The Amazing Internet

In 1935, George Bernard Shaw remarked that thanks to the radio, he could hear more good music in a week than he could have heard "in ten years, if at all," back in the 1880s when he was writing music criticism in London.  Shaw's startling demonstration of the cultural impact of technology often recurs when I think about everything the Internet makes available today.

As recently as twenty years ago, you would have had to turn to the best university libraries if you wanted to consult the enormous mass of printed material you can now read, wherever you are (just about), with a few keyboard taps.  Earlier this week, while rereading the selection in the Norton Critical Edition 2nd from a 1992 paper by Geoffrey Sanborn, I wanted to take a look at the 1823 review essay by Sir Francis Palgrave, "Superstition and Knowledge," that Sanborn shows was one of the minor tributaries feeding into Melville's mind as he toiled over Moby-Dick.  After two or three minutes of searching, I found the very thing, starting at page 245 of this collection of Palgrave's writings.  Not only was it fast; I could save it as a searchable PDF for future reference.  And no scrounging for coins to feed into a smelly library copying machine.

I well remember how excited I was, in the early 1990s, to learn that the nearest state university library had a full set of Robert Southey's The Doctor, which is often mentioned as a possible inspiration (in form) for Moby-Dick.  But now Southey's work is at my fingertips, at any time and from time to time.

And just take a look at this, courtesy of Harvard and Mr. Google.  O brave new world, that has such resources in 't!

Google's Homage

Today's background image at google.com

Google today remembers the publication of M-D (in London, 161 years ago) with the above background image on its search page.

Another hat-tip to brother #3, T. (I've abandoned Google for duckduckgo.com!)

Melville is the one that should keep novelists up at night

A segment in last Friday's broadcast of On the Media (20 Apr 12) caught my ear. In it, writer Tom Bissell recounts how "random events can rule the destinies of the greatest works of art."

The works of Franz Kafka, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and our Herman might have been forgotten, even lost, but for something as arbitrary as a particular person wandering into a used book store.

Melville is the one that I think should keep novelists up at night.

Bissell tells how Moby-Dick was "a resounding un-success" when first published, selling "three thousand copies over its thrity-six years in print." (Does that count sales in England?) By the turn of the 20th Century it was unpublished and unread. Sometime in the early 1900's, "according to the legend," critic Carl Van Doren found a copy of M-D in a used book store, recognized it as a masterwork, and wrote about it. A Melville renaissance followed — his books were brought back into print and have stayed in print since.

The essay that started it all was gathered into Van Doren's study, The American Novel, published in 1921, with a second edition in 1940. Copyright on the 1921 edition has expired; you can find it online.

If you're interested in the current state of the publishing business as it confronts e-readers, copyright extensions, Amazon's under-pricing, and knock-off books (such as "I Am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," not by Stieg Larsson), listen to the entire program.

Today in History

This date in 1851 was the official publication date of Moby-Dick in the U.S. (It had been published in England on October 18, as The Whale.)

Today in History

160 years ago today, Moby-Dick was first publicly available.

Richard Bentley

On October 18, 1851 The Whale (as it was then titled) was published in London by Richard Bentley—500 sets of three octavo volumes.

According to A Note on the Text in my venerable Penguin paperback, Melville's agreement with Bentley was that "the English edition was to appear at least a fortnight before the American." Melville would receive £150 on delivery of the manuscript as an advance of 50% share of the profits. (Using the "pounds" version of Lemuel's "purchasing power calculator," that's equivalent to a wage today of £116,000, or $183,103.)

The text was heavily edited to remove "dubious sexual, or political, or religious overtones" (Penguin). Chapter 25 was entirely missing. Most confusing to critical readers was the absence of the Epilogue—if everyone perished at the end, then who's telling the story?

Contrary to prevailing myth, the initial reviews were not uniformly scathing. They ranged from "...a most extraordinary work..." to "...wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic..." This collection of contemporaneous reviews is worth reading.

The American edition was published by Harper & Brothers, New York, "probably on November 14, 1851" (Hershel Parker). The title on this edition was changed to Moby-Dick. It was published as a single volume in a run of 2,915 copies.

Thus the novel was typeset twice, which resulted in two versions of the text (the English version unsympathetically edited to boot). The dedicated sleuthing of Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, later with G. Thomas Tanselle, rationalized the differences in the two versions to determine "as nearly as possible the author's intentions." The result was the Norton Critical Edition (1967), followed by the Northwestern-Newberry edition (1988).

The logic whereby Hayford and Parker untangled the M-D knot is for another post. Of course, not everyone agrees with their editorial choices, so the search for Melville's "intentions" continues (see the Longman Critical Edition). Some publishers skirt the issue entirely by simply selling (error-ridden) public-domain versions.