SOURCE: McCarthy, Harold T. “Melville's Redburn and the City.” Midwest Quarterly 12, no. 4 (summer 1971): 395-410.

[In the following essay, McCarthy examines Melville's treatment of Liverpool, London, and New York as centers of Anglo-American culture founded on private property, class difference, and social malaise.]

Melville wrote Redburn, he recorded in the journal of his visit to London, “to buy some tobacco with.” The early chapters of the novel make plain what he had in mind. It was to be, as the sub-title suggests, a semi-comic adventure story of a gentleman's son serving before the mast, a formula familiar to readers of the day, and in substance it was to be loosely related to Melville's first sea voyage. Before the Highlander reached its destination, however, Melville's personal commitment to his moral experience broke through the stock formula he had intended; Redburn's voice deepened, the character Jackson was introduced, and Liverpool was observed, not through the eyes of a naive country boy, but through the eyes of a man who had seen several widely different societies, who had grave doubts as to the direction his own society was taking, and who saw in Liverpool the prototype city of the Anglo-American culture.

The first sight of Liverpool's docks, “long China walls of masonry,” brings to Redburn's mind the memory of New York's waterfront although New York has nothing as impressive to offer. Speculating on the names of the docks, Redburn is made to bear too great a weight of irony for a country lad when he suggests that the docks should be named after English heroes. They would be “most fit monuments to perpetuate the names of the heroes, in connection with the commerce they defended.” A true hero “must still be linked with the living interests of his race”: that is, with trade and money. On several occasions Redburn is brought to remark upon the similarity of Liverpool to New York until finally he declares, “I began to think I had been born in Liverpool. …” Redburn assured his friend Harry Bolton, who despaired of finding a place in New York, “… that New York was a civilized and enlightened town; with a large population, fine streets, fine houses, nay, plenty of omnibuses; and that for the most part, he would think himself in England; so similar to England, in essentials, was this outlandish America that haunted him.” If he had stopped to reflect upon the treatment a penniless lad received in England, Harry might have found cold comfort in Redburn's words; he might have anticipated the refusals which drove him to take a job on a whaler.

“Is Liverpool but a brick-kiln?” asked Redburn, soon bored by his confinement to that city. Two years later, in 1851, bored while at work on Moby-Dick in New York, Melville was to describe himself in a letter to Hawthorne as “disgusted with the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York.” (Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, edd., The Letters of Herman Melville [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960], p. 132.) Still later, in Israel Potter, he was to build the image of the brick-kiln into an extraordinary metaphor for the nature of the individual life and the structure of society in a great modern city: baked-dry units in a rigid mass—in short, what Bartleby was to see, staring from the office window or across the prison yard. Bartleby would have said of Liverpool, “I know where I am.”

Sailing to Liverpool, the youthful Redburn has seen little of the world's cities. He knows something of Boston and New York and Albany (which had about 30,000 inhabitants when Melville moved there in 1830). But Melville, describing Redburn's reaction to Liverpool, had seen not only that city but cities on the west coast of South America and tribal cities in the Marquesas. He knew first-hand the possibilities afforded by societies constructed on a fundamentally different basis from those of New York and Liverpool. The romantic propensity to contrast the city with the country, however, was too facile an opposition for Melville. His narrator in Typee gave tension to the novel by his continuous efforts to return to his own culture; the same was true of the narrator of Omoo; and Taji's search for Yillah seems to be inseparable from a context of society. The countryside of Liverpool, as Redburn finds to his dismay, is all owned and guarded. Man-traps, guns, and dogs speed the traveller on his way. In New York state ownership of the countryside was the current issue of anti-rent wars about which Cooper had just completed a trilogy with The Redskins. City or countryside, Liverpool or New York, all the land encountered in Redburn, as later in Pierre, is property. It forms the basis of the society.

