Billy Budd is a novella by Melville, who is most famous for his novel Moby Dick that was written some forty years earlier. Foretopman Billy Budd, to give the book its full title, was written in 1891 but was not published until 1924. It is the story of ‘the handsome sailor’ Billy who, though a decent man, is treated badly by his master-at-arms called Claggart and strikes this nasty character down, killing him outright but unintentionally. The cause of this sorry circumstance is Billy’s stammer that prevents him from defending himself in words when he is wrongfully accused by Claggart.
