''Redburn: His First Voyage'' is the fourth book by the American writer
Herman Melville
Herman Melville (Name change, born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American people, American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance (literature), American Renaissance period. Among his bes ...
, first published in London in 1849. The book is semi-autobiographical and recounts the adventures of a refined youth among coarse and brutal sailors and the seedier areas of
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a popul ...
. Melville wrote ''Redburn'' in less than ten weeks. While one scholar describes it as "arguably his funniest work", scholar
F. O. Matthiessen
Francis Otto Matthiessen (February 19, 1902 – April 1, 1950) was an educator, scholar and literary critic influential in the fields of American literature and American studies. His best known work, ''American Renaissance: Art and Expression in ...
calls it "the most moving of its author's books before ''Moby-Dick''".
Plot
Unable to find employment at home, young Wellingborough Redburn signs on the ''Highlander'', a
merchantman
A merchant ship, merchant vessel, trading vessel, or merchantman is a watercraft that transports cargo or carries passengers for hire. This is in contrast to pleasure craft, which are used for personal recreation, and naval ships, which are u ...
out of
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
bound for
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a popul ...
, England. Representing himself as the "son of a gentleman" and expecting to be treated as such, he discovers that he is just a green hand, a "boy", the lowest rank on the ship, assigned all the duties no other sailor wants, like cleaning out the "pig-pen", a longboat that serves as a shipboard sty. The first mate promptly nicknames him "Buttons" for the shiny ones on his impractical jacket. Redburn quickly grasps the workings of social relations aboard ship. As a common seaman he can have no contact with those "behind the mast" where the officers command the ship. Before the mast, where the common seaman work and live, a bully named Jackson, the best seaman aboard, rules through fear with an iron fist. Uneducated yet cunning, with broken nose and squinting eye, he is described as "a
Cain
Cain ''Káïn''; ar, قابيل/قايين, Qābīl/Qāyīn is a Biblical figure in the Book of Genesis within Abrahamic religions. He is the elder brother of Abel, and the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, the first couple within the Bible. He wa ...
afloat, branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat near him." Redburn soon experiences all the trials of a greenhorn: seasickness, scrubbing decks, climbing masts in the dead of night to unfurl sails, cramped quarters, and bad food.
![Lancelots Hey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Lancelots_Hey.jpg)
When the ship lands in Liverpool he is given liberty ashore. He rents a room and walks the city every day. One day in a street called Launcelott's Hey he hears "a feeble wail" from a cellar beneath an old warehouse and looking into it sees "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. At first I knew not whether they were alive or dead. They made no sign; they did not move or stir; but from the vault came that soul-sickening wail." He runs for help but is met with indifference by a ragpicker, a porter, his landlady, even by a policeman who tells him to mind his own business. He returns with some bread and cheese and drops them into the vault to the mother and children, but they are too weak to lift it to their mouths. The mother whispers "water" so he runs and fills his tarpaulin hat at an open hydrant. The girls drink and revive enough to nibble some cheese. He clasps the mother's arms and pulls them aside to see "a meager babe, the lower part of its body thrust into an old bonnet. Its face was dazzlingly white, even in its squalor; but the closed eyes looked like balls of indigo. It must have been dead for some hours." Judging them beyond the point at which medicine could help, he returns to his room. A few days later he revisits the street and finds the vault empty: "In place of the woman and children, a heap of quick-lime was glistening."
On the docks he meets Harry Bolton, a dandy who claims to be a sailor looking for a job, and Redburn helps him procure a berth on the ''Highlander'' for the return voyage. They become fast friends and make a trip to London where they visit a luxurious private club, Aladdin's Palace, with an exotic environment Redburn struggles to make sense of, concluding it must be a gambling house. The ship soon departs for New York and Bolton's deficits as sailor become apparent. Redburn suspects that Bolton has never been to sea before and Bolton is tormented by the crew. Jackson, after being ill in bed for four weeks, returns to active duty: he climbs to the topsail yard, then suddenly vomits "a torrent of blood from his lungs", and falls headfirst into the sea and disappears. The crew never speak his name again. Reaching port, Redburn heads for his home and Bolton signs on a whaler. Redburn later hears that Bolton, far out in the Pacific, fell over the side and drowned.
Character List
* Wellingborough Redburn (a.k.a., Buttons)
* Redburn's elder brother (unnamed in the book)
* Mr. Jones
* Captain Riga
* The Highlander Crew
** The suicidal sailor
** Jackson
** Max the Dutchman
** The Greenlander
** Mr Thompson, the cook, aka, the Doctor
** Lavender
** Jack Blunt
** Larry
** Gun-Deck
* The Liverpool Docks
** Danby
** Mary, Danby's wife
** Bob Still, Danby's old crony
** Townspeople, other foreign sailors, policemen, the poor, the beggars, the depraved
* Harry Bolton
* Miguel Saveda
* Carlo
* The O'Briens and the O'Regans
* Goodwell
Composition and publication history
Melville alluded to ''Redburn'' for the first time in a letter to his English publisher in the late spring of 1849, in which he wrote that the novel would be practical rather than follow the "unwise" course of his previous novel, ''Mardi'', which had been harshly criticized:
Melville adopted this more commercial approach to writing as his family obligations increased and his working conditions became more difficult. Living with him in the small house in New York City were his wife, child, mother, sisters, and his brother Allen with ''his'' wife and child. Melville later portrayed himself at this time as being forced to write "with
duns
Duns may refer to:
* Duns, Scottish Borders, a town in Berwickshire, Scotland
** Duns railway station
** Duns F.C., a football club
** Duns RFC, a rugby football club
** Battle of Duns, an engagement fought in 1372
* Duns Scotus ( 1265/66–1308 ...
all around him, & looking over the back of his chair—& perching on his pen & diving in his inkstand—like the devils about
St. Anthony."
