rjohara.net

Search:  


This is a web version of the introduction (only) to a previously published paper. Editorial insertions in this web version are enclosed in {braces}. Citations to this paper should refer to the complete printed version:

O’Hara, Robert J. 2015.
The names Ahab and Ishmael in early Massachusetts. Notes and Queries, 62(3): 417–418.


The Names Ahab and Ishmael in Early Massachusetts

Introduction—This note corrects an error in the comprehensive Explanatory Notes to Mansfield and Vincent’s scholarly centennial edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). In their discussion of the novel’s opening lines and the narrator’s name Ishmael, Mansfield and Vincent write, ‘There is no instance of the name [Ishmael] in the Nantucket Vital records to 1850, just as, also understandably, there is no instance of Ahab’.1 { ... }

1 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York, 1952), 587.

{The full text of this paper is available from Oxford University Press. A preprint version is available on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN #2519287).}


© RJO 1995–2022