The Original 1851 Reviews of Moby Dick

I think that sort of competition still very much exists. It's just that - in the Anglosphere, at any rate - the baseline for literacy is far higher. You need only look at the snobbery involved in choice of newspaper to see it.

https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/ gives literacy rates of around 75% in Great Britain and the USA in 1851.

I would guess that's not _that_ low that it would have made an impact on those reading those reviews.

Chances are this has more to do with the limited, high-brow, circulation of these reviews. Harper's, for example, seems to have had a circulation of around 50,000 in 1851 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper%27s_Magazine#History). The USA had a population of about 23,000,000 at the time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1850_United_States_Census), so it would have reached less than 1% of the population.

> think what happened in that time was a kind of competition, where critics like these had a tendency to write things that are more difficult to read, in an attempt to prove how much more literate they are.

Are... these reviews considered difficult to read or especially overwritten, then? Or did you mean something else?

> bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English

Are these not legitimate grounds on which to judge a book? To the extent that these are smaller concerns for modern reviewers (are they?) I'd guess it has more to do with our having settled on a style of prose that allows little variation and is very simple, for a large majority of literature. We now expect and receive little poetry in our prose, to put it another way.

> Literacy rates in the 1800s were low.

Not all that low. Even in 1870, 80% of the US population were literate (and nearly 90% of the white population).

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

I wouldn't say that the use of language in writing is a superficial thing to focus on. The language is the medium through which the author expresses whatever information they're trying to convey. It's always going to be one of the top two things to focus on when critiquing a work of fiction.

All interpersonal communication in any medium is semantically lossy- language is an intermediary through which you are attempting to encode a concept or story or feeling, so that someone else can decode your words into a similar concept/story/feeling whatever inside their own head. Language is the middleman, and an author's skill with language imposes a ceiling on how well they can transfer their ideas to other people.

In the case of fiction, language serves double duty as an art form in and of itself. Both the medium and the message are components of a creative work. Otherwise, every novel would be nothing more than outlines of plots describing sequences of imaginary events, which would be pointless.

I would also disagree with the characterization of /r/iamverysmart- in principle at least, it isn't there for shunning people trying to sound literate. It's for teasing people (usually teenagers or college undergrads going through a phase) who have started to learn interesting things about the world, who are very impressed with their own knowledge, and are expressing ignorance and narcissism rather than the 10-megaton knowledge bombs that they think they're carpet bombing everyone with. Not that I'm in favor of shunning anyone who isn't harming others- it's too mean-spirited and easy to abuse.

I don't see this at all. In fact, I think you have this exactly backwards. The negative criticisms here are by men who see themselves as plain-speaking (writing) commonsense types and see Melville's work as radical and unconventional. Literacy as a status symbol could only have meaning within a very small public sphere - in other words literacy was extremely high within the group that could be expected to do ANY reading AT ALL. There have always been people who write with deliberate obscurity to appear smarter but the language of these reviews and their concerns with language are entirely straightforward in terms of the standards of their day.

It contains multitudes, to be certain.

The other aspect of the novel that people familiar with it only by its reputation often underestimate: it's humor.

It's a sly often oblique humor, by turns Shakespearian, Victorian, and almost anachronistically postmodern. But it permeates the novel and is there right in the opening paragraph:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

By the time I got through that sentence, the fourth in the novel, I was in.

Finally, one additional quote from the novel that stuck with me:

for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

The narrative part of the novel is fine. It's about 80-100 pages of a good thriller at sea and morality tale of revenge. The problem is that the book is 500+ pages, not 100. The other 400 are a tome and treatise on whales, whaling, and whaling culture/philosophy, which are truly tedious. You don't have to skip pages judiciously, you have to skip whole chapters liberally.

The criticism of Ahab having no method to his madness is on point as well.

In my high school AP English class we had to and it was not that bad for a forced assignment.

It is very good. Possibly not the best ever written. There is no way it could be considered the worst book ever written.

Is it possible you got this book confused with Tale of Two Cities?

I'm fascinated by this term "going out". I haven't been able to find anything on it. Do you happen to have any leads or care for discussion?

Gotta love the quote, though, "Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…"

There's an implementation in Node if that helps.