How Moby-Dick Was Really Received in 1851
37 contemporary reviews from British and American newspapers, plus the 1920s revival that made it a masterpiece
The story you’ve heard is wrong.
Every English teacher, every literary history, every public-domain introduction repeats the same claim: Moby-Dick was a critical and commercial failure. The critics hated it, nobody bought it, and Melville died in obscurity.
Like most stories that get repeated often enough, it contains a grain of truth wrapped in a mountain of exaggeration.
The reality: Moby-Dick was reviewed at least 125 times in 1851–1852 by newspapers and magazines in Britain and America. According to the definitive census by Melvilliana, 67% were favorable, 19% mixed, and only 14% were negative. The vicious reviews — the ones that get quoted in every textbook — were a vocal minority.
What follows is the most comprehensive collection of original Moby-Dick reviews ever assembled on a single page. We’ve drawn from the original newspapers — the London Athenaeum, the New York Tribune, the Washington National Intelligencer, the Boston Morning Journal, and dozens more — to show you what readers actually read when Melville’s great whale first breached.
The myth vs. the facts: The legend of Moby-Dick as a “failure” comes from three things: (1) a handful of hostile British reviews that were reprinted in America, (2) Melville’s own depressed account of the book’s reception, and (3) the genuine obscurity of his later career, after he stopped writing novels entirely. The contemporary reviews tell a very different story.
🇬🇧 The British Reception
Moby-Dick was published in London on October 18, 1851 as The Whale, in a three-volume edition by Richard Bentley. British reviewers were the first to weigh in — and they were sharply divided.
Favorable
Mixed
Hostile
Note on the hostile reviews: The Athenaeum and Spectator reviews were the most damaging because they were the only negative British reviews widely reprinted in America. American readers saw these two attacks — and rarely saw the dozens of positive reviews that had appeared in other London papers. This selective reprinting created the false impression of universal failure.
🇺🇸 The American Reception
Moby-Dick was published in America on November 14, 1851, by Harper & Brothers. American reviewers were overwhelmingly favorable. Melville was already a celebrated author from Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), and his reputation carried Moby-Dick to a respectful, often admiring, audience.
Favorable
Mixed & Negative
📊 The Verdict at the Time
How Many Reviews? What Did They Say?
The definitive census (compiled by Melvilliana) counts 125 known reviews and notices of Moby-Dick published in 1851–1852:
| Sentiment | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Favorable 🟢 | 85 | 67% |
| Mixed 🟡 | 23 | 19% |
| Negative 🔴 | 17 | 14% |
Positive reviews outnumbered negative ones by a ratio of 5 to 1.
The idea that “the critics hated it” is a myth — one that was created by three factors:
- The hostile reviews were the most quotable. Chorley’s “Bedlam literature” line was too good not to repeat. It has been quoted in every biography since.
- Negative British reviews were selectively reprinted in America. American readers saw the Athenaeum and Spectator attacks, but rarely saw the John Bull, Morning Advertiser, or Daily News praise.
- Melville himself believed his career was failing. His letters from 1851–1852 are filled with disappointment — not because of the reviews, but because of the sales.
The Sales Reality
Moby-Dick sold approximately 3,200 copies in its first year in America — fewer than Typee (6,700) or Omoo, but still a respectable number for a $1.50 novel in 1851. In Britain, the three-volume edition at 31s.6d. sold roughly 500 copies.
The book did not fail commercially. It failed relative to Melville’s earlier successes, which had been extraordinary. The real problem was that Melville’s subsequent novels — Pierre (1852), The Confidence-Man (1857) — were critical and commercial disasters that soured the market. By the 1860s, Melville’s books were out of print, and he had stopped writing fiction entirely.
🌑 The Long Eclipse
For the next sixty-five years, Moby-Dick was not forgotten — but it was quietly shelved.
Melville spent his final decades as a deputy inspector of customs at the New York docks, writing poetry that few read. When he died in 1891, his obituaries mentioned Typee and Omoo as his memorable works. The New York Times got his name wrong. The New York Press gave him a single sentence, referring to him as “Herman Melville, the author of Typee.”
There were flickers of interest. A few perceptive readers kept his name alive:
But these voices were isolated. The masterpiece was sleeping.
🔥 The Melville Revival (1919–1928)
In 1919, on the centenary of Melville’s birth, a young Columbia lecturer named Raymond Weaver was persuaded by his colleague Carl Van Doren to write an essay about Melville for The Nation. Weaver reluctantly accepted, assuming it would be “child’s play — a day’s job.”
What he discovered changed literary history.
The Revival Timeline
1917 — Carl Van Doren publishes a chapter on Melville in the Cambridge History of American Literature, calling for a re-evaluation.
August 1919 — Raymond Weaver’s centenary essay appears in The Nation, sparking a surge of interest.
1921 — Weaver publishes Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, the first book-length biography of Melville. It is a sensation.
1921 — Van Doren publishes The American Novel, devoting a full chapter to Melville and calling Moby-Dick “the nearest approach in American literature to a Shakespearean tragedy.”
1923 — D.H. Lawrence publishes Studies in Classic American Literature, devoting two chapters to Melville. Of Moby-Dick, Lawrence writes: “It is a surpassingly beautiful book.”
1924 — Weaver edits a sixteen-volume collected edition of Melville’s works for Constable & Co., finally making the full corpus available.
1925 — William Faulkner names Moby-Dick as one of the three greatest novels in English literature.
1927 — E.M. Forster gives his Clark Lectures at Cambridge (published as Aspects of the Novel), devoting substantial analysis to Moby-Dick.
1928 — Carl Van Doren writes: “Benito Cereno equals the best of Conrad in the weight of its drama and the skill of its unfolding.” The canonization is complete.
By 1930 — Moby-Dick is firmly established as one of the greatest American novels. It has never left the canon since.
D.H. Lawrence’s interpretation was particularly influential. Writing in the aftermath of World War I, Lawrence saw in Moby-Dick a prophetic critique of the obsessive, self-destructive will that had driven Europe to war:
📜 What the 1851 Reviews Reveal
Reading these original reviews — all 37 of them — tells us something important not just about Moby-Dick, but about how literary taste works.
The negative reviewers were not stupid. Chorley at the Athenaeum accurately identified Moby-Dick’s strangeness: its mixture of genres, its structural digressions, its defiance of novelistic convention. He saw exactly what the book was. He just didn’t like it.
The positive reviewers — particularly Welling at the National Intelligencer, Whipple at Graham’s Magazine, and the anonymous reviewer at John Bull — recognized the same strangeness and called it genius.
The difference was not in what they saw, but in what they valued. Moby-Dick was not ahead of its time. It was perfectly of its time — but its time was divided about what a novel should be.
The 1920s revival was not a “rediscovery” of a lost book. It was a re-evaluation of a book that had always had its champions. The modernists needed Moby-Dick — its formal daring, its symbolic density, its willingness to break rules — and they found it waiting for them.
📚 Browse the Complete Archive
All 36 reviews above are available as individual pages in the Moby-Dick Reviews Archive — browse them like a reader on Amazon or Goodreads, paginated for easy reading.
🐋 Experience the Novel That Divided the World
One hundred seventy-five years of debate. Thousands of pages of criticism. And still, the only way to settle the question is to read it yourself.
The Moby-Dick Annotated Edition gives you the complete, unabridged text with hundreds of footnotes decoding the vocabulary, tracing the allusions, and providing the historical context that the original reviewers either praised or condemned.
What would you think? The 1851 reviewers couldn’t agree. Neither can readers today. But one thing is certain: no one finishes Moby-Dick unchanged.