Billy Budd: With Readers Guide

This edition of BILLY BUDD is based on the text edition by Frederic Barron Freeman and corrected by Elizabeth Treeman; reprinted by permission of the publichers, Harvard University Press, copyright 1948, 1956, by the President and Fellows of Harvard Collage. From The year 1797, the year of this narrative, belongs to a period which, as every thinker now feels, involved a crisis for Christendom not exceeded in its undetermined momentousness at the time by any other are whereof there is record. The opening proposition made by the Spirit of that Age involved rectification of the Old World’s hereditary wrongs. In France, to some extent, this was bloodily effected. But what then? Straightway the Revolution itself became a wrong-doer, one more oppressive than the kings. Under Napoleon it enthroned upstart kings, and initiated that prolonged agony of continual war would be what to some thinkers apparently it has since turned out to be–a political advance along nearly the whole line for Europeans. Now, as elsewhere hinted, it was something caught from the Revolutionary Spirit that at Spithead emboldened the man-of-war’s men to rise against real abuses, long-standing ones, and afterwards at the Nore to make inordinate and aggressive demands–successful resistance to which was confirmed only when the ringleaders were hung for an admonitory spectacle to the anchored fleet. Yet in a way analogous to the operation of the Revolution at large, the Great Mutiny, though by Englishmen naturally deemed monstrous at the time, doubtless gave the first latent prompting to most important reforms in the British navy.