AND THE VICTORIAN NAUTICAL : GENDER, GENRE AND THE MARKETPLACE Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace

Series Editors: Kate Macdonald Ann Rea Editorial Board: Kristin Bluemel David Carter Stella Deen Christoph Ehland David Finkelstein Jaime Harker Nick Hubble Elizabeth Maslen Victoria Stewart

T   S  1 e Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch Simon R. Frost 2 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel Cheryl A. Wilson 3 Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel: Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor Erica Brown 4 John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity Kate Macdonald and Nathan Waddell (eds) 5 Women’s University , 1880–1945 Anna Bogen F   T e Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations Francesca Saggini Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: e Art of Female Beauty Kirby-Jane Hallum , Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: e Modern Library Series, 1917–1955 Lise Jaillant This page intentionally left blank WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL AND THE VICTORIAN NAUTICAL NOVEL: GENDER, GENRE AND THE MARKETPLACE



Andrew Nash ROUTLEDGE ROUTLEDGE Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2014 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

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© Taylor & Francis 2014 © Andrew Nash 2014

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Nash, Andrew, 1972 – author. William Clark Russell and the Victorian nautical novel: gender, genre and the marketplace. – (Literary texts and the popular marketplace) 1. Russell, William Clark, 1844–1911. 2. stories, English – History and criticism. 3. English  ction – 19th century – History and criticism. 4. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 19th century. I. Title II. Series 823.8-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-1-84893-376-7 (hbk)

Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements ix List of Figures and Tables xi

Introduction 1 1 Sailor and Writer 15 2 Writing as a Woman 37 3 Finding the Sea 59 4 Writing the Sea: Genre and eme 81 5 Writing the Sea: Women and Gender 109 6 Marketing the Sea: Serials 131 7 Marketing the Sea: Books and Publishers 153

William Clark Russell: A Bibliography 183 Notes 189 Works Cited 213 Index 223 W. CLARK RUSSELL

Figure I.1: William Clark Russell. From a photo by Elliot & Fry (undated). Author’s collection. PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

is book is intended as a contribution to the broadening canon of scholar- ship on Victorian  ction. More than any other critical or reference work, John Sutherland’s Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1988; 2nd edn, 2009) has drawn attention to the vast industry of Victorian  ction and the extent to which our critical judgements have been dependent upon a very small sample of novelists, whose careers and literary achievement cannot provide a fully rep- resentative picture of what the Victorian novel actually meant to Victorians. Recent scholarship which has attempted to open up the canon and explore the  ction and working lives of popular and less-well-known writers of the period has concentrated mainly on women novelists. Much valuable work has been pro- duced in this area but many male novelists, well known and successful in their day, have also fallen into critical obscurity, and our understanding of the map of Victorian  ction will only become clearer once their experiences are taken into account. Ironically, one of the main themes to emerge from this study is the extent to which the Victorian novel was assumed to be a feminized genre, in terms of its authorship, readership and content. My account of one highly successful male author o ers what I hope is a valuable perspective on the pressures of gender, genre and the structures of the literary marketplace which conditioned the ways in which authors sought to make a career out of writing  ction. I gratefully acknowledge the Bibliographical Society for the award of a Major Research Grant to support some of the archival work undertaken for this book. Sta at the University of Reading’s Archives and Special Collections service have been unfailingly kind, helpful and accommodating of my requests over many years. In particular I would like to thank Verity Andrews, Guy Baxter, Michael Bott, Nancy Fulford and Brian Ryder. e sta of many other librar- ies have also helped and I would like to acknowledge the following: the Bolton Archive and Local Studies Service; the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library; the sta in the Manuscripts Reading Room of the British Library. For permission to consult the Chatto & Windus archives I acknowledge Random House UK Ltd.

– ix – x William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel

Many friends, colleagues, bibliophiles and scholars have provided help, sup- port and assistance of varying kinds during the writing of this book. I gratefully acknowledge the following: John Addy, Richard Beaton, Simon Eliot, David Finkelstein, Graham Law, David McKitterick and Sondra Miley Cooney. I am especially grateful to John Spiers for several bibliographical enquiries and for generously allowing me to consult his unparalleled Collection of Victorian and Edwardian Fiction and to reproduce an image for one of the illustrations. Kate Macdonald and her co-editors of the Literary Texts and the Popular Mar- ketplace series have been patient and accommodating. My colleagues Lucinda Becker, Simon Dentith, Alison Donnell, Patrick Parrinder and Nicola Wilson helped and supported in various ways, o en at di cult times. I am especially grateful to Andrew Mangham for reading and commenting helpfully on mate- rial at several stages. All errors are my own. Finally, I acknowledge the patient support and encouragement of Jonathan Bell and my family: Bood, Didge, Kady, Edward and Z. LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure I.1: William Clark Russell. From a photo by Elliot & Fry (undated) viii Figure 7.1: Th e Convict Ship. ree-volume edition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895) 159 Figure 7.2: Alone on a Wide Wide Sea. Yellowback edition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1893) 164 Figure 7.3: e 2s.6d. edition of Russell’s published by Chatto & Windus in 1892 165 Figure 7.4: Th e Frozen Pirate (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. [1889]) 167 Figure 7.5: Th e Convict Ship. Sixpenny edition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1907) 168 Figure 7.6: Die Seekönigin [ e Sea Queen] (Stuttgart: Verlag von Robert Lutz, 1900) 171 Figure 7.7: Marooned (New York: M. J. Ivers & Co.) 176

