Patrick Brantlinger's book Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 has been a great asset to me in examining themes of imperialism, racism, and colonialism in Captain Marryat's works, as well as placing him in his context of Victorian cultural and literary history. It's slightly dated at this point (originally published in 1988), but still very relevant.
But Brantlinger unfortunately treats Marryat as primarily a writer for children, and he also just hates the guy. He tends to read him without nuance, flattens the moral ambiguity of his stories, and at one point he refers to Marryat's literary colleagues who were also ex-Royal Navy (Frederick Chamier, William Nugent Glascock, William Johnson Neale, etc.) as his SEAGOING CRONIES. (I put the book down and started laughing, at that point.)
There is a light-hearted anecdote in The Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat about Marryat having some improperly cured animal hides on display in his home, which then attracted insects, as told by his daughter Florence—who clearly loved her father but was not above making fun of him. (After angrily insisting that nothing was wrong, Captain Marryat finally admitted the problem and sent the infested hides to be treated).
Brantlinger assumes that it is "perhaps some satisfaction for the modern reader" to learn about this incident, which also cracks me up. Like, there was no need to include this in a literary analysis, but he is just filled with glee to think of some embarrassment happening to Marryat.
Really one of the most sly and clever parts of Mr. Midshipman Easy is the fact that Jack Easy is an insufferable hypocrite. He goes on and on about the equality of man, but because he thinks he's an Enlightened Intellectual and not because he truly believes in it. There are countless examples of Jack pulling rank on people he thinks are beneath him—and this is when he's still a young idealist; by the end of the book he embraces his privilege and literally becomes a Tory politician.
I was just laughing over teenage Jack, busted trespassing on a neighbour's property and helping himself to the well-stocked fishing pond. Jack's verbose argument that private property shouldn't exist doesn't impress the proprietor, who instructs his groundskeepers to get rid of him.
“Sir, I beg your pardon, you have not yet heard all my arguments,” replied Jack, who did not approve of the conclusions drawn.
“I have no time to hear more, Mr. Easy: I wish you a good morning.” And the proprietor departed, leaving Jack in company with the keepers.
“I’ll trouble you for that rod, master,” said William. James was very busy stringing the fish through the gills upon a piece of osier.
“At all events you will hear reason,” said Jack. “I have arguments—”
“I never heard no good arguments in favour of poaching,” interrupted the keeper.
“You’re an insolent fellow,” replied Jack. “It is by paying such vagabonds as you that people are able to be guilty of injustice.”
“It’s by paying us that the land an’t poached — and if there be some excuse for a poor devil who is out of work, there be none for you, who call yourself a gentleman.”
“According to his ‘count, as we be all equal, he be no more a gentleman than we be.”
“Silence, you blackguard, I shall not condescend to argue with such as you: if I did I could prove that you are a set of base slaves, who have just as much right to this property as your master or I have.”
“As you have, I dare say, master.”
“As I have, you scoundrel; this pond is as much my property, and so are the fish in it, as they are of your master, who has usurped the right.”
“I say, James, what do you say, shall we put the young gentleman in possession of his property?” said William, winking to the other.
William took the hint; they seized Jack by the arms and legs, and soused him into the pond.
Picturesque and beautiful as all falling water is, to describe it is extremely difficult, unless, indeed by a forced simile; the flow of language is too tame for the flow of water; but if the reader can imagine a ledge of black rocks, about sixty or seventy feet high, and that over this ledge was poured simultaneously the milk of some millions of cows, he will then have some idea of the beauty of the creaming Falls of the Mohawk, imbedded as they are in their wild and luxuriant scenery.
— Frederick Marryat, Diary in America.
Captain Marryat coming SO close to admitting that his powers of prose are inadequate for the task at hand, before plunging ahead anyway with "the milk of some millions of cows"...
Oliver Warner, British naval historian and writer: It would be possible, indeed it has been done, to compile an anthology of passages from which a student might conclude that Marryat was a minor master of English prose. But the extracts would need to have been chosen with cunning, and it would not be possible to lift any long unbroken stretches without revealing sentence after sentence which care would have transformed.
On the subject of reading Captain Marryat—which is a tag as well as the title of this blog—I have changed my mind about what editions to recommend, and at this point I highly endorse scanned 19th century editions. (Good news, these are the free books on sites like Google Books and Archive.org!) I don't recommend new e-books, except for some deluxe ones that have facsimile pages from a 19th century edition, and no OCR. If optical character recognition was used to create the text, which includes some new print-on-demand editions, there are almost guaranteed errors, even with human proofreading.