The book is a fictional narrative based loosely on Melville's own first voyage to Liverpool in 1839. The manuscript was completed in less than ten weeks and, without any attempt at polishing it, Melville submitted it to his American publisher
Harper & Bros who published it in November 1849. Melville checked the proof sheets, which came out in August, and sent them along to Bentley for publication in England, where it appeared six weeks before the American version. In 1922 it was published as a volume of the Constable edition of Melville's complete works. Since then it has been continuously in print in inexpensive hard cover editions and since 1957 in paperback.
Reception
Melville referred to ''Redburn'' and his next book ''
White-Jacket
''White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War'' is the fifth book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1850. The book is based on the author's fourteen months' service in the United States Navy, aboard the frigate USS ' ...
'' as "two ''jobs'' which I have done for money—being forced to it as other men are to sawing wood".
[ Delbanco, Andrew: ''Melville, His World and Work''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005: 111. ] It was reviewed favorably in all the influential publications, American and British, with many critics hailing it as Melville's return to his original style. The critics were divided along national lines when reviewing the scene in Launcelots Hey, the British dubbing it "improbable", the Americans "powerful". In 1884
William Clark Russell
William Clark Russell (24 February 18448 November 1911) was an English writer best known for his nautical novels.
At the age of 13 Russell joined the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy (United Kingdom), Merchant Navy, serving for eight years. The h ...
, the most popular writer of
sea stories in his generation, praised the book's force and accuracy in print. He also sent Melville a personal letter where, among other items, he said "I have been reading your ''Redburn'' for the third or fourth time and have closed it more deeply impressed with the descriptive power that vitalises every page."
John Masefield
John Edward Masefield (; 1 June 1878 – 12 May 1967) was an English poet and writer, and Poet Laureate from 1930 until 1967. Among his best known works are the children's novels ''The Midnight Folk'' and ''The Box of Delights'', and the poem ...
would later single the book out as his favorite of Melville's works. When ''Redburn'' was praised, Melville wrote in his journal, "I, the author, know
tto be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with".
[ He later complained: "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the ''other'' way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."
]
Assessments
Elizabeth Hardwick finds that passages of the book display a rhetorical brilliance: "Throughout Melville's writings there is a liberality of mind, a freedom from vulgar superstition, occasions again and again for an oratorical insertion of enlightened opinion." She points to the passage in chapter 33 where Melville describes the German immigrants preparing for their voyage to America:
Interpretations of ''Redburn'' generally fall into two schools. The first, usually called the biographical school, may be found in studies of Melville written in the 1920s by critics such as Raymond Weaver
Raymond Melbourne Weaver (1888 – April 4, 1948) was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1916–1948, and a literary scholar best known for publishing ''Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic'', the first full ...
, John Freeman, and Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a wr ...
. Typifying this school's approach is Mumford's statement that:
By the 1950s, a second school arose which might be called the "mythic" school. Newton Arvin
Fredrick Newton Arvin (August 25, 1900 – March 21, 1963) was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors.
After teaching at Smith College in N ...
wrote:
This new approach represented a broad trend that sought to reinterpret American literature—Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner, and Hemingway—in the light of mythic quests and patterns. In one view, ''Redburn'' is "a stronger indictment of an American embarking upon a voyage of international experience than Henry James would produce and a more ironic and embittered portrait of the young protagonist's incapacity for art than James Joyce would produce."
Critics have clarified or called attention to particular points. After some debate in the 1980s when the notion was first proposed, critics seem to agree that Aladdin's Palace is a "male brothel", including Elizabeth Hardwick who describes it as "a strange, fastidiously observed, rococo urban landscape unlike any other dramatic intrusion in Melville's writings or in American literature at the time." Following Hardwick, critic Evan Lang Pandya argued that Aladdin's Palace draws on "fantasies of the blank Arabian signifier, the obscure desert of ambiguities, including sexual ambiguity."
In addition to the social criticism of the Launcelott's Hey incident (Ch. 37), Melville attacks the evils of alcohol and the exploitation of emigrants by shipping services. The chapter "A Living Corpse", like Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...
' ''Bleak House
''Bleak House'' is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and ...
'', contains an example of spontaneous human combustion
Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is the pseudoscientific concept of the combustion of a living (or recently deceased) human body without an apparent external source of ignition. In addition to reported cases, descriptions of the alleged phen ...
in literature (Ch. 48).
References
Sources
* Blum, Hester (2011)
"Melville and the novel of the sea." ''The Cambridge History of the American Novel''. Eds. Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
* Matthiessen, F.O. (1941). ''American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman''. London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Further reading
*
*
*
*
External links
* Entry for ''Redburn''
Melville.org
*
*
{{Authority control
1849 American novels
Novels by Herman Melville
Novels set in Liverpool
Nautical novels