RICE UNIVERSITY Maritime Networks: the Oceanic Imaginary in The

Home , British Sea Power, Lumberman (shipwreck), Mak Wilson, Nautical fiction, West Africa Squadron, William Clark Russell

RICE UNIVERSITY

Maritime Networks: The Oceanic Imaginary in the British Long Nineteenth Century

Mark Celeste

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE

Doctor of Philosophy

APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE

Helena Michie, Chair Agnes C. Arnold Professor in Humanities, Professor of English

Betty Joseph Associate Professor of English

Leo Costello Associate Professor of Art History

HOUSTON, TEXAS April 2019 Copyright

Mark Celeste

2019 ABSTRACT

Maritime Networks: The Oceanic Imaginary in the British Long Nineteenth Century

Mark Celeste

This project argues that maritime history and culture shape both the form and the content of the nineteenth-century British novel. Each chapter takes up a different historical genre of maritime writing—the shipwreck tale, the steamship story, the logbook, the sea chantey, and the ship surgeon’s manual—as a heuristic for oceanic reading. In recovering these maritime contexts, I track what I call the “oceanic imaginary”: not only how novels literally represent life on and around the ocean, but also how novels draw upon oceanic circulations and exchanges to imagine and craft complex literary systems. Specifically, I chart how novels incorporate historically specific maritime styles, allusions, and structures and how those texts, in so doing, register the flows and frictions of a radically networked world—a world connected and divided, more often than not, by water. As I show, we can read any novel as maritime fiction— regardless of whether the action takes place on land or at sea—if that novel registers the influence of maritime history upon its textual world.

My project merges the historicist concerns of oceanic studies with the renewed critical attention to form. To track the influence of a historical maritime ethos upon literary style, I consider not only large-scale sociopolitical forms (such as the distributed network) but also sentence-level figurations (such as metonymy) that register the text’s engagement with culture and history. Maritime details and figurations provide more than just historical flavor; they serve, rather, as the formal anchors of historicity, the nodes iv that link the literary text to paraliterary movements across both land and sea. Taken together, my chapters surface how the literary marketplace overlaps with the political, social, economic, and ecological networks of the nineteenth-century maritime world.

In tracing the distributed maritime networks of the oceanic imaginary, I also work to remap the literary landscape. In place of the traditional spatiotemporal divisions of

Romanticism and Victorianism, I opt for a longer, wider period drawn together by water.

As I see it, an oceanic nineteenth century spans multiple bodies of water, from the

English Channel to the Caribbean to the Pacific to the South China Sea to the Suez Canal, and stretches from the second voyages of James Cook (1772–75) to the sinking of the

Titanic (1912). Framed so expansively, an oceanic nineteenth century affords new literary historical connections—not only between land and sea, but also between certain peoples, places, goods, ideas, events, and technologies previously separated by longstanding trends in academic literary study. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For this project I am grateful for the support of the Department of English, the

Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Humanities Research

Center at Rice: their generous travel funding allowed me to explore the archives at the

British Library and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. I also would like to thank the special collections librarians at the National Maritime Museum’s Caird Library, who were always helpful (and patient) with my esoteric technical questions (“How many chronometers did the HMS St Albans have on board in 1807?”).

Over the past several years I have been fortunate enough to draw upon an ever- growing network of mentors, colleagues, peers, family, and friends who have shaped my work in innumerable ways—my own “little knot of the navy,” as it were. Having now written a project about distributed webs of influence, I recognize how many lives become entangled in a single text. Here, then, I can only begin to express my gratitude to all of those who have guided me.

Many thanks to my parents for so many years of love and support. Thanks, too, to

Bob and Mary Evans, who welcomed me into their family with open arms, and to my grandpa for his unflagging encouragement: to this day he always reminds me to “focus on

[my] studies.” And a special thanks to the furry members of my ever-growing family—

Louis, Watson, and Oscar—who added so much joy to my life (even when you sat directly on what I was reading).

I would not be at Rice were it not for Kevin Morrison, who first got me thinking about the archive and my own place within British nineteenth-century studies. At Rice, those intrepid souls of the Long Nineteenth Century Working Group—especially Sophia vi

Hsu, Lindsey Chappell, Niffy Hargrave, Lindsay Graham, and Randi Mihajlovic—have repeatedly helped me expand my literary-historical horizons. Along with the LNC group, several others—Ryan Fong, Susan Lurie, Thad Logan, Joe Campana, and Alexander

Regier, as well as Scott Pett, Clint Wilson, and Jade Hagan—helped me sharpen the style and substance of my writing. So too did working at SEL with Logan Browning and Becky

Byron: I was proud to serve as a Diana Hobby Editorial Fellow for five years, and I hope that my work here reflects SEL’s high standards of accuracy, consistency, and clarity.

Many of the above lent a helpful ear as I rambled on about the oceanic (and a few even laughed at my never-ending stream of maritime puns). And I never would have been able to complete this project without the support and camaraderie of Joe Carson and Evan

Choate: thank you both for your wit and wisdom.

I am deeply grateful for all that my committee has done for me. It was Leo

Costello’s analysis of Turner’s Slave Ship that sparked my own investigation into the relationship between history and representation in Brontë’s Villette. And Leo (along with

Katie White and Scott McGill) has helped keep me sane throughout the whole writing process: as both my third reader and my lead guitarist, Leo has shown me that the worlds of academia and rock ‘n’ roll are not mutually exclusive. Betty Joseph can pinpoint the weak spots in an argument like no other; her precise questions and comments have challenged me to rethink and redefine key parts of my project, and my work is all the better for it. Moreover, her enthusiasm is contagious: you have not read Robinson Crusoe until you have read Robinson Crusoe with Betty. And where would I be without Helena

Michie? This project began in her “On or about 1860” course, and it has grown in many ways with her guidance. Although Helena’s name directly appears in only a few places in vii my chapters, on every page of this project I have attempted to think like Helena, to emulate her brilliant synthesis of clarity and complexity. For this project and beyond, I cannot thank Helena enough for all she has given me and taught me. She is everything that an advisor, a scholar, and a friend should be.

In my first week at Rice I met the person who would make Houston home. Jane has stood by my side through the ups and downs of this project, celebrating with each archival discovery and keeping me grounded when the words just weren’t connecting as I wanted them to. She has been a sounding board for ideas half-baked, just right, and overcooked; she has remained ever patient and practical while I paced around the computer (“walking out an idea,” I called it; “procrastinating,” said Jane); and she has selflessly taken on and given up so much to keep our life together moving ahead, especially at those moments when my own head was in the clouds. I cannot thank her enough for all that she does for me and for our son. So Luke, when you read this one day, give your mama a big hug. And then I’ll teach you some sea chanteys. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iii

Acknowledgments v

Figures ix

Publication Notice x

Introduction Toward an Oceanic Nineteenth Century 1

Chapter 1 Metonymic Chains: Shipwrecks, Slavery, and Networks in Villette 45

Chapter 2 The “Bond of the Sea”: Conrad, Coal, and Entropy 79

Chapter 3 Charting Persuasion 136

Chapter 4 Chanteying Bodies and Narrative Labor 188

Coda Ahoy! or, Looking for an Oceanic Reading 242

Bibliography 270

FIGURES

Figure 1: the Austens’ naval network 26

Figure 2: the “bond of the sea” 27

Figures 3–5: Francis Austen, facing page entries for 29 June and 3 and 5 July 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans, AUS/3A, Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 162

Figures 6–7: Francis Austen, facing page entries for 11 and 19 July 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans, AUS/3A, Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 163

Figure 8: Phiz [H. K. Browne], frontispiece to Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848), iii 222 x

PUBLICATION NOTICE

A modified portion of chapter 1 has been published in “The Brontës and Critical

Interventions in Victorian Studies,” ed. Lauren Hoffer and Elizabeth Meadows, special issue, Victorian Review 42, 2 (Fall 2016): 343–60. 1

INTRODUCTION

Toward an Oceanic Nineteenth Century

This project explores how the nineteenth-century British novel not only invokes maritime history and culture in diffuse and complex ways, but also draws upon the textual networks built around the oceanic to imagine a global geopolitics. The oceanic— my shorthand term for the overlapping social, political, economic, ecological, and, especially here, literary systems arising out of maritime exchange and circulation—helps us think anew about the literal and figurative dimensions of literary texts, especially in relation to questions of connectivity, mobility, influence, historicity, and genre. I argue that the oceanic shapes both the form and the content of the British novel, and that the

British novel, in turn, enters into dialogue with the sociopolitical systems and distributed effects of Britain’s maritime culture and oceanic empire. By reading a selection of novels alongside historical maritime genres—the shipwreck tale, the steamship story, the naval logbook, the sea chantey, and the ship surgeon’s manual—I work to locate the British novel within the maritime networks of the long nineteenth century. In the process, I consider the uses and limits of an oceanic account of nineteenth-century literary history: what does oceanic reading afford, what does it occlude, and what does it teach us about how we read, write, and understand literary history?

Across this introduction, four chapters, and a coda, I detail a specific set of historical and theoretical heuristics by which to understand the oceanic imaginary of maritime fictions. I ultimately move toward a view of the oceanic not as a mere setting, not as a simple marker of genre, but rather as a literary mode through which texts situate themselves in various maritime networks. I begin with a discussion of metonymy, the 2 modus operandi of the oceanic. This discrete, sentence-level form then carries us to my discussion of a distributed sociopolitical form—the network—and all of its historical and historiographical affordances. Along the way I locate my work within oceanic studies specifically and British nineteenth-century studies more generally, defining and defending my move toward a longer, wider sense of the time period. I conclude with an overview of my chapters, as well as a brief meditation on how they model a more dynamic understanding of nineteenth-century literary history.

- - -

My work serves as a response to how readily we metaphorize the ocean for our own critical and political purposes, abstracting and alienating the life and labors of the sea from the actual lived conditions of the maritime world. It requires little imaginative labor to describe the “fluidity” of narrative prose or the “ebb and flow” of poetic rhythm.

Here there be scare quotes: we’re not talking about the oceanic; we’re talking about something like the ocean. Water and waves, ships and sailors, creatures and currents—all become metaphorically yoked into the service of some larger idea that has often has little to do with the specific history and culture of the oceanic. From such a vantage point shipwrecks are never actual shipwrecks; they are metaphors for political turbulence, figurative wrecks of the conceptual ship of state, beset by storms (which are, of course, not actual storms but further metaphors for revolt and revolution).1 Such maritime metaphorization exemplifies what Margaret Cohen terms “hydrophasia,” an inability to conceive of the sea as (quite literally) the sea (14). When so afflicted, Cohen notes, critics

1 On the ship of state metaphor, see George P. Landow, Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (1982; 116–8). 3 fail to recognize the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as an actual castaway, or the crew aboard the Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) as actual sailors. The metaphoric—i.e., association by resemblance—displaces the literal:

Crusoe, with his transnational holdings and control of production, resembles a capitalist, and the Pequod’s crewmen, given their division and specialization of labor, resemble factory workers (see Cohen 81).

My project challenges us to think otherwise. To counter hydrophasia and the critical displacement of the oceanic, I propose an alternate hermeneutic for reading the oceanic: contiguity. In literary terms, I propose a shift from metaphor to metonymy.

When we read and make meaning not via resemblance but via contiguity—when we move, in other words, from one pole of Roman Jakobson’s taxonomy of linguistic meaning to the other—we avoid abstracting and alienating maritime texts from the historical specificity of maritime culture and politics, from the ocean qua ocean.2

Shipwreck, for instance, when understood as a metonym rather than a metaphor, links us to actual historical discourses of waterborne wreckage—such as the abolitionist iconology of the circum-Atlantic slave trade, as I detail in my first chapter—and locates the literary text within culturally contiguous social, political, and economic systems. In place of a metaphoric abstraction that carries us away from the sea, we have a metonymic network that helps us read the oceanic on its own terms.

Unlike metaphor, which posits an abstract, symbolic resemblance, metonymy

2 See Roman Jakobson’s 1956 essay “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” (41–7), which describes association by resemblance and association by contiguity through case studies of aphasia—a critical coincidence, given my own work here to diagnose and respond to “hydrophasia.” 4 always registers literal contact or connection between elements. A mode of figurative substitution, metonymy replaces the name of one thing with that of a culturally contiguous thing or attribute. Coal, for example, is a metonym for Britain and its oceanic empire: as I detail in my second chapter, this small, combustible rock, unearthed in

Britain and transported in British merchant ships and through British colonial ports, serves as a material substitute for the nation that mined it and moved it. Through the coal trade, then, Britain literally and figuratively spreads pieces of itself around the globe.

