing off paid paragraphs . . . , about books, as the bona fide opinions of their editors, and so gulling the public,” when in fact the reviews were written and paid for by the book publishers. (This use of puff goes back, according to the OED, at least as far as lines written at the end of the sixteenth century by John Marston, “Blown up with the flattering puffs/ Of spongy Sycophants.” It can be found more than a hundred years earlier as a verb.) Though the publisher had sought a thousand pounds in damages, he received forty shillings (two pounds) and an order to pay his own costs.

The author of the piece in The Illustrated London News pressed his assault on “that ugly literary monster, the London booksellers’ puff”:

Every person accustomed to peruse the evening papers will have been struck from time to time with literary notices scattered among the miscellaneous topics of chit chat, and couched in a tone of delicate inuendo [sic] about books that are forthcoming, or of extravagant approval about those which are forthcome. The work must be a jewel! The reader has leaped from his sofa to his bell-rope, and in five minutes his servant has been inquiring of Sams, Mitchell, or Hookham [London booksellers], either when it will be published, or why it has not arrived. Now the paragraph which has betrayed him into this excitement is all fudge—fudge in the most provoking, Vicar-of-Wakefieldish sense.

the publisher of the book has paid perhaps a guinea [a pound and a shilling] for its insertion. It may deceive hundreds, but it is only a bookseller’s puff, originally manufactured by some such hack as was examined for Mr. Colburn on the Atlas trial—but doomed to go the round of the morning newspapers upon the now established authority of “Evening paper.”

The Globe, the Sun, and the Standard were specifically condemned. The correspondent pointed out that the Times, when reprinting such guff, prefixed the word “advertisement” before the suspect quotes (or perhaps the listing itself), while the Chronicle “ ‘stigmatises’ them with diminutive type.” According to the British Newspaper Archive, the Globe was a “booksellers’ trade journal,” though the Sun and the Standard were not.

Richard Bentley was perhaps not above quoting from reviews that he had bought and paid for. To conceal the source under the name “Evening paper” is exactly the accusation in TheLondon Illustrated News. The actual name of the paper might have made the knowing reader discount the opinion—why else conceal it? The deception can’t have been simply because one of the ads was placed in the Globe, as the disguise remains in the ads placed elsewhere, earlier. The Globe’s notice, just five sentences long, is certainly full of outlandish flattery, even among reviews that praised Melville highly. There is no firm evidence, alas, that Bentley stooped to such a contrivance, even if common among publishers.

Knowing that the Globe review might have been planted, however, may also make suspect the similarly brief raves in TheMorning Post and the Morning Herald on the same Monday. There’s a small overlap of vocabulary among these October 20 reviews, but not enough to suggest they were written by the same man—indeed, a canny publisher would have employed three different men. If Bentley did place that earlier review in the Herald, which appeared two days after the official publication of the novel, perhaps he quoted only from the later review because that was the one he had not ordered written and needed no disguise. The reviews are, however, short enough that half an hour’s skimming might have made any critic familiar enough with the novel to hazard a review of it.

Some evidence of the culture of reviewing during the period may also be found, if we trust to fiction, in The Way We Live Now (1875). Though the novel follows Moby-Dick by more than two decades, Trollope’s career began before Melville’s novel was published. Bentley’s possible hand in placing reviews is reminiscent of Lady Carbury’s solicitation of favorable notices of her first book. (“To puff and to get one’s self puffed,” she writes to a friendly editor, “have become different branches of a new profession.”) When she complains to her publisher about a particularly dire review, Trollope explains the Linnaean structure of the literary world:

There is the review intended to sell a book—which comes out immediately after the appearance of the book, or sometimes before it; the review which gives reputation, but does not affect the sale, and which comes a little later; the review which snuffs a book out quietly; the review which is to raise or lower the author a single peg, or two pegs, as the case may be; the review which is suddenly to make an author, and the review which is to crush him. . . . Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable. When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed—been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut’s car of criticism till his literary body be a mere amorphous mass—then a real success has been achieved.

With allowance for a small amount of caricature, this seems a fair description of reviewing then and now—apart from the near extinction of the crushing review.

The harsh criticism of Melville’s period may be almost as disconcerting to a modern reader as the shiftiness of publishers. Those who think critics should never criticize may find the treatment of his masterpiece, however acceptable by nineteenth-century standards, not edifying but shocking. The early critical reactions did not prevent Moby-Dick from being recognized as the Great American Novel, though that took most of a century—and neither did the positive reviews, nor the bits of possibly paid-for puffery, create a best-seller. The British edition never sold out. Though Moby-Dick did go through three more American printings over the next twenty years, the later ones were small and overall sales poor. Melville’s nine novels were published in an astonishing eleven years, the first seven in seven. After the last, The Confidence-Man (1857), an act of genius exceeded only by the tale of the whale, Melville abandoned fiction and fled to poetry, for which he possessed almost no gift. For two decades he was forced to make his living as a New York City customs-house inspector.

