Articles of War: Subjects and Objects Aboard the Nineteenth-Century Naval Novel

ABSTRACT

This essay engages the world of the nineteenth-century naval novel, considering how the ‘wooden world’ presented in such narratives came to shape a unique representational order. Taking Captain Frederick Marryat’s The King’s Own (1830) as primary evidence, it is argued that naval novels depict the man-of-war as a place where the things – and men – of the parlour and marketplace find themselves reconstituted as components of the ‘Service’. This alternate order emerges in one of the most exhilarating features of high-seas thrillers: their recurrence to dense, largely un-translated nautical terminology. Such language foregrounds the man-of-war as a purely functional assemblage of parts, inviting the subject to die and become reborn as an object of state. At one level, this project was distinctly British. At the same time, the British fixation on naval gadgetry resonates with American and French naval novels of the period, cooperating in what arguably became a transnational militarism. Such narratives prepare the way for a modern ideological strategy by which warfare becomes ennobled on the basis of its economic sanctity.

KEYWORDS:

• Nineteenth-century novel
• nautical fiction
• war fiction
• the war novel
• Frederick Marryat
• thing theory
• militarism

Notes

1. N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 13–14.

2. Frederick Marryat, The King’s Own (Ithaca, NY: McBooks Press, 1999), 271. In this and subsequent references to Marryat, I rely on editions based upon R. Brimley Johnson’s 1896 The Novels of Captain Marryat. According to Louis J. Parascandola, Johnson is most faithful to the first editions. See Parascandola, ‘Puzzled Which to Choose’: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), ‘Preface,’ np.

3. See N. A. M. Rodger, Articles of War: The Statutes Which Governed Our Fighting Navies 1661, 1749, and 1886 (Homewell, Havant, Hampshire: Kenneth Mason, 1982), 27.

4. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 52.

5. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Captain’s Deathbed,’ in The Captain’s Deathbed and Other Essays (San Diego: Harcourt, 1978), 43.

6. John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare (New York: Viking, 1989), 47.

7. Joseph Conrad, ‘Tales of the Sea,’ in Notes on Life and Letters. The Complete Works, Vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1924), 54.

8. Published under the pseudonym ‘Jack Nasty-Face.’

9. Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 168–70.

10. Ayşe Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 43. Celikkol’s readings largely derive from The King’s Own and the historical romance Snarleyow, or the Dog Fiend (1837). While she admits that Marryat often returns the seafarer to state discipline, she strongly emphasises the novels’ anarchic, hedonic and cosmopolitan potential.

11. See David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007) for the argument that these wars were ‘total.’

12. See Keegan (15–16) as well as Martin Robson, A History of the Royal Navy: The Napoleonic Wars (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 183–200. Jürgen Osterhammel provides the long view, explaining how throughout the nineteenth century Britain’s navy underwrote free trade on a global scale. See his book The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 450–61.

13. Admiral Lord Cochrane, The Autobiography of a Seaman (New York: Lyons Press, 2000), 13.

14. N. A. M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815 (New York: Norton, 2004), 581.

15. For a time, Marryat commanded a sloop charged with capturing smugglers. Displeased with naval strategies for dealing with illegal trade, he wrote the Admiralty proposing more effective measures (Parascandola 21).

16. Herman Melville, White-Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 373.

17. See John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006).

18. Sara Ficke is especially convincing on Marryat’s nationalism. See ‘Pirates and Patriots: Citizenship, Race, and the Transatlantic Adventure Novel.’ Transatlantic Literary Exchanges 1790–1870. ed. Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 118.

19. John Sutherland, ‘The Nautical Novel,’ The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2013), 455.

20. See Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, the chapter ‘Bringing up the Empire’ (47–72), as well as Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 1994).

21. For details on the Nore, see Leonard F. Guttridge, Mutiny: A History of Naval Insurrection (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1992), 64ff. The crisis came to a head with some two dozen warships expelling or confining their officers, blockading the Thames, and issuing petitions that ominously echoed the phraseology of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The mutiny eventually collapsed, but in an era in which an emergent British identity was deeply invested in the Royal Navy, the event shook public consciousness.

22. Typically for Marryat, the hero’s career will track with an inheritance plot. A tragic final act, however, sees Willy poisoned before he can enjoy his fortune.

23. I take this phrase from an 1841 anthology of Charles Dibdin’s lyrics, Songs Naval and National.

24. James Fennimore Cooper, Sea Tales: The Pilot and The Red Rover (New York: The Library of America, 1991), 387.

25. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 163.