Moreover, when literary authors write about coal, they are also—consciously or otherwise—writing about nation and empire. Metonymy establishes what Julia Sun-Joo

Lee calls “textual contact zones,” places where the literary text and the extratextual world meet and cross-pollinate (19, original italics). Thinking in terms of cultural contact, Lee says, helps us see the “material and imaginative networks,” the systems of exchange and circulation, that shape the literary text (21).3

In tracing such networked “contact zones,” my work here also builds upon Elaine

Freedgood’s methodology of “strong” metonymic reading, an interpretive mode wherein metonyms serve as indexes of larger historical, cultural, and political significance (14).

“Weak” metonymic reading, by contrast, remains constrained to the narrative frame, making meaning only within the symbolic system of the novel. Strong metonymic reading leads us beyond the boundaries of the text, placing the novel in dialogue with a

3 Lee helpfully models a metonymic hermeneutics in her study of American slave narratives and their impact on the style of the nineteenth-century British novel, locating these texts within the same “material and imaginative networks.” By shifting our gaze from “metaphoric appropriation” to “metonymic alliance,” Lee lays out a understanding of literary influence via historically specific material and ideological contiguity rather than mere resemblance (10). 5 range of extratextual systems and contexts. My reading of maritime novels relies upon strong metonymy: I work to move upward and outward from the text, locating it within the maritime networks of the oceanic. Like Freedgood, I trace the “ideas in things” (coal, for example). But whereas Freegood’s “things” under examination are all material (e.g., mahogany furniture, calico curtains, and colonial tobacco), I want to extend her methodology to include the immaterial and the ephemeral. In my fourth chapter, for instance, I examine how two novels’ uses of sea chanteys—the songs of leisure and labor sung at sea—registers the wider world of rhythmic maritime discipline and shipboard sociality. A chantey has a very material impact, but it itself is not a material “thing[].”

Whether it focuses on the material or otherwise, though, strong metonymic reading extends Jakobson’s understanding that prose functions via metonymy: “As the narrative unfolds,” says Jakobson, its focus shifts from an object to its neighbor (in terms of physical space—time or causality, that is).” Hence Victor Erlich, quoting Jakobson, declares that while the “motive force” of poetry is similarity, that of prose is “association by contiguity” (qtd. in Woloch 202).4 Freedgood’s historicist-formalist methodology, then, shifts our sense of what counts as a textual “neighbor”: not just the other words on the page, but also the extratextual “things” circulating in contiguous material histories, cultural systems, sociopolitical networks, etc.

All of my work here accordingly focuses on strong metonymic readings of prose

4 Roman Jakobson, “Randbemerkugen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak,” Slavische Rundschau 7 (1935), qtd. in Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (1955; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 231; and Erlich 231. I borrow both Jakobson’s and Erlich’s quotations here from Alex Woloch’s discussion of metonymic narrative emplacement in The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (2003; 202). 6 rather than of poetry. The poetry of the long nineteenth century, especially that of the

Romantics, often takes up the sea as a central symbol for something other than the sea.

Several of the “Big Six” turn to the sea to illustrate abstract philosophies.5 Samuel Taylor

Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1789 and 1817) famously muses on morality and free will via the harrowing, symbolic journey of a sailor; George Gordon, Lord

Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) boasts of the sea’s sublime power— power operating on a scale far beyond that of the human, power that metaphorically erases the agency of humankind. Even William Wordsworth—a Lake Poet like

Coleridge, but a man often associated with the land in literary history—pens “With Ships the sea was sprinkled far a nigh” (1806), a sonnet that gestures toward the unfathomable nature of waterborne movement. By contrast, the prose of the nineteenth century functions less according to a single symbolic system and more along the lines of multiple, overlaid distributed networks of association. The scope and sprawl of prose—especially the lengthy, overpopulated, multi-plot three-volume novels that are a hallmark of the nineteenth century—challenge us to think beyond centralized systems of meaning.

Especially in prose, then, metonyms figure the warp and weft of distributed networks of cultural association. And strong metonymic reading in particular prompts us to move beyond authorial intent and toward larger systems of influence. It is less, I propose, that the authors under my consideration consciously orchestrate all metonymic signification and more that they live and write in an increasingly connected world, a world of circulating ideologies and and discourses that might not directly signal their

5 On the “Big Six,” see Sue Chaplin and Joel Faflak’s introduction to Romanticism in The Romanticism Handbook (2011; xviii). 7 presence. Metaphor often unmistakably announces itself in the disjunction between tenor and vehicle: in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61), for instance, when

Wemmick walks among the prisoners at Newgate, he becomes a “gardener” in his

“greenhouse” examining the various flowers that will soon achieve “full blow” (i.e., full bloom) at their trials (281). The metaphor yokes together two distant, noncontiguous things: no actual flowers grow among the prisoners at Newgate, but both may share a similar fate—i.e., being cut down in their prime. Metonymy, by contrast, is more difficult to recognize, as it requires historically specific knowledge. In my third chapter, for instance, I propose we read the uniform units of abstract time—i.e., seconds, minutes, hours—that structure Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817) as metonyms for Britain’s quest for longitude, itself part of the larger imperial conquest of the Age of Discovery. This strong metonymic reading only works, however, if we have a clear understanding of extant discourses of maritime measurement and nautical navigation. With such knowledge, though, we can locate Austen and Persuasion within a longer, wider history of naval mobility. My point is not that Austen could actually explain the technical calculations of longitude, but rather than she lives and writes in a particular time and place deeply concerned with tracking specific spans of time as a means to agency and mobility, especially in relation to empire and oceanic conquest. Ultimately, then, my approach—thinking in terms of contiguous cultural networks via strong maritime metonymy—provides a far more precise account of the actual power relations at play across the oceanic than do simple metaphoric readings about “fluidity” and other such watery abstractions.

Here I build upon oceanic studies scholarship that frames the sea as an actual, 8 physical space of exchange. Oceanic readings argue for a more literal and historically situated understanding of maritime fiction, taking to heart Hester Blum’s clarion call:

“THE SEA IS NOT A METAPHOR” (“Prospect” 670). As Bernhard Klein and Gesa

Mackenthun put it, “the ocean itself needs to be analyzed as a deeply historical location whose transformative power is not merely psychological or metaphorical—as its frequent use as a literary motif might suggest—but material and very real” (2). To distinguish the historically hydrographic from the merely metaphoric, oceanic studies scholars, in the words of Colin Dewey, trace the “particular experience of maritime laborers, passengers, and captives” and chart the “significance of transported and transplanted peoples, crops, and animals to biological and ecological environments” (“Crafty” 861). What results is a

“fluid cartography,” as Iain Chambers puts it, in which “[h]istories and cultures are ... connected, rather than divided by water” (671). Oceanic studies also brings together multiple scholarly fields and endeavors: histories of the novel, of literacy, and of sail and steam power; studies of empire, of ecology, and of race; and theories of form, of history, and of ontology. And thinking beyond the academy, Steve Mentz and Martha Elena

Rojas note the timeliness and relevance of what they call the “blue humanities”: now more than ever, in our age of “repeated global ocean-fueled crises, from climate change to disruptions in international trade caused by political and economic breakdowns,” we must attend to the role and presence of the oceanic in globalization, aesthetics, and environmentalism (4).6 The concern of oceanic studies for the sea as actual environment

6 For the record, I have mixed feelings about the appellation “blue humanities”: it does offer a productive counterpart to the various greens of ecocriticism, but I can’t shake the sense of “blue” as either melancholy or vulgar—hence my preference for the more straightforward name “oceanic studies.” 9 aligns with the recent ecological turn in British nineteenth-century studies. In a 2018 issue of Victorian Studies, a special number on “Climate Change and Victorian Studies,”

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller writes, “Our climate is changing, but must Victorian studies change too? The real question is, how could it not?” (537). Reassessments of oceanic history and culture form the vanguard of such critical change.

This new generation of oceanic scholarship explores how maritime history and culture help us reconceptualize literary history. In The Novel and the Sea (2010), for instance, Cohen offers a new genealogy of the novel, arguing that we can understand the epistemic breaks between the literary styles of the Enlightenment, Romanticism,

Victorianism, and Modernism through recourse to the sea. Borrowing a concept from

Joseph Conrad, Cohen uses the mariner’s “craft”—the embodiment of capacity, skill, and knowledge—as the standard by which to define different literary periods: the

“performing descriptions” of the eighteenth century (75); the “sublimation of the sea” of

Romanticism (11); the laboring professionals navigating capitalist exchange in the nineteenth century; and the “routinization of the sea” that moves authors in response toward proto-Modernist “[e]dge zones” at the turn of the twentieth century (179–80). A brief example from Cohen’s work, although not a literary text, illustrates the dynamic exchanges between maritime craft and aesthetic craft: borrowing an idea from James

Hamilton, Cohen highlights the parallels between J. M. W. Turner’s Snowstorm (1842), with its steamship caught in a dark, swirling vortex of wind and wave, and Michael

Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity (1831), whose magnetized iron fillings illustrate the pattern of electromagnetic fields. We can see Turner’s painting, argues

Cohen, as an early “foray[] into artistic modernism” through its “inversion of the 10 sublime,” moving us from “forceful experience to a diagram of force” (127 and 131).7 If, in Cohen’s genealogy, the sublime sea of Romanticism turned upon visual power, then

Turner’s modernism represents forces beyond the visual; his abstraction makes visible the forces behind modern navigation and oceanic conquest—namely the electromagnetic fields that turn the compass needle. Cohen rightly reminds us that oceanic navigation, like modernism, also relies upon abstraction. Longitude, after all, is not a natural fact but rather a manufactured representation of the relationship between duration and distance.

Like Cohen, I consider the stylistic exchanges between maritime and literary craft, tracing how the global systems that shape oceanic experience impact the representation of fictional worlds. Paralleling Cohen’s reading of oceanic electromagnetism in Turner’s Snowstorm, my second chapter makes visible how thermodynamic entropy shapes the imperial world of Conrad’s steamship stories. In the same way that Cohen takes up the actual forces that move the compass, I think through the actual, technical workings of coal and steam power. Oceanic reading, as Cannon

Schmitt explains, asks us to embrace the revelatory power of the obvious. We are so used to the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” says Schmitt—“so accustomed,” that is, “to straining our ears for faint whispers ... beneath or behind the obvious”—that “affirming that texts say what they mean and mean what they say takes on the force of a revelation” (“Tidal”

12). Hence Freedgood and Schmitt’s call for what they term “denotative reading,” a mode of surface reading that synthesizes the literal and the figurative.8 When we

7 On J. M. W. Turner and electromagnetism, see James Hamilton, Turner and the Scientists (1998; 74). 8 On surface reading, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (2009; 1–21). 11 encounter a specific technical object—such as, say, a sailing ship—in literature, we first need to understand how it actually works. Armed with that literal knowledge, we can follow new lines of interpretation. In his denotative reading of Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness (1899), Schmitt models how we might explain nautical details in a way that does not simply explain them away. Schmitt tracks the narrated tidal movements of the

Thames and their subsequent shifting of the Nellie, the yawl upon which Marlow and our frame narrator sit; by the story’s end the tides literally turn the ship and the narrative gaze from the east and the mouth of the Thames, leading out to Africa, to the west and upriver, looking into the dark heart of London. Schmitt argues, then, that the nonhuman ebb and flow of the Thames provides the frame and the occasion for the novel’s comparative critique of imperial colony and metropole (see “Tidal” 8 and 17–27). Ultimately, then, oceanic reading challenges us to think the literal and the figurative together.

Blum similarly uses the actual conditions and lived experiences of maritime life as a heuristic to understand literary creation. In The View from the Masthead (2008) she argues that nineteenth-century American sailors’ writings articulate the interpenetration of manual and intellectual labor, a movement from “a state of physical competence to one of imaginative competence” (2). Like Blum, I consider how maritime labor and culture influence literary style and narration. In my fourth chapter, for instance, I use sea chanteys as a heuristic to understand narrative emplotment and emplacement: these songs of shipboard labor and leisure help us think through questions of organization, collective movement, and mobility—the very same questions, I believe, that reveal how narratives structure and locate their systems of major and minor characters. Like Blum, then, I focus on the modes of imagination enabled by maritime culture. I admire how her concept of a 12 maritime imagination—what she calls the “view from the masthead”—works through historical specificity. Blum bases her argument not in metaphoric free association (e.g., the fluidity of the ocean enables the “fluidity” of thought) but in careful attention to the actual conditions of maritime life.

