[3] Unable to find employment at home, young Wellingborough Redburn signs on the Highlander, a merchantman out of New York City bound for Liverpool, England.

Representing himself as the "son of a gentleman" and expecting to be treated as such, he discovers that he is just a green hand, a "boy", the lowest rank on the ship, assigned all the duties no other sailor wants, like cleaning out the "pig-pen", a longboat that serves as a shipboard sty.

Uneducated yet cunning, with broken nose and squinting eye, he is described as "a Cain afloat, branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat near him."

Redburn soon experiences all the trials of a greenhorn: seasickness, scrubbing decks, climbing masts in the dead of night to unfurl sails, cramped quarters, and bad food.

One day in a street called Launcelott's Hey he hears "a feeble wail" from a cellar beneath an old warehouse and looking into it sees "the figure of what had been a woman.

On the docks he meets Harry Bolton, a dandy who claims to be a sailor looking for a job, and Redburn helps him procure a berth on the Highlander for the return voyage.

Jackson, after being ill in bed for four weeks, returns to active duty: he climbs to the topsail yard, then suddenly vomits "a torrent of blood from his lungs", and falls headfirst into the sea and disappears.

Melville alluded to Redburn for the first time in a letter to his English publisher in the late spring of 1849, in which he wrote that the novel would be practical rather than follow the "unwise" course of his previous novel, Mardi, which had been harshly criticized:[4] I have now in preparation a thing of a widely different cast from "Mardi":—a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience—the son of a gentleman on his first voyage to sea as a sailor—no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale.

He also sent Melville a personal letter where, among other items, he said "I have been reading your Redburn for the third or fourth time and have closed it more deeply impressed with the descriptive power that vitalises every page.

"[9] Elizabeth Hardwick finds that passages of the book display a rhetorical brilliance: "Throughout Melville's writings there is a liberality of mind, a freedom from vulgar superstition, occasions again and again for an oratorical insertion of enlightened opinion.

The first, usually called the biographical school, may be found in studies of Melville written in the 1920s by critics such as Raymond Weaver, John Freeman, and Lewis Mumford.

Typifying this school's approach is Mumford's statement that:In Redburn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings about life and his experiences up to his eighteenth year.

[12]This new approach represented a broad trend that sought to reinterpret American literature—Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner, and Hemingway—in the light of mythic quests and patterns.

After some debate in the 1980s when the notion was first proposed, critics seem to agree that Aladdin's Palace is a "male brothel", including Elizabeth Hardwick who describes it as "a strange, fastidiously observed, rococo urban landscape unlike any other dramatic intrusion in Melville's writings or in American literature at the time.