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Between Book and Reality: The Guidebook in Redburn and Clarel

The guidebook is not the most widely respected genre of literary composition. Guidebooks such as the Lonely Planet series or the earlier Baedeker series became standard equipment for travel, and they continue to guide our ventures. Rarely do we reflect critically about the guidebook and its relationship to the experience of travel. An exception is Melville’s treatment of it in Redburn (1849) and later in his long poem Clarel (1876). In these two works, Melville is not only mining guidebooks for material but also manipulating expectations regarding the genre to make a larger point about our modern relationship to the world and to religious traditions. It is especially in the act of pilgrimage, imagined or real, that the failure of the guidebook becomes clear in these two works. When protagonist Wellingborough Redburn ships out from New York bound for Liverpool, he brings with him a green morocco guidebook that his father had taken with him on a visit to the city almost thirty years earlier. Melville spends a full chapter describing the guidebook, followed by one in which Redburn is portrayed walking around Liverpool with guidebook in hand (Chs. 30 and 31). In his 1938 source study, Willard Thorp demonstrates that Melville’s description of the guidebook in these chapters was an exact representation of The Picture of Liverpool from 1808. Douglas Robillard gives more critical attention to Melville’s use of visual material and ekphrasis. Both studies center on the useful material that Melville could mine from guidebooks, in terms of content and the physical description of the book itself. In Redburn, the guidebook becomes the type of all literary works. Disenchanted with the effectiveness of the old guidebook to get him around Liverpool, Redburn meditates: