Redburn: His First Voyage:
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... [D]esirous though we are to praise, we are compelled to admit
that, in Redburn, Mr. Melville comes not up to the mark
he himself has made. It is evident that, on his debut, he threw
off the rich cream of his experiences, and he must not marvel if
readers have thereby been rendered dainty, and grumble a little
when served with the skim-milk. Redburn is a clever
book, as books now go, and we are far from visiting it with
wholesale condemnation; but it certainly lacks the spontaneous
flow and racy originality of the author's South Sea
narration....
... We can assure Mr. Melville he is most
effective when most simple and unpretending; and if he will put
away affectation and curb the eccentricities of his fancy, we see
no reason for his not becoming a very agreeable writer of
nautical fictions. He will never have the power of a Cringle, or
the sustained humour and vivacity of a Marryat, but he may do
very well without aspiring to rival the masters of the art.
--Frederick Hardman, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,
November 1849
It gives us pleasure to be able to praise this book, for we feared that the author had exhausted his vein, and that he might follow up his Mardi with others of similar sort, to disgust rather than to amuse the public.... The book is intensely interesting, and yet is reared on a basis apparently insufficient.... But the great charm of the work is its realness. It seems to be fact word for word, bating a little that is melo-dramatic and exaggerated in the hero, at the outset. With this exception, the tale is told simply and without the least pretension; and yet, within its narrow bounds, are flashes of genuine humor, strokes of pure pathos, and real and original characters. --Charles Gordon Greene, in Boston Post, November 20, 1849
Ships, the sea, and those that plough it, with their belongings on shore -- these subjects are identified with Herman Melville's name; for he has most unquestionably made them his own. No writer, not even Marryat himself, has observed them more closely, or pictured them more impressively. Indeed, in one respect, Melville, to our thinking, has shown more talent than many of his predecessors in telling tales of the sea. They have generally chosen the picturesque side of nautical life. He often selects those views of it which, apart from his clever treatment, would be uninteresting, if not repulsive. --William Young, in New York Albion, November 24 1849
The present work, though it hardly has the intellectual merit of Mardi, is less adventurous in style, and more interesting. It can be read through at one sitting, with continued delight, and we see no reason why it should not be one of the most popular of all the books relating to the romance of the sea. The fact that it narrates the adventures of a "green hand," will make it invaluable to a large class of youthful sailors. The style sparkles with wit and fancy, but its great merit is a rapidity of movement, which bears the reader along, almost by main force from the commencement to the conclusion of the volume. --Philadelphia Graham's Magazine, January 1850
Many of the notices of Redburn that we have seen, speak of him as a second De Foe, but there is hardly an English writer he so little resembles as the author of Robinson Crusoe. The charm of De Foe is his simplicity of style, and artistic accuracy of description; the author of Redburn on the contrary is, at times, ambitiously gorgeous in style, and at others coarse and abrupt in his simplicity. But his style is always copious, free and transparent. His chief defect is an ambitious desire to appear fine and learned which causes him to drag in by the head and shoulders remote images that ought not to be within a thousand miles of the reader's thoughts. --Charles F. Briggs, in New York Holden's Dollar Magazine, January 1850
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