Bedlamite: The Whale

From London Athenaeum, 25 October 1851

This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed …

… The result is, at all events, a most provoking book,—neither so utterly extravagant as to be entirely comfortable, nor so instructively complete as to take place among documents on the subject of the Great Fish, his capabilities, his home and his capture. Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise …

We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book … Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature—since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.

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Herman Melville’s The Whale was first issued in three volumes by Richard Bentley, London (18 October 1851). Bentley’s expurgated edition notably omitted the epilogue, leaving Ishmael’s survival unexplained. The American edition was issued in a single volume by Harper & Brothers, New York (14 November 1851), bearing Melville’s full intended title: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.