The oceanic also helps us look anew at empire, and vice versa. Here I expand upon the work of Samuel Baker, who understands the British Empire through the lens of the Romantic literary imagination. Specifically, he argues that the modern concept of

“culture” arises out of Britain’s oceanic imperial geopolitics at the turn of the nineteenth century: “while the British navy was establishing hegemony over the ocean during the

Napoleonic Wars,” he writes, “Britain’s leading poets and thinkers ... established the modern idea of ‘culture’ by framing ... human life as a whole within the horizon of a common experience of the sea” (x).9 As Baker sees it, the imperial enters the realm of the everyday via the maritime. From a more ecological standpoint, Miller notes how “the geographies of climate change ... bear a historical relation to European and American imperialism” (538). As the British Empire cast its net wide across the globe, it fundamentally changed the distribution of natural resources—not only for its own age, but also for generations to come. Many such changes played out across the waters of the nineteenth century, and attention to the ocean qua ocean makes clear the impact of geopolitics upon the environment. Sam Willis, discussing the 1912 sinking of the RMS

Titanic, the famous symbol of British technological hubris, explains how

9 Baker offers much to oceanic studies, but he is a bit of an outlier in the field: he offers engaging readings of Romantic poetry written on and around water, but he himself admits that his methodology favors a metaphorical “fluidity,” and that his book “never really has been” about the ocean qua ocean (251). 13

the wreck of the Titanic was not only a product of its age because she was especially luxurious, or large, or because there were insufficient lifeboats, or because many more wealthy passengers were saved than poor, but because she struck an iceberg ... [I]n 1999, for the first time in 85 years, the shipping lanes southeast of Newfoundland were completely free of icebergs. Indeed, since the 1980s winter temperatures to the north of the Grand Banks have risen by 0.5°, enough to change forever the landscape in which the Titanic sank (200–1).

The wreck of this British leviathan metonymically represents not only the untenable scale of the British Empire—a system spread, at its peak, over a quarter of the globe—but also the violence and destruction that followed in its wake. That sense of scale and dissolution inevitably seeps into the literature of the long nineteenth century. My second chapter most directly takes up the ecological effects of empire, examining the interrelation of thermodynamic entropy and the colonial coal trade in Conrad’s sea fiction. My other chapters, though, also engage with imperial systems, tracking the maritime circulations, technologies, and discourses borne out of imperial hegemony: the circum-Atlantic trade in slaves and material goods, the calculation of longitude for more accurate oceanic conquest, and the self-disciplinary techniques of shipboard community.

Yet these imperial-maritime circulations, technologies, and discourses are well woven into the fabric of the literary text. Unlike the actual British, they may not readily announce themselves when the colonize a literary landscape (or seascape). Hence the critical utility of strong metonymic reading: we recognize the oceanic resonances of everyday “things” in literature only when we take into account geopolitical circulations beyond the bounds of the text. The literal and figurative come together under the aegis of the oceanic. In methodological terms, strong metonymic reading creates a “contact zone” between the historicist concerns of oceanic studies and the renewed critical attention to form. As I trace the influence of a historical maritime ethos upon literary style, I consider 14 not only large-scale sociopolitical forms (such as the distributed network) but also sentence-level figurations (such as metonymy) that register the text’s engagement with history and culture. Maritime details and figurations, I argue, provide more than just historical flavor within a novel; they serve as the formal anchors of historicity, the nodes that link the literary text to paraliterary movements across land and sea.

Following my texts as they move across the nineteenth century and across the globe, I track what I call the “oceanic imaginary”: a mode of representation that metonymically invokes the oceanic as a means not only to craft literary worlds but also to figure connections to extratextual networks, circulations, and exchanges. Specifically, I chart how novels incorporate historically specific maritime styles, allusions, and structures and how those texts, in so doing, metonymically register the flows and frictions of a networked world—a world connected and divided, more often than not, by water.

Yet my study does not stop at the shoreline; I believe that the oceanic imaginary also permeates the land. Hence alongside texts that literally represent life on and around the water, such as Frederick Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), Robert Louis

Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881–82), and Conrad’s “Youth” (1898) and Typhoon

(1902), I read what we might call “landlocked” narratives—stories that take place entirely on terra firma—such as Austen’s Persuasion (1817), Dickens’s Dombey and Son

(1846–48), and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). Both waterborne and landlocked texts,

I argue, draw upon the oceanic to imagine distributed social, political, economic, and ecological systems within and beyond the bounds of the text.

Other literary histories often invoke the idea of the “imagination.” The standard formula prefaces the term with a historical event, type, or concept: for example, Sandra 15

M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the

Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Debbie Lee’s Slavery and the Romantic

Imagination (2004), Blum’s View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and

Antebellum American Sea Narratives (2008), Stefanie Markovits’s The Crimean War in the British Imagination (2009), Katherine Byrne’s Tuberculosis and the Victorian

Literary Imagination (2011), Allen MacDuffie’s Victorian Literature, Energy, and the

Ecological Imagination (2014), or Cyrus R. K. Patell’s Cosmopolitanism and the Literary

Imagination (2015). Such instances of “imagination” gesture toward the subjective nature of literary representation. As many generations of literary critics—historicist or otherwise—have told us, to figure something in fiction is inevitably to transform it.10 The

“imagination” also helps us think about collectivity and connectivity, as in, for instance,

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), which argues that, among other things, a sense of shared time—more precisely, a common temporal imagination via the newspaper and the multiplot novel—affords an idea of nation and nationality (see 25).

This literary-critical lineage of “imagination” directs my present project, which takes up both foundational and new discussions of the dynamic interrelation of literary text and historical and cultural context.

I find more critical utility, though, in the “imaginary,” a related yet more focused concept from the social sciences that emphasizes the individual within culture. In a 2006 special issue of Anthropological Theory focusing on “Cultural Anthropology’s Key

Words,” Claudia Strauss argues that the imaginary challenges us to synthesize a “study

10 In literary-critical terms, we might refer to this process of transformation as “defamiliarization.” Victor Shklovsky first outlined the capacity of literature to make the familiar strange in “Art as Technique” (1917; see 18 and 21). 16

[of] concrete material and symbolic conditions” with a study of “the understandings, emotions, and desires that individuals develop as they experience these conditions.”

Providing a “person-centered approach,” the concept of the imaginary thus helps us avoid

“turn[ing] culture into an abstraction” (323). The imaginary, in other words, asks us to consider how lived experience of culture differs from person to person. So while the concept, shares a fundamental relationship with “ideology” (as defined by Louis

Althusser, “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” [109, original italics]), the imaginary avoids homogenization. If ideology works from the top down, imposing an “imagined relationship” upon the collective social system, then the imaginary works from the bottom up, tracing how individual networked actors imagine their world and their place(s) within it. We might see culture and community, then, not sharing a single imaginary but rather arising out of multiple overlapping imaginaries.

The oceanic imaginary thus describes not only the creative affordances of fictionalization but also a situated understanding of sociopolitical and cultural systems.

Each oceanic imaginary is unique: Brontë does not invoke the oceanic to build her literary world in the same way that Conrad does; Conrad’s oceanic imaginary differs from that of Austen, and so on and so forth. Yet all of these individually imagining authors come together under the aegis of the oceanic. Each draws upon maritime history and culture in unique and diffuse ways, but in their turn to the sea they share a common bond. So although we might not traditionally conceive of these authors and their texts as purveyors of maritime fiction, my historicist-formalist reading of their imagined worlds locates them within overlapping systems of maritime circulation and exchange. 17

My research thus deals with “maritime fiction” broadly conceived. This genre, often overlooked for its supposed critical depth and complexity, entails more than just swashbuckling seafaring stories, more than just tales of white whales and ancient mariners. I seek, in fact, to expand our understanding of the genre: I believe that we can read any novel as “maritime fiction”—regardless of whether its action takes place on land or at sea—if that novel registers the influence of maritime history upon its textual world.

Here I build on the work of John Peck, who argues in his study of nineteenth-century transatlantic literature that a novel “does not need to include a sea voyage in order to have something interesting to say about a country’s maritime economy and culture” (3). Peck helpfully differentiates “maritime fiction” from “nautical fiction” and “sea fiction,” two generic categories that suggest that all events must take place on open water. But events on land, Peck makes clear, can invoke maritime history and culture just as readily, and, in so doing, they “bring into focus some fundamental questions about the nature of British society” (4).11 Following Peck, I work to demonstrate the critical utility of a more inclusive, more diverse understanding of maritime fiction. When, for instance, we understand Villette or Persuasion as maritime fiction, we can locate them within new historical and sociopolitical currents. As I detail in my first chapter, an oceanic reading of

Villette draws out the novel’s articulation of the longue durée of circum-Atlantic slavery; what once seemed like an introspective, psychological autobiography of the author

11 For an example Peck cites Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), specifically the firm of Murdstone and Grinby, which supplies wine to packet ships. David’s stepfather (Murdstone) is a partner in the business, and the young David himself works for the firm: through the maritime, writes Peck, we see the “maritime foundation of middle-class prosperity” (4). 18 becomes a social problem novel on a global scale. Likewise, in my third chapter, we see how an oceanic reading of Persuasion recasts the marriage and education plots in terms of mobility: finding your place in a wider world requires a keen eye to relative duration and distance.

In tracing the oceanic imaginary of an expanded field of maritime fiction, I also work to remap the literary landscape. In place of the traditional spatial and temporal divisions of Romanticism and Victorianism, I opt for a longer, wider period drawn together by water. As I see it, an oceanic nineteenth century spans multiple bodies of water, from the English Channel to the Caribbean to the Pacific to the South China Sea to the Suez Canal, and stretches from the second voyage of James Cook (1772–75) to the sinking of the Titanic (1912). Framed so expansively, an oceanic nineteenth century affords new literary historical connections—not only between land and sea, but also between certain peoples, places, goods, ideas, events, and technologies previously separated by longstanding trends in academic study. Through the sea we find common ground, for instance, between Austen and Conrad, between Villette and the circum-

Atlantic slave trade, or even between critical methodologies (historicism and formalism) or between modes of representation (the literal and the figurative).

Especially for studies of maritime culture and the oceanic, I prefer network- friendly designations such as the “long nineteenth century” over the traditional

“Victorianism,” a term that falsely suggests a degree of ideological coherence around an arguably arbitrary figure.12 In practice, “Victorian” means many different things to many

12 In fact, this present paragraph will be one of the few in my project in which I actually use the term “Victorian” outside of a direct quotation or citation. 19 different people, and the term lacks a consistent critical use. Are we talking only about the years 1837-1901? Or should we also include years and events that profoundly shaped the Victorian era, such as the first Reform Bill in 1832? And are we just talking about the

British Isles here, or does the “Victorian” permeate across the empire—perhaps even to lands no longer under the crown, such as what some puzzlingly call “Victorian”

America? We might, then, describe the Victorian with the same words Henry James used to describe its three-volume novels: a “loose, baggy monster, with ... queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary.”13

What greater utility, then, could there be in a “long nineteenth century,” a concept that seems equally capacious and “arbitrary,” if not more so? To begin, the term affords temporal flexibility: in place of specific years we have only the descriptor “long.” The ambiguity reflects the blurriness of discursive and ideological boundaries. The British world, of course, did not radically change the moment the crown landed on Victoria’s head in 1837, and “Victorianism” proper may have actually died before its namesake.14

Historical change comes by gradation. We should use a critical term, then, that does not pretend toward distinct temporal borders. In its flexibility and ambiguity, then, the “long nineteenth century” directly embraces the “accidental and the arbitrary”; in its expanded capacity it allows for—perhaps even demands—a whole new range of connections and conversations. One of the first critical uses of the term comes from Eric Hobsbawm, who

13 Henry James, preface to The Tragic Muse (1907), qtd. in Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1997; 521n2). 14 Walter Besant—himself a late “Victorian” subject—once famously observed that “the mind and habits of the ordinary Englishman” were so completely transformed by 1897, “that he [the ordinary Englishman] would not, could he see him, recognize his own grandfather” (qtd. in Robson and Christ 1018). 20 across three foundational Marxist-historicist studies of Europe—The Age of Revolution

(1962), The Age of Capital (1975), and The Age of Empire (1987)—outlines a period that stretches from the revolutions (industrial and political) in the closing decades of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of global warfare in the first decades of the twentieth.15 In a sense, then, the “long nineteenth century” encompasses everything that critics are already doing with “Victorianism”—i.e., making connections to events and ideas both before and after the period proper—but it comes without all of the qualifications, caveats, and clarifications. Even better, it moves us away from the illusion of a period built around a particular person in a particular place at a particular time, and toward the distributed networks of a global nineteenth-century world.

