Melville evidently began composing Omoo in the summer of 1846. He wrote John Murray, the British publisher of Typee, on July 15, 1846, offering Omoo:

  I have another work now nearly completed which I am anxious to submit to you before presenting it to any other publishing house. It embraces adventures in the South Seas (of a totally different character from “Typee”) and includes an eventful cruise in an English Colonial Whaleman (A Sydney Ship) and a comical residence on the island of Tahiti. The time is about four months, but I & my narrative are both on the move during that short period. This new book begins exactly where Typee leaves off—but has no further connection with my first work. (Corr 57–58)

  Murray promised a “liberal” offer for the new book (Corr 585).

  When Melville had submitted Typee for publication in Murray’s Home and Colonial Library series, the publisher was concerned about the book’s veracity. Murray wrote that it read like the work of a “practised writer” who may not have experienced the adventures he described (Log I: 199). In contrast, John Wiley, the American publisher of Typee, had been uneasy about the book’s blasphemy and its attack on the missionaries. The second American edition of Typee, including the appended “The Story of Toby,” was cleansed of the strongest of these attacks.

  Typee, however, is set in the Marquesas, which had been visited by few missionaries by the time of Melville’s stay in 1842. In contrast, much of Omoo is set in the Tahitian islands, which had been missionized since 1797. Thus, Omoo constitutes a more virulent critique of the negative impact of the missionaries on local culture. Concerned, Melville wrote to his literary friend Evert Duyckinck: “As I hinted to you some time ago I have a new book in M.S.—Relying much upon your literary judgment I am very desirous of getting your opinion of it & (if you feel disposed to favor me so far) to receive your hints…. I beg you to pay particular attention to the following chapters—Chapters 33. 34—& 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.—They all refer more or less to the missions & the condition of the natives” (Corr 67–69). A few days later, Duyckinck wrote to his brother George: “Melville is in town with new MSS agitating the con-science of John Wiley and tempting the pockets of the Harpers. I have read it…. He owes a sailor’s grudge to the Missionaries& pays it off at Tahiti” (Log I: 230). Gordon Roper, author of the Historical Note for the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Omoo (1968), observes that there is no evidence “when Melville may have offered the book to Wiley & Putnam or whether Wiley ever had a real chance to refuse it” (328). Harper & Brothers published Omoo and five of Melville’s later books (Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Pierre).

  The book was set from Melville’s manuscript, and proof sheets were issued to Melville. It was “an express condition” of Melville’s arrangement with Harper & Brothers “that after furnishing me with a complete proof, they shall defer publication until I have time to make arrangements to bring out the book in England…. Thus the English copyright can be secured” (Corr 72). Melville had to publish his book first in England in order to obtain a British copyright for it; if the book was published first in the United States, British publishers could simply “pirate” the text without paying the author any compensation.

  The proof sheets were sent off by steamer for London on February 1, 1847, but held up by a zealous customs official in Liverpool, who mistook the sheets for the American piracy of a British work rather than an original work by an American. The sheets finally reached Murray, and the British edition officially appeared on March 27, 1847. Although the American edition of Omoo was not deposited for copyright and therefore not officially published until June 16, 1847, it was available to the public at the beginning of May.

  Excluding variants in spelling and punctuation, there are seventy-nine differences between the first British and first American editions of Omoo. As Roper notes, “To decide whether the English or the American reading in each of these cases reflects Melville’s final intention is the main issue which any editor of Omoo must face” (334). When Melville sent the proof sheets to Murray, he wrote, “There may be some minor errors—typographical—as the plates have been hurried in order to get them ready in time for the steamer” (Corr 78). Melville may have had a chance to go over that set of proofs before shipping, so some of the British edits may be his own. He also went over proof sheets before the American publication: he wrote Murray that the proof sheets “will be gone over & corrected before publication here” (Corr 78). Neither the manuscript nor the proof sheets of Omoo are extant; all that survives for editors are the first British and first American editions.

  Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, editors of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, took the premise that Melville may have corrected both the British and the American proof sheets under consideration when producing their critical text of Omoo in 1968. Their goal was to publish a text as close as possible to that which Melville intended. Their editorial objective was clearly stated, and all variants between the two first editions are listed and discussed in an appendix. This Penguin edition is set from the Northwestern-Newberry text.

  III. CRITICAL RECEPTION

  The literary reputation of Omoo over time has swung widely, from being considered by contemporary reviewers even better than Typee to being dubbed a “desultory bore” on Ishmail, the Melville online discussion group. Omoo remains one of Melville’s least known and least read works, but those who do read it may discover a far better and more profound book than they had been led to expect.

  Melville had high hopes for Omoo’s reception, writing Murray on January 29, 1847:

  Of the book itself, of course, you will judge for yourself. So I will not say, what opinions of it have been given here by persons competent to judge of its merits as a work calculated for popular reading.—But I think you will find it a fitting successor to “Typee.”(Corr 78)

  Murray himself had written, “I am much pleased with Omoo” (Log I: 237).

  Owing to the success of Typee and prepublication publicity, Omoo was widely anticipated. When the book appeared, the earliest reviews were highly favorable. The London Spectator stated, “Unlike most sequels, Omoo…is equal to its predecessor,” a sentiment later echoed in Littell’s Living Age. In another early review, the London Economist claimed Omoo “will be read with amusement by all.” The Toronto Anglo American noted, “‘Typee’ was something rare; but ‘Omoo’ is still rarer.” In his review in the Brooklyn Eagle, Walt Whitman was somewhat more measured in his praise, calling Omoo “the most readable sort of reading…. We therefore recommend this ‘narrativeof adventure in the south seas’ as thorough entertainment—not so light as to be tossed aside for its flippancy, nor so profound as to be tiresome.”

  The accolades, especially those from the British press, continued. The Albion found Omoo a “delightful” romance, “embellished with powers of description, and a graphic skill of hitting off characters little inferior to the highest order of novelist and romance writers.” The London Literary Gazette noted, “Some of the sketches of character are very happy; and the descriptions of the islands and their inhabitants graphic, truth-like, and effective.”

  Early American reviewers likewise praised the book. W. E. Cramer, editor of the Daily Wisconsin, stated: “[Melville] has the genius to succeed, and by perseverance, he may carve his name as high in the Temple of Fame as an Irving or a Scott…. Mr. Melville belongs to a family of genius.” Women’s magazines reaffirmed this commendation. “Dickens,” Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book told its readers, “has nothing more amusing in his Pickwick Papers than the portraits of Zeke and Shorty.”

  In the midst of the praise, however, the harsh critique of the Christian press began to appear. The review in the New-York Evangelist commenced positively, then became more critical: “These lively sketches steal one’s favor and approbation in spite of himself…. The author’s mendacity [deliberate untruthfulness] is sometimes flagrantly visible, as well as his spite against the religion and its missionaries.” The Boston Christian Observatory condemned those who praised the book: “The eulogies pronounced on the work by some may lead others, who have not read it, to suppose that it is possessed of literary merit, candor and truth. They will be astonished to find, on perusal, how meager are its deserts in these respects.” Moral outrage was not confined to the Christian press; Horace Greeley in the New-York Weekly Tribune found Omoo “positively diseased in moral tone” and “dangerous reading for those of immature intellects and unsettled principles.”

  South Pacific missionary papers, not unexpectedly, were effusive in their vilification of Melville. The Polynesian stated:

  His caricatures of the missionaries, whether in the pulpit or surrounded by a gaping crowd of natives—his contempt for the constituted authorities and the consuls and officers—his insubordination—his skulking in the dark where he could not be seen by decent men—his choice of low society—his frequent draughts of “Pisco” or other liquors—his gentle associations with Tahitian damsels—his habits and associations—all prove that he was utterly unqualified to act as an intelligent observer.

