There are a few books that are fixed in the popular imagination as much by their illustrations as by the text. Winnie-the-Pooh springs to mind as a prime example of such a collaboration between author and illustrator. E. H. Shepard’s pictures of the bear and the piglet are seen everywhere, especially on social media memes peddling folksy platitudes, completely divorced from A. A. Milne’s words yet instantly recognizable. Shepard is also responsible for the original and iconic images of the characters from The Wind in the Willows, while you can barely think of Roald Dahl’s books without envisioning Quentin Blake’s BFG.
These are all children’s books of course: adult books are far less commonly distinguished by their illustrations. Yet in all of publishing it is hard to find any book that has been not only defined, but also rescued from oblivion by its illustrations, to quite the same extent as one of the mightiest and meatiest of all Great American Novels – Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. This leviathan of maritime storytelling, philosophical digression and metaphysical symbolism is far from being a children’s book, yet it was hauled up from the depths by a set of pictures. Moreover, these art works came from a man whom the author didn’t even live to meet, never mind collaborate with: the remarkable Rockwell Kent.
The birth of Moby Dick was a difficult one, which partly explains its quick descent into obscurity. It was first published in 1851 in America and Britain, but each country had a different version. Due to a mistake by the British printer, the ‘Epilogue’, w
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Subscribe now or Sign inThere are a few books that are fixed in the popular imagination as much by their illustrations as by the text. Winnie-the-Pooh springs to mind as a prime example of such a collaboration between author and illustrator. E. H. Shepard’s pictures of the bear and the piglet are seen everywhere, especially on social media memes peddling folksy platitudes, completely divorced from A. A. Milne’s words yet instantly recognizable. Shepard is also responsible for the original and iconic images of the characters from The Wind in the Willows, while you can barely think of Roald Dahl’s books without envisioning Quentin Blake’s BFG.
These are all children’s books of course: adult books are far less commonly distinguished by their illustrations. Yet in all of publishing it is hard to find any book that has been not only defined, but also rescued from oblivion by its illustrations, to quite the same extent as one of the mightiest and meatiest of all Great American Novels – Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. This leviathan of maritime storytelling, philosophical digression and metaphysical symbolism is far from being a children’s book, yet it was hauled up from the depths by a set of pictures. Moreover, these art works came from a man whom the author didn’t even live to meet, never mind collaborate with: the remarkable Rockwell Kent. The birth of Moby Dick was a difficult one, which partly explains its quick descent into obscurity. It was first published in 1851 in America and Britain, but each country had a different version. Due to a mistake by the British printer, the ‘Epilogue’, which includes the story of the narrator Ishmael’s survival, was missing, which gives the novel a very different and rather downbeat ending. Moreover, British censorship laws demanded the expurgation of thousands of words that were judged to be sacrilegious, sexually explicit (even when discussing the reproductive habits of whales), disrespectful of the Royal Family (including a chapter on the use of sperm whale oil at the Coronation), or just plain incorrect. Just to add to the perplexity, in Britain the novel was issued under Melville’s provisional title The Whale, which begs the philosophical question whether it was really the same book at all. The transatlantic confusion was certainly of no benefit to Moby Dick’s already dicey reputation. Neither version was a huge commercial success. The first US edition sold 2,300 copies in the first year but then on average only twenty-seven copies a year for the rest of Melville’s life, a situation not helped by the destruction by fire of most of the remaining copies in 1853. Five hundred copies of the first British edition were printed, only about half of which were sold in the first four months. The book fell out of print four years before Melville died. Contemporary reviews were hardly likely to launch the book into the bestseller lists, either. They weren’t uniformly terrible, but reviewers in Britain bemoaned the gloomy ending while critics on both sides of the Atlantic were confused by the frequent digressions on whale biology, religion and sailors’ undergarments. Comments that the book was a ‘crazy sort of affair’ (Boston Post) written in ‘mad (rather than bad) English’ (London Athenaeum) were the norm. References to the book after Melville’s death in 1891 are very hard to find and Moby Dick disappeared from view, another forgotten book by a largely unremembered author. It was not until 1919, the centenary of Melville’s birth, that critics picked up the book, read it and decided that it might be quite interesting after all. By 1923, the grand contrarian D. H. Lawrence was singing the book’s praises in his Studies in Classic American Literature, and it began to be reprinted in modest numbers. It was still far from a cultural monolith, however, being the preserve of a select few. It still awaited the ministrations of Rockwell Kent. As many such great stories do, the tale of Moby Dick’s success hangs on the actions of one man. Already considered an important figure in American art, Kent was invited in 1926 by the Lakeside Press of Chicago to produce an illustrated version of a great American novel as part of a series of six limited editions. The Lakeside Press had a number of suggestions, but Kent was resolute. There was only one book he would consider contributing to the series, a novel that resonated with his soul and that deserved an edition of gravitas. As he wrote to William Kittredge, Lakeside Press’s director of design and typography, Moby Dick was a ‘most solemn, mystic work . . . that should be read slowly, reflectively; the large page and type induce such reading. The character of the type should be homely, rather than refined and elegant, for homeliness flavors every line that Melville wrote.’ In Melville’s writing he found a mirror of his own artistic vision. Melville and Kent had much in common, although the latter was only 9 when the former died. Kent lived until 1971 and seems to represent an entirely different era, yet the sympathies between the two men are clear. Impoverished by the death of his debt-ridden father, Melville had a very patchy early career as a clerk and schoolteacher until his yearning for adventure caused him to sign up as a sailor and lead a peripatetic life that included the period 1841–2 working on the whaling ship Acushnet, a clear model for Captain Ahab’s Pequod. His time roving the seas instilled in him a rapport with the ordinary men he worked with, a hatred of authority – he was involved in at least one mutiny – and a love of individual freedom. Kent’s life followed a comparable path. As a young artist he travelled to landscapes as diverse and forbidding as Greenland, Tierra del Fuego, Newfoundland and Alaska, developing a strong belief in personal liberty and a socialist ideology that would eventually lead him to fall foul of McCarthy. He produced books, drawings and prints as he went and by the 1920s he was recognized as one of America’s pre-eminent illustrators. His 1915 illustrated memoir Wilderness, recording his journey through Alaska with his 9-year-old son, has become a classic. It also contains scenes of cavorting orcas that laid the foundations for his depictions of Moby Dick. In general, Kent’s artwork speaks strongly of the heroism of the working man, often in beautiful but inhospitable landscapes, in just the same way that Melville so often celebrates the fortitude and dignity of the ordinary mariner. These temperamental and political sympathies informed Kent’s approach to Moby Dick, leading him to work at a deeper level than most illustrators dealing with a seafaring yarn. Melville’s primary inspiration for Moby Dick was, of course, his own experience, combined with real-life accounts of the 1821 sinking of the whale-ship Essex by a giant sperm whale and the exploits of a rogue albino sperm whale called Mocha Dick. He also drew from illustrated whaling memoirs by the likes of William Scoresby and Thomas Beale. These volumes furnished him with material for the digressions on whale biology, while the engraved illustrations helped him with the vivid visual imagery. In producing his own images, Kent was able to go back to Melville’s sources and adapt the dramatic engravings according to his own vision. He cleverly honoured the nineteenth-century origins of the tale at the same time as creating his own symbolic interpretation of the work. One of the enduring qualities of Moby Dick is the mystery of the white whale. Critics have argued endlessly over the symbolism of the creature. Some maintain it is a symbol of colonialism, or the American Dream, or the illusion of spiritual perfection, or mortality. Others claim that it isn’t a symbol of anything other than a large sperm whale in an adventure story. Melville himself doesn’t make it clear. In the famous Chapter 42 of the book, he has Ishmael wondering why he finds the whale’s whiteness so threatening when it is the colour of purity and perfection:Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loath some than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.
There is no answer to Ishmael’s question, and the whale’s whiteness remains a blank, pristine screen upon which all kinds of horror, disgust and fear can be projected. It was this visual quality that so appealed to Kent and that informed his decision to work in black-and white. Not only was he able to refer back to the engravings of the old whaling books, he was also able to emphasize the supernatural white ness of the whale that so often appears, gleaming and monstrous, from the black depths of his inky backgrounds. The Lakeside Press knew immediately that Kent had produced something special with his 280 ink drawings. William Kittredge wrote in a letter that ‘we will all go jump in the lake if this book is not the greatest illustrated book done in America’. He was right to be proud. The three-volume set, issued in 1930 on thick paper bound in black cloth lettered in silver, and housed in an aluminium slipcase, was limited to a thousand copies. Due to Kent’s fame, it quickly sold out. Within the year, a trade edition in one volume, with only 272 illustrations and in a smaller format but still a beautiful production, was published by Random House, with Kent’s name on the cover rather than Melville’s. It outsold the original 1851 edition within the first six months. The cultural effect was immediate. Cassell rushed out a British edition using Kent’s illustrations. Other publishers jumped on the bandwagon with their own editions, and before long Moby Dick was being included in cheap series such as Spencer Press’s World’s Greatest Literature library despite having been more or less forgotten only ten years previously. The lure of the white whale was felt in other media, too. In 1930 John Barrymore remade his 1926 silent film The Sea Beast as a talkie with a few tweaks and named it Moby Dick. This was followed in 1956 by John Huston’s more famous version starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab with a script by Ray Bradbury. Orson Welles was also in this film, having produced a radio version in 1946 and a stage adaptation in the same year as the film. In 1938, Bernard Herrmann, later to be renowned as Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite composer, wrote a cantata based on the book that was premiered by the New York Philharmonic. If anything shows how entrenched the book became in the popular imagination, it is surely the production in 1947 of a series of Moby Dick headscarves designed by Rockwell Kent himself for Contemporary Design Inc. He came to hate them for being ‘objectionable’, but he couldn’t deny the customer appeal of his white whale. We will never know how Herman Melville would have felt about all this. He certainly would not have predicted it. He died a disappointed man who retired from writing as he saw his early popularity fade. Perhaps he would have relished the chance to work with Kent, with whom there was such an obvious affinity. He surely would have been thankful though. It is rare to find an artistic soulmate, especially after death, and even rarer for that posthumous collaborator to bring your work back to life so dramatically on your behalf. Whatever the white whale symbolizes to critics, it now means only one thing to Herman Melville – immortality.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Chris Saunders 2026
About the contributor
Chris Saunders is Director of Collections at Henry Sotheran Ltd, Britain’s oldest antiquarian bookdealer, where he handles mainly literature and natural history. He lives in Sussex where he grows vegetables and tries to placate his wife by not allowing his piles of unread books to get too high.
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