SOURCE: Mathewson, Stephen. “‘To Tell Over Again the Story Just Told’: The Composition of Melville's Redburn.” ESQ: A Journal of American Renaissance 37, no. 4 (1991): 311-20.

[In the following essay, Mathewson asserts that Melville expanded Redburn into a full-length book by repeating and recycling elements from the first section into the novel's sections on Liverpool and New York through a process of “self-plagiarism.”]

In 1849, Melville feverishly and rather joylessly wrote Redburn, the first of two books he would complete during that summer in an effort to atone for the financial failure of Mardi. He wrote to his English publisher Richard Bentley that he had “enlarged” Redburn, “somewhat to the size of Omoo—perhaps it may be a trifle larger.”¹ Melville frequently relied upon sources while composing; for example, he enlarged his early work by incorporating exploration and travel narratives into his stories of South Seas adventure. In Redburn, however, he expanded his narrative by replicating his own story. The first third of the narrative, the outward-bound voyage from New York to Liverpool, is ingeniously repeated on the return voyage, and the Liverpool section in the middle of the narrative has repeated clusters of three chapters within itself. Apparently, the hurried pace at which Melville wrote Redburn precluded much creativity and compelled him to borrow, as it were, from himself.

On 5 June 1849, Melville complained to Bentley about the reviews of Mardi and mentioned his initial plans for Redburn. Addressing his practical reasons for writing a book with “no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale,” he elaborates: “In size the book will be perhaps a fraction smaller than Typee; will be printed here by the Harpers, & ready for them two or three months hence, or before. I value the English Copyright at one hundred & fifty pounds, and think it would be wise to put it forth in a manner, admitting of a popular circulation.” Melville wrote Redburn, then, to make money from a popular audience, “those who read simply for amusement” (L, 86).

The conditions under which Melville wrote his tale of “cakes & ale” in June and July of 1849 were far from ideal. Living in his house were two newborn children—his own son, Malcolm, and Allan Melville's daughter, Maria—and other relatives as well. Melville stayed in New York City the entire summer, giving up his customary August vacation to work, and, despite the very crowded household, was kept indoors because of an epidemic of blue cholera that infected the city from the middle of May until the first of August.² Under these oppressive conditions, both physical and economic, he composed Redburn in less than two months.

On 20 July 1849, at the plague's height, Melville wrote to Bentley about the novel's progress: “[it] is now going thro' the press, & I think I shall be able to send it to you in the course of three weeks or so.” He also accepted Bentley's offer of one hundred pounds for the book, fifty less than asked for. Melville must have been disappointed, especially since the reasons for enlarging Redburn were economic; the more volumes “got up” in Bentley's style, the more money paid in advance (L, 88). By the end of the summer, Melville had written Redburn as well as White-Jacket, becoming “a tired and somewhat bitter man.”³

Still the question remains: how did Melville expand Redburn from a book “a fraction smaller than Typee” to a book “somewhat … the size of Omoo—perhaps … a trifle larger”? Chapters, characters and scenes already appearing in the first section of the book (the voyage to Liverpool) are recycled in the third section (the return voyage to New York). In addition, the book's middle (Liverpool) section is enlarged through the repetition of key scenes. Since he had little time for imaginative invention that summer, Melville recast what he had already written into the latter portions of the book.

1

Melville repeats leave-takings and sailings in the initial land chapters, an indication that he had a hard time getting his novel out to sea in June. Redburn leaves home and sails down the Hudson River to New York City, doubling these actions when he takes leave of the Joneses, a substitute family for his own, and sails from New York City on the Highlander. In chapter 4, “How He Disposed of His Fowling-Piece,” Redburn goes to two different pawnbrokers to dispose of his gun, retracing his steps to the first pawnbroker. He says, “My best plan then seemed to be, to go right back to the curly-headed pawnbroker, and take up with my first offer.”⁴ Redburn, though, receives two dollars and a half for his gun rather than the initially offered three. Later, while writing Moby-Dick, Melville would encounter the same problem getting his book started.

