SOURCE: Tallack, Douglas. “Not Unoriginal: Herman Melville's Short Stories.” In The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story: Language, Form and Ideology, pp. 140-80. London: Routledge, 1993.

In the following essay, Tallack examines Melville's use of narrative technique and point-of-view in “The Town-Ho's Story.”

That would be too long a story …

—Herman Melville, ‘The Town-Ho's Story’

I

Shortly before its publication in 1851 as Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick, ‘The Town-Ho's Story’ appeared in an issue of Harper's Magazine accompanied by a footnote which read: ‘From “The Whale”. The title of a new work by Mr Melville, in the press of Harper's and Brothers, and now publishing in London by Mr Bentley’ (Melville 1851: 658). Later in 1851 the Baltimore Weekly Sun and the Cincinnati Daily Gazette also carried the story with similar footnoted explanations. The dual generic reference implicit in this minor incident in American literary history is tied up with the more abstract...