Table 3.1: ree-volume novels by William Clark Russell published by George Bentley & Son 61 Table 7.1: Novels by William Clark Russell published by Chatto & Windus 170

– xi – This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of ’s story of ‘ e Five Orange Pips’, Dr Watson is found seated at the  re ‘deep in one of Clark Russell’s  ne sea-stories’. A storm is outside, and as he reads, the Doctor feels ‘the howl of the gale … blend with the text’ and ‘the splash of the rain … lengthen out into the long swash of the literary sea waves’.1 William Clark Russell (1844–1911) was the greatest late Victorian nautical novelist. Author of over forty full-length sea stories published between 1875 and 1905, his stirring ship adventures and poetic sea descriptions were widely admired by his contemporaries. To he was ‘the prose Homer of the great ocean’ and to Swinburne ‘the greatest master of the sea, liv- ing or dead’.2 King was another passionate devotee and many other contemporaries, including and George Meredith, read and admired his works. His reputation spread internationally. In America, where he enjoyed an even greater popularity than in his home country, he was seen as a rival to and . His stories were also translated into several European languages, including Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish and French (oddly, in view of his attitude towards Britain’s persistent naval enemy). When began his literary career in the 1890s it was Russell who was instantly identi ed as his progenitor as a writer of sea stories.3 e story of how this industrious sailor and author (who spent much of his adult life con ned to a wheelchair) conquered the literary ocean is, however, far from simple. e presumptions Russell held about the literary marketplace and his early attempts to master other types of  ction illuminate much about perceptions of and attitudes towards gender and the gendered status of the novel in the  nal third of the nineteenth century. His career encompasses an important transitional phase in the history of the novel, one that saw the rise of the professional author, the breakdown of the three-volume system and the development of recognizably modern forms of genre  ction. e way Russell eventually carved out for himself a niche market in a particular genre helps bring into fuller perspective shi s in publishing practice and literary fashion in the late Victorian period.

– 1 – 2 William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel

For all his subsequent reputation as a writer of sea stories, Russell did not come to the sea immediately or easily. When he began writing a er leaving the merchant navy in 1866 he had little notion of becoming a nautical novelist. Prior to 1875 when he published John Holdsworth, Chief Mate (his  rst novel set substantially at sea) he produced fourteen full-length novels as well as a , several non- ctional works, and a considerable amount of journalism and criti- cism, little of it to do with the sea. During these formative years as a professional author he attempted to capture the popular taste by experimenting with various forms of writing, including farce, parody and, most frequently, sensation  ction. He also experimented with names, publishing some of his novels anonymously and some under the pseudonyms ‘Sydney Mostyn’, ‘Eliza Rhyl Davies’ and ‘Philip Sheldon’. His adoption of female or ambiguously gendered pseudonyms arose from his perception of the novel as a feminized form and novel-reading as predominantly a female activity. A er ten years of trying and failing to exploit existing popular markets, he eventually created and mastered one of his own when he turned his writing talent to the sea. e details of Russell’s early literary career have always been somewhat mys- terious. Even his immediate family seemed unclear about the extent and nature of his work before he became a nautical novelist. In 1916,  ve years a er the author’s death, his daughter Marguerite Ellaby negotiated with Chatto & Win- dus for a ghostwritten memoir of her father which was never completed. Ellaby sent Frank Swinnerton, who o ered to revise her manuscript, various docu- ments and letters but could provide little help when Swinnerton asked about three early novels he had seen recorded. She was able to con rm that the works mentioned were by her father, but it transpired that the only early novel of which the entire Russell family possessed a copy was the anonymous Life’s Masquerade (1867).4 is is one of several works by Russell not attributed to him in the Brit- ish Library catalogue. Confusion about Russell’s career set in from the moment of his death when an obituary in Th e Times identi ed John Holdsworth, Chief Mate (1875, herea er John Holdsworth) as his ‘ rst novel’ and misdated it to 1874.5 No mention was made of his fourteen early land-based novels, and other mistakes in dating gave the impression that Russell had mastered the sea from the outset of his literary career. Of the   een nautical titles listed, ten were given wrong publication dates, some being brought forward in time by almost a decade. e obituary in Th e Times seems to have been used as the basis for other sources, including the original DNB entry which perpetuated the sequence of false dates.6 More recent refer- ence books continue to present inaccurate information. e Oxford Companion to the Sea, also citing John Holdsworth as his  rst novel, records that Russell wrote ‘twenty-two’ sea stories in all, a  gure less than half his actual nautical output.7 ese misrepresentations have resulted in Russell’s early career escaping the notice of those few critics who have paid his work any attention. Some of his Introduction 3 early novels have appeared in a bibliography of sensation  ction and one title, Th e Deceased Wife’s Sister (1874), has received a small amount of critical atten- tion as part of wider discussions of the treatment of marriage laws in Victorian  ction.8 None of these listings or discussions link Russell’s early novels to his much more famous sea stories, however. Equally, accounts of Russell as a nauti- cal novelist have paid little or no attention to his early work. In his critical study of maritime  ction, John Peck records John Holdsworth and Th e Wreck of the ‘Grosvenor’ (1877) as Russell’s  rst two published novels.9 In the Longman Com- panion to Victorian Fiction, John Sutherland includes the ‘land’ story As Innocent as a Baby (1874) among his sample list of novels, but says nothing about its content and makes no mention of the other works Russell published before he turned to the sea.10 Even those aware of the author’s early career have spread con- fusion. In his book Anonymity, John Mullan misreads the chronology and argues that Russell ‘adopted the pseudonym Eliza Rhyl Davies (as one among several)’ because he was so proli c:

When he wished to diversify into other  ctional genres he fashioned new names and identities. e romantic mysteries Th e Mystery of Ashleigh Manor (1874) and A Dark Secret (1875) merited a female author, an escape from the manliness of his bracing tales of the sea.11

e female pseudonyms were, however, part of an early phase of Russell’s career that the author was keen to erase from posterity. Russell would have been content with the way his apprentice work was for- gotten. He sometimes alluded to his early career in interviews, but managed fairly successfully to conceal his numerous early failures from his contemporar- ies. Biographical material published in provincial newspapers to accompany the serialization of one of his novels mentioned that he ‘dri ed’ into literature  ve years a er leaving the merchant navy and ‘published two or three ordinary love stories’ before writing John Holdsworth.12 More o en, however, his career was presented as having commenced with John Holdsworth.13 In his contribution to My First Book, a series of autobiographical essays by di erent writers  rst pub- lished in the Idler, he chose to write about Th e Wreck of the ‘Grosvenor’, his  rst critical success.14 In this essay Russell does not refer explicitly to the many novels he published before this story, but he does discuss the contingent factors bear- ing upon his early attempts at  ction. He recalls that his writing ambitions were constrained by expectations of genre and perceptions of audience demand:

when the scribbling mania possessed me it was long before I could summon courage to write about the sea and sailors … I asked myself, Who is interested in the Merchant Service? What public shall I  nd to listen to me? ose who read novels want stories about love and elopements, abductions, and the several violations of the sanctities of domestic life.15 4 William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel

Russell devoted ten years of ‘scribbling mania’ to novels about love, marriage, elopement, abduction, and more than just ‘several’ violations of the sanctities of domestic life. His early attempts to capture a popular taste were made under the assumption that the ‘great mass of readers – those who support the circulating libraries – are ladies’.16 He spent several years attempting not only to write for the woman reader but also to fashion a female consciousness in his  ction. Looking back in 1894 he judged Th e Wreck of the ‘Grosvenor’ as an explicit break with that conviction: ‘in the “Grosvenor” I went to sea like a man’.17 e gendered dimension of authorship in the Victorian period was, of course, highly conspicuous. Mary Ann Evans’s assumption of the name George Eliot was motivated not so much by a desire to enter the masculine world of writing but to distance herself from perceived notions of the woman writer.18 In 1852, two years before he began living openly with Evans, George Henry Lewes asserted in his essay on ‘ e Lady Novelists’ that ‘the masculine mind is characterized by the predominance of the intellect, and the feminine by the predominance of the emotions’. e statement was, he admitted, ‘purposely exaggerated’ – ‘no such absolute distinction exists in mankind’ – but it was meant to serve as a ‘sign-post’ for understanding what he saw as the di erent literary sensibilities of men and women. It meant that:

Of all departments of literature, Fiction is the one to which by nature and by circum- stances, women are best adapted … e domestic experiences which form the bulk of woman’s knowledge  nd an appropriate form in novels; while the very nature of  ction calls for that predominance of Sentiment which we have already attributed to the feminine mind.19