Harrison Hayford has argued that in Moby-Dick “it takes not one but two chapters to do the narrative job of getting Ishmael started out to see the watery part of the world on his first whaling voyage,” noting that Ishmael does not sail from the first port he comes to, but the second, thus staying at two separate inns and going to bed twice at the second inn.⁵ The same observation applies to Redburn because he, too, sails from his second port. Like Ishmael, Redburn signs aboard his ship in two separate scenes: the day before the Highlander sails when he “put[s] down” his “name and beat[s] a retreat” (19), and again when one of the ship's mates asks if he has signed on as “a tailor” (24). In Redburn, Melville had the same problems beginning his narrative that he would have in Moby-Dick, and in both cases he solved the problem by means of duplication.⁶

While Redburn is in Liverpool, repetition abounds: Melville reuses his own material, and also introduces another source, the guidebook The Picture of Liverpool; he then repeats what he writes about the guidebook to further enlarge this middle section of the novel. Here Max the Dutchman serves as an emblem for Melville's method. Forgetting that the Dutchman is a bachelor (79), Melville writes that he has wives performing similar functions in the different ports: “Liverpool, away from the docks, was very much such a place as New York” (202). In chapter 27, “He Gets a Peep at Ireland, and at Last Arrives in Liverpool,” Redburn sees a woman come aboard the Highlander when it docks in Liverpool. Carrying clean clothes for Max, Sally (his Liverpool wife) exchanges “her bundle of clean clothes for a bundle of soiled ones, and this was precisely what the New York wife had done for Max, not thirty days previous” (128). This is an appropriate opening to the Liverpool section, for here the repetitious composition patterns really begin.

Clearly, Redburn's reason for sailing to Liverpool is to retrace the experiences of his father's visit to that city by following his father's guidebook. Melville employs the guidebook framework in a very sophisticated way, juxtaposing Redburn's and the book's descriptions of Liverpool to expand the section in its first two chapters, 30 and 31. Whether congruous or incongruous, what Redburn finds while walking the streets of Liverpool he finds in the guidebook. In chapter 30, “Redburn Grows Intolerably Flat and Stupid over Some Outlandish Old Guide-Books,” Melville repeats The Picture of Liverpool verbatim, undercutting his own method when he has the narrator exclaim, “I will not quote thee, old Morocco … I should be charged with swelling out my volume by plagiarizing from a guide-book—the most vulgar and ignominious of thefts!” (150). Melville, however, continues his method of self-plagiarism in the next chapter, “With His Prosy Old Guide-Book, He Takes a Prosy Stroll through the Town.” In effect, Melville spells out how his strategy works in this chapter: “having my guide-book in my pocket, I drew it forth to compare notes” (152). Redburn finds in “Old Morocco” that a fort should be where he stands, but he sees a tavern which stands only in name, “The Old Fort Tavern,” for what he reads in the guidebook.

The same compositional pattern appears in the next chapter: Redburn reads the guidebook, sees the existing surroundings, and finally compares his perception to the text. Attempting to follow his father's path, he searches for his father's hotel, the Riddough, and finds his way into the Merchant's Exchange quadrangle. He relates what he has read in the guidebook about the Town Hall, describes what he sees in the square, and then compares what he sees with the guidebook, noting such points of difference as the statue of “Lord Nelson expiring in the arms of Victory” (155). After contemplating the statue, Redburn gets tossed out of a reading room, an action paralleled in another ejection scene in chapter 42, “His Adventure with the Cross Old Gentleman.” Eventually he learns that the Riddough Hotel has been pulled down and concludes that “the thing that had guided the father, could not guide the son,” since guidebooks are “the least reliable books in all literature” (157).

