In the Library
Billy Budd
Herman Melville, 1924
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 28
- Length
- Length 30k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Joseph Conrad
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Antigone
Sophocles
Sophocles sets the same collision, conscience against the letter of the law, but gives the condemned a voice and lets her argue back.
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Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville
Melville's other short study of a man who cannot be reasoned with or saved, told by the decent employer who quietly fails him.
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About the book
The merchant ship is named the Rights-of-Man, and when the press gang takes the boy off her he waves his hat and calls goodbye to her by name. His new lieutenant hears sedition in it. He is wrong. Billy Budd cannot read, cannot lie, and has never meant a double thing in his life, and that is precisely the trouble. Aboard a warship in the year of the great mutinies, a master-at-arms who has no earthly reason to hate him hates him anyway, for nothing the story will name beyond a depravity according to nature, and brings a charge the boy cannot answer, because under strong feeling his tongue locks. So he answers with his fist. Melville died with the manuscript unfinished and no editor has ever entirely settled it; what stands is a captain who believes Billy innocent and hangs him for the law. Billy's last words are a blessing on that captain, and the whole ship says them back.