Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 51 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
A man goes to sea to avoid killing himself, and joins a whaler captained by someone with a worse reason for being there. Between the chase there is an encyclopaedia of whales, ropes, oil and men, and an argument about whether anything means anything.
Why Gustave Doré
Doré's Ancient Mariner is the direct precedent and it is uncanny how close it sits — a ship, a crew, an ocean rendered as something with a will, and a sailor punished for an act against an animal. He engraved that in 1876, five years before Melville died in obscurity.
The Rime plates are the closest thing to a Moby-Dick edition that ever existed. This cycle finishes the thought.
What to look for
Water. Doré's sea is never flat and never decorative; it has volume and weight and the ship sits in it rather than on it. Watch the plates where the whale is absent — the ocean alone carries the dread.
