Billy Budd and Other Stories

Summary

This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist. At first Bartleby works prodigiously; then, asked to check his copies, he answers that he would prefer not to, and gradually extends the refusal to all work, to leaving the office and finally to eating. The lawyer, baffled and guiltily sympathetic, moves his practice rather than evict him. Bartleby is taken to the Tombs prison, where he dies facing a wall. A coda reports a rumour that he had worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. Benito Cereno (1855) follows the genial American captain Amasa Delano, who boards a battered Spanish slave ship off Chile and is puzzled by its sickly, nervous captain, Don Benito, and his ever-attentive servant Babo. Delano's assumptions about race blind him to the truth until the end: the enslaved Africans have taken the ship, killed the slaver Aranda, and are staging the performance of normal command. Delano's men retake the ship; a deposition retells the revolt; Babo is executed and Don Benito dies soon after, broken. The Encantadas (1854) is a series of ten sketches of the volcanic Galápagos Islands, including the story of Hunilla, a widow abandoned on an island. Billy Budd, set in 1797 just after the Spithead and Nore mutinies, concerns a handsome, innocent foretopman impressed onto HMS Bellipotent. Billy is loved by the crew but has a stammer that stops his speech under stress. The master-at-arms Claggart, consumed by an envy the narrator calls a 'natural depravity', falsely accuses him of plotting mutiny before Captain Vere. Unable to speak, Billy strikes Claggart, who dies. Vere convenes a drumhead court and urges conviction under martial law despite believing Billy innocent at heart; Billy is hanged at dawn, blessing Vere, and his body does not convulse. Vere later dies of wounds murmuring Billy's name, while a naval chronicle records the event as a villainous mutineer's crime.

Plot or Argument

• Bartleby, the Scrivener

  A lawyer's copyist withdraws from work and life with the phrase 'I would prefer not to'; the narrator's charity fails and Bartleby dies in prison.

• Benito Cereno

  Captain Delano misreads the situation aboard the San Dominick, where a slave revolt is concealed by a staged performance; a legal deposition supplies the hidden history.

• The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles

  Ten sketches of the Galápagos, mixing natural description, tortoise lore and tales of castaways, hermits and the abandoned widow Hunilla.

• Billy Budd: impressment and Claggart

  Billy is taken from the merchant ship Rights-of-Man; Claggart's envy grows and he plots an accusation of mutiny.

• Billy Budd: the blow and the trial

  Accused before Vere, Billy cannot speak and kills Claggart with one blow. Vere's drumhead court condemns him under the Mutiny Act.

• Billy Budd: execution and afterlives

  Billy is hanged blessing Vere; the narrative follows Vere's death, the official distorted report and the sailors' ballad 'Billy in the Darbies'.

Characters

• Bartleby, title character

  A pallid copyist who prefers not to do anything, ending in total withdrawal.

• The Lawyer, narrator of Bartleby

  A cautious, kindly-minded Wall Street lawyer unsettled by his employee's passive resistance.

• Amasa Delano, American captain (Benito Cereno)

  Good-natured but obtuse sealing captain whose assumptions blind him to the revolt.

• Benito Cereno, Spanish captain

  Terrorised commander forced to act out normal command; he never recovers.

• Babo, leader of the revolt

  Plays the devoted servant while directing the deception; executed and silent at the end.

• Billy Budd, title character

  Innocent, beloved foretopman with a stammer, hanged for killing his accuser.

• John Claggart, master-at-arms

  Intelligent, envious petty officer who falsely accuses Billy.

• Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, commander of the Bellipotent

  Bookish captain who believes Billy innocent before God but insists on hanging him under martial law.

• The Dansker, old sailor

  Veteran who warns Billy that Claggart is 'down on' him.

Lessons

• Law and justice can diverge

  Vere admits Billy is morally innocent yet hangs him to uphold discipline in wartime. Melville forces the reader to weigh institutional necessity against individual conscience.

  • Was Vere right? Was he required to act as he did?
  • Why does Billy bless Vere?
  • What does the distorted naval report suggest about official history?

• Perception is shaped by prejudice

  Delano cannot imagine that enslaved Africans could plan and execute a revolt, so he misreads every clue. Benito Cereno shows how ideology blinds well-meaning observers.

  • Which clues does Delano miss, and why?
  • Why does Babo remain silent after capture?

• Refusal as a mystery

  Bartleby's quiet refusal exposes the limits of the narrator's charity and of a world built on copying and commerce. The story resists any single explanation of his behaviour.

  • Is Bartleby ill, protesting, or something else?
  • Does the lawyer do enough for Bartleby?
  • What does the Dead Letter Office rumour add?

Context

Bartleby and Benito Cereno appeared in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in the 1850s, at the height of the debate over slavery; Benito Cereno adapts the real Amasa Delano's 1817 Narrative of Voyages, which recorded the 1805 revolt aboard the Tryal. Billy Budd is set in 1797, after the Spithead and Nore mutinies in the Royal Navy, in the war with Revolutionary France.