Though Redburn finds guidebooks unreliable, Melville found them both reliable and helpful when composing rapidly, for he returns to the guidebook and to the same compositional pattern. Redburn uses the book to search for the “Old Docks,” and later, in chapter 36 (“The Old Church of St. Nicholas, and the Dead-House”), to supply facts about the old church. In each instance he follows the same pattern of reading, seeing, and comparing. Having Redburn read The Picture of Liverpool achieves the same end as plagiarizing it: Melville is “swelling out” his “volume” by using the book in two ways while writing. His use of the guidebook resembles Carlo's accordion playing: he expands the Liverpool section by pulling on his compositional accordion, the guidebook, unfolding a scene that might have been presented from a single point of view into one he can present from at least three perspectives.

The search for the old docks leads to a similar pattern of composition. Chapter 32, “The Docks,” describes the area around the Liverpool docks and sets up topic-by-topic descriptions that follow in the next three chapters: chapter 33 (“The Salt-Droghers, and German Emigrant Ships”), chapter 34 (“The Irrawaddy”), and chapter 35 (“Galliots, Coast-of-Guinea-Man, and Floating Chapel”). Melville then repeats this pattern. Chapter 37, “What Redburn Saw in Launcelott's-Hey,” introduces the topic of the poor, the human waste of nineteenth-century industrial England. Looking down into a cellar in Launcelott's-Hey, Redburn sees, “crouching in nameless squalor, with her head bowed over … the figure of what had been a woman. Her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children, that leaned toward her, one on each side” (180). The huddled woman and her children resemble the struggling forms Redburn saw earlier at the base of Nelson's statue:

At uniform intervals round the base of the pedestal, four naked figures in chains, somewhat larger than life, are seated in various attitudes of humiliation and despair. One has his leg recklessly thrown over his knee, and his head bowed over, as if he had given up all hope of ever feeling better. Another has his head buried in despondency, and no doubt looks mournfully out of his eyes, but as his face was averted at the time, I could not catch the expression.

(155)

Functioning like “The Docks,” chapter 37 provides compositional material for Melville. He addresses the topic of the poor in chapter 38 (“The Dock-Wall Beggars”), chapter 39 (“The Boole-Alleys of the Town”), and chapter 40 (“Placards, Brass-Jewelers, Truck-Horses, and Steamers”). Again Melville hints at his method in these two sets of chapters when he writes in chapter 40, “As I wish to group together what fell under my observation concerning the Liverpool docks, and the scenes roundabout, I will try to throw into this chapter various minor things that I recall” (192).

The central chapter in the Liverpool section (37, “What Redburn Saw in Launcelott's-Hey”) Melville rewrites in the New York voyage section in chapter 58, “Though the Highlander Puts into No Harbor As Yet; She Here and There Leaves Many of Her Passengers Behind.” He recasts the potent description of the poverty seen in Launcelott's-Hey when depicting Redburn's descent into the ship's hold on the way back to New York: “In every corner, the females were huddled together, weeping and lamenting; children were asking for bread from their mothers, who had none to give” (287). Melville's method characterizes, in a sense, the famine and disease on the ship: “But as the dying departed, the places of two of them were filled in the rolls of humanity, by the birth of two infants, whom the plague, panic, and gale had hurried into the world before their time. The first cry of one of these infants, was almost simultaneous with the splash of its father's body in the sea” (289). The social criticism Melville begins when describing the poor in Liverpool he repeats with force when he dwells upon the conditions the Irish emigrants suffer on the Highlander, conditions worse than those they escape.

2

The largest pattern of repetition shows Melville finishing the narrative by using what he had written in the first voyage section. The principal characters on each trip, Redburn on the outward voyage and Harry Bolton on the return voyage, are very much alike. To begin with, they physically resemble each other. Redburn says, “I was young and handsome,” and later he calls Bolton “handsome” (58, 216). Melville's handsome sailors also have similar backgrounds: Redburn's father died when he was young and Bolton, too, “was early left an orphan” (217). Both are fallen gentlemen with no financial means, Redburn's fortune collapsing with his father's bankruptcy and death and Bolton's through gambling, which strips him of his “last sovereign” (217). And we read in chapter 56, “Under the Lee of the Long-Boat, Redburn and Harry Hold Confidential Communion,” that Redburn “could sympathize with one in similar circumstances,” discussing with Bolton their “common affairs” (279).

As Bolton's reasons for sailing resemble Redburn's, so do the circumstances surrounding his going to sea. Bolton finds that the sea has “a dash of romance in it” (218) which is like the “strange, romantic charm” Redburn feels when dreaming of the sea, reading ship advertisements in the New York City newspapers (3). Both are broke, and Bolton's selling of his vests for money to buy sailor's gear resembles Redburn's pawning of his gun for the same purpose. Their signings-on are very similar, as is Captain Riga's behavior in each. In chapter 3, “He Arrives in Town,” Mr. Jones aids Redburn in signing-on the Highlander, with Captain Riga playing the role of a “fine funny gentleman” (16). Bolton's signing-on in chapter 44 parallels Redburn's so plainly that Melville writes that Redburn “perceived in the captain's face that same bland, benevolent, and bewitchingly merry expression, that had so charmed, but deceived me, when, with Mr. Jones, I had first accosted him in the cabin” (219). In their signings-on, both Redburn and Bolton are forced off the ship, not able to stay onboard until the ship sails: Redburn spends a miserable night in rainy New York City, and Bolton, with Redburn, spends “A Mysterious Night in London” in chapter 46.

Not only do Redburn's and Bolton's port experiences match but their sea experiences do so as well. In chapter 14, “He Contemplates Making a Social Call on the Captain in His Cabin,” Redburn dresses to present himself to the “gentlemanly” Captain Riga: “I put on a white shirt in place of my red one, and got into a pair of cloth trowsers instead of my duck ones, and put on my new pumps, and then carefully brushing my shooting-jacket, I put that on over all, so that upon the whole, I made quite a genteel figure” (68). On deck the ship's crew ridicules Redburn's appearance, asking him if he “was dressing to go ashore,” which elicits laughter and shouting (68-69). This scene is substantially repeated in chapter 50, “Harry Bolton At Sea,” in which “this Bury blade” Bolton comes “on deck in a brocaded dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and tasseled smoking-cap, to stand his morning watch” (253). The crew mocks Bolton's dress, but not in such a lighthearted manner as in Redburn's case. A mate cries, “Who's that Chinese mandarin?” The mocking continues, the sailors hating Bolton and his mahogany wardrobe chest. In each scene of mockery the sailor Jackson plays the same role. He asks Bolton “to lift up the lower hem of his trowsers, to test the color of his calves” (254), much as he had derided Redburn “with a hideous grin”: “‘Let him go, let him go, men—he's a nice boy. Let him go; the captain has some nuts and raisins for him’” (69). Thus, despite superficial changes, the Bolton scene is clearly a rewriting of the Redburn scene.

Melville also mirrors Redburn's first experience going aloft in the rigging in Bolton's similar experience. As in the dressing scenes, the outcomes differ: Redburn's scene leads to the crew's acceptance and Bolton's to their further rejection. In chapter 16, “At Dead of Night He Is Sent Up to Loose the Main-Skysail,” Max the Dutchman tells Redburn to go aloft in the rigging. “Holding on might and main to the mast,” Redburn reflects, “I seemed all alone; treading the midnight clouds; and every second, expected to find myself falling—falling—falling, as I have felt when the nightmare has been on me” (78). He overcomes his fears and completes his task, then descends and receives “something like a compliment from Max the Dutchman” (79). In the Harry Bolton chapter, Melville recasts Redburn's trial in the rigging, but to very different thematic ends. Like Redburn, Bolton is ordered aloft and forced to climb the rigging; like Redburn he experiences fear: “he stopped short, and looked down from the top. Fatal glance! it unstrung his every fiber; and I saw him reel, and clutch the shrouds, till the mate shouted out for him not to squeeze the tar out of the ropes” (256). Like Jackson in the clothing scenes, Max the Dutchman serves parallel functions when Redburn and Bolton climb the rigging. While Max orders Redburn aloft, he literally butts Bolton up: “Max went up the rigging hand over hand, and brought his red head with a bump against the base of Harry's back” (256). Bolton, after unreeving the sail, returns to the deck “pale as death, with bloodshot eyes, and every limb quivering” (257). Unlike Redburn, who is approved by the crew, Bolton again earns “jibes and jeers” (257). The going aloft and clothing scenes repeat, but so does the pattern of acceptance and rejection. In each Bolton scene the end result is the same: the crew rejects him.

