The Whale, Philip Hoare, c. 2008/2010

Moby Dick references.

The quarry: the sperm whale -- p. 36. A toothed whale of the deep was terrifying vs the "placid baleen whale of coastal waters.

Moby Dick: published four years (1855) after Wuthering Heights (1851) -- the latter was the only novel to rival Moby Dick's mysterious narrative power, p. 35. Drew on Melville's whaling experiences ten years earlier.

That note regarding Wuthering Heights. One wonders if both Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights could have been staged as ghost stories?

In Wuthering Heights, the Yorkshire heath was itself a character, so was the whale in Moby Dick.

In Moby Dick: the mad prophet Gabriel of a passing ship, the Jeroboam, warns Captain Ahab of the danger of the whale.

And then this, sounds like something from Harold Bloom, p. 36:

"Moby-Dick surpasses all other books because it is utterly unlike any other. It stands outside itself from the start, with its introductory list of historical quotations pertaining to the whale, as gathered by Ishmael's "sub-sub-librarian"; and from there it moves through eccesnric taxonomical descriptions as Melville attempts to capture his subject even as his hunters sought to harpoon it...."

A critic, Viola Meynell, 1921, noted that J. M. Barrie invented Captain Hook out of Ahab, and his pursuant, time-ticking crocodile from the White Whale. -- p. 37

D. H. Lawrence, 1923, talked about how great/strange Moby-Dick is/was.

"Moby-Dick became the great American novel retrospectively ... it also became a kind of bible, a book to be read two pages at a time ... a transcendental text.

Note: the Peabody Sisters -- 1830s / 1940s, I suppose. Transcendentalism about that time, late 1840s. So, Melville much time in Salem, near the center of transcendentalism.

Pequod's first made: Starbuck.

Page 38 - 39: Humans -- "How have we moved so far from one notion of the whale to the other, in such a short space of time?"

In Melville's time, hunted them to extinction. Now, we do anything to keep them from dying out.

Remember, this book is about the whale. It's easy to forget when reading this chapter.