That such need not be the case was illustrated by Melville's narrator in the valley of Typee, who saw the idea of property as one of the evils of civilization from which the islanders were free, and who summed up all the evils from which they were free in the words “no Money!” Young Redburn, fresh from a country town near Albany, had not thought much about the concept of property until a savage sign warning passers-by to keep off the inviting green fields started a dialogue in his mind:

And who put it there?
The proprietor, probably.
And what right had he to do so?
Why, he owned the soil.
And where are his title deeds?
In his strong-box, I suppose.
Thus I stood wrapt in cogitations.

Soon Redburn was asking himself, “What right has this man to the soil he thus guards with dragons? What excessive effrontry, to lay sole claim to a solid piece of this planet, right down to the earth's axis, and, perhaps straight through to the antipodes!”

Even more disturbing to the young Redburn was the constant sight of crowds of beggars and cripples, citizens of Liverpool who possessed neither money nor property. Like Pierre Glendinning, who first encountered the reality of destitution when he saw the whores and drunkards in a New York watch-house, Redburn had nothing in his experience to compare with the sight of the Liverpool poor. With poor and beggarly Negroes, yes; but with native-born, white beggars, no. It must be the vote, Redburn mused, that kept American citizens free or this condition. He conveniently forgets that it was economic hardship that sent him to sea in the first place; and Melville, who knew what hardship could be in America as a result of his father's bankruptcy, then his brother's bankruptcy, and finally his own privations after the financial chaos of the Panic of 1837, generously allows Redburn his flurry of patriotic fervor. Still, despite the recurrent financial panics and cholera epidemics, New York City's ills could not compare with the extreme poverty and sickness to be found in Liverpool.

With reference to the treatment of Liverpool in Redburn, Newton Arvin noted in Herman Melville (N. Y.: Sloane, 1950), p. 105, that, “it was not until the nineteenth century that the great city, any great city, the great city an sich, could become just the kind of city it did become of human iniquity.” In Melville's Early Life and Redburn (N. Y.: N. Y. Univ Press, 1951), p. 216, William H. Gilman has commented more extensively on Redburn's struggle with the changing Liverpool:

… his isolation in Liverpool and the monstrous poverty of the place furnish glimpses of the growing conflict in the nineteenth century between man and the modern city. In his love of historical tradition, Redburn is the civilized Westerner who seeks to assimilate and be assimilated by his own culture. But in Liverpool Redburn finds a commercial and relatively new metropolis, blind to the past and interested only in profit, inhuman in itself and dehumanizing its swarming populace.

And Leon Howard, in Herman Melville (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1951) pp. 26-27, pointed out that for generations before the Municipal Reform Act of 1835 the city government of Liverpool had been split up among discordant authorities. A more central and efficient administration was in office at the time of Melville's arrival, but it had been able to make little impact upon the social disorder.

It can be said that Redburn is aware of several Liverpools: (1) the one which has existed in his imagination, the Liverpool of his father's anecdotes, of his father's guidebook “The Picture of Liverpool,” and of his romantic sense of what old European cities ought to be; (2) physical Liverpool with its gigantic maze of concrete docks, masses of ships, sordid slums, crooked streets walled by soot-blackened brick buildings, and the “Old Church” based upon the “Dead-House”; and (3) the human Liverpool. What had guided the father soon proves useless as a guide for the son, and Redburn must try to make some meaning of a city in which there is a continual contradiction and confusion between the values of the past still provoking an illusion of vitality—the world of churches, reading clubs, titles, heroes—and the swarming reality of the concrete docks.

The buildings that should be emblematic of the vital ideals of the culture are all derelicts to Redburn. The spaces of the city have shifted in such a way as to crowd out the elements that had possessed spiritual and aesthetic value for his father in order to provide for the vastly increased commerce. The very survival, let alone the comfort, of great numbers of the city's inhabitants had been ignored in adapting the city to its all but exclusive function as a trading center. Goods and men are shipped in and shipped out; trade is the one thing that matters. The only meaningful structures in the city are those which serve trade, and except for the human litter of beggars and cripples, almost all human life is adapted to processing the endless circulation of goods and men.