For a long nineteenth century—especially an oceanic long nineteenth century—is inherently a wide nineteenth century. Hobsbawm, for instance, encourages us to think across the countries of Europe. As we trace longer connections across time, though, we also need to consider contiguous movements beyond the standard container of literary history: the nation. In the words of John O. Jordan, “The nation ... no longer seems an adequate container for the research that many scholars of the nineteenth century wish to pursue” (938). I see my work as part of the global turn in nineteenth-century studies, following Caroline Levine’s call to move “from nation to network.” While the idea of

Britain-as-nation still appears in my study, my aim in outlining (as my title announces) a

“British long nineteenth century” deals less with tying everything back to Britain and more with locating the nation within multiple global networks via oceanic reading.

15 As a counterpoint to the long nineteenth century, Hobsbawm outlines a “short twentieth century” (see The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 [1994]). 21

Underwriting much of my critical remapping is empire. Britain was, of course, one of the preeminent sea powers of the nineteenth century; as an island nation and a central, high-degree nexus of empire, Britain’s unique position—both geographically and geopolitically—provides a productive entry point into discussions of maritime networks.

Maritime networks helped catalyze the rise—and, I will argue, fall—of the global empire upon which the sun never set. Carl Schmitt, in his analysis of the geopolitics that shapes the traditional division between land and sea, argues that England in the nineteenth century “opted for an exclusively maritime existence” (51). As other nation-states claimed the land, in theory the sea “would belong to nobody, or everybody”; but “in reality,” Schmitt explains, “it would belong to a single country: England” (46). At this historical moment, says Schmitt, England—and, by extension, Britain and its empire— comes to view itself as part of the sea. Britain’s maritime networks afford global mobility and communication; hence the nation, “[l]ike a fish ... was able to swim to another spot of the globe. It was no more and no less than the mobile centre of a world empire” (51). In addition to his fish simile, Schmitt also figures Britain metonymically, describing the nation as a ship, a vessel separate from the Continent (see 50). This figuration is cultural contiguity at work, not mere resemblance: to rule the waves, Britain relied upon its network of ships—and the imperial network of material resources used to build them.

Yet an “imperial Britain” and an “oceanic Britain” are not necessarily isomorphic.

As much as empire pushes us to think globally, it is not the only means by which to trace global circulations and exchanges. And as much as my chapters do take up the traumas, technologies, and discourses that powered and propagated the British Empire, I find greater utility here in terming things “oceanic” rather than “imperial”: I want to 22 emphasize not only the shift from nation to network, but also the fact that Britain is not in control of these literary representations. Maritime networks may not be centralized networks, and the oceanic and the oceanic imaginary can transform the imperial in ways at odds with British hegemony. In my third chapter, for instance, I suggest that the maritime women in Persuasion possess a much sharper sense of naval navigation than the actual Royal Navy sailors of the novel: while Captain Wentworth has actually sailed and commanded ships for Britain in the Napoleonic Wars, Anne Elliot seems much more versed (by the novel’s end) in the actual discourses of oceanic circulation and conquest.

And in my fourth chapter, I consider how Captain Cuttle in Dickens’s Dombey and Son uses sea chanteys—songs designed to enforce shipboard discipline and to maintain a hierarchy of command—as prompts for cheerful sociality. I also consider how Long John

Silver, a lowly ship’s cook, deploys chanteys to deliberately undermine shipboard authority and usurp mutinous control. In sum, we can trace the distributed effects of empire without reproducing the centralized geo- and sociopolitical structures of empire.

In the same vein, Jon Mee notes that postcolonial critics have led the charge to think beyond Britain’s shores, but he acknowledges that “[t]he question of empire is not the only way that studies in the nineteenth century have looked beyond the paradigm of national literatures” (938; see also 936). As I see it, some of the most productive efforts in transnational and global studies take shape around bodies of water: scholars of the

Caribbean, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean craft literary histories outside traditional terrestrial bounds. Following new paradigms of historiography via oceanic exchange as detailed in Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) and Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead (1996), studies by (in no particular order) Dewey, Tim Watson, Belinda 23

Edmondson, Vanessa Smith, Michelle Burnham, Engseng Ho, Gaurav Desai, Paul

Youngquist and Frances Botkin, and Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright, among others, relocate national literatures, histories, and cultures within a wider—if not specifically an oceanic—context.16 Such scholarship moves toward the view of “the global” proposed by Sanjay Krishnan: less a transparent process of description and more an ideologically charged heuristic for producing a worldview (see 1 and 4).

In the long nineteenth century, maritime networks were a fundamental part of this heuristic. In Britain and beyond, authors looked to the sea to understand the wider world and their place within it. So although scholars such as Anderson, Hobsbawm, Ernest

Gellner, and Michael Hechter famously argue for the long nineteenth century as the age of the nation-state, oceanic reading reframes the long nineteenth century as the age of the network.17 In The Transformation of the World (2009; trans. 2014), his sprawling global history of the long nineteenth century, Jürgen Osterhammel defines networks as

“traceable configurations of a repetitive relation or interaction”; networks denote a set of

16 See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993); Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996); Dewey, “Annus Mirabilis to The Ancient Mariner: Oceanic Environments and the Romantic Literary Imagination” (2010); Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780-1870 (2008); Belinda Edmondson, Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (2009); Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (1998); Burnham, “Oceanic Turns and American Literary History in a Global Context” (2016); Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (2006); Desai, “Oceans Connect: The Indian Ocean and African Identities” (2010); Youngquist and Botkin, “Introduction: Black Romanticism: Romantic Circulations” (October 2011); and Hutchings and Wright, eds., Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870: Gender, Race, and Nation (2011). 17 See Anderson, Imagined Communities; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (2012); Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983); and Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (2004). 24

“relations that have attained a certain degree of regularity.” One of the “outstanding features of the nineteenth century,” says Osterhammel, “was the multiplication and acceleration of such repeated interactions, especially across national boundaries and often between regions and continents ... To think in terms of networks was a nineteenth-century development” (710–1). Jonathan H. Grossman shows us as much in Charles Dickens’s

Networks (2012), which traces how literary works imagine community in an age of transnational systems. Reading Dickens alongside the history of public transportation systems, Grossman both builds upon and qualifies the work of Anderson in Imagined

Communities. While Anderson argues that a novel’s multiplot structure affords an idea of nation via simultaneity, Grossman contends that community via narration in a

“meanwhile” temporality extends beyond the frame of the nation. He explains how the

“homogenous, empty time” upon which Anderson builds his argument actually arises from “an interlocking global passenger network,” from railroads and route maps, steam ships and time-tables” (187).18 In my work here—especially my analysis of Conrad and coal power—I continue Grossman’s investigation of how and why networks transgress both physical and imagined borders.

In sum, networks afford both connectivity and historicity. I borrow the concept of

“affordances” from Levine, who herself borrows it from design theory. Affordances, she explains, “describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” (Forms

6).19 Networks have the potential to connect people, places, things, etc., and to do so in a

18 On “homogenous, empty time,” see Anderson (26). 19 Levine offers several affordance examples of materials and forms: “Glass affords transparency and brittleness. Steel affords strength, smoothness, hardness, and durability … Rhyme affords repetition, anticipation, and memorization. Networks afford connection

25 historically specific way. Yet, as Levine makes clear, a network is not simply a synonym for connectivity; rather, a network is a sociopolitical structure that deals with proper arrangement and placement (see Forms 112–4). Hence a network approach to nineteenth- century British literary history must do more than simply conclude that Britain was highly connected across land and sea. (We already knew that.) Instead, networks can provide a historically specific account of how culture and power spread and transform across time and space. For despite their seeming potential for chaotic sprawl, networks actually follow systematic ordering principles, and with careful attention to contiguity and exchanges we can parse the logic of how and why nodes connect—or fail to connect.

Especially with regard to oceanic circulations, networks help us answer questions about who or what moves where, and why. Indeed, networks offer a highly flexible form for thinking through sociopolitical relations. As the sociologist Paul McLean explains, a tie between nodes “can record almost anything” (17): family relations, professional transactions, social bonds, physical proximities, ideological affinities (or aversions), etc.

Consider, for instance, the distributed naval network I trace around the Austen family in my third chapter (see Figure 1, below). The visualization captures the systematic constellation of people, places, events, and objects. The result is complex but not chaotic.

If anything, the network helps us see the exact structure of influence that, I argue, comes to shape Persuasion. The sociologist Charles Kadushin puts it nicely: “connected people tend to have an effect on one another” (9).20 In my diagram of the Austens’ naval world,

and circulation” (6). 20 The effect of influence is even more pronounced when two given nodes share multiple connections between them—what sociologists term “multiplexity” or “multiplex ties” (see McLean 18). 26 for instance, Francis serves as an influential intermediary: as both brother to Jane and

Figure 1: the Austens’ naval network officer in the Royal Navy, he transitively links his sister to a naval network of people, places, and things deeply concerned with longitude—with questions, that is, of oceanic mobility, navigation, and conquest.

McLean also highlights how the nodes themselves need not be human or material

(although we often tend to think along such lines). For instance, I could diagram my second chapter’s argument about Conrad’s Typhoon as a triad (see Figure 2, below). The nodes here are not specific material entities but rather generalized concepts that describe relations distributed across time and space. Providing the bond between each of these 27

powerful nodes is

coal—a fairly

mundane material

object. The relational

logic here is again

metonymic: as I

explain in my second

chapter, coal

simultaneously serves

as a representative

Figure 2: the “bond of the sea” “thing” for all three systems—the oceanic, the imperial, and the thermodynamic. Metonymic networks help us see the power relations behind the everyday.

Metonymic networks also provide a means through which to trace indirect influence. Levine, McLean, and Kadushin all cite Mark S. Granovetter’s concept of

“weak ties,” the idea (in Kadushin’s words) that “important things flow from people with whom one has limited connections” (Kadushin 27; see also Levine, Forms 112; and

McLean 19). I believe that strong metonymic reading often relies on networked weak ties. Although the names suggest an opposition, the two concepts actually describe a similar phenomenon: finding and following meaning outside of a familiar system. For

Freedgood, the familiar system is the literary text; for Granovetter, it is the tight-knit social circle, which tends to share (and thus echo) the same ideas. As an example, my strong metonymic reading of Villette begins with a weak tie: shipwreck. Within the 28 dominant systems traditionally used to read the novel (autobiography and psychological interiority), shipwreck signifies little. But shipwreck is the first link in a metonymic chain—i.e., a series of historically specific semantic substitutions—that points us outward to new systems of meaning. Put differently, only when we follow this metonymic weak tie do we understand Villette’s fundamental relationship to the circum-

Atlantic networks of the slave trade.

Yet for all the connectivity that networks afford, that connectivity is not automatic. Osterhammel cites the irony, for example, that “‘India’ was said to be part of the international telegraph network, but the great mass of Indians had no direct experience of this” (711). I likewise pay particular attention to the boundaries and limits of networks, tracking how transnational oceanic systems break down or hinder connectivity in ways both material and ideological. Too often do we uncritically embrace the metaphor of “flow” to describe networked movement—especially in the case of oceanic and/or economic exchanges. But, as Augustine Sedgewick argues, “flow” is a fantasy that effaces the actually existing labors and struggles around who and what moves (see 165–6). To counter this free-flowing fantasy, I borrow from design theory and disability studies the concept of “mobility,” which captures not only movement but also resistance to movement. As Robert D. Aguirre puts it, mobility “theorizes the tension between that which is able to move and that which is fixed, rooted, moored, or bound”

(2). In his reading of Anthony Trollope’s West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859),

Aguirre highlights the “regional and global frictions” in travel by “ship, train, horseback, mule, and foot” in the region (1). He foregrounds the knots and kinks in the flow of information and, by extension, in imperial control. Aguirre’s project makes clear the 29 degree of nuance required when invoking the form of the network. Tim Cresswell, describing what he sees as a “new mobilities paradigm” in critical discourse, similarly writes that “mobility involves a fragile entanglement” of three aspects: actual individual physical movement (or the lack thereof), cultural representations of that movement, and subsequent social practices and discourses that develop around embodied movement

(18).21 The meaning of mobility thus depends not only upon context (“[o]ne person’s speed is another person’s slowness,” says Cresswell) but also upon the historical conditions regarding who can and cannot move—or, more precisely, upon the sociopolitical discourses that allow certain bodies and actors to move and that keep others in place. Mobility, then, moves toward a concept of geopolitics in motion. In Cresswell’s words, “Speeds, slownesses, and immobilities are all related in ways that are thoroughly infused with power and its distribution” (21).

