User:Derchr18

From 1850s

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The first British edition (entitled The Whale) was published in three volumes on October 18, 1851 by Richard Bentley, London. The first American edition was published November 14, 1851 by Harper & Brothers, New York. Letters to Richard Henry Dana and Richard Bentley show that Melville was far along on a new book by May 1850. Melville had made a deal with Bentley that the novel would be finished by the fall of that year in exchange for 150 pounds. This was a sum of money that Melville was in much need of. He was recently married with a newborn child and his financial situation was poor. However, Melville didn't finish Moby-Dick until a year later. This was because he had "abandoned the nearly-finished romance to spend an entire year rewriting under a spell of intense intellectual ferment further heightened by the study of Shakespeare and a developing friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne." In September 10, 1851, the final work was finally sent to his publisher. The novel received some positive reviews from people within the literary circle that Melville was part of, such as from Hawthorne. However, the novel wasn't excepted by the public at large and as a result, sold poorly.

A review from The London Atlas seemed to capture the general sentiment towards the novel in a November 1851 review. In this review the critic recognizes the potential for genius behind the book, stating, "In some respects we hold it to be his greatest effort. In none of his previous works are finer or more highly soaring imaginative powers put forth." He goes on to complement the impressive descriptive powers of Melville's writing. However, where he loses his reader, the critic tells, is in the "score of chapters, perhaps for the remainder of the book, (where we) wade wearily through a waste of satirical or quasi-philosophical rhapsody, vainly longing and vainly looking for an island of firm treadable common sense, on which to clamber out of the slough, it might be of clever, but after all, of vain and unprofitable words."

This is the section of the novel that was most difficult for the general public living in the 1850's to except. In another 1851 review, Evert A. Duyckinck expands further on why this is so. He states, "Appropriating perhaps a fourth of the volume is a vein of moralizing, half essay, half rhapsody, in which much ment and subtlety, and no little poetical feeling, are mingled with quaint conceit and extravagant daring speculation. This is to be taken as in some sense dramatic; the narrator throughout among the personages of the Pequod being one Ishmael, whose wit may be allowed to be against everything on land, as his hand is against everything at sea. This piratical running down of creeds and opinions, the conceited indifferentism of Emerson, or the run-a-muck style of Carlyle (Scottish essayist whose work was influential during the Victorian era) is, we will not say dangerous in such cases, for there are various forces at work to meet more powerful onslaught, but it is out of place and uncomfortable. We do not like to see what, under any view, must be to the world the most sacred associations of life violated and defaced." This statement, which is quite comparable to other contemporary reviews, shows the ill feelings that arose in the 1850's when Melville dared to question the popular beliefs of the time. The beliefs that he was questioning were the ideologies that Western civilization was built on and what reveils is lack of willingness

Another cause for criticism among British reviewers was due to the fact that the epilogue was left out of the first British publication. This explained how Ishmael survived the destruction of the Pequod. Without this final chapter, readers were left wondering how the narrator managed to tell the story.

(Quote from, The Life and Works of Herman Melville, http://www.melville.org/melville.htm; historical information from, A Routledge Literary Sourcebook; Moby-Dick. Ed. by Michael J. Davey.)