Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) - Herman Melville

This meetup is hosted by Wisdom and Woe. For more details and to RSVP, please go to to: Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)

The manuscript of Billy Budd was left incomplete when Herman Melville died in 1891, lending prescience to the declaration (from Moby-Dick, chapter 25) that "if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling."

But Billy Budd's glory derives not only from Melville's first-hand experience at sea, but also from the Somers mutiny of 1842 and eighteenth-century British naval law. The novella's subtitle--"an inside narrative"--obliquely links it to his cousin Gansevoort, who had been aboard the U.S. Brig Somers when the mutiny occurred. (Another interpretation links it to Melville's father-in-law, chief justice Lemuel Shaw, for his role in enforcing the notorious Fugitive Slave Act.)

The story is retrospectively set in 1797, with Britain at war against Revolutionary France, following a spate of mutinies that threatened its Maritime front. Enter Billy Budd, "the handsome sailor"--Melville's presumptive answer to the dandy--whose moral innocence portends an equally subversive counter-revolution.

Billy Budd is a classic in the fields of law and literature. In the words of Robert L. Gale: "The rich, imagistic, and allusive style of Billy Budd has intrigued readers, but it is the psychological nature of the three principle characters that has challenged the critics. In what ways is Billy Budd a Christ figure? What does his stammer symbolize? To what degree is Captain Vere an admirable naval officer and father figure? What is his motivation? Is Claggart an unmitigated Satan? Is Billy Budd to be read as Melville's testament of faith or as an ironic document concerning fallen humanity?"

Wisdom and Woe is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."