A whaling epic that flopped on arrival turns 175 today. On November 14, 1851, Harper & Brothers released Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in New York, a single volume of 635 pages with a first printing of just 2,915 copies. Herman Melville, already almost $700 in debt to his publisher, was and about to watch the book that now opens with literature’s most famous three words sink almost without trace.
Those words are exactly as Melville printed them in the first American edition: “Call me Ishmael.” The same opening paragraph, read today in the 1851 US text, has a line that suits the anniversary even better. Ishmael says he heads for the ocean “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.”
London got it first, under a different name
The New York release was not the first. Melville had sold the British rights to Richard Bentley, who brought the novel out in London on October 18, 1851, as three volumes titled simply The Whale. Bentley printed only 500 copies, because Melville’s previous books had sold slowly in Britain.
The hyphenated title Moby-Dick was a last-minute change made for the American edition. Inside the book, in both countries, the whale himself is written as “Moby Dick” with no hyphen, a quirk that still trips up quiz writers.
The two editions differ in more than the title. Bentley’s revisers cut or softened passages they considered offensive, and the British version leaves out the Epilogue entirely. That means London readers never learned how Ishmael survives to tell the story. In total the British text varies from the American one in more than 700 wordings, plus thousands of changes to spelling and punctuation.
Written in a Berkshires farmhouse
Melville started the book in February 1850 and needed about 18 months, a year longer than planned. Most of the writing happened during the winter of 1850-1851 at Arrowhead, his farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In August 1850 he met Nathaniel Hawthorne at a picnic, and the friendship left a mark: the novel is dedicated to Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius.”
Harper refused him an advance, so Melville borrowed money and paid for the typesetting and plates himself. He told Hawthorne he was in New York to “work and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press.”
From failure to Great American Novel
Reviews were mixed and sales were poor. By the time Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dick was out of print. Its reputation only took off after the 1919 centenary of his birth, when critics and novelists rediscovered it. William Faulkner later said he wished he had written it, and D. H. Lawrence called it “the greatest book of the sea ever written.”
Melville’s raw material was real. He sailed as a common seaman from 1841 to 1844, including on whalers, and the white whale is modeled on a famously elusive sperm whale. Readers who want a modern dose of whale strangeness can compare the novel with the day Oregon blew up a beached sperm whale with dynamite in 1970.
Moby-Dick at 175, by the numbers
- October 18, 1851: The Whale published in London, 3 volumes, 500 copies.
- November 14, 1851: Moby-Dick published in New York, 1 volume, 635 pages, 2,915 copies.
- 1891: Melville dies with the book out of print.
- 1919: The centenary of his birth sparks the revival.
- November 14, 2026: 175 years since American readers first met Ishmael.
Put another way, the London edition gave British buyers one copy for roughly every six that Harper printed for the American market, and those British readers got a book with a different title and no ending. Early printings now rank among the prized trophies of literary collecting, much like the 1937 Hobbit first edition found in a Bristol house clearance.
The story of a famous text drifting away from its author’s version is a familiar one in our look at how Frankenstein’s “It lives” came from an 1823 stage play. For Moby-Dick, the fix is simple: the 1851 American edition, Epilogue included, is free to read on Wikisource, starting with chapter 1, “Loomings.”
Further reading
Image: Elisa.rolle, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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