I own at least three or four inexpensive new e-books of Marryat's works. In the course of going through them to find quotes, which is a thing I do regularly for this blog, I have found many instances of words incorrectly transcribed, and sometimes parts of sentences are entirely gone. (It made a meaningful difference in one quote from Poor Jack, in the original vs. Delphi Classics Kindle edition.)
But it isn't just poor character recognition and errors in e-books and modern editions that detracts from the works: the way the words are spaced in the original text, with extra spacing where a modern writer might put a paragraph break, is best suited to Marryat's style.
Take this passage from The King's Own:
It's a wall of text no matter what you do with it, but the double-spaced sentences and spacing around punctuation in this 1834 edition make it easier on the eyes. Compressing that down with modern typography does it no favours.
In Puzzled Which to Choose: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat, Louis J. Parascandola notes that he is chiefly using The Novels of Captain Marryat, edited by R. Brimley Johnson in the late 19th century, as "the more reliable text," although he laments that there is "no standard edition of the complete novels." I once imagined that early editions of Marryat's works would be more authentic, but since then I've found out that some "revised" editions of the 1830s censor him significantly. Even 20th century editions of Marryat can be bowdlerized, treating him as a "children's writer" (Mr. Midshipman Easy is particularly vulnerable to this).
As I approach the two year anniversary of creating this blog, I increasingly contemplate making a pinned post (pinned posts weren't even a thing in the wild and carefree days of 2019!) I find that I use the tag "biography" for posts that relate to Frederick Marryat's real life, but I have not consistently used any kind of book review tagging for books by or about him. You can look up individual titles and hopefully find them.
I remember informing my family on fakebook around the same time that I was going to read the complete works of Captain Marryat, and I comically imagined that this project would cause me to mentally shift into some kind of deranged old salt and declare that I had the weather-gage on someone before challenging them to a duel. (The reality of reading Too Much Marryat is more like, increasing numbers of commas, creep, into your work, and you find yourself writing 'any thing' or 'every one' instead of the modern, single-word spellings).
I am also wondering if there is a better time for queued posts to publish. Currently it is 9:00AM CST/3:00PM GMT.
Hi! Where should I start with learning about Marryat/reading his books? Your blog has made me really interested haha
Thanks for the ask, I love getting messages like this! As far as reading his books, we’re in a golden age of accessibility thanks to all the 19th century literature available for free download on Google Books: that’s how I’ve read almost all of my Marryat books so far. If you’re willing to pay for electronic versions of his books, there are many offerings on Kindle and through Apple Books. Print versions are harder to find, but nautically-focused McBooks Press has many recent Marryat reissues. (edit to add: I recommend free scanned 19th century editions of Marryat's books on sites like Google Books and Archive.org, in preference to ebooks and print on demand. No bad OCR, and the original typesetting benefits the period writing style of huge paragraphs with double- or triple-spaced sentences).
When I first started reading Marryat, in the form of Google e-books on my phone, I would always have one or two browser tabs open just to look up the Age of Sail terminology, and sometimes period references. I can now recommend a few more free e-books for that purpose: The Sailor’s Word-Book, by Admiral William Henry Smyth, and The Young Sea Officer’s Sheet Anchor by Darcy Lever. Sometimes just plugging sailing terms into a search engine can give you misleading results that are more relevant for modern yachts, not a sea-going vessel from the days of Nelson’s Navy.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in many ways reading Frederick Marryat is comparable to reading Jane Austen. Same time period, same culture, and you’ll find a similar vocabulary to refer to social conventions, food, clothing, the political climate, and so on. This is useful to know because while there is unfortunately not a big Marryat fandom out there, there is a massive Jane Austen fandom who have produced numerous guidebooks and blogs about fashion, food, you-name-it from early 19th century Britain, and these can be very helpful!
What Marryat books should you read first? This is subjective, but I recommend his early and mid-career novels for adults —as opposed to the books for children that he wrote at the end of his life, which are unsurprisingly less spicy and more didactic— and avoiding his historical fiction e.g. The Phantom Ship, which is heavy on the purple prose since people from The Past have to be melodramatic. (Also he didn’t have access to Google, and he put carronades in a historical novel 100 years before they were invented amongst other bloopers). One of Marryat’s greatest charms is the veracity of his Napoleonic-era novels, which draw from his lived experiences. Scholars look to Marryat as a primary source on everything from club-hauling a ship to sailors’ tattoos.
