SOURCE: “The Impressments of Billy Budd,” in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 39, No. 3, Autumn, 1998, pp. 361–84.

In the following essay, Westover delineates the ways in which impressment functions as the governing trope of Billy Budd.

Voltaire relates a tour of the Thames he made with an Englishman who bragged that “he would rather be a modest boatman on the Thames than an archbishop in France.” On the following day the famous writer was surprised to find the man “in heavy chains, bitterly complaining of the abominable government that took him by force from his wife and children to serve on the King's ship in Norway.” Voltaire records his sympathy for the man, but impishly adds: “A Frenchman, who was with me, admitted to me that he felt a malicious pleasure in seeing that the English, who reproached us so loudly for our servitude, were just as much slaves as we...