In the autumn of 1849, a young American wearing a new green coat – of which he was inordinately proud – arrived in London. He checked in to a boarding house on Craven Street, a narrow road running down from the Strand to the then unembanked Thames. The house is still there, at the end of a Georgian terrace, an improbable survivor. You may have passed the turning many times and never thought to have walked down it. Even if you had, you may not have noticed that on the wall of the end house, whose bow window still looks out on to the river, is an equally improbable blue plaque. The young American was Herman Melville and the plaque commemorates the author and his greatest creation – the wondrous phantasmagoria that is Moby-Dick, which was born in that boarding house.
That November, the writer wandered around the imperial metropolis, down its “anti-lanes” and river tunnels, from tavern to publisher’s office, trying to sell his latest book,White-Jacket. Melville had been youthfully famous from his debut, a bestselling book of sensual tales of the South Seas, Typee, first published in London, but had become increasingly obscure in his literary output. He knew he had to come up with something spectacular – “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”.
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