Composition

Bartleby was published in 1853 and The Encantadas and Benito Cereno in 1854–1855; they were collected in The Piazza Tales (1856). Melville worked on Billy Budd from about 1886 until his death in 1891, leaving a heavily revised manuscript. It was first published in 1924 by Raymond Weaver; the Hayford and Sealts edition (1962) established the standard text and the ship's name Bellipotent (earlier editions read Indomitable).

Reception

Melville's short fiction was little noticed in his lifetime. After the Melville revival of the 1920s, Billy Budd became one of his most discussed works, adapted as an opera by Benjamin Britten (1951) and a film by Peter Ustinov (1962). Bartleby has become a touchstone for discussions of passive resistance, alienated labour and depression.

Comparisons

• lord-jim

  Both turn on a maritime crisis and a trial; Conrad's Jim fails a test of courage, while Billy's innocence is condemned by the logic of naval discipline.

• the-narrative-of-arthur-gordon-pym-of-nantucket

  Poe's mutiny and race-haunted voyage is a precursor to Benito Cereno's slave-ship deception.

• twelve-years-a-slave

  Northup's narrative documents the slavery whose violence Benito Cereno conceals beneath a staged scene of mastery and servitude.

• heart-of-darkness

  Delano's misreading of the San Dominick anticipates Marlow's uncertain witnessing of imperial violence.

• the-new-york-trilogy

  Auster's isolated, withdrawing New Yorkers descend from Bartleby, and the trilogy invokes Melville directly.

• the-last-days-of-socrates

  Billy, like Socrates, accepts an unjust verdict without resentment, and both stories ask whether law must be obeyed when it errs.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• In Billy Budd, the narrator's comparison of Billy to Adam before the Fall, and his long attempt to explain Claggart's envy as a natural depravity that has no ordinary motive.
• The scene in Captain Vere's cabin when Claggart accuses Billy to his face, Billy's stammer stops his speech, and his single blow kills the master-at-arms.
• Vere's speech to the drumhead court, where he grants that Billy is innocent before God but argues that the officers serve the King under martial law and must condemn him.
• Billy's execution at dawn, his last words blessing Captain Vere, and the three afterlives of the story: Vere's dying murmur, the naval chronicle's false report, and the sailors' ballad Billy in the Darbies.
• In Bartleby, the lawyer's escalating attempts to help, reason with, and finally escape his copyist, including his reading of Edwards on the Will and Priestley on Necessity to make peace with Bartleby's presence.

Key terms and names

Impressment

The forcible taking of seamen into the Royal Navy. Billy is impressed from the merchant ship Rights-of-Man onto HMS Bellipotent at the opening of the novella, and his cheerful farewell to his old ship is later read as suspicious.

The Nore and Spithead mutinies

Two great mutinies in the Royal Navy in 1797, just before the story is set. Their memory explains why Vere and his officers fear any sign of mutiny and why Billy's blow cannot be treated as a private quarrel.

Drumhead court

A summary court-martial held aboard ship in wartime. Vere convenes one immediately after Claggart's death rather than waiting to refer the case to the admiral, a choice the narrator leaves open to question.

Natural depravity

The narrator's term for Claggart's evil, an innate malice that hides behind reason and respectability and is drawn to hate innocence itself. It is the novella's attempt to name evil without an ordinary motive.

Mutiny Act

The martial law under which Billy is tried. Vere argues that the court must judge the act, a blow that killed a superior officer, and not the intention or the innocence of the man.

Billy in the Darbies

The sailors' ballad that closes the novella, imagining Billy's last night in irons. It preserves the crew's memory of Billy against the official chronicle that names him a villainous mutineer.

Dead Letter Office

The government office where undeliverable letters were burned. The rumor in Bartleby's coda that he once worked there gives the lawyer, and the reader, a last clue to his despair.

San Dominick

The battered Spanish slave ship in Benito Cereno, on which the Africans led by Babo have taken control and stage the appearance of normal command for Captain Delano's visit.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In Billy Budd, what does Claggart accuse Billy of, why can Billy not answer him in words, and what happens when Billy strikes?
2. Comprehension What reasons does Captain Vere give the drumhead court for condemning Billy, even though he believes Billy is innocent at heart?
3. Comprehension In Bartleby, what steps does the lawyer take to deal with his copyist after Bartleby begins to say he would prefer not to?
4. Interpretation Vere exclaims that Claggart was struck dead by an angel of God, yet the angel must hang. How can both halves of that sentence be true at once for Vere?
5. Interpretation Why does Melville give Billy a stammer that fails him precisely when he is falsely accused? What does it suggest about innocence in a world of law and speech?
6. Interpretation The novella ends with three accounts of Billy: Vere's dying words, the naval chronicle, and the sailors' ballad. Which account does Melville want us to trust, and why does he include all three?
7. Interpretation In Benito Cereno, Captain Delano spends most of a day aboard the San Dominick without understanding what he sees. What in his own character keeps him from seeing, and how does the closing deposition change the reader's view of the whole story?
8. Big Question When the law requires a judge to condemn someone he believes innocent before God, should the judge obey the law, refuse, or seek another way? What does Billy Budd suggest, and do you agree?

