Development & Publication History
The first known allusion to Redburn appeared in a letter to Melville's English publisher, in the late spring of 1849, in which he stated the novel would be practical rather than follow the "unwise" course of his heavily-criticised previous novel, Mardi.
| “ | I have now in preparation a thing of a widely different cast from "Mardi":—a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience—the son of a gentleman on his first voyage to sea as a sailor—no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale. I have shifted my ground from the South Seas to a different quarter of the globe—nearer home—and what I write I have almost wholly picked up by my own observations under comical circumstances. | ” |
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—Letter to Richard Bentley, June 5, 1849 |
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This more commercial approach to writing came as Melville's working conditions worsened and his family obligations increased. Now living with him in the small house in New York city were his wife, child, mother, sisters, and his brother Allen with his wife and child. Melville later portrayed himself at this time as being forced to write "with duns all around him, & looking over the back of his chair—& perching on his pen & diving in his inkstand—like the devils about St. Anthony."
The book is a fictional narrative based loosely on Melville's own first voyage to Liverpool in 1839. The manuscript was completed in less than ten weeks and, without any attempt at polish, was submitted to his American publisher Harper & Bros who published it in November 1849. The proof sheets, which came out in August, were checked by the author and sent along to Bentley for publication in England. The book actually appeared there six weeks before the American version. In 1922 it was published as a volume of the Constable edition of Melville's complete works. Since then it has been continuously in print in inexpensive hard cover editions and after 1957 in paperback.
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