  Two years later, the Friend urged Melville to leave New York and go to the South Pacific, “where there are no Bibles, no Sabbaths, no Sanctuaries, nothing to remind one that Jesus Christ came to seek and save that which was lost!”

  One of the most stinging attacks on Omoo was the eleven-page assault written by George Washington Peck for the American Review. Peck tells us he read the book with a “perpetual recoil,” a sentiment repeated at the end: “Omoo is a book one may read once…with a perpetual recoil” (emphasis in original). Peck calls the book “venomous,” “venerous,” a book of “cool, sneering wit” that everywhere manifests a “cool superciliousness” and “the perfect want of heart.” Not content merely to condemn the book, Peck directs vitriol at its author. He calls Melville “as palpable a barbarian as any tattooed New Zealander.” In a two-page diatribe, he proclaims that a man who portrays himself as successful in love as Melville does with the Polynesian beauties must be either homosexual or impotent through syphilis: “effete either by nature or through decay.” Not surprisingly, Peck would later condemn Melville’s Pierre (1852) as “a bad book! Affected in dialect, unnatural in conception, repulsive in plot, and inartistic in construction” (Log I: 463).

  Omoo evoked strong reactions, both admiring and contemptuous, from its contemporary reviewers. Modern Melville scholarship of Omoo and the rest of Melville’s oeuvre began with the publication of Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic in 1921. The early Melville revival appreciated the nuances of Omoo and especially the humor in it. In 1923, D. H. Lawrence wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature: “Perhaps Melville is at his best, his happiest, in Omoo.” Omoo, he asserted, is “picaresque, rascally, roving” (207). In 1929, Lewis Mumford would call Omoo “perhaps the most underrated of Melville’s books.” He found Omoo “in some respects superior [to Typee] in literary quality,” but it “has been treated as if it were but the rinsings of the heady Typeean jug” (82). William Ellery Sedgwick (1944) believed Omoo had “far more humor” than Typee and “the broad genre realism of the eighteenth century” (36). Newton Arvin (1950) saw Typee and Omoo as written “off [the] less profound levels” of Melville’s mind, but there were “intimations of complexity in them” (79). Warner Berthoff, in The Example of Melville (1962), argued that “certain odd bits of social comedy” stay in the reader’s mind after reading Omoo rather than either pictorial effects or Melville’s blunt observations on the destruction of Tahitian culture (68).

  As time passed, Omoo came to be viewed more and more as a slight piece. As John Samson wrote in 1984, “It is as if, in the canon of works sacred to Melville scholars, Omoo holds a peculiar place as the one novel completely simple and profane, not harboring ‘the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God’ [Moby-Dick, ch. 23], but nevertheless (or therefore) a welcome relief for the scholar toiling over Melville’s usual inordinate complexity and intellectuality” (496).

  Recent critics continue to comment on Melville’s use of comedy and character as well as on the perceived lack of profundity in Omoo. Like Arvin, Christopher Sten (1996) contended that Omoo is not a profound book and, like Lawrence, that it is picaresque—although he sees Doctor Long Ghost, rather than the protagonist Typee, as “the true picaresque center of the novel” (62, 41, 47). Toni Oliviero (1983) went further, arguing that Doctor Long Ghost “may have the honor of being the first of Melville’s really good characters” (43). Steven Kemper(1978) asserted, “Omoo is not profound, nor is it merely sunny and simple”; in his protagonist, Melville created “a rough form of his typical isolato” (420, 425).