Russell’s decision to adopt a female perspective in his early works, and in some instances a female pseudonym, was conditioned by this widely held conception of the di erence between men’s and women’s writing. He was, however, unu- sual in adopting a range of pseudonyms, from the ambiguously gendered Sydney Mostyn to the unequivocally female Eliza Rhyl Davies and the unequivocally male Philip Sheldon. His recourse to female impersonation (both through declared authorship and perspective) certainly didn’t have the psy- chological compulsion that drove William Sharp to invent his alter ego ‘Fiona Macleod’. Like Sharp, however, whose stories of the Celtic Twilight carried in their subject matter implicitly femininized associations, Russell’s adoption of a female perspective was also a response to genre. As I show in Chapter 2, the bulk of his early  ction consisted of sensation novels, a genre strongly associated with the woman writer and reader. As an apprentice author, eager to make a commer- cial living out of writing, Russell seized on a  ctional form he considered most likely to earn him pecuniary success and adapted his style to suit. Introduction 5

e widespread practice of issuing work anonymously or under pseudonyms has prompted recent debates over whether men were more likely to masquer- ade as female authors in this period than women were as male. Working from evidence in the Macmillan archive, Gaye Tuchman argues, unconvincingly, that in the 1860s and 1870s ‘solid data seem to support the assumption that … men were more likely to assume a female name than women were to use either a male or a neuter name’.20 Ellen Miller Casey’s more reliable sampling of reviews of  ction in the Athenaeum suggests the opposite to be the case.21 John Mullan also argues that in the nineteenth century ‘examples of women writers adopting masculine pseudonyms were far more frequent than the opposite’.22 Whatever the extent of the trends, it is certain that some male authors adopted a female pseudonym as a commercial expedient in an e ort to succeed in what was per- ceived as the feminized domain of the novel. e assumption that novel-reading was primarily a female activity – and a potentially dangerous one – was widely held in the period. In a much-cited arti- cle from 1859 entitled ‘False Morality of Lady Novelists’, W. R. Greg asserted that ‘novels constitute a principal part of the reading of women, who are always impressionable, in whom at all times the emotional element is more awake and more powerful than the critical’.23 Kate Flint has shown how the idea that men and women responded di erently to the of reading persisted throughout the century across a range of printed discourse. As a consequence, awareness of a ‘dis- crete category “the woman reader” … a ected the composition, distribution, and marketing of literature’.24 Russell’s attempt to master what he saw as the femin- ized form of the novel demonstrates the force of this category. A crucial component of the ‘distribution and marketing’ of literature in this period (and consequently of its composition) was, of course, the circulating library. When Russell began writing, the big circulating libraries (notably Mud- ie’s) still constituted the main market for new  ction. His assumption that the ‘great mass of readers – those who support the circulating libraries – are ladies’ was widely held in the period and derived from the strict form of censorship that Mudie’s and other libraries exercised in the novels selected for circulation. Every novelist of the period was subject to what became known as the ‘young girl’ standard25 and pressured to conform to produce novels that addressed what George Moore, in ‘A New Censorship of Literature’, referred to as ‘a sort of guide to marriage and the drawing-room’.26 When Th e Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) was removed from Mudie’s shelves, a dispirited George Meredith remarked: ‘If novels and poems are to be written for young women only, I must learn the art afresh’.27 Charles Reade was only one of many male novelists who felt emascu- lated by having his ‘true’ work proscribed by libraries which ‘will only take in ladies’ novels’.28 Critical responses to Reade’s hugely successful It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) contrasted ‘male readers’ with ‘Mudie’s female subscribers’.29 6 William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel

It is hardly surprising, then, that a young novelist like Russell should consider his main audience to be female. With one exception, all of Russell’s early novels were published in two- or three-volume sets at the expensive price set by the libraries of 10s.6d. per volume (in practice the libraries purchased from publishers at a heavy discount, paying between 4s.6d. to 5s. per volume). Because none of them were republished in cheap editions (with the exception of one that was resuscitated twenty years a er  rst publication), few readers would have bought copies of these early works. Russell’s audience outside the library reader was thus almost non-existent. It was only a er he achieved success with Th e Wreck of the ‘Grosvenor’ that publishers successfully marketed his novels in cheap editions at prices aimed at the book- buyer. In the 1860s and 1870s, he was locked in a losing battle with a market he wrongly assumed to be interested only in particular styles of  ction. By going to sea ‘like a man’ Russell was presenting his success as a nautical novelist as one of breaking through barriers to authentic expression. Yet even a er he had found his true artistic voice in the sea, and discovered an ostensibly masculine market, female characters and perceptions of the woman reader con- tinued to be important in the construction of his novels. In My First Book he recalled how, when he began writing sea stories, his sense of audience was still governed by the demands of publishers and library readers:

if I was to  nd a public I must make my book a romance. I must import the machinery of the petticoat. e pannikan of rum I proposed to o er must be palatable enough to tempt the ladies to sip it. My publishers wanted a market, and if Messrs Mudie and Smith would have none of me I should write in vain.30

