Redburn

"Redburn: His First Voyage" [The full title is "Redburn: His First Voyage: Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service." See the Library of America edition edited by George Thomas Tanselle. ISBN 0-940450-09-7] is a novel by Herman Melville published on September 29, 1849, by Richard Bentley in London and on November 14, 1849, by Harper & Brothers in New York City.

Overview

The author returned to the tone of his first novels, "Typee" (1846) and "Omoo" (1847). "Redburn" is a semi-autobiographical novel concerning the sufferings of a refined youth among coarse and brutal sailors and the seedier areas of Liverpool. This theme of a youth confronted by realities and evils for which he is unprepared—or incorrectly prepared by both family and American institutions—is a prominent one in Melville's works.Fact|date=May 2007

While not generally considered as profound as Melville's later works, the most notable being "Moby-Dick," the novel can be viewed as a precursor to later, more complex works of fiction. For example, many of "Redburn's" themes are echoed in "Moby-Dick," and some of "Redburn's" characters are forerunners of those in Melville's most epic novel (e.g., Jackson is a precursor of Captain Ahab).

With "Redburn," Melville was hastily trying to return to a more commercial format after having taken a critical and commercial drubbing with his allegorical novel "Mardi," which had been published earlier in the year. Melville leaves behind the complex structures in "Mardi," a book that never quite gelled, for a more straightforward and travelogue-like narrative in the traditions of his earliest work. The novel does, however, display some of the more experimental tendencies that made "Moby-Dick" so popular after Melville's death, and begins to incorporate much of the symbolism that separates his earlier work from later, denser novels such as "." Melville also takes the opportunity in "Redburn" to make a number of social criticisms, perhaps most prominent among them both explicit and implicit attacks on the evils of drink. Oddly enough, "Redburn" also contains one of the notable examples of spontaneous combustion in literature, along with Charles Dickens' "Bleak House."

Publication history

"Redburn" was published in the United States in November 1849. Melville referred to it and his next book "White-Jacket" 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. ISBN 0-375-40314-0] After it was praised, Melville felt guilt and wrote in his journal, "I, the author, know [it] to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with".

References