SOURCE: “Billy Budd: Reclaimed by the Nineteenth Century,” in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 9, 1984, pp. 43–59.

In the following essay, Cheikin examines Billy Budd from a nineteenth-century perspective, taking into account the literary, cultural, and political circumstances of the time.

A writer writes and a reader reads at a particular moment in history. With the best intentions to avoid the confines of the calendar, it is difficult to grasp concepts that are alien to our own era, that are dissonant with our own attitudes and ideas. This problem is even more crucial when the work at hand has been written in one century and published in the next. Billy Budd presents such a problem.

Herman Melville's classic tale, left in a “semi-final draft”¹ in the year of his death, 1891, was not published until 1924. While the work has stirred much interest and extensive commentary, its admirers have been...