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Moby-Dick Reviews Archive

Browse all 125 known contemporary reviews of Moby-Dick from 1851–1852, plus key revival-era criticism. The most complete collection online.

🇺🇸 The Presbyterian hostile
“Incurably irreligious. ”
— November 29, 1851
🇺🇸 North American Miscellany hostile
“Melville's new work is pronounced by the Athenaeum an absurd book. Its catastrophe, it says, is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed. ”
— December 1851
🇺🇸 Boston Statesman hostile
“A negative notice, similar in content to the Boston Post's hostile review. ”
— November 22, 1851
🇺🇸 Southern Quarterly Review (Charleston, SC) hostile
“In all those portions of this volume which relate directly to the whale... the interest of the reader will be kept alive. In all other aspects, the book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his Mad Captain... is a monstrous bore. ”
— January 1852
🇺🇸 United States Magazine and Democratic Review hostile
“The truth is, Mr. Melville has survived his reputation. Bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English. ”
— Volume 30, January 1852
🇺🇸 Methodist Quarterly Review hostile
“The book contains a number of flings at religion, and even of vulgar immoralities that render it unfit for general circulation. ”
— Volume 34, January 1852
Arthur Stedman favorable
“There it lay, an orphan, with no one to claim it. So these years have passed, and Melville has been lost. ”
— 1892 — writing in the year after Melville’s death
Frank Jewett Mather Jr. favorable
“Of all the books which in this century have been produced by the brain of man, the most wonderful is Moby-Dick. ”
— 1919 — quoting an unidentified admirer
Raymond Weaver, The Nation favorable
“Essentially he was a mystic, a treasure-seeker, a mystery-monger, a delver after hidden things spiritual and material. It was Melville’s abiding craving to achieve some total and undivined possession of the very heart of reality. ”
— August 2, 1919 — Melville centenary essay
D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature favorable
“Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American... The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them to-day. ”
— Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923
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Moby-Dick Annotated Edition

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