Framed as a question of power, mobility asks us to think about what Anna

Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “friction”: more than a simple synonym for “resistance,” friction offers a kinetic metaphor the material and ideological limits that shape the globalizing operations of power. Friction, of course, slows moving objects down, but it also is the force that allows them to move. Tsing cleverly observes how “[a] wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere” (5-6).

Friction helps us see how the very act of connection affects the whole system—and there is no such thing as a frictionless system. Networks, although built upon (in

Osterhammel’s words) repeated “relations that have attained a certain degree of

21 For further discussion of the three aspects of mobility, see Cresswell, “Politics” (19– 20). See also Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (2006). 30 regularity,” must always remain open to change from within. In my fourth chapter, for instance, I consider how Long John Silver’s bodily disability—his peg leg—affords a transformative friction: it hinders his mobility, but it also prompts him to orchestrate a politics of prosthetic mobility, coordinating other bodies as replacements for his missing limb. The resulting metonymic network spreads across Treasure Island, shaping the narrative and the text’s articulation of shipboard community.

Networks afford not simply connectivity but an ever-evolving connectivity, a sociopolitics in process. The “social,” as Bruno Latour describes it, is an assemblage always in the process of being assembled. A network, says Latour, “doesn’t designate a domain of reality or some particular item, but rather is the name of a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a translation, an enrollment. It is an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together” (64–5). I find quite productive Latour’s idea of networked movement as “translation,” for to move through a network is to be transformed by it. Hence Latour’s definition of the “actor,” a networked entity (human or nonhuman) that is made to act by other external forces: “An ‘actor’ ... is not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it” (46). And the “translation” of that actor, in turn, reshapes the network around it. Such reciprocity gestures toward the cybernetic affordances of networks, the capacity for dynamic feedback in a radically connected system. Whereas scientists— and some literary theorists—use “cybernetic” to describe self-regulating or “homeostatic” biological, thermodynamic, ecological, or narrative systems, my interest lies less in hermetically-sealed, self-perpetuating systems and more with networked reciprocity, the 31 tendency of one node to react to changes to a different node connected somewhere down the line (see Clarke, Neocybernetics; and Hagen, “Homeostatic” 179–96). The action and reaction may not necessarily be “symmetric,” to use the technical sociological term, but they nevertheless speak of dynamic mutuality (Kadushin 15; see also 21).

The mechanics I trace in literary-historical maritime networks align much more closely with the actual oceanic origins of the term “cybernetic.” As Cohen explains, “The mathematician Norbert Wiener coined the term ‘cybernetics’ in 1948, after the Greek word for steersman, kubernetes. Wiener chose this term because he understood the steersman’s activities to be a foundational paradigm for feedback systems” (81). The steersman, with his hand on the ship’s tiller, must feel and respond to (or choose not to respond to) movements and pressures both minor and major; he must process, collate, and connect multiple points of information into a knowable system. Readers, says Cohen, undergo a similar experience with novels. She cites the narratologist Wolfgang Iser, who describes reading as a wholly cybernetic experience: like the steersman, the reader engages in the “feedback of effects and information throughout a sequence of changing situational frames; smaller units progressively merge into bigger ones” (Iser, The Act of

Reading [1980], qtd. in Cohen 80). Iser does not use the word “networks,” but his characterization of active reading here should sound familiar: networks cluster nodes together, and remain open for the tying-in of additional nodes—a process we might describe as “smaller units progressively mer[ing] into bigger ones.”

This simplified, oceanic-originated understanding of cybernetics helps us avoid the flat ontology that Latour and other systems theorists posit in their understanding of human and nonhuman systems. Constituted by ever-changing global circulations and 32 exchanges and subject to multiple simultaneous feedback effects, maritime networks are—and must remain—radically open systems. The modus operandi of the cybernetic steersman is not self-regulation or homeostasis but connectivity via dynamic feedback.

While he has some agency, reading the wind and the waves and turning the tiller in response, his mobility is never fully under his own control; he moves within multiple oceanic systems at once, pushed and pulled by concerns variously political, social, economic, and ecological. We might, then, learn a lesson from the steersman. Although literary-historical studies of the long nineteenth-century often like to single out a particular network—material networks such as the railway, the mail coach, or the periodical press, or more abstract constellations such as the public sphere—networks never exist in isolation.22 Hence the plural of my title: maritime networks, especially given their imbrication and overlap with other sociopolitical structures—namely the hierarchies and networks of empire—resist the homogenization and power-leveling of flat ontology. When crafted without an eye to historical specificity, network readings can inadvertently repeat historical violence. For example, placing humans on the same ontological level as nonhumans strikes me as no better than the politics of empire, which exploited and objectified colonized peoples, alienating their labor and treating them as a

22 I thus take up one of the main critical questions that Levine poses in Forms: what happens when sociopolitical forms encounter and overlap with one another? For studies that focus on a single type of network, see, for instance, Grossman; Paul Raphael Rooney, Railway Reading and Late-Victorian Literary Series, Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace (2018); Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2016); Nicholas Mason, Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (2013); David Stewart, Romantic Magazine and Metropolitan Literary Culture (2011); Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762-1830 (2011); and Patrick Leary, The “Punch” Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian England (2010). 33 mere means to material resources. Connectivity happens all too easily, all too readily in a flat ontology; the theory effaces the historical conditions and vicissitudes of connectivity.

With the cybernetic steersman as our guide, though, we can raise key questions about mobility and friction—and thereby account for asymmetrical power relations and heuristic resistances in network readings.

- - -

Each chapter of my dissertation takes up a different historical genre of maritime writing—the shipwreck tale, the steamship story, the logbook, the sea chantey, and the ship surgeon’s manual—as a heuristic for an oceanic reading. In recovering these maritime contexts, I draw out the literary dimensions of oceanic circulation and exchange. Taken together, my chapters make visible how the literary marketplace overlaps with the political, social, economic, and ecological networks and movements of the nineteenth-century maritime world. I unpack how my chosen primary novels enter into dialogue with the traumas of the slave trade, the system of colonial coaling stations, the self-diagnostic charting of longitude, the sociopolitical rhythms of merchant marine labor and mobility, and the portside spread of venereal disease.

I organize my four main chapters in two thematic clusters. The first two chapters deal with specific circulations in specific bodies of water: I locate novels by Brontë and

Conrad within the political and economic networks of Caribbean slavery and the imperial and ecological systems of the eastern Indian Ocean, respectively. The second two chapters focus on maritime styles and structures: I trace how maritime textual forms dealing with mobility, organization, and placement—namely logbooks and sea chanteys—lend narrative shape to novels by Austen, Stevenson, and Dickens. My two 34 thematic clusters deliberately pair chapters on supposedly “landlocked” novels (e.g.,

Villette) with chapters on novels that we more readily recognize as maritime fiction (e.g.,

Typhoon); this contiguity reinforces the power of the oceanic imaginary to permeate the historicity of the land. It also models how we might rethink the standard connections of literary history: how often do we get to read Austen’s Persuasion and Stevenson’s

Treasure Island side-by-side? My coda then steps back, shifting not only in tone but also in scope to reflect on the process of reading and writing oceanic literary history.

Chapter 1, “Metonymic Chains,” examines Brontë’s Villette (1853) alongside the history and iconology of shipwreck. Although the critical tradition takes Villette to be an inward-looking, autobiographical text, I argue that the novel’s two scenes of shipwreck speak of fundamental connections outward in both time and space, namely to the traumatic longue durée of the circum-Atlantic slave trade. The two wrecks—the first figurative, the second literal—teach us about the representative mechanics of the oceanic:

Villette’s scenes of shipwreck function metonymically rather than metaphorically, carrying us beyond the symbolic system of the novel. We can read the novel anew when we think in terms of contiguity rather than resemblance. While many postcolonial readings of Jane Eyre (1847) have trained us to look for metaphors of slavery, Villette offers something far more complex: metonymic chains. The novel moves in scale from the individual to the global through a series of semantic substitutions, beginning with the two wrecks. An oceanic reading of Villette thus emphasizes distributed systems of influence: rather than suggesting that Brontë consciously orchestrates this figurative invocation of history, we must instead think of author and work as nodes within overlapping oceanic networks: i.e., the literary marketplace, the circum-Atlantic slave 35 trade, the abolitionist movement, and the Christian missionary system.

Chapter 2, “The Bond of the Sea,” offers an ecocritical analysis of coal in

Conrad’s “Youth” (1898) and Typhoon (1902). Borrowing a phrase from the former, I track what I call the “bond of the sea,” the metonymic triangulation of the oceanic, the imperial, and the thermodynamic via coal. The two sea stories, I argue, figure coal as a metonym not only for Britain and its oceanic empire but also for the threat of entropy. On board Conrad’s coaling barques and steamships, the thermodynamic leaks, absences, and frictions match the breakdown of the crew’s bodily boundaries; this breakdown, in turn, registers not only the depletion of natural resources across Britain’s Pacific colonies, but also the finitude of empire itself. Although imperialism sought to be a closed, self- sustaining system, Conrad’s variously leaky, entropy-ridden coaling ships and steamers highlight the irony that coal—the very element that supposedly powered British global dominance—produces only dissolution. The “bond of the sea,” I suggest, thus asks us to think the literal and the figurative together. The technical maritime details—including the presence, absence, and use of coal—that populate Conrad’s sea stories afford a range of interpretive possibilities.

Chapter 3, “Charting Persuasion,” draws upon an archive of Royal Navy logbooks to frame questions of spatial and temporal precision in Austen’s final completed novel. Although critics traditionally read Persuasion (1817) through the history of the

Napoleonic Wars, I locate the novel within a longer, more global history of oceanic conquest: the quest for longitude. Specifically, I trace how maritime histories of measurement and mobility shape both the form and the content of Persuasion. The novel’s fascination with charting relative distance and tracking abstract, small-scale spans 36 of relative time (e.g., seconds, minutes, and hours) speaks to its inheritance of over a century of debate about temporal and spatial precision at sea. The quest for longitude sparked the desire to represent precisely the relationship between duration and distance— and that same desire, I argue, runs through Persuasion. The novel turns on a poetics of scale, marking intervals in time and space to coordinate actions and to make meaning. To better understand the chronotopes of Persuasion, I turn to the Royal Navy logbooks of her older brother, Francis William Austen. From the naval logbook, I suggest, Persuasion borrows three stylistic principles from the naval logbook: free indirect discourse, collective movement, and diagnostic entries. Ultimately, both the logbook and

Persuasion deal with establishing your place in a wider world.

Chapter 4, “Chanteying Bodies and Narrative Labor,” takes up selected hauling, heaving and forecastle chanteys to parse both sociopolitical and narrative structure in

Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881–82) and Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48). I track how these novels’ differently-abled sailors—figures with missing legs and hands— use chanteys prosthetically, extending their bodies through song and becoming, in effect, crucial high-degree nodes within the social fabric of their respective narrative worlds. My two test cases, the peg-legged Long John Silver and the hook-handed Captain Cuttle, thus raise questions about disability and mobility and narrative emplacement, as well as about the critical utility of surface reading. What happens, that is, when we read these two chanteymen as chanteymen? Chanteys, the songs of labor and leisure sung aboard merchant ships and whaling vessels, kept bodies in correct time and in good spirits.

Despite a rich archive of primary material, though, very little has been written about the importance of chanteys to literary history. My work thus also serves in part as a recovery 37 project: chanteying, I suggest, provides a historically specific heuristic through which can better understand the dynamic interrelation of bodies, labor, and storytelling.

The coda, “Ahoy! or, Looking for an Oceanic Reading,” offers a meta-reflection on maritime historicism and oceanic reading. What happens, I ask, when literary historians look for something that they know should be there but that they cannot find?