Another pattern concerns Jackson, who is ill during each passage. In chapter 12, “He Gives Some Account of One of His Shipmates Called Jackson,” Melville writes that Jackson “was being consumed by an incurable malady” (58), and in chapter 55, “Drawing Nigh to the Last Scene in Jackson's Career,” the sailor has a “malady which had long fastened its fangs in his flesh” (275). This illness leads to his spectacular death in a fall from the ship's rigging, an enactment of the fear Redburn and Bolton share. Jackson's death also recalls the drunken sailors' deaths onboard the Highlander which inaugurate each voyage. Chapter 48, “A Living Corpse,” repeats chapter 10, “He is Very Much Frightened; the Sailors Abuse Him; and He Becomes Miserable and Forlorn.” Melville writes in chapter 48, “it was destined that our departure from the English Strand, should be marked by a tragical event, akin to the sudden end of the suicide, which had so strongly impressed me on quitting the American shore” (243). One of the three drunks brought onboard, Miguel Saveda, spontaneously combusts and is then thrown overboard. As Melville indicates, this chapter is “akin” to chapter 10, in which a drunken sailor brought on the ship commits suicide by leaping into the sea, “raging mad with the delirium tremens” (50). Also in each chapter, Jackson strikes fear into the heart of Redburn: Jackson's remarks about each drunk's death freeze Redburn's “blood” and make his “soul stand still” (246).

Rather than create new material to complete Redburn, then, Melville used what he had already written to enlarge the book. He fashioned his text in this manner for economic reasons: faster composition meant faster financial return for both Redburn and White-Jacket. Yet in spite of his haste, Melville knew he had written a good novel. “I have not repressed myself much,” he wrote of Redburn to Lemuel Shaw on 6 October 1849 (L, 92), but he despised the novel for the economic state it was meant to remedy, hence his comment to Evert Duyckinck in a letter from London, 14 December 1849, about “beggarly ‘Redburn’” (L, 95). The narrative fittingly ends with Bolton and Redburn cheated out of their wages by Captain Riga: like Melville after Mardi, they are again broke, repeating the financial states that prompted their sailings.

Notes

1. Melville to Richard Bentley, New York, 20 July 1849, The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), 88; hereafter cited parenthetically as L, with page number.

2. Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1951), 134.

3. Howard, Herman Melville, 134.

4. Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford et. al, vol. 4 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1969), 22; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number only.

5. Harrison Hayford, “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing of Moby-Dick,” in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1978), 128, 129.

6. Hayford asserts that in Moby-Dick “duplicates breed duplicates” (“Unnecessary Duplicates,” 129). His purpose, however, is to show “Melville's shifting intentions for some of the central characters in Moby-Dick” (128). Thus he argues that the pattern of duplicates arising in Moby-Dick signals that “the larger process in which Melville was engaged at this point was a multiple reassignment of roles among four of his central characters” (144). Though Redburn and Moby-Dick share duplicate beginnings, the pattern of repetition that arises in Redburn results from Melville's hurried writing process and not from the reassignment of characters' roles that Hayford finds in Moby-Dick.