  The three most significant studies of Omoo are Charles Roberts Anderson’s Melville in the South Seas (1939), Gordon Roper’s Historical Note for the Northwestern-Newberry edition(1968), and Harrison Hayford’s work on the Hendricks House edition (1969). Anderson was one of the first and most thorough of those to search government records, newspapers, logbooks, and South Pacific travelogues for authoritative information on Melville’s wanderings. The amount of work undertaken by Anderson can be glimpsed in his discussion of finding the tale of Willie the carpenter in Edward T. Perkins’s Na Motu:

  This plain tale furnishes a rich reward for the student of Melville who has made his way through several hundred volumes of South Sea travels—all too frequently with negative results—constantly on the alert for any tidbit of information that might throw light on the Polynesian wanderings of an embryonic author, whether it be a confirmation of his actual adventures or merely a source for his published narratives. (307)

  Anderson found almost every document of significance except the British consular records of the mutiny aboard the Lucy Ann. Those were later uncovered by Ida Leeson, a librarian at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, who announced her find in the Philological Quarterly in 1940, one year after the publication of Anderson’s book. Anderson, however, had discovered a reference to the mutiny in the September 23, 1842, entry of the logbook of La Reine Blanche and therefore verified that the mutiny had in fact occurred.

  Roper’s competent Historical Note comprises a study of Melville’s use of written sources and the history of the text as well as a thorough assessment of contemporary reviews. However, Hayford’s work for the Hendricks House edition remains the seminal publication on Omoo. It is what Roper calls the “most detailed historical and critical consideration of the book yet written” (343). The page proofs for the Hendricks House edition were completed in 1957, but the book was not published until 1969. The Editors’ Introduction includes a close study of Melville’s written sources, what Hayford calls “prompt-books”(xxii), as well as a thorough analysis of the narrator. It also canvasses the many reviews of the book as well as the pre-1957 scholarship. The lengthy Explanatory Notes detail passage by passage the sources used by Melville. Finally, it includes a complete transcription of the consular records concerning the Lucy Ann revolt.

  Melville’s tone in Omoo is both ironic and comic. Omoo fore-shadows a subgenre of American culture that partakes of a sort of irony that does not become part of the widespread vernacular until the 1960s and has since become a staple of popular culture. The lineage from Omoo goes forward to John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and the “cool, sneering wit” that characterized the counterculture of the 1960s. The tone of Omoo is much like the tone of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), or Dylan’s laconic interactions with earnest, conventional interviewers, especially as seen in the Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005). In all of these, the central characters are part of a group outside the mainstream whose motto is “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” Doctor Long Ghost and the narrator of Omoo create a circle beyond the bounds of society, spontaneously and unspokenly recognizing in each other an affinity of perspective, a removed “cool”—just as the bums of Cannery Row do, just as Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise do, just as Bob Dylan and the musicians in his electric backup band do. They create their own ironic outsider language, tweaking the “squares” who stuffily go about their business without realizing that the beachcombers, bums, and beatniks they disdain are laughing at the hypocrisy and posing that characterize social norms.

  Mark Twain skewers the absurdity of conventional society in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), but not with the ironic tone of Omoo. Huck is a naïf. The narrator of Omoo has a detachment that Huck cannot have. Melville’s narrator is a beach-comber, an outsider by definition. Like the bums of Cannery Row, he is not part of nor does he have a stake in society, whereas Huck accepts the legitimacy of immoral social convention and struggles unsuccessfully against his own natural morality in the face of it. The mocking tone that Omoo’s narrator and Doctor Long Ghost employ as they interact with those around them is foreign to Huck. That mocking tone is a gateway that invites the reader to share the narrator’s ironic perspective on society. The reader can depart the conventions of society and join the beachcombers, bums, and beatniks.

  In Omoo, Melville’s narrator brings to bear his ability to see several viewpoints simultaneously. The narrator’s critique of the missionaries’ deleterious effect on Tahitian society sets him apart from a sailor seeking simply to entertain himself, but also from the earnestness of the missionaries who see themselves as reformers. The “protest novel” aspect of Omoo is more than the “sailor’s grudge” against the missionaries mentioned by Evert Duyckinck (Log I: 230). Melville deplores the destruction caused by the interaction between Europeans and islanders and wants us to reconsider the cost of “civilizing” other nations. Yet he writes his protest in the face of his own skepticism that society is capable of either comprehending or responding effectively to the problems he relates.