e chapters in this book show how Russell overcame the di culty of pitching a sea story to a market dominated by library readers, and how his work came to be marketed in a range of di erent physical formats to a variety of . e book argues that both before and a er he developed his distinct genre of the sea story, his literary career was played out against ideas and de nitions of genre and gender that were conditioned by the institutions of the marketplace. A er a survey of his life and career in Chapter 1, the second chapter looks at his sensa- tion  ction and his e orts to write as a woman. Chapter 3 traces the emergence of the sea as a subject and o ers readings of his  rst two published sea stories. Chapters 4 and 5 consider aspects of his nautical writing in more detail, looking respectively at genre and the representation of women and gender, while the  nal two chapters examine the publishing history of his sea stories in more detail. e remainder of this introduction aims to situate Russell’s nautical  ction within the styles and genres of writing that preceded and in uenced his own work. Introduction 7

Russell and the Tradition of the Sea Story As a subject, the sea runs deep in the history of English literature. e earli- est surviving poem in English about the sea, ‘ e Seafarer’, was copied into the Exeter Book which dates from the early tenth century. of sea voyages are, of course, as old as narrative itself. As Robert Foulke argues, the tradition of the sea voyage narrative has its roots in prehistoric literatures and in arche- typal stories, Biblical and Classical, notably the stories of Noah and Jonah, and Odysseus’s multiple wanderings.31 In England, the form took on a documentary style in the sixteenth century with the publication of Richard Hakluyt’s collec- tion of geographical discoveries Th e Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffi ques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1584). As Peck argues, ‘In Hakluyt, the move is from re-narrating to recording history; the experiential displaces allegorical or symbolic presentations of a sea journey’.32 Distinctions between  ction and history become blurred in the voluminous maritime literature that runs from Hakluyt into the eighteenth century, and it is this tradition of nauti- cal writing that provides the foundations for the form of the English novel in the early eighteenth century. Margaret Cohen argues that in (1719) appropriated the forms of best-selling non ctional sea voyage literature, drawing on the tradition of the ‘remarkable occurrence’ at sea to forge a new ‘poetics of adventure’.33 e historical, the ‘remarkable’ and the  ctional were blended together in a text that, as Peck suggests, ‘rede ned the sea story in the process of de ning the form of the English novel’.34 Packed into the amorphous category of the ‘sea voyage narrative’ or ‘sea adventure  ction’ is, however, a number of discrete genres and overlapping styles which re ect larger aesthetic and cultural forces that the ocean has helped to forge. Indeed, for a late nineteenth-century writer like Russell there existed both a tradition of the sea story and a largely separate tradition of writing about the sea. e latter was heavily in uenced by the aesthetics of the . As Jonathan Raban argues, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the sea became the archetype of the sublime as the concept developed through Enlight- enment philosophy. e sensation of ‘agreeable horror’ that confronted Joseph Addison at the sight of a tempest leads into Edmund Burke’s a rmation of the ocean as the source of the sublime where the sea became the highest form of ‘ter- ror’ that can excite the imagination and so invoke pleasure.35 As Raban explains, Burke’s theory of the sublime ‘e ectively legitimized the sea as a great subject for art’ for the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and the of Byron, Shelley and Coleridge.36 Byron’s Romantic sea, depicted in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), was ‘Dark-heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime’, an ‘image of Eter- nity’ that o ered everyone the opportunity ‘To mingle with the Universe’.37 8 William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel

As we shall see, this Romantic tradition of the sea is visible in those marine aspects that invade Russell’s early domestic novels. It is also visible in the sce- nic painting found throughout his nautical writing. Signi cantly, however, his elaborate evocation of the colours and movements of ocean panorama (which were o en likened to Turner’s paintings) were conducted from on board ship. e sublime sea of Romantic literature was essentially a distant view from land.38 Cohen refers to this characteristic as ‘the sublimation of the sea’; Byron’s ocean was ‘puri ed of human agency’ and the sea disconnected from the practical work of seamanship.39 One of Russell’s singular achievements was to break through this disconnection by taking the reader on board ship and aligning the sublime sea – what one of his characters calls the ‘mystery of the boundless, desolate ocean’40 – with the routine, mundane details of practical seamanship. If the romantic sublime was the main in uence on stylistic depictions of the sea in nineteenth-century art and literature, there existed a tradition of sea stories that was to some extent independent of that style. Although, as noted, maritime adventures had been part of the novel form from its inception, and although depictions of sailors and the sea persisted in the work of Tobias Smollett and oth- ers, it’s not really possible to speak of a discrete genre of nautical  ction until the early nineteenth century. e serialization of Michael Scott’s Tom Cringle’s Log in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1829 initiated a vogue for nautical novels in the 1830s, invariably set during the Napoleonic wars and o en written by veteran o cers. e recurring pattern of these highly episodic stories was the depic- tion of a young boy who joins or is coerced into joining the , battles against the French, and is rewarded for his courage and bravery with promotion and, usually, a bride. Out of this voluminous literature emerged a series of stock characters and situations which drew in part on caricatures of naval types long established on the popular stage. e able seaman became jolly ‘Jack Tar’ whose ubiquitous appearance in novels of this period led to reviewers complain- ing of being ‘drenched in salt-water wit’.41 e nautical novel was characterized by a humorous evasion of the harsh life of the real sailor who was presented as a spirited, fun- lled fond of singing and dancing and generally happy with his lot. One of the chief writers of this genre, Captain Frederick Chamier, used as a motto for his stories lines penned by the eighteenth-century songwriter Charles Dibdin:

