Found on the wonderful British Newspaper Archive with images newly available in June 2025, an early notice of The Whale in the London Weekly Times & Echo for Sunday, November 2, 1851. This item is not collected in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). I will add it now to my inventory of 1851-1852 reviews of Moby Dick; or The Whale, here:
From the London Weekly Times & Echo (2 November 1851):
THE WHALE. By Herman Melville, Author of "Typee," "Omoo," "Redburn," &c. 3 Vols. London: Bentley, New Burlington street.
Mr. Herman Melville stands alone in his peculiar celebrity, that of enabling the public to obtain glimpses of the private life and confidential transactions of seamen and their companions. In the volumes before us he gives evidence of having enjoyed most favourable opportunities of studying the personal characters of harpooners, mates, and sailors generally, and of becoming acquainted with the struggles, adventures, and experiences attendant upon whaling expeditions. "The Whale" is a book in which there is a great deal of romance mixed up with real sketches of life and manners. The captain of a ship that starts from Nantucket for the South Seas to catch the whale undertakes the voyage for the sole purpose of making the chase of the white whale, which, we are told, can neither be captured nor hurt, as the harpoon will not wound it, and which possesses extraordinary strength and cunning. The catastrophe of this daring adventure is that the ship is attacked by the white whale, and sinks with all on board. The early chapters, though containing but little adventure, are by far the best, and relate to topics that are, for the most part, fresh to English readers. Mr. Herman Melville there appears in his strongest point--sketching of character; and we cannot resist the temptation of laying before our readers one of his broad pictures of
LIFE IN AMERICAN SEAPORTS.
[Excerpted from Chapter 3, The Spouter-Inn in the British edition, titled The Whale]
Entering that gable-ended "Spouter Inn" you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry, with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. * * * * * Upon entering the place, I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.” * * “I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be ready directly.” — I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought. At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings. Good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner. — "My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead certainty.” — "Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?” — "Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny; “the harpooner is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and likes ’em rare.”
* * Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.” — A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the bar—when the little wrinkled old fellow there officiating soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which the fellow mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island. The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously.
The "little wrinkled old fellow" tending bar in the London Weekly Times & Echo version above (printed "wrinkled little old fellow" in The Whale) is a "wrinkled little old Jonah" in the 1851 American edition of Moby-Dick. A longer excerpt from Chapter 3 "The Spouter Inn," correctly giving "wrinkled little old fellow" from the British edition, had appeared with the generally negative review of The Whale in the London Athenaeum on October 25, 1851.
Related post
- Moby-Dick widely praised in 1851-2
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html
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