About the docks and in the central mercantile areas the crowd swarms continually. Each morning Redburn joins the flow. A disillusioned Redburn observes that “upon the whole, and barring the poverty and beggary, Liverpool, away from the docks, was very much such a place as New York … the same elbowing, heartless-looking crowd as ever.” If, at this point, Melville had New York uppermost in mind because he was living there, the balance would be redressed shortly when he revisited England upon finishing Redburn. Of one dreary day (Friday, November 9th, 1849) he recorded in his London journal:

While on the Bridges, the thought struck me again that a fine thing might be written about a Blue Monday in November London—a city of Dis (Dante's)—clouds of smoke—the damned & c.—coal barges—coaly waters, cast-iron Duke & c.—its marks are left on you. …

Melville used this image in Israel Potter, adding to it a comment upon the crowd: “that hereditary crowd—gulfstream of humanity—which, for continuous centuries, has never ceased pouring, like an endless shoal of herring, over London Bridge.” Israel had fled to London, “for solitudes befriend the endangered wild beast, but crowds are the security, because the true desert, of persecuted man.” Redburn walks through the cities of the plain, through the cities of Dickens, of Balzac, of Dostoevsky, and of Gogol, past “scores of tattered wretches” picking over rubbish, past “multitudes of beggars” whose petitions are scrawled on the paving stones “in an hour's time destined to be obliterated by the feet of thousands and thousands of wayfarers,” past a “lane of beggars” who thronged the docks in neighborhoods where “the sooty and begrimed bricks of the very houses have a reeking, Sodomlike, and murderous look …”

In the center of this unreal, fourmillante city Redburn comes across a statue that was not in his fathers's guidebook and haunts him so that he must return repeatedly to stare at it. The statue is of Nelson, with Victory and Death, and with the figures of four captives, supposedly representing Nelson's victories, at its base. Again the precociously ironic Redburn thinks of how England's heroes are linked with her trading empire, and this thought leads to thoughts of slavery in his own country and to the thought “that the African slave-trade once constituted the principal commerce of Liverpool; and that the prosperity of the town was once supposed to have been indissolubly linked to its prosecution.” Redburn recalls that his father had often spoken to gentlemen visiting their house “of the unhappiness that the discussion of the abolition of this trade had occasioned in Liverpool.” Thus, Melville brings the image of New York more clearly through the Liverpool palimpsest.

In Mardi he had already used a city's monuments to satirize its pretensions: the red stripes on the flag over the capital of Vivenza are compared to the bloody stripes on the back of the man employed to raise it; and at the base of the statue to liberty are pasted the rewards for runaway slaves. Nelson was, for Melville, but another instance of what he was to describe through his characterization of John Paul Jones, in Israel Potter, as “the primeval savageness which ever slumbers in human kind,” a quality to be found in “the heart of the metropolis of modern civilization.”

Melville had remarked in Typee upon the ease with which a native could bring up a family of numerous children, while civilized man, “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth,” was often at his wits' end to provide for his starving offspring. A counterpart to the public statue of the warrior Nelson is the secluded, sculpturesque group of a mother and her children resignedly starving to death in a cellar off Launcelott's-Hey. No passerby interferes, not even the policeman; for death, too, has been secularized. The waters of the docks and the alleys of the city provide a daily harvest of corpses for the nearly dead scavengers who collect them for the bounty which secures their own survival. “There seems to be no calamity overtaking man, that can not be rendered merchantable,” muses a much more reflective Redburn.

In Redburn the assailant and the victim are all part of the same “landscape”: the modern city. The corpses that have accumulated overnight in docks and alleys are collected in the Death-House, and there each day a crowd can be found gazing in upon the dead. As the Death-House is in the basement of a church, the area surrounding it is a graveyard, and each day “swarms of laborers” cross and recross it, erasing with their boots the death's-heads and crossbones carved on the horizontal stones. The dead are merely the waste-product of the society. Once their utility, even as corpses, has ceased, they are not so much forgotten as disposed of.