A sailor’s life’s the life for me, He takes his duty merrily; If winds can whistle he can sing, Still faithful to his friend and king.42

Russell greatly disapproved of this image of the merry sailor. In A Sea Queen an old sea captain denounces all nautical airs as ‘lubberish’, believing that Introduction 9

all right-minded men who followed [the profession of the sea] would never let its dignity su er in the eyes of landsmen by leaving them to suppose that the oaths, swag- ger, and drink which novelists and dramatists have used as pigments for the painting of that deplorable creature, nicknamed Jack Tar, were truthful components of the English seaman’s character.43

Russell explored the topic of nautical literature numerous times in his non-  ctional writing. In a lengthy essay published in the Contemporary Review and reprinted in the collection In the Middle Watch, he complained that the nautical novelist and the writers of ‘marine drama’ had ‘misled the public’ with ‘carica- tures of seamen’ laughing, drinking and spinning yarns, ‘speaking a language crowded with marine expressions’, and dressed in farcical style with a tarpaulin hat and bell-mouthed trousers ‘run extravagantly tight to the hips’.44 e result was not only a misrepresentation of the true life of the sailor, but a degradation of the art of the sea story:

As a man who went to sea in the merchant service at the age of thirteen and a half, and who stuck to the calling to the age of twenty, who for seven and a half years ate bad pork and beef, scrubbed decks, slushed masts, and underwent the whole routine, from furling the mizzen royal to helping to pass the weather main topsail earring in days when topsails were single sails, I claim a right to complain with some bitterness of soul of those writers who, knowing nothing about the sea, write marine stories in one, two, or three volumes, and so go on sinking the maritime literature of this coun- try by another and yet another stone fastened to it.45

e one major literary  gure of the era of the nautical novel was Captain Fred- erick Marryat who, like his many imitators, had seen in the Napoleonic wars. Russell admired Marryat as an artist, in spite of his formulaic plots, and later wrote introductions to reprints of four of his novels published by John Lane. He also applauded his command of seamanship: ‘ e comfort the sailor gets in reading Marryat is that he  nds every manoeuvre, every order, every account of sea adventure right’.46 He nevertheless protested at the reassuring picture of sea life portrayed in most of Marryat’s works. As Peck argues, in works like Peter Simple (1834) and Mr Midshipman Easy (1836) the young men who go to sea in Marryat’s stories  nd the life harsh ‘but this is celebrated rather than deplored’.47 Discipline, work and duty are enclosed within an essentially comic spirit. Russell was determined not to disguise the harshness of sea life with a cheerful narra- tive . In ‘ e Middy’s Yarn’, a sketch  rst published in and later collected in volume form, a   een-year-old midshipman questions the veracity of Marryat and other sea authors:

Marryat, indeed! no sea-story books ever put the real truth before a chap. Can Mar- ryat put the  avour of salt pork in your throat? Can he make you understand what being on deck in foul weather for twelve hours at a stretch is, with the galley  re 10 William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel

washed out, nothing to drink but cold water, and nothing to eat but sea biscuits, which are always either too hard to bite or too so to swallow, with a damp bun to go to when the watch is called at last?48

Russell believed that a new kind of sea story was needed, one based on the real conditions of ship life and written by men who knew the sea. Before he could create his own genre, however, he had to shake o associations that clung to the old. As I show in Chapter 4, the prevailing perception of the literary sailor drawn from an outmoded and largely obsolete tradition of the sea story was widely invoked in reviews of his early nautical novels. In retrospect, however, Th e Wreck of the ‘Grosvenor’ came to be viewed as having ‘marked a new era in the evolution of the nautical novel’.49 It has been suggested that the vogue for the nautical novel in the 1830s dis- appeared because of exhaustion at its ‘lack of variety, the endless repetitions of a few stock incidents … and a few familiar characters’.50 A er this period the sea story in Britain was con ned largely to the juvenile market and to the popular bibliographic forms of the ballad and penny dreadful.51 Sailors and the sea were not absent from adult Victorian  ction as works such as ’s West- ward Ho! (1855) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) demonstrate, but as a distinct genre it was titles like W. H. G. Kingston’s Peter the Whaler (1851) and the many adventure stories of G. A. Henty that carried forth the sea voyage narrative. Russell saw the association between sea stories and a juvenile audience as another impediment to creativity:

