| On this day in 1851, Harper & Brothers published Moby-Dick , by Herman Melville, about a ship captain named Ahab who is obsessed with hunting the great white sperm whale that took his leg.
The book had been published in Britain in October with the title The Whale; Melville's decision to change the title didn't get there in time. The American version of the book had crowded pages and ugly binding, but the English version was done in three beautiful volumes with bright blue and white covers. It also had gold stamps of whales, but they were the wrong kind: they were shaped like Greenland whales�humpbacks or gray whales�instead of sperm whales. The British publisher accidentally left out the ending of the book, the epilogue. This confused a lot of British readers, because without the epilogue there was no explanation of how the narrator lived to tell the tale. It seemed like he died in the end with everyone else on the ship. The reviews from Britain were harsh, and costly to Melville. At the time, Americans deferred to British critical opinion, and a lot of American newspaper editors reprinted reviews from Britain without actually reading the American version with the proper ending. Melville had just bought a farm in Massachusetts, his debts were piling up, he was hiding them from his wife, and he was counting on Moby-Dick to bring in enough money to pay off his creditors. The book flopped, partly because of those British reviews. Melville never fully recovered from the disappointment. In America, Moby-Dick sold for $1.50. One reviewer said the book wasn't worth more than 25 cents. It took only two weeks for the publisher to see that Moby-Dick would sell even fewer copies than Melville's previous books. In his lifetime, Melville's royalties added up to a total of about $10,000. These days, college students buy 20,000 copies of Moby-Dick every year. Melville said, "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." Ahab's titanic struggle with the whale has elicited innumerable interpretations from literary critics. Is Ahab merely by intense personal feelings of revenge or is he locked into a cosmic stuggle between good and evil? If the latter, who represents evil: Moby Dick or Ahab? According to the critic, Richard Chase, in Ahab we see a man alienated from mankind by a fanatical will and intellect which have distorted all the genial emotions into a vindictive hatred of life itself. The object of a relentless pursuit, a Moby Dick is a formidable combatant. ~Writer's Almanac and the Facts on File Dictionary of Historical and Cultural Allusions. |
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