My current Intro to Marryat rec is his novella The Three Cutters (but not, as I note in the linked post, his novella The Pirate, which usually comes bundled with The Three Cutters as they were originally published together). Mr. Midshipman Easy comes up a lot, and it’s certainly one of his more well-known works in the present day. I’m a little more equivocal about recommending it as a first venture into Marryat (I prefer a few books ahead of it), but in a way it’s a good crash course into his novels, for good and bad. It can be very funny, there is some trenchant commentary, and in other parts it totally runs off the rails. There is also a characteristic level of simultaneously condemning racism (the prejudice the character Mesty encounters) and indulging in racist tropes that make modern readers uncomfortable (the way Mesty’s dialog is written; the fact that he is a Scary Black Man devoted to the white hero character).
Not to digress too much about Marryat’s Problematic ways, because he was a pretty complex and flawed person from two centuries ago and I hate to flatten that complexity, but it bears mentioning that he tends to write, in general, in broad national and ethnic stereotypes. It’s rare for his Black characters to not speak in an othering dialect which I could very charitably say is influenced by a West Indian accent that he would have encountered in real life. He has barbaric Irish characters in The King’s Own who attack and kill the survivors of a shipwreck, but a more positive albeit still stereotypical representation in Terence O’Brien from Peter Simple. (O’Brien and Mesty are, weirdly enough, very similar characters who both exist to support the [Anglo] white hero— and “Ashantee” Mesty even speaks with an Irish accent, since he learned English from Irish emigrants). Marryat’s white European (non-British) characters can have literally the same diction as his Black characters, as in this passage from Jacob Faithful with a French person speaking: “Madame Tagliabue did noting but cry all last night when she heard the very bad news about de debt, and all dat [...] suppose a gentleman no lose his honour, what matter de money?”
The fact that Marryat’s novels take place all over the British Empire, and depict the multicultural world of that Empire even within Britain, because the Royal Navy took a pragmatic approach to a diverse workforce, means that there are many opportunities for him to use cringey dialect and indulge in offensive stereotypes that were regarded as acceptable humour or familiar tropes at the time. Contrast and compare with his friend and contemporary Charles Dickens, who is beloved even today, but I would argue that he was about a hundred times more racist than Marryat, going by the screeds that he published in magazines (many of them quoted in Patrick Brantlinger’s book Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, which also examines themes of imperialism and colonialism in Marryat’s works).
I wouldn’t be reading so much of Frederick Marryat if I didn’t enjoy the way he spins a yarn, and I find his novels genuinely entertaining on their own merit, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that a big part of my enjoyment is the way Marryat illuminates his time period and his world. I am deeply interested in the 19th century Royal Navy, the British Empire, and life in early 19th century England; and Marryat is almost like having a personal guide, making his era “real to us and ordinary,” as Virginia Woolf wrote. There are thrilling aspects to his world and horrifying ones. Marryat writes from his own perspective, that of a privileged, upper-class, Protestant white man, but he is not without empathy and nuance (and sometimes I think he is unfairly painted as some kind of imperialist cheerleader when he was often critical of the empire and its machinations).
To learn more about Captain Marryat himself, you can’t go wrong with one of the chief sources for all of his biographies: his daughter Florence Marryat’s collection of correspondence and biographical sketches, The Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat. This is available as a free e-book: volume 1, volume 2. David Hannay’s Life of Frederick Marryat is very Victorian and mediocre, but also free in e-book form. (Can’t beat free books!)
For a modern(ish) biography of Marryat, my personal favourite might be Oliver Warner’s Captain Marryat: A Rediscovery, but it was published in 1953. Much easier to find, and most recently published, the naval historian Tom Pocock wrote Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer and Adventurer in 2000. Pocock’s book is probably the best recommendation for someone looking for a good Marryat biography that includes illustrations and isn’t impossible to find. It’s fun to read, and Pocock has an obvious love for Marryat and his books (and he gets bonus points from me for being a Frank Mildmay fan).
I finally re-titled this blog into something slightly more dignified. When I created it about a year ago, after a wild ride getting into Marryat's novels and jonesing over the lack of content and discussion, "I guess Frederick Marryat is my life now" was a fitting title. (That statement isn't any less true, as I continue with this project and learn more and more about Frederick Marryat and his family.)