I was frightened by the Writer for boys. He was very much at sea. I never picked up a book of his without lighting upon some hideous act of , some astounding and unparalleled shipwreck, some marvellous island of treasure … his paper ship had so long and successfully  lled the public eye that I shrank from launching anything real … in plain English, I judged that the sea story had been irredeemably depressed, and rendered wholly ridiculous by the strenuous periodic and Christmas labours of the Writer for Boys.52

It was not until he had established his reputation that Russell published stories explicitly aimed at a juvenile audience and he repeatedly lamented the ‘depres- sion of the marine novel to the level of the intelligence of boys’.53 Russell was equally scathing of the genre of the small-boat voyage which  ourished in the 1860s. Works such as John MacGregor’s Th e Voyage Alone in the Yawl ‘Rob Roy’ (1867), and E. E. Middleton’s Th e Cruise of the Kate (1870) were light-hearted accounts of voyages taken in small private sailing vessels which became ‘Victorian bestsellers’.54 To Russell they were another illustration of the relegation of the sea story to a misrepresentative subgenre: ‘It will not do for a man who wants to be reckoned a friend of seamen to get his knowledge of Introduction 11 the sea out of yachting’.55 e recovery of the sea voyage narrative and its eleva- tion as a serious art form was to him a matter of national necessity and pride:

if sea-novelists will not make up their minds to go to sea as sailors, and learn to be cor- rect by pulling and hauling and going alo and the like, even the little boys will give us up, and the end of it must be that the greatest maritime nation in the world will have no other marine literature but the novels of Marryat and one or two others.56

e main distinctiveness of Russell’s work in the tradition of the sea story was his focus on the merchant service as opposed to the Royal Navy, which had been the near exclusive terrain of Marryat and the nautical writers of the 1830s. In My First Book he wrote: ‘I could not recollect a book, written by an Englishman, relating, as a work of  ction, to shipboard life on the high under the  ag of the merchant service’.57 In his non- ctional writing he repeatedly underlined his intention to address public ignorance about the British merchant service: In one article he wrote:

ese kingdoms form the greatest maritime nation that the world has ever beheld or that history makes mention of. It is, nevertheless, true that there is scarce a public in Europe more ignorant of and indi erent to sea a airs than the people of this country. If you speak to the man in the street about our mercantile marine he will look at you with a dull and silly eye. Pronounce the word sailor, and his imagination conjures up the bluejacket who lurched against him round the corner yonder. … the man in the street heeds not, and knows nothing about our Mercantile Marine.58

Russell’s principal achievement in the history of the sea story was to move away from the heroics of the warships and the stereotypes associated with the ‘blue- coat’ and  nd romance in the realism of the mercantile marine. As a retired sailor comments to a female passenger in A Strange Voyage:

Let them charm you in novels; but for the realities of the deep choose … the stern, bitter seafaring life of the merchant service … all the shipwrecks, all the seamanship, all the harsh toil which makes men real sailors are in it.59

In the absence of a valuable British tradition, Russell traced his antecedents in the history of nautical literature to the American writers Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville. He considered James Fenimore Cooper, the other great nineteenth-century American writer of the sea, ‘ponderous, and rather priggish’ in style and, moreover, ‘full of inaccuracies’ and ‘nautical absurdities’.60 e supe- rior artistry of Melville in Moby Dick (1851) was only one reason why Russell ranked him ahead of Cooper. In an article in the North American Review he wrote that until Melville and Dana ‘the commercial sailor of Great Britain and the United States was without representation in literature’.61 ese two writers had not shrunk from dealing with the harsh facts of a mariner’s life. He greatly admired Melville and in later years wrote introductions to reprints of 12 William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel

(1846) and (1847), published in 1904 and 1905 by John Lane in the same series as the Marryat reprints. But the nautical work he admired most was Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840). A diary of the author’s time spent in the American merchant service, Dana’s work throws into narrative form a voy- age from Boston round Cape Horn to California, and takes up the cause of the common sailor against his harsh treatment from captains and shipowners. To Russell it was important not just because it was ‘a solid fact from beginning to end’, but because it o ered an insider’s view of the profession of the merchant sailor. Dana, he argued,

showed the public down into the merchant ship’s forecastle, pointed to the bunks in which the sailors sleep, the dripping carlings, the evil-smelling slush-lamp, the water splashing through the scuttle, the poor clothes of the heavily worked men, the infa- mous food and vile water on which they subsisted.62

