ABSTRACT
Herman Melville's (1819-1891) <lnk targetID="A16518936014">Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)</lnk> was his fourth novel after Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Mardi (1849), as well as forerunner of classic Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851). Redburn is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction, a sea-borne bildungsroman, that recounts the adventures of a middle class youth who takes to the sea with coarse sailors on a voyage from New York to Liverpool and back. Like his protagonist Wellingborough Redburn in the novel, Melville himself was born into a genteel New England family that suffered a series of economic setbacks until his father went bankrupt. Also like Redburn, Melville himself also took to sea on the St Lawrence in 1839, when he was aged 20, the experience of which he revisited in his fictional works. Although Melville did not sail on the Highlander, he did encounter Famine Irish emigrants while returning by canal boat from his honeymoon in Quebec in mid-August 1847. According to his new bride. Elizabeth Shaw, 'Herman preferred to remain on deck all night to being in the crowd', 1 an experience which helped to furnish the aloof self-image for his protagonist in Redburn 2