Put differently, what are the limits of surface reading and of suspicious reading? I take up a discrepancy in my own research as a case study: All of the writing (both primary and secondary) around the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864; rev. 1866 and 1869) enforces the idea of the libidinous “Jack Tar,” a libertine sailor figure with a woman in every port and a wife in none. Yet popular seafaring novels of these years—for instance, the works of

Frederick Marryat (b. 1792; d. 1848) and William Clark Russell (b. 1844; d. 1911)— feature no instances of venereal disease or prostitution. Even moments that could be metaphorically overread—that is, spun out via an overwrought, conspiracy-theory-esque hermeneutics of suspicion and metaphorically connected to sexual disease—are few and far between in these novels. To unpack this apparent critical impasse, I retrace my steps through databases and nineteenth-century ship’s surgeons’ manuals; in the process, I raise questions not only about historical exchanges in contagious disease but also about the critical challenges in navigating the oceanic archive.

All of my work, then, focuses on nineteenth-century prose, literary or otherwise.

As described above, prose readily affords a strong metonymic reading of cultural contiguity. Especially in the long nineteenth century, the novel—a literary form that seeks to capture the networked complexity of everyday social life—speaks of circulation and exchange. The very form develops alongside the rise of mass-market, serialized 38 publication, of circulating libraries, and of increasing political and historical awareness.

In the same way, in the long nineteenth century Great Britain—a relatively small landmass—served as a crucial node in social, geopolitical, economic, ecological, and literary systems of circulation and exchange across the globe. Railroads and shipping lanes snaked across land and sea; mail coaches, telegraph lines, social clubs, and serialized periodicals spread fact and fiction far and wide; and theories of evolution and of empire linked bodies and minds across time and space. For the British, then, the nineteenth century was an age of networks, both literal and ideological. An oceanic view of the nineteenth century surfaces this radically connected world.

Whereas the sea in the eighteenth century is often figured as a space of freedom and isolation, with a polity and aesthetic separate from the land, the sea in the nineteenth century speaks of dynamic interrelation. As Siobhan Carroll notes, the “unfathomable ocean of the eighteenth century” was “a space often depicted as fundamentally antithetical to civilization” (15). For the eighteenth-century sea promised freedom for two figures with a fraught relationship with civilization: the pirate and the fugitive slave.

Pirates took to the sea to escape the laws of terrestrial nations. Throughout the golden age of piracy (ca. 1690–1726), writes Marcus Rediker, many pirates sought “the perpetuation of a ‘life of liberty’” (37). Even when piracy was effectively sanctioned by national governments, privateers still exercised a mercenary autonomy: David J. Starkey and

Matthew McCarthy note that “[b]eneath this legal facade ... there existed an underworld of robbery, deception, smuggling, and misconduct. The buccaneers showed no particular loyalty towards one colony over another and would take licenses from any governor, regardless of the political climate in Europe” (135). Life at sea allowed them to slip the 39 laws and bonds of eighteenth-century landed civilization.

The slave took a similar view in the eighteenth century: the land was a site of labor, discipline, and punishment. As Charles R. Foy and W. Jeffrey Bolster explain, dockyards and port towns relied heavily on black slave labor in the eighteenth century; slaves served as stevedores, carpenters, and sailmakers. The sea, though, offered a means of escape: many fugitive slaves sought passage on or attempted to stow away in ocean- bound ships (see Foy 46–77; and Bolster 131–57). The fact that slaves would view the sea as a route to freedom—i.e., as a path out of slavery—bears a grim irony, given the history of Middle Passage, the horrific journey by ship that carried so many African men and women into slavery—and that killed many others enroute. That said, even Middle

Passage registers how the eighteenth-century sea served as a space of separation: once a crossing was made, there was little chance of returning.23

To be at sea in the nineteenth century, by contrast, does not entail the same kind of isolation and separation. My chapters model the dynamic connectivity of an oceanic nineteenth century. In terms of both content and methodology they trace the common ground between seemingly unrelated maritime networks: to understand the oceanic, we need to understand how various systems—for instance, the circum-Atlantic slave trade, the thermodynamic networks of coal and steam power, the structures of empire, the communities of the ship and of the shoreline, and the spread of contagious disease—all work together. Carroll, in her study that extends up to 1850, describes certain regions of the sea as “uncolonizable” space. Through a longer view of the nineteenth century,

23 Conditions and connections did not automatically improve, of course, with the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, but at the very least the nineteenth century opened with this circum-Atlantic practice of violent separation being declared illegal. 40 however, I would like to suggest otherwise: even the most seemingly remote, inaccessible, or friction-fraught spaces—at sea or on land—are awash with oceanic power relations. If my readings of Villette and Persuasion teach us anything, it is that the oceanic conquests of empire—of domination and navigation—readily seep into landlocked literary texts in diffuse and complex ways. Even maritime fictions that use the sea as a literal prompt for adventure (such as “Youth,” Typhoon, and Treasure Island), or even as a prompt for light-hearted comedy and sociality (such as Dombey and Son), nevertheless metonymically register the biopolitical and geopolitical concerns of mobility, placement, and organization, the tensions between life and labor that structure the oceanic world.24

Through maritime networks and the oceanic imaginary I thus seek to demonstrate the multiplicity inherent in the British long nineteenth century. What we have is less a single network and more a network of networks—overlapping systems of circulation and exchange. Google Maps offers a helpful parallel of my own literary historical remapping: we can freely zoom in and out to reorient our sense of space and spatial relations; each new project of departure or arrival generates a unique map, a specific understanding of how and why certain points connect. In the same way, we can refocus our narrative of the nineteenth century around different peoples, places, events, texts, and ideas—each node bringing into focus a new constellation of other nodes. Yet as these systems rise to the

24 Biopolitics encompasses the governmental techniques used to structure biological life. The premodern state would punish those who trespass against its laws, leaving the remaining law-abiding citizens on their own. The modern biopolitical state, explains Michel Foucault, inverts of this power structure, enacting a nomos of “make live and let die” (“Society” 239). 41 surface, other nodes and networks will slide out of focus. In the same way that we can never see a network in its totality, we will never fully grasp the entire warp and weft of the nineteenth century. Networks often value width over depth. (We might recall a line from Matthew Arnold’s “Resignation” (1849): “Not deep the Poet sees, but wide.”25) In theory, networks proliferate indefinitely; given one large enough, we could connect anything and everything. In practice, though, networks have very real boundaries. Think again of Google Maps: in theory, I could get transit directions from my home to almost anywhere else on earth. This exercise, however, quickly loses utility: yes, I could chart an actual driving route from Houston to Shanghai, but I would never actually make that drive for reasons of distance, cost, and time, among other barriers. The challenge of an oceanic, networked long nineteenth century, then, is less about keeping everything in our heads at once and more about embracing a flexible methodology for reading and writing literary history.

My project is both an experiment and a lesson in how to read the history of the ocean. Beyond the thematic order in which they actually appear, my main chapters fit together in several ways. (We might even say that they are thoroughly networked.) Most directly they take up the effects of imperial geopolitics, the physical and ideological violence rendered through the oceanic. Circum-Atlantic slavery and colonial coal provided the labor and the material for the empire that “rule[d] the waves.”26 The accurate charting of longitude at sea afforded British ships oceanic agency, enabling them

25 Matthew Arnold, “Resignation,” line 212, qtd. in McGann (150, original italics). 26 See Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (2004). Herman takes his title from the patriotic naval song “Rule, Britannia!” (ca. 1740). 42 to access colonies and capture new spaces. Global movement is also on the mind of merchant chanteymen, especially those whose own physical mobility is impaired— having, say, lost a leg or a hand while in the precarious service of the sea. In fact, I could cluster my chapters according to specific maritime service: my readings of Villette and

Persuasion take up histories of the Royal Navy, while my readings of “Youth,” Typhoon,

Treasure Island, and Dombey and Son deal with the British Merchant Marine.

All of my chapters also aid in my quest for a longer, wider nineteenth century. We can map my progression across the oceanic. My reading of literary and nonliterary maritime texts carries us (according to my chapter order) across the English Channel and the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, through the Suez Canal, into the Indian Ocean, around the

South China Seas and the southern Pacific, and back up the Thames, finally leaving us somewhere in the Mediterranean. My earliest main text is officially Persuasion (1817), accompanied by a reading of Cook’s second voyage (1772–75) from the earlier Age of

Discovery. My analysis of Villette (1853), though, looks back to the Haitian Revolution

(1791–1804), and my study of sea chanteys in Dombey and Son (1846–48) and Treasure

Island (1881–82) raises the same questions about shipboard discipline via orality as the mutiny on the Bounty (1789). As a counterpoint, my reading of thermodynamic entropy in Conrad’s turn-of-the-century coal stories focuses on the precarity of futures variously imperial and ecological. My Conrad chapter perhaps stands out from the other main chapters in that it deals with stories literally set at sea; except for Stevenson’s Treasure

Island, the rest of my main works under consideration are “landlocked.” My coda, however, makes clear that a literal nautical setting is no actual guarantee of oceanic historicity: one of the most well-known works of nineteenth-century British maritime 43 fiction, Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), I argue, actually has little to teach us about the lived conditions of the maritime world in the long nineteenth century. If anything, it is a marriage plot novel in the guise of sea fiction. In this way it recalls my reading of the delayed marriage plot of Persuasion, which I argue invokes maritime discourses of navigation—namely questions of relative duration and distance—to help a woman locate herself within the world.

I, too, am interested in Anne Elliot’s (and Austen’s, for that matter) position within an oceanic world. I see my remapping of literary history as a recovery project: I seek to place maritime history and maritime fiction—two fields traditionally dominated by men—into direct dialogue with a greater number of women authors and characters.

My whole project, in fact, aims to expand our literary historical archive. Quite literally, I work to recover a range of maritime genres and contexts, placing literary history into intimate contact with forms such as the logbook and the sea chantey; with networked circulations and exchanges such as the circum-Atlantic slave trade, the colonial coaling system, and the portside spread of venereal disease; and with events such as the quest for longitude. At the same time, I trace the oceanic as a (capital “A”) Archive, a site of impacted power relations and transformations.

I am admittedly tempted to make an ocean pun here—something, perhaps, about dredging history up from the deep. But I have learned much in the process of writing this project. As we move toward an oceanic nineteenth century, we have to focus not so much on symbolic depth but on literal surface—that is, not on the metaphoric connections that anyone can make but rather on the metonymic ties that register the overlapping social, political, economic, ecological, and literary networks of the British long nineteenth 44 century. The challenge, once again, is to think the literal and the figurative together. We readily conceive of the sea as a site of erasure: no monuments and, of course, no landmarks on its ever-changing surface. I think it is less, though, that the sea totally annihilates all traces and more that we lack a widespread knowledge, method, and vocabulary by which to engage with oceanic histories. Here I seek to address that gap.

- - - 45

CHAPTER 1

Metonymic Chains: Shipwrecks, Slavery, and Networks in Villette

“[G]reat pains were taken to hide chains with flowers.” —Villette (1853)

TOWARD A CIRCUM-ATLANTIC READING

At 8:00 p.m. on 14 April 1816, signal fires flared to life in the corn and cane fields along the southeastern plantations of Barbados, a West Indian colony of the British

Empire. The slave revolt had begun. Six days later, a baby girl was born thousands of miles away, in Yorkshire, England: Charlotte Brontë.

More than mere chronological coincidence is at play here. Multiple moments in

Brontë’s canon speak of a fundamental connection to circum-Atlantic slavery. The most obvious (or, at least, the most popular) example is Jane Eyre (1847), which, as many critics have shown, features explicit metaphors and imagery of slavery and the infamous

Creole madwoman in the attic. Overt metaphors of slavery also appear in Brontë’s The

Professor (1846), Shirley (1849), and her unfinished Emma (1853) (see Meyer 60–63).

We might also look to her juvenilia: Brontë’s Roe Head journal (1831–32) features a wild storm that, in Susan Meyer’s words, “evokes ... the vision of Africans in revolution against white British colonists” (61n2). Similarly, Brontë’s work in Poems by Currer,

Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) repeatedly employs the language of slavery (see Avery 267).

Beyond the canon, we can look to Brontë’s ties to slavery through her Yorkshire connections. Several critics chart how Brontë’s social milieu—family, neighbours, employers, local libraries, lecture tours, and so on—renders slavery an inescapable part of her life in northeastern England. Christopher Heywood argues that the Brontë sisters 46 had “access to the confidential history” of slavery through their neighbors in Yorkshire with plantation estates in Jamaica. Drawing examples from Jane Eyre and Wuthering

Heights (1847), he argues that the sisters possess a “skill in apportioning these hidden histories among their texts (198 and 185).

