Billy Budd


Billy Budd, Sailor , formerly known as Billy Budd, Foretopman, is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by critics as a masterpiece when a hastily transcribed version was finally published in 1924, it quickly took its place as a classic second only to Moby-Dick among Melville's works. Billy Budd is a "handsome sailor" who strikes and inadvertently kills his false accuser, Master-at-arms John Claggart. The ship's Captain, Edward Vere, recognizes Billy's lack of intent, but claims that the law of mutiny requires him to sentence Billy to be hanged.
Melville began work on the novella in November 1886, revising and expanding it from time to time, but he left the manuscript in disarray. His widow Elizabeth began to edit the manuscript for publication, but was not able to discern her husband's intentions at key points, even as to the book's title. Raymond M. Weaver, Melville's first biographer, was given the manuscript and published the 1924 version, which was marred by misinterpretation of Elizabeth's queries, misreadings of Melville's difficult handwriting, and even inclusion of a preface Melville had cut. Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. published what is considered the best transcription and critical reading text in 1962. In 2017, Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library published a "new reading text" based on a "corrected version" of Hayford and Sealts' genetic text prepared by G. Thomas Tanselle.
Billy Budd has been adapted into film, a stage play, and an opera.

Plot summary

Billy Budd is an English seaman impressed into service aboard the Royal Navy warship HMS Bellipotent in 1797, when the Navy was reeling from the Spithead and Nore mutinies and threatened by the French First Republic's military ambitions. He is impressed onto Bellipotent from the British merchant ship The Rights of Man.
Billy, a foundling from Bristol, has an innocence, good looks and a natural charisma that make him popular with the crew. He has a stutter, which becomes more noticeable when under intense emotion. He arouses the antagonism of the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart. Claggart, while not unattractive, seems somehow "defective or abnormal in the constitution", possessing a "natural depravity." Envy is Claggart's explicitly stated emotion toward Budd, foremost because of his "significant personal beauty," and also for his innocence and general popularity. This leads Claggart to falsely charge Billy with conspiracy to mutiny. When the captain, Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, is presented with Claggart's charges, he summons Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private meeting. Claggart makes his case and Billy, astounded, is unable to respond, due to his stutter. In his extreme frustration he strikes out at Claggart, killing him instantly.
Vere convenes a drumhead court-martial. He acts as convening authority, prosecutor, defense counsel and sole witness. He intervenes in the deliberations of the court-martial panel to persuade them to convict Billy, despite their and his beliefs in Billy's moral innocence. Vere claims to be following the letter of the Mutiny Acts and the Articles of War.
Although Vere and the other officers did not believe Claggart's charge of conspiracy and think Billy justified in his response, they find that their own opinions matter little. The martial law in effect states that during wartime the blow itself, fatal or not, is a capital crime. The court-martial convicts Billy following Vere's argument that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir more mutiny throughout the Royal Navy. Condemned to be hanged the morning after his attack on Claggart, Billy's last words prior to his execution are "God bless Captain Vere!", which are repeated by the gathered crew in a "resonant and sympathetic echo."
The novel closes with three short chapters that present ambiguity:
  • Chapter 28 describes the death of Captain Vere. In a naval action against the French ship Athée, Captain Vere is mortally wounded. His last words are "Billy Budd, Billy Budd."
  • Chapter 29 presents an extract from an official naval gazette purporting to give the facts of the fates of John Claggart and Billy Budd aboard HMS Bellipotent, but the "facts" offered turn the facts that the reader learned from the story upside down. The gazette article describes Budd as a conspiring mutineer likely of foreign birth and mysterious antecedents who is confronted by John Claggart. The master-at-arms, loyally enforcing the law, is fatally stabbed by Budd. The gazette concludes that the crime and weapon used suggest a foreign birth and subversive character; it reports that the mutineer was executed and nothing is amiss aboard HMS Bellipotent.
  • Chapter 30 is a cheaply printed ballad, "Billy in the Darbies", written by one of Billy's shipmates as an elegy. The adult, experienced man represented in the poem is not the innocent youth portrayed in the preceding chapters.