Melville's technique of ironic association, which links the figure of dying Nelson and his slave-like captives with the figures of the dying mother and children and the bodies gathered for public inspection in the Death-House suggests the entire city is a house of the dead. The citizens who are so oblivious to the fate of their fellowmen are, metaphorically, “making merry in the house of the dead.” Like the Death-House on which it is based, the “Old Church” is dead. The mummery of Christianity had exasperated the blind guide in Mardi to plead, “Off masks, mankind, that I may know what warranty of fellowship with others, my own thoughts possess.” In his first two novels Melville had indicated how the Christian missionaries brought with them a way of life that was destructive of many genuinely Christian elements in the primitive societies. Just as their concept of religious practice was wholly unsuitable to the way of life of the primitive islanders, so the religious practice of the Protestant sects in Liverpool (and New York) was wholly irrelevant to a people for whom death and suffering had become a meaningless fresco on the concrete walls of the docks and the sooty brick walls of their dwellings. The language of official religion was something they did not care to hear. Melville considered the usual sermon to be, in a real sense, anti-religious; and he wrote in 1851 to Hawthorne, “Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.” (Letters, p. 125.)

In Liverpool, and by implication New York, Melville was depicting the secular city. Of course services were held at the traditional time and place, and Melville attended them. While he evinces no hostility in his description of the religious service in Redburn, what comes through is its futility. In The Secular City (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1965), p. 2, Harvey Cox has described what had happened this way:

The forces of secularization have no serious interest in persecuting religion. Secularization simply bypasses and undercuts religion and goes on to other things. … The gods of traditional religions live on as private fetishes or the patrons of congenial groups, but they play no role whatever in the public life of the secular metropolis.

Although Redburn's unusual clothing raised some eyebrows, he was always admitted to the Sunday services and seated behind a pillar. The sailor lad was welcome to listen to the service, but love? hospitality? “But, alas! there was no dinner for me except at the sign of the Baltimore Clipper.” Melville was to remark, in Pierre, that “by all odds the most Mammonish parts of this world—Europe and America—are owned by none but professed Christian nations, who glory in the owning, and seen to have some reason therefor.” In Redburn he anticipated this comment in many ways, but especially in Redburn's sense of how money, and money in the form of property, make the laboring class invisible as persons to those who have money. Redburn cries out to his readers, “We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death.”

Such a note, Melville realized, might compromise the success of his adventure story, so he kept his pot boiling with an account of an adventure in Ali Baba London, of Carlo the singer, and Harry Bolton's mishaps. But the character of Jackson and the plight of the immigrants were too much for artistic restraint. Even though much of the American reading public regarded self-criticism as a form of treason and preferred to believe that evil was located abroad, Melville had to insist that evil existed everywhere. In Mardi he put the idea this way: “The grand error of this age, sovereign-kings! is the general supposition, that the very special Diabolus is abroad; whereas, the very special Diabolus has been abroad ever since Mardi began.” On the Highlander it is the character Jackson who seems to personify evil, and, as Newton Arvin has pointed out, “in addition to him and to all the personages, and more overpowering than any of them, there is the infernal city of Liverpool.” (Melville, p. 105.) It was through Jackson and Liverpool that Melville sought discreetly to make Americans aware that the Diabolus was everywhere.

If Jackson has nothing of the dynamism of Ahab, of whom he cast such a strong foreshadow, he has also nothing of the sneaking malevolence of Claggart. Whether flinging the beeves' hearts in the face of the cheating innkeeper, or claiming his right to the most perilous position on the ship in the violence of a storm, Jackson is the acknowledged leader of the crew. He knows from experience on pirate ships, slave ships, and emigrant ships the evil of which human beings are capable. If he has been an assailant, he has also been a victim; and he will not allow his shipmates the luxury of a God.

