SOURCE: McCarthy, Harold T. “Melville's Redburn and the City.” Midwest Quarterly 12, no. 4 (summer 1971): 395-410.

In the following essay, McCarthy examines Melville's treatment of Liverpool, London, and New York as centers of Anglo-American culture founded on private property, class difference, and social malaise.

Melville wrote Redburn, he recorded in the journal of his visit to London, “to buy some tobacco with.” The early chapters of the novel make plain what he had in mind. It was to be, as the sub-title suggests, a semi-comic adventure story of a gentleman's son serving before the mast, a formula familiar to readers of the day, and in substance it was to be loosely related to Melville's first sea voyage. Before the Highlander reached its destination, however, Melville's personal commitment to his moral experience broke through the stock formula he had intended; Redburn's voice deepened, the character Jackson was introduced, and Liverpool was...