ough he took inspiration from Dana, Russell’s standpoint in his own stories is di erent in one important respect. He claimed that Dana was the  rst ‘to li the hatch and show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle’, but although he built his own novels around the professional work of the merchant seaman he rarely adopted the perspective of the ordinary sailor of the forecastle. He sometimes wrote from the viewpoint of the passenger but more commonly took the per- spective of the junior o cer – the chief mate or second mate. In fact, as I show in Chapter 4, his attitude towards ‘Mercantile Jack’ was ambivalent, sympathiz- ing with his plight but o en painting him as ignorant, unthinking and too easily driven to acts of mutiny. What Russell really took from Dana was the connection between the sea story and skilled work which Margaret Cohen sees as being restored to the sea voyage narrative by the work of Melville, and Joseph Conrad.63 Russell is a missing link in this historical and canonical trajectory. Although his nautical novels were nothing if not eventful, teeming with adventurous situa- tions and sometimes purely fantastical, his reconstruction of the sea voyage narrative around the working lives of merchant seamen established a new direc- tion for the nautical novel, one that helped raise the artistic standing of the genre and paved the way for later practitioners, such as Conrad, to pursue their own, more ambitious, artistic aims. It should not surprise us that Russell was widely invoked as a point of high comparison in reviews of Conrad’s early sea stories. However contrasting their artistic approach to the functions of plot and charac- ter, the shared commitment to shaping the narrative around practical work at sea made it natural for Conrad’s ‘intimate knowledge of seamanship’64 and ‘broad acquaintance with the feelings of the merchant seaman’65 to be compared with those of Russell. e comparison was particularly widespread in America where Russell’s critical standing was even higher than in Britain. e San Francisco Introduction 13

Chronicle began its review of Th e Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) by stating that Russell’s position as the ‘greatest storyteller of the sea’ had been ‘unquestioned … for nearly the life of a generation’.66 at position of pre-eminence was recognized throughout the literary world. When Oscar Wilde parted from Alfonso Conway (a young man he had picked up on the beach at Worthing) he gave the unemployed newspaper seller, who ‘wanted to go to sea as an apprentice in a merchant ship’, a copy of Th e Wreck of the ‘Grosvenor’.67 e author had many admirers among his fellow writ- ers, both young and old. Conan Doyle, who had been a ship’s surgeon and who instilled a love of Russell into Dr Watson, later wrote of his own reading tastes: ‘If I had to choose a sea library of only a dozen volumes … Clark Russell deserves a whole shelf for himself ’.68 Among other admirers, George Meredith, who grew up in a family of naval out tters from Portsmouth, told the man he considered ‘a brother of the pen’ that his ‘description of blue water scenes have o en given me pleasure’.69 Among other writers of the sea, Herman Melville dedicated his penul- timate published work, John Marr and other Sailors (1888), to Russell. Printed by the De Vinne Press in an edition of twenty- ve copies, the book opened with an ‘Inscription Epistolary’ in which Melville asserted that Th e Wreck of the ‘Gros- venor’ ‘entitled Russell to ‘the naval crown in current literature’ and recalled how, on the book’s  rst appearance in America, ‘all competent judges’ exclaimed:

e very spirit of the brine in our faces! What writer, so thoroughly as this one, knows the sea, and the blue water of it; the sailor and the heart of him; the ship, too, and the sailing and handling of a ship? Besides, to his knowledge he adds invention.70

One testament to the power of that invention, as well as the verisimilitude of Russell’s writing, is found in an incident recalled in W. B. Yeats’s Reveries over Childhood and Youth, written in 1914. e poet’s maternal grandfather, Wil- liam Pollexfen, was a sailor who had run away to sea at the age of twelve and later owned his own ship. In Reveries, Yeats recalls how one year in the mid-1880s the old sailor was stirred to a nocturnal adventure of his own:

When my grandfather came for a few days to see a doctor, I was shocked to see him in our house. My father read out to him in the evening Clark Russell’s Wreck of the ‘Grosvenor’; but the doctor forbade it, for my grandfather got up in the middle of the night and acted through the mutiny, as I acted my verse, saying the while, ‘Yes, yes, that is the way it would all happen’.71

e author’s greatest devotee was Algernon Swinburne, whose own poetic obsession with the sea naturally drew him to Russell’s seascapes and elemental adventures. ere is no evidence that the two authors ever met or corresponded but they held a mutual appreciation for each other’s work. In Th e Ship’s Adventure Russell wrote of the sea air being ‘full of the so sweetness of Swinburne’s rush- 14 William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel ing sea verse’.72 In September 1896 Swinburne wrote to Andrew Chatto, his own publisher, requesting copies of all Russell’s books published by Chatto’s  rm.73 According to Lewis Melville, Swinburne would read out from the novels ‘night a er night’ to his friend eodore Watts-Dunton.74 Later, when he proclaimed Russell ‘the greatest master of the sea, living or dead’, Swinburne declared: ‘his name is a household word wherever the English language is spoken, and the splendid qualities of the British sailor known and understood’.75 e following chapters will map the extraordinary literary voyage that took Russell from being a thirteen-year-old midshipman to the position of being a household word in the English language.