[In the following essay, Pry contends that Melville's novel, centered on a theme of Christian brotherhood, is far more unified than many critics and readers assume.]

Melville's critics have always been much kinder to Redburn than was its author, who insisted that the book was “trash,” written only “to buy some tobacco with.”¹ Most critics have in fact rather liked the story of young Wellingborough Redburn's series of disillusionments as he enters the world of experience, and they have found this novel of initiation notable for its comfortably comic tone, as the more mature Redburn looks back upon and gently mocks his younger self setting out upon the “first voyage.” Some readers, too, have found the book interesting for its symbolism, particularly for the glass ship, for the series of guidebooks young Redburn turns to, and for the eye as the organ of perception.² But many readers, however much they admire the book's tone or see promise and early development in this pre-Moby-Dick Melville romance, also contend that the novel is finally a failure, most often citing an inadequate development of the Harry Bolton-Redburn friendship, with the second half of the book as a consequence taking on a “fragmentary character”;³ or insisting upon a flawed angle of narration because Melville fails to retain the boy's perspective after the ship reaches Liverpool.⁴ But the book's subject is expectation vs. experience, the ambiguity of appearance and reality, and that apparent lack of unity is itself only appearance: the book's wholeness is its thematic interest in Christian brotherhood, with a purposeful irony developing as Melville juxtaposes and parallels symbols, characters, dramatic actions, and speaking voices, all of which work to develop the brotherhood theme.

Indeed, the lengthy subtitle implies much of Melville's purpose and method: Redburn: His First Voyage, Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service. The “Reminiscences,” the elder Redburn-narrator's account of his education, direct the narrative itself, while the “Confessions” of a failure to live by that education account for the romance's irony. That is, the narrative's series of literal models, guidebooks, and families help young Wellingborough learn the value of his Bible, his “Holy Guide-Book,” but the narrative is told in ironic contexts to emphasize the young man's failure to live the Bible's brotherhood arguments. That Redburn realizes his youthful errors is clear in the closing lines of the book: this mature Redburn has since “passed through far more perilous scenes than any narrated in this, My First Voyage,”⁵ yet Melville/Redburn's insistence on the Biblical brotherhood allusions in the concluding paragraphs assure us that Redburn is aware of his youthful errors, while the “Confessions” sub-title and motif indicate the mature narrator's personal remorse.

The book opens with young Redburn adopting a series of guides and beliefs, all appearances which will promptly be shattered by reality. Foreign lands and ships have “a strange, romantic, charm” (3); he will be able to read thick French books without having to stop to look up words (7); he will be a hero to his family, telling them stories of exotic places just as his successful father had done (32-33): But the Liverpool of reality will be dirty and dreary, Redburn will not manage French well at all, and he will have no heroic tales to tell. Additionally, Redburn early believes that his aristocratic hunting jacket will place him above his shipmates, and that the ship's captain will recognize class distinctions and invite Redburn to dine at the Captain's table: but shipmates only mock the young man in his useless coat, while Captain Riga entirely ignores his newest and most inexperienced seaman. The highly symbolic glass ship, which the adventuring young man uses as a romantic model for his journey, is an accurate guide only in its very dark interior, one which foreshadows the darkening of Redburn's romantic expectations when he actually takes up life aboard the Highlander; interestingly, the mature story-teller notes that many of the glass spars and ropes on the miniature have been broken, and a figure-head on the ship has fallen from his perch (fallen, his sisters say, on the very day young Redburn set out on his voyage), but Redburn will not repair it: he notes a “secret sympathy” between himself and the fallen sailor and “will not have him put on his legs again, till I get on my own” (9). Thus Redburn acknowledges even this early in the book his failure to profit by his proper models and experiences—and thus his need for “confession.”

So the appearance vs. reality theme is announced early in the tale, and the principal keys to our understanding of Redburn's education are the series of books the young man considers as he voyages to Liverpool and the “family” motif which runs throughout the novel and helps to unify it. The books are four in number: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, given to him in New York by Mr. Jones, from which Redburn hopes to learn “the true way to retrieve the poverty of my family” (86); Jack Blunt's Dream Book—a fellow sailor's text for interpreting dreams and foreseeing future events; The Pictures of Liverpool, a book from his father's library; and the “Holy Guide-Book” (157). The young sailor quickly finds Smith's book “dull and stupid” and uses it for a pillow (87); Blunt's book of prophecies fails to foresee a near collision at sea (92); neither seems an adequate model or guide for Redburn. In part, Melville uses the Smith and Blunt books for comic purposes; but even after their rejection as useful guides, the books continue to be implied as a basis for ironic comparison, both with the Bible and with the events of the novel. Smith's theories, for example, may be seen as the actual if indirect economic “cause” of the starvation scenes in Liverpool: in that episode, Redburn's stolen bread and cheese (182) suggest perhaps comparison with the Bible's fishes and loaves; but ironically, young Redburn's only effort to imitate the Biblical model, here a compassionate ministry to the poor and hungry, is a failure.

The Liverpool guidebook is more richly and explicitly developed: Redburn can review the book's maps before his arrival in Liverpool, so he may anticipate and prepare for the future; the book is filled with the annotations of his father's 1808 Liverpool visit—records of appointments and expenses—so he may also understand the past; and it includes too his own childish scrawling and pictures from various ages of his youth, drawn onto the fly-leaves, together with the “handiwork” of his brothers and sisters and cousins. Thus the family's past, his own growth, his father's experiences, a chart for the present and the future—all seem compactly and usefully drawn together for Redburn's practical ventures. But it is only appearance, for Liverpool has changed so much that the map “bore not the slightest resemblance” to the Liverpool Redburn visits (152). He realizes that “the world is indeed growing old” (149), and that “the thing that had guided the father, could not guide the son” (157). Redburn comes to an Emersonian understanding: “Every age makes its own guidebooks, and the old ones are used for waste paper” (157).

But in rejecting these three books—of philosophy, of prophecy, of geography and of family history—Redburn embraces one other: “there is one Holy Guide-Book, Wellingborough, that will never lead you astray, if you but follow it aright” (157), Redburn reminds himself. And that is the crux of his problem, for he recognizes the “brotherhood” theme of the Scriptures, but fails to live by it.

Developing his Christian family of man theme, Melville provides a number of families and brother images, beginning with the opening paragraphs of the novel when Redburn's “elder brother” gives up his shooting-jacket and rifle so that the young man might better make his way into the world—or rather, around it, since the mature narrator Redburn acknowledges that sailors like himself “only go round the world, without going into it” (133), further confessing his inability to become wholly involved in the world. As the story unfolds, many family references, both literal and metaphoric, contribute to Melville's argument that Redburn is of the whole family of man, that the Bible is man's proper code, and that too often the families become separated or divorced for superficial reasons. Adam and Eve, progenitors of humanity, would suffer “parental torment” to see all this “world's woes” (188). Among the more interesting figurative family allusions is the appearance of the “atheist and infidel” Jackson (104), that early version of Claggart in whom Redburn senses “even more woe than wickedness” (105); Jackson is a “Cain afloat” (104), as Melville purposefully links Christianity, the Bible, and the brother motif.

In another such instance, the ship's old cook, Mr. Thompson, reads to his comrade, the steward, from the story of Joseph and Pontiphar's wife, encouraging the younger man to take Joseph as a “man of excellent principles, whom he ought to imitate” (83). The exemplar revealed for young Wellingborough arrives in another form of brotherly unity in a later chapter, “The Horatii and Curiatii,” in which Melville presents a modern parallel to the Roman legend of warring brothers, but here the three ten-year-old triplet O'Briens join with the three ten-year-old O'Regans—although the two sets are temperamentally far apart—to attack the astonished Max the Dutchman after he throws Mrs. O'Brien's Bible overboard (267-269). Indeed, this chapter may be seen as a dramatic rendering of Melville's major argument in the book: “the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world” (292).

