Melville was six weeks in Liverpool. Of this part of his adventure, he says in Redburn: “I do not mean to present a diary of my stay there. I shall here simply record the general tenor of the life led by our crew during that interval; and will proceed to note down, at random, my own wanderings about town, and impressions of things as they are recalled to me now after the lapse of so many (twelve) years.”
Not the least important detail of these six weeks is the fact that Melville and his ship-mates were very well fed at the sign of the Baltimore Clipper. “The roast beef of Old England abounded; and so did the immortal plum-puddings and the unspeakably capital gooseberry pies.” Owing to the strict but necessary regulations of the Liverpool docks, no fire of any kind was allowed on board the vessels within them. And hence, though the sailors of the Highlander slept in the forecastle, they were fed ashore at the expense of the ship’s owners. This, in a large crew remaining at Liverpool more than six weeks, as the Highlander did, formed no inconsiderable item in the expenses of the voyage. The Baltimore Clipper was one of the boarding houses near the docks which flourished on the appetite of sailors. At the Baltimore Clipper was fed not only the crew of the Highlander, but, each in a separate apartment, a variety of other crews as well. Since each crew was known collectively by the name of its ship, the shouts of the servant girls running about at dinner time mustering their guests must have been alarming to an uninitiated visitor.
“Where are the Empresses of China?—Here’s their beef been smoking this half-hour”—“Fly, Betty, my dear, here come the Panthers”—“Run, Molly, my love; get the salt-cellars for the Splendids”—“You, Peggy, where’s the Siddons’ pickle-pot?”—“I say, Judy, are you never coming with that pudding for the Sultans?”
It was to the Baltimore Clipper that Jackson immediately led the ship’s crew when they first sprang ashore: up this street and down that till at last he brought them to their destination in a narrow lane filled with boarding-houses, spirit-vaults and sailors. While Melville’s shipmates were engaged in tippling and talking with numerous old acquaintances of theirs in the neighbourhood who thronged about the door, he sat alone in the dining-room appropriated to the Highlanders “meditating upon the fact that I was now seated upon an English bench, under an English roof, in an English tavern, forming an integral part of the British empire.”
Melville examined the place attentively. “It was a long narrow little room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall, the top of which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles stuck into mortar. A dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden ship suspended from the ceiling. The walls were covered with a paper, representing an endless succession of vessels of all nations continually circumnavigating the apartment. From the street came a confused uproar of ballad-singers, bawling women, babies, and drunken sailors.”
It was during this disenchanting examination that the realisation began to creep chillingly over Melville that his prospect of seeing the world as a sailor was, after all, but very doubtful. It seems never to have struck him before that sailors but hover about the edges of terra-firma; that “they land only upon wharves and pier-heads, and their reminiscences of travel are only a dim recollection of a chain of tap-rooms surrounding the globe.”
Melville’s six weeks in Liverpool offered him, however, opportunity to make slightly more extended observations. During these weeks he was free to go where he pleased between four o’clock in the afternoon and the following dawn. Sundays he had entirely at his own disposal. But withal, it was an excessively limited and distorted version of England that was open for his examination. Except for his shipmates, his very distant cousin, the Earl of Leven and Melville and Queen Victoria and such like notables, he knew by name no living soul in the British Isles. And neither his companions in the forecastle, nor the remote and elaborately titled strangers of Melville House, offered encouragement of an easy and glowing intimacy. With but three dollars as his net capital—money advanced him in Liverpool by the ship—and without a thread of presentable clothing on his back, he could not hope promiscuously to ingratiate himself either by his purse or the adornments of his person. Thus lacking in the fundamentals of friendship, his native charms stood him in little stead. So alone he walked the streets of Liverpool and gratuitously saw the sights.