Like Teiresias accusing Oedipus of his guilt, Jackson tries to force upon Redburn a knowledge of the evil of which Redburn is product and part; and in so doing he bears Melville's message to the self-righteous readers who have allowed themselves to identify with the “Son-of-a-Gentleman in the Merchant Service.” Melville's truth is Jackson's truth, and Melville wants to smash the apple-cheeked American innocence, the innocence of the Captain Delanoes, that mocks his truth. Redburn is frightened and fascinated by Jackson. He sees him in terms of the great sinners, Satan, Cain, Tiberius; but he sees too that Jackson is the best seaman aboard, that he is the leader of the crew, and that his death has an heroic dimension. As with so many of Hawthorne's characters, sin was the necessary condition for Jackson's vision of human evil, or its disguises and its pervasiveness and its outrageous depths. The deliberate cliche attached by Redburn to Jackson's death, “the wages of sin,” is an ironic sop by Melville to a public conditioned to associate evil with sickness, poverty, and social exclusion, as well as with other races and other nations. Jackson is one of those who, as Melville expressed it in a letter to Hawthorne, “says NO! in thunder.” (Letters, p. 125.)

At the time Melville wrote Redburn the pressures upon both Liverpool and New York were radically altering the physical and cultural structures of both cities. A crucial event for both was the total failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1846 and the resultant Irish exodus. Liverpool was the major port of departure for the emigrant sailing-ships and New York the major port of arrival. The emigrants swarmed into Liverpool, which did its best to cram them aboard ships and send them to New York, where those who survived the voyage could struggle for survival in the city. Melville's voyage to Liverpool on which the novel was partly based took place in 1839; but he was writing the novel in New York in 1849 and basing much of it—especially the emigrant chapters—on the accounts of emigration that appeared frequently in newspapers and magazines in 1847 and 1848, on reports of proceedings in both Congress and Parliament attempting to regulate conditions aboard the emigrant ships, as well as on his observation of the arrival of these ships and their passengers in New York. His account of the hardships of the steerage passengers aboard the Highlander suggests that the year he had most in mind was 1847, designated in a London Times editorial (September 17, 1847) as “the black year of emigration,” when the ship fever Melville describes was epidemic.

What Melville dramatized in Redburn was that human beings were treated as so much cargo—a point also made by Marcus Lee Hansen in The Immigrant in American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940), p. 157, where he observes, “Historically, the immigrant may have been the bearer of civilization to America, but, actually, he was classed with barrels of pork and bales of cotton.” Redburn's father (and Melville's father too) in his visit to Liverpool seemed to have moved in a world in which human relations were governed by rules of civility; Redburn finds a humanity debased by money, and the treatment of the emigrant drives out the element of humanity itself. It is the truth of Jackson's vision of things. Now the crowd is made up of herded Irish laborers, “penned in just like cattle,” sounding “like a drove of buffaloes,” passing “vast quantities of produce, imported from starving Ireland,” and on their way “to help harvest English crops.” Denied not only property but any share in the food they have labored to produce and harvest on the property of others, the Irish look to America, not for freedom and democracy as the American myth would have it, but for the chance to own a piece of the soil for themselves.

Like the Irish, Melville's Redburn is one of the dispossessed, and he sees their situation from their point of view. As Melville depicts them, the Irish are intensely human. At the head of a troop of laborers an Irishman shouts, “Sing Langolee, and the Lakes of Killarney,” and communicates immediately Melville's perception of the individual person, the homely habits, beliefs, the landscapes and dreams gathered there. It comes across in Redburn's conversations with the most varied characters—a Lascar from the Indian ship Irrawaddy, a sailor ballad-singer, the skipper of a salt-drogher. What is prized is individuality, personality, a character's sense of himself as a distinct identity, even though he should be, in Liverpool, a racial curiosity (the Lascar), a beggar (the ballad-singer), or in himself the captain and crew of his humble vessel (the skipper of the salt-drogher). The handling of these casual encounters and their significant placement are remarkable technical achievements in the novel.

