Charles Reade's copy survives into the 21st century, as Hershel Parker verifies in his essay on "Melville's British Admirers," available in the
Third Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, pages 646-662.
The 1915 item described below is an early witness of its existence, before Michael Sadleir footnoted it in the "Herman Melville" chapter of
Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (London, 1922):
* There is in existence the copy of Moby Dick in which Reade made extensive notes and excisions, maybe with the idea of issuing an abbreviated version. Readers of Love Me Little, Love Me Long will immediately detect the influence of Melville's great book on the whaling narrative related by Frank Dodd to Mr. Fountain and to his lovely niece.
< https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/t5w671z2w?urlappend=%3Bseq=230>
Trying to track down Charles Reade's copy of
Moby-Dick in the 1930's, John Howard Birss wrote Sadleir who told him
"it must have been fifteen years ago when he saw the book, 'three volumes in one, and bound in scarlet cloth, in a little shop kept by Everard Meynell off Piccadilly, which shop shortly disappeared for its owner went to California and there died.' " -- Notes and Queries Volume 173, November 27, 1937, page 390.
Everard Meynell (1882-1926) was a son of Alice and Wilfred Meynell. Viola Meynell (who in 1920 wrote on "Herman Melville" for
The Dublin Review and then introduced the influential Oxford
Worlds Classics edition of
Moby-Dick) was his sister. Everard's place was The Serendipity Shop, a "charming little book snugery" as Edward Storer called it, reviewing "literary book-shops" in a 1916 "London Letter" for
Bruno's Weekly. Originally located on Museum Street near the British Museum, the Serendipity Shop relocated to 7 East Chapel Street in Mayfair--which is where Michael Sadleir saw Reade's copy of
The Whale (as
Moby-Dick was titled in the first British edition). Off Piccadilly, as you can see in this wonderful map by MacDonald Gill, available today from
Blackwell's Rare Books.
Before Everard Meynell had it in his Serendipity Shop, Reade's
Whale was in the possession of Charles Garvice (1850-1920), the popular romance novelist. During the First World War, Garvice gave it to the British Red Cross Society, to be sold at auction with a dazzling inventory of donated art works. Reade's
Whale was included in the
Red Cross Sale of rare books conducted by Christie's on Tuesday, April 27, 1915. From the
Catalogue of the collection of works of art presented to the British Red Cross Society and the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in England:
Presented by Charles Garvice, Esq.
1740 Melville (Herman) The Whale, FIRST EDITION, 3 vol. in
1, with 2 Autograph Signatures of CHARLES READE, and
numerous MS. alterations, apparently for a new edition 1853
Accessible online courtesy of
HathiTrust Digital Library:
<https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101073996355?urlappend=%3Bseq=332>
As Parker states, "Reade had marked up the 1853 Bentley issue, three volumes bound as one" ("Melville's British Admirers" in
Moby-Dick, 3rd Norton Critical Edition page 652).
For the same 1915 auction, Alice Meynell donated an autographed copy of her
Collected Poems, and the original autograph manuscript of "Any Saint" by
Francis Thompson.
The project of abridgement inferred by Sadleir has been confirmed in Emerson Grant Sutcliffe's work on
Charles Reade's Notebooks,
Studies in Philology Vol. 27, No. 1 (January 1930), pages 64-109 at 77-78.
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/4172053>
As reported by Sutcliffe, Reade's 1858-9 "Digest" lists numerous "literary projects" including a collection of "Good Stories, or corpus fictorum" starting with
"1. Leviathan." Reade thought such tales "Might use 1st my power of discerning the immortal element" and 2nd,
"my knowledge of what is to be done by excision." As Sutcliffe also observes,
"Data in the other notebooks show that Leviathan is Moby Dick, and that Reade had some thoughts of using some part of it in a whaling story, "fabula cetacea."
Elsewhere in the notebooks, the whale story exemplifies "
Reade's abridgments. [This is struck out.] Sharp novels or some such general title. Fabula cetacea." These particular notes are discussed in more detail by Thomas Mallon in
Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), pages 79-80. Mallon observes that "at some point Reade abandoned this plan" of transparent abridgments, "in favor of simple theft." Here Mallon refers most directly to Reade's
plagiarism of Mlle. de Malepierre by Madame Charles Reybaud (Henriette Étiennette Fanny Reybaud) in
The Picture, first published in
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, March–April 1884.
For a specific instance of Reade's use of Melville in David Dodd's whaling narrative (David not Frank Dodd, as Sadleir misnamed the young sailor-hero), one might compare Dodd's ambergris yarn with the adventure of Stubb in chapter 91 of
Moby-Dick,
The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud, followed in the next chapter by Ishmael's riff on
Ambergris. For a start, here's the rewrite by Charles Reade from
Love Me Little, Love Me Long Vol. 1 (London, 1859), pages 82-4):
... Then David told them how he had fallen in with a sperm
whale, dead of disease, floating as high as a frigate; how,
with a very light breeze, the skipper had crept down toward
her; how, at half a mile distance, the stench of her was
severe, but, as they neared her, awful—then so intolerable
that the skipper gave the crew leave to go below and close
the lee ports. So there were but two men left on the brig's
deck, and a ship's company that a hurricane would not have
driven from their duty sculked before a foul smell; but such
a smell—a smell that struck a chill and a loathing to the
heart, and soul, and marrow-bone; a smell like the gases
in a foul mine: 'it would have suffocated us in a few moments if we had been shut up along with it.' Then he told
how the skipper and he stuffed their noses and ears with
cotton steeped in aromatic vinegar, and their mouths with
pig-tail (by which, as it subsequently appeared, Lucy understood pork or bacon in some form unknown to her narrow
experience), and lighted short pipes, and breached the brig
upon the putrescent monster, and grappled to it, and then
the skipper jumped on it, a basket slung to his back, and a
rope fast under his shoulders in case of accident, and drove
his spade in behind the whale's side-fin.
'His spade, Mr. Dodd?'
'His whale-spade; it is as sharp as a razor;' and how
the skipper dug a hole in the whale as big as a well and
four feet deep, and, after a long search, gave a shout of triumph, and picked out some stuff that looked like Gloucester cheese; and when he had nearly filled his basket with
this stuff, he slacked the grappling-iron, and David hauled
him on board, and the carcass dropped astern, and the captain sang out for rum, and drank a small tumbler neat, and
would have fainted away, spite of his precautions, but for
the rum, and how a heavenly perfume was now on deck
fighting with that horrid odor. And how the crew smelt
it, and crept timidly up one by one, and how 'the Gloster cheese was a great favorite of yours, ladies: it was the king
of perfumes: ambergris: there is some of it in all your richest scents; and the knowing skipper had made a hundred
guineas in the turn of the hand. So knowledge is wealth,
you see, and the sweet can be got out of the sour by such
as study nature.'
'Don't preach, David, especially after just telling a fib
— a hundred guineas!!'
'I am wrong," said David. '
'Very wrong, indeed.'
'There were eight pounds; and he sold it at a guinea
the ounce to a wholesale chemist, so that looks to me like
128 l.'
Then David left the whales, and encouraged by bright
eyes, and winning smiles, and warm questions, sang higher
strains.