To this list I would like to add Villette (1853), Brontë’s final completed novel. I believe that Villette possesses an intrinsic relationship to the horrors of circum-Atlantic slavery. The “circum-Atlantic,” as Joseph Roach explains, is a historiographic mode that

“insist[s] on the centrality of the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the

Americas” (4). At first glance, the term hardly seems fitting for Villette, a novel traditionally read with an eye to autobiography rather than geopolitical history writ large.

On the surface of the text, we do find several short, scattered references to slavery, but these are mostly abstract metaphors—simple stylistic signals of inequality—rather than specific historical markers. Yet the surface of the text also affords historical depth—if we know how to read it. For a circum-Atlantic reading of Villette, we must look beyond metaphor and toward metonymy. In particular, we must revisit the novel’s often- overlooked scenes of shipwreck. Two brief yet violent shipwrecks punctuate Villette: the first, a figurative wreck, occurs during Lucy’s account of her journey from childhood to maturity; the second, a literal wreck, occurs offstage, bringing the novel to its infamously cryptic close. These two wrecks, I contend, metonymically connect the novel to specific

“diasporic and genocidal” circulations and exchanges at the hands of Britain that played out in the waters of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and beyond.

More precisely, in this chapter I argue that Villette invokes the horrors of slavery in the British colonies of the Caribbean through a series of historically specific 47 metonymic figurations—what I call metonymic chains; though these chains the novel engages the maritime networks of circum-Atlantic slavery. As I show here, Villette weaves together multiple transnational systems—systems variously literary, economic, political, and biographical; a circum-Atlantic reading of the novel thus moves us beyond the level of the individual and the frame of the nation. Villette’s two shipwrecks teach us not only how to understand Brontë’s representational poetics, but also how to salvage an oceanic history from a supposedly insular, autobiographical text. Villette, we shall see, enters into dialogue with the troubles of and with the British Empire, especially in regard to its enslaved men and women—even though the novel appears over four decades after the end of the slave trade and two decades after the abolition of slavery across the empire.

For out of the novel’s two wrecks emerge the turbulence and trauma of jettison, of slave revolt, and of the longue durée of colonial slavery.

At stake here, then, is the status and genre of the novel. By drawing out the themes and histories of slavery that underwrite Villette’s two wrecks and, in turn, the novel as a whole, I seek to reframe the text not only as maritime fiction, but also as a social problem novel on a global scale. For over a century and a half, we have read

Villette as a novel primarily concerned with psychological interiority. A good number of critics even read the novel as autobiography: Helene Moglen, for example, suggests that

Villette “gathers together the threads of all of the fictions and fragments of [Brontë’s] life” (229). In such readings, the shipwreck is a symptom—a return of the repressed—of some latent authorial trauma disrupting the Bildungsroman arc. Many suspicious autobiographical readers note how, in the years leading up to the novel’s publication,

Brontë experienced heartbreak and suffered multiple deaths in the family. Hence 48 shipwreck is nothing but a metaphor: this “landlocked” novel, after all, ostensibly has nothing to do with shipwreck, let alone maritime history and culture in general. From this viewpoint, though, we limit Villette to signifying only on the smallest of historical scales: that of the individual.

I, however, propose a different genre through which to read Villette: the shipwreck tale. When we read Villette alongside the history and iconology of shipwreck, we can locate the novel, its author, and its protagonist as networked actors within actual sociopolitical systems of the circum-Atlantic. Even though the narrative action of Villette takes place almost exclusively on land, the metonymic chains of shipwreck point us toward a wider oceanic world. One girl’s pain becomes part of something much larger.

For Villette’s wrecks occur, I contend, at and through the intersection of multiple transnational networks built on and around the oceanic: the literary marketplace, the slave trade, the capitalist economy, the abolitionist movement, and the Christian missionary system. Shipwreck, in short, challenges us to parse the representational politics and poetics of overlapping networks.

The time is ripe for reading Villette as a node within wider circum-Atlantic networks networks. Scholars, as observed by Heather Glen, have begun to “challenge the view that [Brontë’s] novels speak simply of ‘private experience.’” Brontë’s works are

“much more aware of and responsive to a multifarious and changing early nineteenth- century world” (Glen 1–2). Similarly, Alexandra Lewis notes a growing interest in trans-

Atlantic exchanges in studies of the Brontë sisters (201). Such attention to Brontë’s wider world echoes recent general efforts by scholars to truly grapple with the global dimensions of British literature in the long nineteenth century. In the words of Tim 49

Watson, “the relationship between national, imperial and Atlantic histories needs to be rethought” (157). Such rethinking, I believe, entails not just a turn to the global, but specifically a turn to the oceanic. Maritime networks surface the circulations and exchanges that will reconceptualize British nineteenth-century literary history.

Yet, to date, no one has offered an extended discussion of Villette within the context of the circum-Atlantic and the fraught history of slavery. Eleven years ago, Sue

Thomas argued that the signs of empire in Jane Eyre were “massively under-read” (4).

We might say the same now about Villette. We have whole articles on the Brontë family’s Yorkshire ties to slavery, whole chapters on the role of slavery in Jane Eyre, whole books on Brontë’s historical imagination and relationship with British imperialism, and yet virtually nothing on the importance of slavery to Villette. If scholars do mention

Villette and slavery in the same sentence, this lip service appears as a footnote to or a tangent in a postcolonial reading of Jane Eyre.1 Equally overlooked are Villette’s shipwreck scenes. Only a handful of readers have addressed at length the significance of the two wrecks. Most critics take a psychoanalytic rather than historicist tack, looking inward rather than outward (see, for instance, Sandner 71; Glen 254; and Swann 145–6).

Although shipwreck was part of the fabric of everyday life in the first half of the

1 Humphrey Gawthrop, for instance, makes a single mention of Villette in an article entirely devoted to Emily and Charlotte Brontë’s ties to slavery (see 283). Slavery becomes a bizarre blind spot in readings of Villette: Mandy Swann, for example, spends an entire article discussing the symbolism of the sea in Villette yet never once mentions the idea of slavery. To my knowledge, the longest reading of slavery in Villette is the opening to Susan Meyer’s chapter on “Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre”: across four paragraphs, Meyer traces how Lucy is equated to the colonial savage (see 60–3). Also relevant might be Aimillia Mohd Ramli’s analysis of Villette’s Orientalism, which links the girls’ school to the harem and the enslavement of women (see 120). 50 nineteenth century—hundreds of British ships sank every year, and shipwreck was a popular motif in abolitionist and political literature (see Huntress; Grocott; and Cant)— we have yet to see a satisfying historicist reading of Villette’s two wrecks.

To uncover the historicity of Villette, we must attend to form—in particular, the novel’s figurative language. Like other works in Brontë’s canon, Villette features several metaphors of enslavement, yet these comparisons feel abstract and overgeneralized, emptied of force and violence. Across the novel, explicit invocations of the “slave” and

“slavery” serve only as simple equations of inequality: Lucy is a “slave” to her authoritarian headmistress, Madame Beck; the young girls are “enslaved” by the regimentation of their boarding school; the infatuated Dr. John is initially a “slave” to

Ginevra; and Lucy is “enslaved” by Ginevra’s selfish machinations. Such slavery via metaphor lacks temporal and spatial specificity. The impact of circum-Atlantic slavery on

Villette appears only when we look beyond metaphor toward metonymy.

For metonymy produces historicity of a different kind than metaphor. A mode of figurative substitution, metonymy replaces the name of one thing with that of a closely culturally related thing or attribute. Such representation by surrogate allows us to make major jumps in scale: “the crown,” for example, a small, material object, can stand in for a whole range of monarchical power, duties, and actions. Yet, regardless of scale, metonymy always expresses a fundamental connection between the chosen terms. Unlike metaphor, which posits resemblance, metonymy speaks of contiguity (see Jakobson 41–

7). In so doing, metonymy outlines the warp and weft of a network—in particular, a distributed network of cultural association. Eschewing a single structural principle, a distributed network posits multiple points of influence. The same might be said of 51 metonymy, which moves us beyond authorial intent (and the 1:1 correspondence of metaphor) and toward larger cultural systems that shape textual meaning. Thus, rather than seeing certain characters in Villette as merely like or resembling slaves, we must instead view them as fundamentally connected to slavery. Brontë’s characters—as well as

Brontë herself—exist within a preponderance of circum-Atlantic maritime networks that link them to slavery.

So while many postcolonial readings of Jane Eyre have trained us to look for metaphors of slavery, Villette offers something far more complex: the metonymic chains of distributed networks. These series of semantic substitutions move us in scale from the individual to the global. It is less, though, that Brontë consciously forges Villette’s metonymic chains and more that she writes as part of a heterogeneous literary market. In this chapter, then, through the distributed networks of the circum-Atlantic, I want to move beyond a purely autobiographical reading of Villette, beyond Brontë as the sole force shaping the text. To do so, I engage in “strong” metonymic reading. “Weak” metonymic reading, Elaine Freedgood explains, remains constrained to the narrative frame; it makes meaning only within the symbolic system of the novel. Strong metonymic reading, by contrast, leads us beyond the boundaries of the text. Within this mode of surface reading, metonyms serve as indexes of larger historical, cultural, and political significance (Freedgood 14). Villette’s two wrecks, for instance, serve as the first link in metonymic chains that we can follow outward to larger, culturally contiguous systems.

From a traditional critical viewpoint, Villette might seem an odd choice with which to begin a project on maritime history and oceanic networks. Yet, as I strive to 52 show in this chapter, Villette models two core mechanics of the oceanic imaginary that shape my work in subsequent chapters. First, the literal and the figurative working hand- in-hand: I stay with the surface of the text, reading shipwreck as shipwreck and tracking how Villette figures history; in the process, I draw out the interpretive possibilities of the literal. Second, metonymic figuration that deconstructs the supposed binary division between land and sea: Villette builds its fictional world through recourse to the history, culture, and politics of the circum-Atlantic; in so doing, it teaches us about contiguous systems and the multiple connections afforded by the oceanic. Shipwreck renders Lucy,

Brontë, and Villette as parts of larger circum-Atlantic systems. Ultimately, then, Villette articulates the profound reach of the oceanic, helping us expand the boundaries of maritime fiction as a critical category. As I explain in my introduction to this project, following John Peck, a novel need not take place at sea to engage with maritime history and culture (see Peck 3). The oceanic imaginary readily permeates the historicity of

“landlocked” novels.

UNCERTAIN WATERS

I begin with the conclusion to Villette: the literal shipwreck that swallows up M.

Paul Emanuel. This scene teaches us how to understand the novel’s interplay of history and form. Specifically, the conclusion renders historicity through the sentence-level form of metonymy; this figuration, in turn, offers us a poetics of scale that moves us from individual figures to larger sociopolitical forms—namely the networks of circum-

Atlantic.

By raising questions about the fate of M. Paul, the concluding wreck also raises larger questions about the fate of the West Indies. Near the end of the novel, M. Paul 53 departs for Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, to oversee a large estate—one that undoubtedly involves slave labor. Three years later, sailing from the West Indies back to Europe, he encounters a week-long storm that rages until “the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks”

(495). Here the novel ends, leaving M. Paul’s fate up to the reader. Traditionally, critics turn to Brontë’s biography to explain the open-ended conclusion: although Brontë originally intended M. Paul to perish at sea, she compromised when her father desired a happier ending; thus, as Brontë’s most famous biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, puts it,

Brontë ultimately “veil[ed]” M. Paul’s fate in “oracular words” (Life 2:219). We can look beyond biography, however, and cast the novel’s ambiguous end as part of a longer, wider history of the West Indies and an oceanic nineteenth century. Three elements—the storm, the shipwrecks, and M. Paul himself—metonymically point to the political uncertainty that runs through a post-1833 circum-Atlantic world.

Awaiting M. Paul’s return from Guadeloupe, Lucy turns her gaze westward. But there she spies a coming storm of terrible proportions:

The skies hang full and dark—a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings—glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch that sail! Oh! guard it! (495).

The impending trans-Atlantic tempest speaks of social and political turmoil. Like Lucy, who “know[s] some signs of the sky,” we immediately recognize ill omens. The natural world appears wholly unnatural. The sky is at once dark and burning. Clouds twist themselves into “strange forms.” Out of the heavens burst images of battle: “wild” and

“bloody,” the skies “shame Victory,” who proudly boasts of her bloodshed. “Victory” 54 here may be an allegorical figure, but the name may also reference the HMS Victory, the flagship of Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar

(1805), a decisive engagement that inaugurated Britain’s nineteenth-century rule of the waves and helped clinch Britain’s power as an oceanic empire. Indeed, the Brontë family as a whole seems to have been fascinated with Nelson.2 Be it allegory or allusion,

“Victory” here prompts questions of sovereignty and geopolitical control. The mornings shine “glorious, royal, purple,” like a “monarch in his state.” This description seems peaceable enough—“glorious” even recalls the bloodless Glorious Revolution (1688).