Faith Connections

• Genesis 3 (Scripture)

  The narrator compares Billy to Adam before the serpent came into his company. Claggart's hatred of Billy's innocence reads like the serpent's envy of unfallen man, and Billy's fall through one violent act echoes the loss of Eden.

• Genesis 22 (Scripture)

  The narrator imagines that Vere's private interview with Billy before the execution may have resembled Abraham embracing Isaac on the point of sacrifice. The comparison casts Vere as a father bound by a higher command, while leaving open whether his command truly came from God or only from the state.

• Matthew 25:35-40 (Scripture)

  Jesus identifies himself with the stranger, the hungry, and the prisoner. The lawyer in Bartleby finds a stranger in his office who will not eat and ends in the Tombs, and his final cry for Bartleby and humanity measures how far his charity went and where it stopped.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 36 (Church Fathers)

  Aquinas defines envy as sorrow at another's good, perceived as lessening one's own excellence. Claggart, who resents Billy precisely for his beauty, goodness, and the crew's love for him, fits this definition closely, which helps students name what the narrator calls a mystery.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: In time of war, after mutinies that threaten the fleet, a ship's discipline depends on the certain enforcement of martial law. Billy struck and killed his superior officer, an act the Mutiny Act punishes with death regardless of intention. If the court spared him, the crew would see weakness and the fleet's order would be endangered. Therefore Vere argues that Billy, though innocent before God, must hang; Melville sets that argument against Billy's innocence, Vere's own anguish, and the crew's memory, leaving the reader to judge whether law here serves justice or betrays it.

Rhetorical device: paradox. Immediately after Claggart's death, Vere says the master-at-arms was struck dead by an angel of God, yet the angel must hang. The two short sentences hold innocence and condemnation together, and the whole remaining story unfolds the tension in that single line.

Debate: Resolved: Captain Vere was right to convene the drumhead court and hang Billy Budd.

Memory Work

Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang

I would prefer not to

Writing Prompts

Essay: Vere tells the drumhead court that the officers' allegiance is to the King and not to nature or private conscience. Using his speech, Billy's blessing at the execution, and the closing contrast between the naval chronicle and the sailors' ballad, argue whether Melville presents Vere as a tragic hero, a mistaken judge, or something else.

Comparison with The Last Days of Socrates: Socrates and Billy Budd are both condemned by lawful courts, and both accept their deaths without bitterness toward those who condemn them. Compare Socrates' reasons in the Crito for submitting to the laws of Athens with Vere's reasons for enforcing the Mutiny Act, and argue whether obedience to law means the same thing for the condemned man and for the judge.

Medical Lens

Bartleby is one of the most frequently cited literary 'cases' in psychiatry teaching: his progressive withdrawal, mutism-like repetition, immobility and refusal of food have been read as depression, catatonia, schizophrenia or autism, as well as political protest. These are competing readings, and the story deliberately withholds an explanation. Billy Budd offers a surgeon as a minor character: the ship's surgeon pronounces Claggart dead, privately wonders whether Vere is 'unhinged', and later discusses the absence of the usual spasm in Billy's hanged body, a passage that touches on period debates about will and physiology. Billy's stammer, which fails him under emotional pressure, is presented as his single defect. Benito Cereno's lasting collapse after his captivity can be discussed as an early literary portrait of psychological trauma, with caution.

• Bartleby, middle and end

  Bartleby's escalating refusals, his living in the office, removal to the Tombs, refusal to eat and death against the prison wall.

  Melancholia DepressionStarvation NutritionAsylum InstitutionDeath Dying
• Billy Budd, early chapters

  Billy's 'organic hesitancy', a stutter that seizes him under strong emotion.

  Disability DeformityMind Body
• Billy Budd, after Claggart's death

  The surgeon examines Claggart and silently questions Vere's sanity as Vere moves toward a drumhead court.

  Physicians DoctorsMadness Psychosis
• Billy Budd, after the execution

  The purser and the surgeon debate why Billy's body showed no spasm at hanging.

  Physicians DoctorsDeath Dying
• Billy Budd, early chapters on Claggart

  The narrator's discussion of Claggart's 'natural depravity', a quasi-clinical portrait of envy and malice.

  Psychology Unconscious
• Benito Cereno, closing pages

  Don Benito withdraws to a monastery and dies within months, unable to recover from his ordeal.

  Trauma Shell ShockMelancholia Depression

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Write Vere's defence before a modern court-martial, then the prosecutor's reply.

• Fiction

  Tell Bartleby's story from the point of view of Turkey, Nippers or Ginger Nut.

• Classroom

  Reread the first half of Benito Cereno and list every clue Delano misinterprets.

Further Reading

• Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

• The Piazza Tales, Herman Melville

  The 1856 collection in which Bartleby and Benito Cereno first appeared together.

• Melville: His World and Work, Andrew Delbanco

• Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, Amasa Delano

  Source of Benito Cereno.

• Billy Budd (opera), Benjamin Britten