The life of Max the Dutchman itself complicates our understanding (and Wellingborough's) of the Bible's usefulness as a guidebook. Max sails only between Liverpool and New York, and has two “amiable wives” who know nothing of one another; but when Redburn calls Max's conduct “immoral” (129), the Dutchman points to the Bible: he asks “triumphantly, whether old King Sol, as he called the son of David, did not have a whole frigate-full of wives; and that being the case, whether he, a poor sailor, did not have just as good a right to have two” (129). Max's question indicates the ambiguity and complexity in Melville's tone throughout: Max is a comic figure playing a comic role, just as Mark Twain's Jim plays a comic role when he comments on Solomon and his harem (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter fourteen); but like Jim, Max the Dutchman has a more serious purpose when he takes the case of Solomon as a Christian model. That Wellingborough should be his brother's keeper is a reasonable Biblical and cultural theme; that a Biblical hero should be the keeper of many sisters (or wives) may be Biblically sound but is culturally wrong. The Bible may thus be internally inconsistent, from Melville's cultural perspectives, but what is important is young Redburn's ability, despite that inconsistency, to understand the significance of Christian brotherhood as a guide. Redburn is given the contradictions between the model and culturally-condoned conduct, and he is able to distinguish between the appearance of Solomon's “right” and the reality of Max's moral or cultural wrong. Redburn's perceptions here suggest that he realizes the Bible's uses and ought therefore to have been a proper “brother” to Harry Bolton.

That Redburn understands the implications of Melville's argument about “the patrimony of the whole world” is especially clear through the Liverpool experiences; that he fails to live by these ideals is understood especially in the primary “brother” motif in the book, the relationship between Redburn and Harry Bolton. Redburn does come to see the depths of man's sufferings as he travels about Liverpool, the town where each dock is “an epitome of the world” and where all “the nations of Christendom, and even those of Heathendom,” can be found (165). The description of the Bombay ship, the Irrawaddy, emphasizes the tendency of Christians to separate themselves from others, to fail to serve where they may be needed: every Sunday morning the English ship's officers read prayers, “while the heathen at the other end of the ship were left to their false gods and idols. And thus, with Christianity on the quarter-deck and paganism on the forecastle, the Irrawaddy ploughed the sea” (171). To counterpoint this isolation of leadership, Melville provides a more committed model of brotherhood in the floating chapels of Liverpool, where the clergy bring their forceful sermons directly to the waterfronts where the “sinners”—sailors and “women collected from the notorious lanes and alleys”—can hear the “men of God” (176).

The Lancelott's-Hey episode further dramatizes Redburn's awareness of his obligation to serve in Christian brotherhood rather than in isolation. Here, in the narrow Liverpool street, Redburn discovers Betsey Jennings and her three daughters dead and dying. Starving, unable to do more than moan softly, the suffering family in a dreary cellar beneath a warehouse stir Redburn to action: but the old women in the open lot nearby only scorn the dying, the policeman claims the warehouse is not on his street, the warehouse employee denies them (“do you suppose, that Parkins and Wood want their warehouse turned into a hospital?” [182]), and even Handsome Mary and the cook at Redburn's boarding house reject the request for food. Redburn's thefts of food for the dying are of little help, and after the woman and her daughters are gone, Redburn observes what it means to reject one's Christian brother: he alludes specifically to the Bible's story of Lazarus, then concludes his recollection of this episode: “Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures … are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead” (184)? Thus the mature Redburn is clearly aware of the linked Bible-Christianity-brotherhood significance of his narrative—and of his own failure to treat Harry Bolton as a “brother.”

The major parallelism and principal “brother” motif is in the characters of Redburn and Harry Bolton: Melville creates them as counterparts, as “brothers” in a figurative and a Christian sense, then shows us Redburn's rejection of his brother. Note the parallelisms in the lives of the two characters: Formerly of a family prominent in business and politics, Redburn prepares for the sea by losing his money foolishly; he comes to sea inappropriately clothed, is nicknamed “Buttons” by a hostile crew (28), becomes sea-sick, makes his terrified first venture to “loose the main-skysail” (77-78) when he sees that none of his ship-mates will intervene, and sees the unhappy drunk hurl himself overboard (50). Young Harry Bolton of England, also apparently of a distinguished family (217), gambles away his money before setting sail on his first voyage, stands his first watch in “a brocaded dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and tasseled smoking-cap” (253), is mocked by his fellow sailors, refuses to go aloft at all until physically forced to do so (255-256); and he sees Miguel Saveda, newly abroad ship and perhaps already dead when brought aboard, suffer “animal combustion” (245), burn up and be thrown overboard. Redburn has learned to be a sailor, has the experience of his education, yet every time Harry Bolton appeals to Redburn, the experienced friend fails him: terrified of the rigging, Harry turns to Redburn for help of some kind, and “settling his eye on me, and seeing there no hope, but even an admonition of obedience … he made one bound into the rigging” (256). Redburn on his own first voyage found himself a kind of outcast, “a sort of Ishmael” with a “hatred growing up in me against the whole crew” (62); yet when the outcast Harry Bolton seeks Redburn's support, the now experienced sailor denies his “bosom friend” (223). After the ship docks in New York City, Redburn finds letters from his family which prompt a hasty return home. Advising Harry of his plans, Redburn sees his brother become “downhearted”—but leaves him anyway, in the care of a friend named Goodwell, just as Redburn himself had been left in New York City earlier by his literal brother in the care of the friend named Jones. And the results will be comparable, for a well-meaning Jones had been unable to serve Redburn well (indeed, he had ruined Redburn's chances of getting a much-needed ＄3.00 advance on his salary), and the well-meaning but ironically-named Goodwell will be poor counsel to Redburn's “brother,” Harry Bolton.

Redburn has argued that the Bible is the one “Holy Guide-Book,” and that “the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world,” that all mankind is one brotherhood. Yet he does not live by what he knows, and he realizes the full implications of his failure only as the tale concludes, when in the final paragraphs the brother motif comes full cycle and he learns of Harry Bolton's fate. An English sailor recalls an event aboard a whaling ship several years earlier:

“We had hardly been out three months,” said he, “when on the Brazil banks we lost a boat's crew, chasing a whale after sundown; and next day lost a poor little fellow, a countryman of mine, who had never entered the boats; he fell over the side. … Poor fellow, he had a hard time of it, from the beginning; he was a gentleman's son, and when you could coax him to it, he sang like a bird.”

“What was his name?” said I, trembling with expectation; “what kind of eyes did he have? what was the color of his hair?”

“Harry Bolton was not your brother?” cried the stranger, starting.

The dramatic irony here is quite sharp, and comparison of the opening brother image in the book, in which the elder brother's counsel is recalled with light irony, shows the movement of the book's tone, for the pointed dramatic irony of the closing paragraphs emphasizes again Redburn's Christian perspective. And both the insistent brother motif and the changing tone, particularly as Melville's story-telling voice changes (from young Redburn to the experienced seaman to the author himself), are not flaws in the book but are instead sensible and sensitive artistic probings of Wellingborough Redburn's difficulties in sorting expectations from realities, in learning the responsibilities of brotherhood, and in confessing his own failure to care for Harry Bolton.

Notes

1. Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), I, 327.

2. Arthur Sale, “The Glass Ship: A Recurrent Image in Melville,” MLQ, [Modern Language Quarterly] 17 (1956), 118-127; Willard Thorp, “Redburn's Prosy Old Guide Book,” PMLA, 53 (1938), 1146-1157; Edgar A. Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1968), pp. 61-63; Victor J. Vitanza, “Melville's Redburn and Emerson's ‘General Education of the Eye’,” ESQ, [A Journal of the American Renaissance] 21 (1975), 40-45.

3. Merlin Bowen, “Redburn and the Angle of Vision,” Modern Philology, 53 (1954), 109.

4. William H. Gilman, Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York: New York University Press, 1951), 208-209 and F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford, 1941), 397.

5. Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1969), p. 312. All further quotations from Redburn will be from this edition and cited in the article by page number only.