Melville signed as a “green hand” on the whaler Acushnet, which set sail at the beginning of 1841 from Fairhaven, a whaling port across the Acushnet River from New Bedford. He lasted only eighteen months, deserting in the Marquesas in July 1842. Years later, while living in Massachusetts, he was visited by one of his old shipmates, Henry Hubbard. Melville afterward composed a memorandum headed “What became of the ship’s company of the whale-ship ‘Acushnet,’ according to Hubbard who came home in her (more than a four years’ voyage) and who visited me at Pittsfield,” the Berkshire town where Melville made his home. At some time, possibly long after, he dated it 1850, though the probable date of Hubbard’s presumed visit was in the spring of 1853. The arguments about the date and a transcription of the document may be found in the Northwestern-Newberry edition.

The various seamen often succumbed, when they did not simply desert, to mishaps or maladies not uncommon among sailors: “run away or killed,” “went ashore . . . , afterwards committed suicide,” “went ashore . . . half dead with disreputable disease,” “died at the hospital,” “went ashore half dead, spitting blood.” Fewer than half the sailors who shipped out on the Acushnet sailed home in her.

Melville’s crabbed and infuriating hand requires a good deal of deciphering, but the transcription stumbles over only one word. His shipmate Robert Murry or Mury (Murray in the memorandum) “went ashore, ?shunning fight, at Rio Janeiro.” This may have been only seventy days into the journey at the Acushnet’s first known port of call, but then Melville might have remembered the fate of Murry already, unless he was put ashore on the return voyage. Captain Valentine Pease, after the return to Fairhaven four years later, swore in an affidavit that Murray had “deserted on the voyage.”

No one needs a member of crew too eager to use his fists.

No better than a scribble, the enigmatic word is called “indeterminate” in the Northwestern-Newberry edition and the alternatives flatly rejected: “ ‘shoving,’ ‘sharing,’ ‘shamming,’ and even ‘showing’ do not fit the context more convincingly.” I agree that shoving, sharing, and shamming fight make little sense in context. It’s not clear, however, why a sailor not on a warship—or a pirate ship—would be dismissed for “shunning fight,” unless it refers to a fight with a whale (presumably irrelevant unless Murray was a harpooner). You might think that having placable members of crew would be an advantage in the confining and uncomfortable quarters below deck on a whaler. As “shunning fight” seems to have been adopted wholesale by writers on Melville, I want to put in a strong word for the remaining alternative, “showing fight.”

Of the readings, “shunning fight” is almost impossible to discover in or before the middle of the nineteenth century. It’s hard to find even now, except in references to this transcript of the Acushnet memorandum. There are only four examples before 1860 in Google Books of “shunning fight,” all from Charles Churchill’s poem “The Duellist” (1763). It’s possible but unlikely that “shunning fight” was a rare idiom that doesn’t appear in print searches. Similarly, there are no instances of contemporary use before 1860 for “sharing fight” (though two false positives, misinterpretations of the scan) and none for “shoving fight.” The abundance of examples for “sham fight” or “shamming fight” cannot overcome the objection that “shamming fight” would be unlikely grounds to send Murry (or Mury) ashore.

Showing fight,” however, is far more likely and far more appealing. According to the OED, to “show fight” is a phrase used as early as 1803, meaning, as should be obvious, “to display pugnacity or readiness to fight.” Before 1860 there are, in Google Books, over 2,000 entries for “show fight” and over 1,500 for “showing fight.” Though a portion prove to be duplicates (as is common in such searches), the phrase appears broadly, in some cases specifically in naval use or by former sailors:

[Frederick Marryat], Peter Simple (London, 1834). [Marryat was a Royal Navy captain who became a novelist before resigning his commission.]
“Vell,” cried the woman who had made me a prisoner, “I do declare I likes to see a puddle in a storm—only look at the little biscuit-nibbler showing fight.”

Matthew Henry Barker (The Old Sailor, pseud.), Topsail-Sheet Blocks; or, The Naval Foundling (London, 1838). [Barker sailed on an East Indiaman and in the Royal Navy.]
“Hold your tongue, youngster, and don’t shove your oar in where ’tis not wanted,” ordered the master’s-mate: “though perhaps it would have been as well to have backed up so much blustering by at least showing fight.”

[George Cupples], The Green Hand: A “Short” Yarn (New York, 1850). [Cupples spent eighteen months at sea before turning to fiction, and in his sixties, after an accident disabled the captain, sailed a merchant ship from India to England.]
Rare fun we had of it for three or four hours on end; the cadets and writers showing fight in a body, the Yankee being regularly keelhauled, tarred, and feathered, though I believe he had crossed the Line twice by land.

George Frederick M’Dougall, The Eventful Voyage of H. M. Discovery Ship “Resolute” to the Arctic Regions in Search of Sir John Franklin (London, 1857). [M’Dougall was a master on the Discovery.]
We have found the little animals [lemmings], rolled up in a ball-like form, snugly ensconced within the folds of our blanket bags; nor would they be expelled from such a warm and desirable position without showing fight.

The examples suggest that, even when not used about sailors, the phrase was part of the vocabulary of writers who sailed and sailors who wrote. The flogging scene from Melville’s White-Jacket (1855) may be relevant, where four sailors are whipped with a “cat,” a cat-o’-nine-tails, after being found fighting on the gun-deck. The captain says, “I allow no man to fight on board here but myself. I do the fighting.”

No one needs a member of crew too eager to use his fists.

William Logan’s new collection of criticism, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History, was published last spring by Columbia University Press.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 40 Number 2 , on page 13
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