Paradise Lost and Found

; or, who put Milton on the title page of The Whale?

I was recently double-checking the precise name of Melville’s publisher in London, making sure the name at the time was simply “Richard Bentley” and not, as it would later become, “Richard Bentley & Son.” In the process, I came across an auction for a first edition of Moby-Dick (under its original title, The Whale), a three-volume set selling for a mere $215,000.

What caught my eye, however, wasn’t the price but the images of each volume’s title page, which along with the title, author, previous works, etc. included an excerpt from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Here’s the text of the quote so you don’t have to squint:

“There Leviathan,

Hugest of living creatures, in the deep

Stretch’d like a promontory sleeps or swims,

And seems a moving land ; and at his gills

Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.”

Compare the above to the title page of the American edition published a month later:

The American edition of course had to fit more information in the same amount of space (i.e., two titles and two publishers) but that isn’t the whole story of how the Milton quote went missing. And as I learned, its erasure actually provides a key piece of evidence in reconstructing the book’s publishing timeline.

Bentley famously published The Whale without the Epilogue chapter, where Ishmael reveals that he was miraculously saved from drowning by the sudden appearance of Queequeg’s coffin, which the carpenter had recently turned into a life-buoy. English readers thus felt misled into thinking that Ishmael had apparently been dead the whole time and, understandably, thought it cheapened the book as a whole. One early review from the London Spectator, published October 25, 1851, specifically called Melville out for violating this unspoken “rule”:

It is a canon with some critics that nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish.

Mr. Melville hardly steers clear of this rule…. His catastrophe overrides all rule: not only is Ahab, with his boat's-crew, destroyed in his last desperate attack upon the white whale, but the Pequod herself sinks with all on board into the depths of the illimitable ocean.

Only slightly less damaging to the integrity of the novel, Bentley also published the Etymology and Extracts chapters at the end of the book, listed as an “Appendix,” rather than at the front as in the American edition. One theory about how this came to be is that perhaps these chapters were a last-minute addition and Melville shipped them to Bentley too late in the printing process. This version of events gives Bentley the benefit of the doubt that it was out of his control and that he wouldn’t make such a major alteration to the book against Melville’s wishes — even though he did exactly that in myriad places, changing words and phrases deemed objectionable on religious or moral grounds. For example, the sky-hawk that Tashtego nails to the mast in the last moments before the Pequod sinks lets out not “archangelic shrieks” but “unearthly shrieks;” and when Ahab first appears on deck in Chapter 28 he’s described in the American version as having “a crucifixion in his face,” altered by Bentley to “an apparently eternal anguish.”

The editors of the Northwestern-Newberry (NN) edition, which attempted to hammer out all of the discrepancies between the American and English editions, found even more reasons to discount this sequence of events. For one, there are more than a dozen identical errors in Extracts in both versions, suggesting that what Bentley received were page proofs, already set with corresponding page numbers, and not a manuscript which would have left room for some judgment in determining where the pages should go.

Instead, the NN editors suggest that the decision may have reflected Bentley’s judgment “that they [Etymology and Extracts] were somehow inappropriate for the opening pages of a novel, and would adversely affect its sales and reception.” The Paradise Lost epigraph is submitted as evidence that Bentley may have seen the move as a compromise:

The epigraph from Paradise Lost that appears on each of the three Bentley title pages but not on the Harper title page may offer some related evidence. One might at first think of its presence as supporting the idea that the extracts were a late addition… that this one extract was all that Melville originally intended…. The trouble with this theory is that Bentley probably had no title-page proofs to follow in the first place; and it is likely that an added section of extracts would have been accompanied by instructions to remove the single quotation. Unless Melville provided Bentley with a manuscript title page that contained the lines from Milton (along with "The Whale" as title), one must presume that Bentley selected that passage from among the extracts and placed it on the title page as a gesture (like the subtitle) toward meeting Melville's wishes, when he knew that he was not fully complying with them. It is difficult, in other words, to explain the position of the extracts and the presence of the epigraph simply by holding that the "Extracts" were a late addition…. All that can be said is that the American title page as published, without the epigraph, probably represents Melville's final decision, since it must have been set after the proofs went abroad.

I admit this is pretty in the weeds, but I was amazed that, as ever, a small detail that I had never noticed before turned out to play a significant role in understanding Melville’s last-minute revisions and final intentions for the book, down to what he wanted to name it.

All that said, it’s hard to blame Bentley for thinking that beginning a three-volume epic about the American whaling industry with 15 pages of quotes might not be the best way to revive Melville’s rapidly-dwindling writing career. At least one critic agreed, writing in November 1851 that the effect was like being served a bowlful of condiments instead of being “scientifically administered sauce-wise.”

Mr. Melville has crowded together in a few prefatory pages a large collection of brief and pithy extracts from authors innumerable, such as one might expect as headings for chapters. We do not like the innovation. It is having oil, mustard, vinegar, and pepper served up as a dish, in place of being scientifically administered sauce-wise.

Further Into the Deep

A few last oddities about the title page:

1. You might have noticed that both the American and English editions swapped Redburn and Mardi chronologically. Although both were published in 1849, Mardi appeared first in March, followed by Redburn in August. Presumably this was done because Redburn had been slightly more successful of the two, though Melville ultimately earned less money for it.

2. Extracts also contains a second quote from Paradise Lost which is of note in that it provided the title for Millard Webb’s 1926 silent film adaptation, The Sea Beast. The film, starring John Barrymore, takes many liberties with the plot but it’s a bit of a head-scratcher that Webb decided to name the film after a phrase from Paradise Lost, and not one from the book. Lloyd Bacon, who directed the 1930 remake also starring Barrymore, opted instead to go with “Moby Dick.”

3. The Paradise Lost quote on the original English title page is actually not exactly what Milton wrote. The word “in” on the second line should be “on,” and the word “breath” on the fifth line should be “trunk.” That is, it should read:

There leviathan,

Hugest of living creatures, on the deep

Stretch’d like a promontory sleeps or swims,

And seems a moving land; and at his gills

Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out a sea.

As the Northwestern-Newbury edition of Moby-Dick points out, this error doesn’t appear in Melville’s copy of Paradise Lost, part of an 1836 edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton. (In fact, thanks to the Melville’s Marginalia Online project, we can even look at the page in his personal copy of the book, though sadly there’s no annotation on the page.)

Nor is the error found in Henry T. Cheever’s The Whale and His Captors, which also quotes this passage and may have been Melville’s source for it. Barring any other explanation, the Northwestern-Newbury editors conclude that the changes were probably just errors in transcription due to Melville’s illegible handwriting. Here, for example, is an annotation he wrote earlier in Paradise Lost, which allegedly reads: "The Italian prints he saw in Rome.”