While on the high seas, Melville had improved his fallow hours by poring over an old guide-book of Liverpool that had descended to him from his father. This old family relic was to Melville cherished with a passionate and reverent affection. Around it clustered most of the fond associations that are the cords of man. It had been handled by Allan amid the very scenes it described; it bore some “half-effaced miscellaneous memoranda in pencil, characteristic of a methodical mind, and therefore indubitably my father’s”: jottings of “a strange, subdued, old, midsummer interest” to Melville. And on the fly-leaves were crabbed inscriptions, and “crayon sketches of wild animals and falling air-castles.” These decorations were the handiwork of Melville and his brothers and sisters and cousins. Of his own contributions, Melville says: “as poets do with their juvenile sonnets, I might write under this horse, ‘Drawn at the age of three years,’ and under this autograph, ‘Executed at the age of eight.’” This guide-book was to Melville a sacred volume, and he expresses a wish that he might immortalise it. Addressing this unpretentious looking little green-bound, spotted and tarnished guide-book, he exclaims: “Dear book! I will sell my Shakespeare, and even sacrifice my old quarto Hogarth, before I will part from you. Yes, I will go to the hammer myself, ere I send you to be knocked down in the auctioneer’s scrambles. I will, my beloved; till you drop leaf from leaf, and letter from letter, you shall have a snug shelf somewhere, though I have no bench for myself.”
To the earlier manuscript additions to this guide-book, Melville added, while on the Atlantic, drawings of ships and anchors, and snatches of Dibdin’s sea-poetry. And as he lay in his bunk, with the aid of this antiquated volume he used to take “pleasant afternoon rambles through the town, down St. James street and up Great George’s, stopping at various places of interest and attraction” so familiar seemed the features of the map. But in this vagabondage of reverie he was but preparing for himself a poignant disillusionment. Lying in the dim, reeking forecastle, with his head full of deceitful day-dreams, he was being tossed by the creaking ship towards a bitter awakening. The Liverpool of the guide-book purported to be the Liverpool of 1808. The Liverpool of which Melville dreamed was, of course, without date and local habitation. When Melville found himself face to face with the solid reality of the Liverpool of 1837, he was offered an object-lesson in mutability. As the brute facts smote in the face of his cherished sentimentalisings, he sat his concrete self down on a particular shop step in a certain street in Liverpool, reflected on guide-books and luxuriated in disenchantment. “Guide-books,” he then came to see, “are the least reliable books in all literature: and nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace.” In the end he sealed his moralising by the pious reflection that “there is one Holy Guide-Book that will never lead you astray if you but follow it aright.” There can be no doubt that the ghost of Allan, retracing its mundane haunts at that moment trailed its shadowy substance through the offspring of its discarded flesh.
If this same paternal ghost, recognising its kinship with this obstruction of blood and bone, tracked in futile affection at Melville’s heels through Liverpool, only a posthumous survival of its terrestrial Calvinism could have spared it an agonised six weeks; only the sardonic optimism of a faith in predestination could have saved Allan’s shade from consternation and fear at the chances of Melville’s flesh. Or it may be that Allan was sent as a disembodied spectator to haunt Melville’s wake, by way of penance for his pre-ghostly theological errors. In any event, Melville, on occasion, took Allan through the most hideous parts of Liverpool. Of evenings they strolled through the narrow streets where the sailors’ boarding-houses were. “Hand-organs, fiddlers, and cymbals, plied by strolling musicians, mixed with the songs of seamen, the babble of women and children, and groaning and whining of beggars. From the various boarding-houses proceeded the noise of revelry and dancing: and from the open casements leaned young girls and old women chattering and laughing with the crowds in the middle of the street.” In the vicinity were “notorious Corinthian haunts which in depravity are not to be matched by anything this side of the pit that is bottomless.” Along Rotten-row, Gibraltar-place and Boodle-alley Melville surveyed the “sooty and begrimed bricks” of haunts of abomination which to Melville’s boyish eyes (seen through the protecting lens of Allan’s ghost) had a “reeking, Sodom-like and murderous look.” Melville excuses himself in the name of propriety from particularising the vices of the residents of this quarter; “but kidnappers and resurrectionists,” he declares, “are almost saints and angels to them.”