Editing Moby-Dick (section)

=== British ===
Twenty-one reviews appeared in London, and later one in Dublin.<ref name="Parker 1988, 700"/> The British reviewers, according to Parker, mostly regarded ''The Whale'' as "a phenomenal literary work, a philosophical, metaphysical, and poetic romance".<ref name="Parker 1988, 702">Parker (1988), 702</ref> The ''Morning Advertiser'' for October 24 was in awe of Melville's learning, of his "dramatic ability for producing a prose poem", and of the whale adventures which were "powerful in their cumulated horrors."<ref>Quoted in Parker (1988), 702</ref> To its surprise, ''John Bull'' found "philosophy in whales" and "poetry in blubber", and concluded that few books that claimed to be either philosophical or literary works "contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the ''Pequod''{{'}}s whaling expedition", making it a work "far beyond the level of an ordinary work of fiction".<ref name="Parker 1988, 702-03">Parker (1988), 702–03</ref> The ''Morning Post'' found it "one of the cleverest, wittiest, and most amusing of modern books", and predicted that it was a book "which will do great things for the literary reputation of its author".<ref name="Parker 1988, 702-03"/>

Melville himself never saw these reviews, and Parker calls it a "bitter irony" that the reception overseas was "all he could possibly have hoped for, short of a few conspicuous proclamations that the distance between him and Shakespeare was by no means immeasurable."<ref>Parker (1988), 703</ref>

One of the earliest reviews, by the extremely conservative critic Henry Chorley<ref name="Robertson-Lorant 1996, 277"/> in the highly regarded London ''[[Athenaeum (British magazine)|Athenaeum]]'', described it as

{{blockquote|[A]n ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.}}

According to the London ''Literary Gazette and Journal of Science and Art'' for December 6, 1851, "Mr. Melville cannot do without savages, so he makes half of his ''dramatis personae'' wild Indians, Malays, and other untamed humanities", who appeared in "an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric, outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive".<ref name="Robertson-Lorant 1996">Robertson-Lorant (1996), 646 note 7</ref> Most critics regretted the extravagant digressions because they distracted from an otherwise interesting and even exciting narrative, but even critics who did not like the book as a whole praised Melville's originality of imagination and expression.<ref>Branch (1974), 27</ref>

Because the English edition omitted the epilogue describing Ishmael's escape, British reviewers read a book with a first-person narrator who apparently did not survive.<ref name="Parker 1988, 702"/> The reviewer of the ''Literary Gazette'' asked how Ishmael, "who appears to have been drowned with the rest, communicated his notes to Mr. Bentley".<ref name="Robertson-Lorant 1996"/> The reviewer in the ''Spectator'' objected that "nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they ''all'' perish."<ref name="Cited in Parker (1988), 708">Cited in Parker (1988), 708</ref> The ''Dublin University Magazine'' asked "how does it happen that the author is alive to tell the story?"<ref name="Cited in Parker (1988), 708"/> A few other reviewers, who did not comment upon the apparent impossibility of Ishmael telling the story, pointed out violations of narrative conventions in other passages.

Other reviewers accepted the flaws they perceived. ''John Bull'' praised the author for making literature out of unlikely and even unattractive matter, and the ''Morning Post'' found that delight far outstripped the improbable character of events.<ref>Parker (1988), 709</ref> Though some reviewers viewed the characters, especially Ahab, as exaggerated, others felt that it took an extraordinary character to undertake the battle with the white whale. Melville's style was often praised, although some found it excessive or too American.<ref>Branch (1974), 28</ref>