Editing Moby-Dick (section)

===Melville's revisions and British editorial revisions===
[[File:The Whale or Moby Dick Vol 1 1851.jpg|thumb|The whale or Moby Dick (half-title page), Herman Melville, 1851]]
The British edition, set by Bentley's printers from the American page proofs with Melville's revisions and corrections, differs from the American edition in over 700 wordings and thousands of punctuation and spelling changes.<ref name="Tanselle 1988, 667"/>

Excluding the preliminaries and the one extract, the three volumes of the British edition came to 927 pages<ref>Tanselle (1988), 685</ref> and the single American volume to 635 pages.<ref name="Tanselle 1988, 687">Tanselle (1988), 687</ref> Accordingly, the dedication to Hawthorne in the American edition—"this book is inscribed to"—became "these volumes are inscribed to" in the British.<ref>Cited in Tanselle (1988), 673</ref> The table of contents in the British edition generally follows the actual chapter titles in the American edition, but 19 titles in the American table of contents differ from the titles above the chapters themselves. This list was probably drawn up by Melville himself: the titles of chapters describing encounters of the ''Pequod'' with other ships had—apparently to stress the parallelisms between these chapters—been standardized to "The Pequod meets the ...," with the exception of the already published 'The Town-Ho's Story'.<ref>Tanselle (1988), 675–76</ref>

For unknown reasons, the "Etymology" and "Extracts" were moved to the end of the third volume.<ref name="Tanselle 1988, 678">Tanselle (1988), 678</ref> An epigraph from ''Paradise Lost'', taken from the second of the two quotations from that work in the American edition, appears on the title page of each of the three British volumes. Melville's involvement with this rearrangement is not clear: if it was Bentley's gesture toward accommodating Melville, as Tanselle suggests,<ref name="Tanselle 1988, 678"/> its selection put an emphasis on the quotation Melville might not have agreed with.

The largest of Melville's revisions is the addition to the British edition of a 139-word footnote in Chapter 87 explaining the word "gally". The edition also contains six short phrases and some 60 single words lacking in the American edition.<ref>Tanselle (1988), 772</ref> In addition, about 35 changes produce genuine improvements, as opposed to mere corrections: "Melville may not have made every one of the changes in this category, but it seems certain that he was responsible for the great majority of them."<ref>Tanselle (1988), 789</ref>