    Composition history

Composed fitfully over the last five years of his life, the novella Billy Budd represents Melville's return to prose fiction after three decades of only writing poetry. Melville had a difficult time writing, describing his process with Moby-Dick as follows: "And taking a book off the brain is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—and even then the painting may not be worth the trouble...."
The "scrapings" of Billy Budd lie in the 351 leaves of manuscript now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
The state of this manuscript has been described as "chaotic," with a bewildering array of corrections, cancellations, cut and pasted leaves, annotations by several hands, and with at least two different attempts made at a fair copy. The composition proceeded in three general phases, as shown by the Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., who did an extensive study of the original papers from 1953 to 1962. They concluded from the evidence of the paper used at each stage, the writing instruments, insertions, and crossings out that Melville introduced the three main characters in three stages of composition: first Billy, in a draft of what became "Billy in the Darbies"; then Claggart: and finally Vere.
The work started as a poem, a ballad entitled "Billy in the Darbies", which Melville intended for his book, John Marr and Other Sailors. He added a short, prose head-note to introduce the speaker and set the scene. The character of "Billy" in this early version was an older man condemned for inciting mutiny and apparently guilty as charged. He did not include the poem in his published book. Melville incorporated the ballad and expanded the head-note sketch into a story that eventually reached 150 manuscript pages. This was the first of the three major expansions, each related to one of the principal characters. As the focus of his attention shifted from one to another of these three principals, he modified the plot and thematic emphasis. Because Melville never entirely finished the revisions, critics have been divided as to where the emphasis lay and to Melville's intentions.
After Melville's death, his wife Elizabeth, who had acted as his amanuensis on other projects, scribbled notes and conjectures, corrected spelling, sorted leaves and, in some instances, wrote over her husband's faint writing. She tried to follow through on what she perceived as her husband's objectives but her editing was confusing to the first professional editors, Weaver and Freeman, who mistook her writing for Melville's. For instance, she put several pages into a folder and marked it "Preface?" indicating that she did not know what her husband had intended. At some point Elizabeth Melville placed the manuscript in "a japanned tin box" with the author's other literary materials, where it remained undiscovered for another 28 years.

Publication history

In August 1918, Raymond M. Weaver, a professor at Columbia University, doing research for what would become the first biography of Melville, paid a visit to Melville's granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, at her South Orange, New Jersey home. She gave him access to all the records of Melville that survived in the family: manuscripts, letters, journals, annotated books, photographs, and a variety of other material. Among these papers, Weaver was astonished to find a substantial manuscript for an unknown prose work entitled Billy Budd.
After producing a text that would later be described as "hastily transcribed", he published the first edition of the work in 1924 as Billy Budd, Foretopman in Volume XIII of the Standard Edition of Melville's Complete Works. In 1928 he published another version of the text that, despite numerous variations, may be considered essentially the same text.
F. Barron Freeman published a second text in 1948, edited on different principles, as Melville's Billy Budd. He believed he stayed closer to what Melville wrote, but still relied on Weaver's text, with what are now considered mistaken assumptions and textual errors. Subsequent editions of Billy Budd up through the early 1960s are, strictly speaking, versions of one or the other of these two basic texts.
After several years of study, in 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., established what is now considered the correct, authoritative text. It was published by the University of Chicago Press, and contains both a "reading" and a "genetic" text. Most editions printed since then follow the Hayford-Sealts text. In 2017, however, the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library published Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings. The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, as it is known, "differs from the one offered by Hayford and Sealts".
Based on the confusing manuscripts, the published versions had many variations. For example, early versions gave the book's title as Billy Budd, Foretopman, while it now seems clear Melville intended Billy Budd, Sailor ; some versions wrongly included as a preface a chapter that Melville had excised. In addition, some early versions did not follow his change of the name of the ship to Bellipotent, from Indomitable, as Melville called it in an earlier draft. His full intentions in changing the name of the ship are unclear, since he used the name Bellipotent only six times.