Christopher Ohge (University of London/EXC 2020 Fellow 2025) | 'You Must Have Plenty of Sea-Room to Tell the Truth in': 'Hawthorne and His Mosses', Textual Fluidity and Adaptive Reading in Digital Editions

Herman Melville's "Hawthorne and his Mosses" has been the focus of many scholarly studies, including a recent comprehensive analysis of marginalia in the work he reviewed. Nevertheless, Melville's process of reading and writing about Hawthorne has not been fully investigated with computational methods. This presentation will show the first digital edition of "Hawthorne and his Mosses" along with text analyses that compare the data of Melville's reading to his manifesto. Rather than establishing Melville's final intentions or privileging the first published version in the magazine Literary World (1850), this Melville Electronic Library edition approaches it as a fluid text, covering the full range of authorial, editorial and adaptive revision, from Melville's marginalia to the manuscript fair copy and subsequent publications of his essay, including visualisations and statistical results. Echoing Melville's call for "plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in," the edition aims to expand our knowledge of Melville's creative process and the numerous textual interventions that followed it.