"You cannot run and read it": Melville's search for the right reader.(Critical Essay)

With his organ of sights strained by long hours of shut up work in the winter of 1850 Melville wrote to Evert Duyckinck that he worn out his evenings "skimming above some large-printed book" that would not tax his eyesight. (1) No single has ever claimed that the work he himself was writing that winter was susceptible to skimming, or, as the saying goe that single could "run and read" it. on the other hand Melville did not trust his readers with the difficult and heterodox material he not absented to them in Moby-Dick--at least not without a certain number of guidance from the author himself. As Robert Milder has