Billy Budd: (An inside revision narrative.)

Abstract: As John Wenke observed in his contribution to Leviathan ’s inaugural issue of Melville’s Hand twenty-five years ago, “Genetic evidence is biographical evidence.” This essay instantiates that claim through a set of late revisions Melville made in Billy Budd , Chapter 24, regarding the insertion of a skeleton in sleeping Billy’s cheek-bone and of “fervid hearts self-contained” regarding Billy’s “secret fire.” The revisions are sourced in Melville’s 1839 trip to Liverpool and his life-long fascination with that city’s Lord Nelson Monument. These later revisions not only link the passage to Melville’s earlier Liverpool recollection of the African sailor as a Black avatar of the Handsome Sailor type, but they also broaden Billy’s condition to embrace all “fervid hearts,” including Melville’s self-containment in his “inside narrative” of Billy’s lethal anger.