Melville alters drastically the persona of Redburn when he deals with the emigrants, as though his own commitment to the subject-matter was too intense to be contained in the light structure he had planned. He saw things from the Irish emigrant's point of view, and even Thoreau, buying his boards or giving advice on diet, was not capable of that. Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951) presented the theme of emigration from the point of view of the emigrant, “and seen from the perspective of the individual received rather than of the receiving society, the history of immigration is a history of alienation and its consequences.” This is how Melville felt, and in Redburn he presented a remarkably thorough account of the whole process from that viewpoint. He dramatized those aspects of the voyage in which the emigrant was most subject to being de-humanized, and where legislation had proved ineffective in curbing the exploiters' greed: the overcrowding of passengers into a cargo hold crudely converted to steerage accommodations; false or inadequate advice in regard to food and clothing necessary for the voyage; barbarous sanitary conditions; no provision against shipwreck; practically nothing in the way of medical care; and other conditions attendant upon the vicious traffic in human beings.

Shortly after the Highlander left Liverpool it was discovered that a crimp had put aboard a corpse under the pretense that he was delivering a drunken sailor. This grim episode becomes illustrative of the whole emigrant shipment. Over twenty of the passengers die under horrible conditions before the ship reaches New York, and like the corpse of the sailor they are tossed with little ceremony into the sea. There is something of the ghastly quality of Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym to the voyage, but if anything Melville was softening the truth. He is not precise as to the number of passengers on his Highlander, but the number of deaths in proportion to the “four or five hundred” steerage passengers was, possibly, a concession to the guilt of his readers. Edwin C. Guillet records in The Great Migration (Toronto and New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1937), p. 84 and p. 91, that, “On three vessels alone in 1847 there were 313 burials at sea, apart altogether from subsequent deaths among the 322 who were sick on arrival, and it may be assumed that sea burials in such numbers were marked by no ceremonies whatever.” He adds, “Of slightly more than 100,000 persons who left the British Isles for America in 1847 a total of 17,445, or 16.33٪, died during the passage, in quarantine, or in the hospital.” Oscar Handlin places the normal mortality on the emigrant sailing-ships as about 10٪, “although in the great year, 1847, it was closer to 20.” (Uprooted, p. 51.) The sailor Jackson, in a Cassandra-like passage, indicated what was in store for the emigrants; Melville knew the terrible truth, brought out in official testimony, that conditions aboard many emigrant ships in those years were worse than aboard ships in the slave trade. It is usual to view Redburn as a story of initiation; part of that story is the initiation of the Irish emigrant into the city of New York.

Early in the voyage to Liverpool, self-centered Redburn found himself “a sort of Ishmael” amongst the sailors who resented the “son-of-a-gentleman” in their midst. In the course of the novel, Redburn's concern shifts to others and takes on the understanding, compassion, and inclusive love characteristic of the “Ishmael” of Moby-Dick. His sympathy is complete for the emigrants, who are themselves “Ishmaels,” driven out from their homelands, friendless, and even reduced to hostility for one another by their desperate condition aboard ship. The emigrant ship becomes, in a familiar Melville metaphor, a social microcosm, with a rigid division of its spaces as determined by money and without regard to human need or even to human life: the emigrants jammed into their filthy steerage slum; the cabin-passengers in private quarters with ample deck space; the crew operating as a police force to see that the morally outrageous distribution of the things of this world is enforced. Against this metaphor, which locks assailant and victim together in a vivid “economy of violence,” Melville poses that of the Great Wall of China, wherein each man may own a stone and share ownership in the world—“For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world.”

Distrusting organizations of church and state, distrusting the effectiveness of laws, and even distrusting man's reason itself as a moral guide, Melville could go no further by way of proposing a cure for the ills he dealt with in Redburn than the old advice—love one another. On this law of charity Saint Augustine had conceived his city. Native Americans wanted the immigrants for their labor, but feared their political power, and, in the case of the Irish, their Catholicism. While this fear raged about him in quasi-organized form as the Know-Nothing movement, Melville made his plea that all nations might claim America for their own. He could see that racial and religious differences are superficial when, in Emerson's phrase, “we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form.” Certainly Melville saw more of the tiger in man than Emerson did, but he had said enough on that subject for a “beggarly ‘Redburn’!” as he referred to his novel in private correspondence, “A little nursery tale of mine.” (Letters, p. 95 and p. 93.)