26. ‘Captain Marryat, the Sea Novelist (With a Portrait),’ The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 48 (Oct. 1836): 229.

27. See, for example, Dana Jr.’s step-by-step rehearsal of tacking, explained in a way rarely duplicated in Marryat, Chamier, Cooper or Sue, in Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages (New York: Library of America, 2005), 177–78. For the New Universal Dictionary, see William Falconer and William Burney, A New Universal Dictionary of the Marine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

28. Margaret Cohen, ‘Traveling Genres,’ New Literary History 34 (Summer 2003): 481–99.

29. Cohen herself doesn’t highlight this example, although she does refer to Barthes. See Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect,’ The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 141–48.

30. See Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 2–13. The French and American economic contexts were not identical to the British. Nevertheless, there were continuities. In America, for example, the early-century transition to liberal capitalism often provoked similar fears concerning material accumulation. American commentators fretted over market side-effects that included greed, intemperate speculation and an un-republican taste for luxury. See Joseph Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market, 1780–1870 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 10–13. Also see Steven Watts, War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 76–77. Watts notes that some American voices welcomed the War of 1812 as a remedy for an ‘emerging cash matrix’ (103).

31. Marryat’s coded references seem to be to Henry Hunt (1773–1835), an MP associated with the Corn Law controversy; William Cobbett and his Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn (1823); and Warren’s brand boot blacking. I have not been able to decipher the reference to ‘W----’s champagne.’

32. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Penguin, 2003), 208–09.

33. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20.

34. Frederick Marryat, Peter Simple (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 68.

35. John H. Harland, Seamanship in the Age of Sail (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 14.

36. William Henry Smyth. The Sailor’s Word-Book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms (London: Blackie and Son, 1867), 7.

37. John Peck, Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719–1917 (Houndsmill, Basington, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 25.

38. The English frigate is in fact destroyed and most of the crew drowned.

39. Felicia Hemans, ‘Casabianca,’ in Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose and Letters (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001), 300.

40. Frederick Marryat, Frank Mildmay, or The Naval Officer (Ithaca, NY: McBooks Press, 1998), 62.

41. Charles Dibdin, Songs Naval and National of the Late Charles Dibdin; with a Memoir and Addenda (London: John Murray, 1841).

42. Frederick Chamier, Ben Brace, The Last of Nelson’s Agamemnons (London: Bentley, 1840).

43. See MacKenzie, ‘Nelson Goes Global: The Nelson Myth in Britain and Beyond,’ in Admiral Lord Nelson: His Context and Legacy, ed. David Cannadine (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 144–65. It’s notable that at one point the U.S. Navy commissioned an edition of the Life to be distributed ‘to every seaman and every officer in the American navy.’ This last fact is noted in Robert Southey, The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson (London: John Murray, 1813), vol. 1, xxi.

44. This entry forms part of an April 1809 dispatch informing the public of the botched Aix Roads action. See ‘Return of the Names,’ London Gazette (21 April 1809): 539. Admittedly, Gazette reports varied in specificity.

45. So the Pequod’s crew refer to amputations in Moby-Dick (1851). See Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 137 and 171.

46. The narrator of The King’s Own claims he joined the Navy after glimpsing the ‘triumphant car upon which [Nelson’s] earthly remains were borne’ process towards St. Paul’s (149). Though fictional, this passage was drawn from personal experience. See Tom Pocock, Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer and Adventurer (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2001), 13–15. For a wonderful analysis of Nelson’s funeral, along with the politics of memorialisation, see Holger Hoock, ‘Nelson Entombed: The Military and Naval Pantheon in St Paul’s Cathedral,’ in Admiral Lord Nelson: His Context and Legacy.

47. Kathleen Wilson construes Nelson’s broken body differently, as emblematic of the shift from a classically-inflected, aristocratic heroism to a heroism of the people. The latter invited identification from a mass public ‘equally dismembered by battles, taxes and gagging orders.’ See ‘Nelson and the People: Manliness, Patriotism and the Body Politics,’ in Admiral Lord Nelson: His Context and Legacy, 63. See also Hoock, 122–23.

48. See Dorothy Van Ghent’s classic reading of Great Expectations in The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), 154–70.

49. See Tamara Siroone Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). Ketabgian complicates the idea that right-thinking Victorians always understood the machine as enemy to ‘organic feeling and vitality’ (2).

50. See Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 136–38; Peck makes a similar point (60).

51. Eugène Sue, The Salamander, a Naval Romance, trans. Henry William Herbert (New York: J. Winchester, New World Press, 1845), 94.

52. Frederic Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 236.