Remember, though, that this sunrise presages a coming storm, implying that monarchies precede revolution. Fittingly, a “rack sails from the west,” suggesting the violence and pain of slave revolt steadily rolling across the Atlantic toward Europe.

The ominous squall is a metonym, part of a larger literary network that figures slave rebellion as a coming storm. William Wilberforce, arguing in his Letter on the

Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807), implores the British government to “avert[] the gathering storm” (324). Similarly, Thomas Fowell Buxton writes of the Jamaica

Rebellion (1832–33), “Then indeed the storm seemed beginning, then the first whispers of that whirlwind seemed beginning which was to sweep off the white population” (qtd. in Matthews 168). Thomas notes similar meteorological omens in Jane Eyre: Edward

2 Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle suggests that Charlotte’s father may have changed their surname from “Prunty” to “Brontë” “in admiration of Lord Nelson, created Duke of Bronte [sic] by the King of Naples” (Martineau 154n1). Similarly, Simon Avery cites an 1851 letter from Brontë to Gaskell wherein Brontë notes her admiration for Trafalgar Square and the monument to Nelson (267). We might also recall the ending to Jane Eyre, wherein Edward Rochester loses a hand and and eye—a corporeal echo of Nelson, who lost his right arm and his sight in his right eye. 55

Rochester describes the enslaved as “black clouds,” and on his journey to England from the West Indies, he remarks that “the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure” (qtd. in Thomas 13).

Villette’s concluding wreck points us toward larger literary and political networks.

The “wild south-west storm” destroys everything in its wake:

That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their full sustenance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder—the tremor of whose plumes was storm (495).

Seven days of nautical carnage—an inverse of Genesis, an unmaking of the world—rock the Atlantic. A “destroying angel of tempest” wields storm and thunder, furnishing the hungry deep with broken barks. The Biblical overtones recall a key trope of abolitionist literature and art: storms wrecking slave ships. A range of works deploy storms as meteorological manifestations of God’s judgment, punishments for the unnatural practice of slavery. Discussing the religious iconology of shipwreck, Leo Costello notes how storms in abolitionist works render the “Christian God’s condemnation of the slave captain” (212). John McCoubrey lists several literary and visual works that feature such abolitionist storms.3

3 Literary works include “Summer” (from The Seasons) by James Thomson (1727); “The Negro’s Complaint” by William Cowper (1792); The Dying Negro, A Poem by Thomas Day (1775); “Song on the Wreck of a Slave Ship” by a “Marius” (1806); Abolition of the African Slave Trade by James Montgomery (1814); and “The Slave Ship” in The New Monthly Magazine (1831). Visual works include The Negro Revenged by Henry Fuseli (1806–07); The Raft of the ‘Medusa’ by Théodore Géricault (1819); and The Deluge (ca. 1805) and The Slave Ship (1840) by J. M. W. Turner, among others (see McCoubrey 312 and 320). 56

The image of the “Atlantic ... strewn with wrecks” also evokes the iconology of the “ship of state,” a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century trope for a nation’s political, social, and economic well-being (see Landow 109 and 118). Authors on both sides of the Atlantic deploy the ship of state as a figure for the governments of Britain,

France, the United States, or the West Indian colonies (often Jamaica). In The French

Revolution (1837), for example, Thomas Carlyle proclaims, “your National Assembly, like a ship water-logged, helmless, lies tumbling ... and waits where the waves of chance may please to strand it” (2:391). Carlyle’s European ship of state is a simile, a specific type of metaphor: the French National Assembly resembles a ship without someone at the helm. Outside of a European context, however, the ship of state trope often takes on a more metonymic resonance, as ships were a fundamental part of hegemonic colonial systems—namely empire and the slave trade. An 1849 Fraser’s Magazine (a periodical to which the Brontë family subscribed), for instance, laments that Whig policies threaten to “make shipwreck” of sugar-producing British colonies (“Current” 360). The

“shipwreck” metonymically recalls the actual wrecks and upheavals of Middle Passage, the horrible shipbound journey that inaugurated Africans into slavery on those sugar- producing British colonies. Another Fraser’s Magazine article offers a similar metonymic omen: “thus should the Ship of State be seen sailing over the waters of time gone by: there is always a burning wake in her track, indicating her course and her perils”

(“Past” 3). In the British West Indies, the“burning wake” of the colonial “Ship of State” and its “course” of exploitation is slave revolt.

In the same vein, Villette’s concluding wreck is a metonym for the precarious political and economic position of the West Indies after the Slavery Abolition Act of 57

1833. The wreck stands in for the failing economy and growing racial tension. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the closure of the British slave trade, the West Indian plantation system began to collapse. Between 1805-50, the price of sugar fell seventy- five percent (see Brendon 607; and Hall, Civilising 202–3). Exacerbating this recession, the Sugar Duties Act of 1846 raised the import fees for sugar from the British colonies.

The loss of both cheap slave labor and preferential tariff protection meant that plantation owners in the West Indies could not compete with the sugar plantations in Cuba and

Brazil, which still used slave labor. Destruction was on the horizon: the sinking West

Indian economy risked sinking the economy of the entire British Empire. An 1832 article from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (another periodical to which the Brontë family subscribed) notes that the “government of the West India colonies, embracing so many wealthy and important islands, consuming L.12,000,000 worth of British manufactures, containing L.130,000,000 of British capital, employing 250,000 tons of British shipping, is silently slipping from our hands” (“West India” 412).4 Accordingly, British colonial masters drove slaves harder, hoping to make up for the loss. Such cruelty and exploitation sparked three crucial slave revolts: Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in

1832–33 (see Craton 259 and 267).

Slave revolt also appears through the figure of M. Paul. In the same way that the concluding wreck (via the ship of state trope) renders the political and economic precarity of the West Indies, M. Paul—the man whose fate hangs in the balance during the final scene—bears an intimate connection to the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). On the one

4 The article also notes that the “L.12,000,000 worth of British manufactures” accounts for nearly a third of all of Britain’s exports (414). 58 hand, Villette often describes the fiery schoolteacher as Napoleonic: Lucy states that “he had points of resemblance to Napoleon Bonaparte,” and she claims that “in a love of power, in an eager grasp after supremacy, M. Emanuel was like Bonaparte” (348–9).5 At the same time, though, Villette repeatedly racializes M. Paul, equating him with the colonized—specifically, with the black slave—rather than the colonizer. The very first description of the schoolmaster declares him a “dark and spare man,” imagery that arguably recalls underfed slaves (66). Later, Lucy portrays M. Paul as a “dark little man,” and she notes the “dark little Professor’s unlovely visage” (129 and 221). In sum, we might see M. Paul as a black Napoleon, an echo of Toussaint Louverture, the former slave nicknamed the “Napoléon Noir.”6 During the first stages of the Haitian Revolution,

Louverture played a decisive role in both combat and negotiations, helping to win (at least for a time) freedom and citizenship for the slaves of Saint-Domingue. Villette also likens M. Paul to a “black and sallow tiger” (325). The imagery recalls Louverture’s principal lieutenant, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the slave nicknamed the “tiger-man”

(l’homme tigre) or “the tiger with a human face” (le tigre à figure humaine) who became the first ruler of an independent Haiti (see Jenson n. pag.). If we read these connections as metaphors, then we see M. Paul as a fierce, temperamental leader—nothing particularly new. But if we read these connections as metonyms, then we see M. Paul as fundamentally tied to circum-Atlantic networks of empire and revolution.

5 M. Paul also pulls on Lucy’s ear and advises her to come along to the picnic in the countryside; Lucy calls this ear-pulling a “Napoleonic compliment” (378). In the endnotes to the 2008 Oxford edition of Villette, Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten note that Bonaparte sometimes showed affection for subordinates by pulling their ears or tapping their cheeks (530n378). 6 Many thanks to Joe Carson for this reference. 59

The three metonyms—the storm, the shipwreck, and M. Paul—form a successive chain of figurative substitutions that moves us in scale from the individual to the oceanic.

What was once a scene about the fate of one man becomes a scene about the fate of the

West Indies and the circum-Atlantic world. Taking into account a longer, wider history, we should note that Villette occupies a key chronological position: set during the late

1830s and early 1840s, the novel faces the political, economic, and moral questions raised by the earlier events in Saint-Domingue (1791–1804), Barbados (1816), Demerara

(1823), and Jamaica (1832–33).

Villette’s open-ended conclusion thus speaks of both narrative and political uncertainty: we do not know what comes next. Indeed, the concluding shipwreck entails a loss of faith and salvation. Swallowed up by the destructive, seven-day storm is M. Paul, the man surnamed “Emanuel”—Hebrew for “God is with us.”7 Faced with the precarity of the future, Villette leaves things up to the reader. The novel ends with a request:

Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return (496).

We must “pause at once” and think. The novel cannot prophesy the outcome of the trans-

Atlantic tempest. Those who refuse to see the stormy wider world around them can

“conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror.” In place of “peril” and

“dread,” a hopeful reader could imagine a “rapture of rescue,” “wondrous reprieve,” and

“fruition of return”—a kind of Second Coming of an Emanuel figure. But M. Paul never

7 See Matthew 1:23 (AV): “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emanuel, which being interpreted is, God is with us.” 60

(re)appears. Thus to “leave sunny imaginations hope” would be to impose a linear notion of progress onto a world characterized by circulation and repetition. The social, political, and economic problems of a pre-1833 world persist—much like how the villains live on at the end of Villette: “Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas;

Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth year before she died” (496). British emancipation had not magically swept away the troubles of the past. And beyond Britain, the institution of slavery still held sway in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil.

Rather than solving these problems, Villette asks the reader to consider the effects of overlapping distributed networks. The traces of circum-Atlantic violence appear in even the most unassuming of texts—even a novel such as Villette, which initially appears to have no intrinsic relation to slavery. Yet we far too readily impose limits upon a network. The oceanic imaginary challenges us to think about sprawl and to consider how webs of transnational influence might not explicitly flag their presence. Consciousness is not a prerequisite to connectivity; one can be an actor in a distributed network without knowing it. Hence we must prevent “sunny imaginations” from cutting ties to the various systems that shape the circum-Atlantic world. The concluding shipwreck thus serves to

“[t]rouble” the “quiet, kind heart[s]” that would be content with isolation. The wreck forges a bond with the economic history and political iconology of the circum-Atlantic, in turn linking the novel to colonial slavery. These metonymic chains reveal Villette’s oceanic imaginary, showing us how the novel speaks of a longer, wider history.

FOLLOWING THE CHAINS

Equipped with this new understanding of Villette’s conclusion, we can return to the novel’s first shipwreck—a scene that, through metonymic chains, renders both 61 oceanic scale and circum-Atlantic historicity. This first wreck appears during Lucy’s narrative of her adolescence, symbolizing an unnamed yet foundational tragedy that shapes her identity. Although a vivid account of rough sailing and storms at sea, this figurative wreck occurs while Lucy stands on solid ground in England—no actual seas or ships are involved. Nevertheless, I believe that this shipwreck metonymically evokes the circum-Atlantic slave trade—in particular, the practice of jettison—and West Indian missionary work.

As Lucy describes the period between her childhood and her present day, she initially encourages the reader to picture her “as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass” (35). All may seem well, but her words echo the fateful homecoming of the title character in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the

Ancient Mariner (1798), when “the harbour-bay was clear as glass” (30). Moreover, as

Debbie Lee explains, critics often read the Ancient Mariner in light of Coleridge’s

“material concerns with ... colonialism and the slave trade” (48).8 Lucy’s allusion to

Coleridge thus suggests a deeper moral conflict within her story, a burden that hangs around her neck like the infamous albatross. Her opening invocation forges a metonymic chain that we might follow, moving from individual trauma to a larger moral debate

8 Conflicting accounts suggest that Coleridge may have been two-faced about slavery and abolition. When he wrote the Ancient Mariner in 1798, he was an active opponent of the slave trade; in the words of Chine Sonoi, Coleridge “condemned the moral degradation of slave traffickers” and “branded as unpardonable the social idleness and political negligence” of Britain (27). Later, though, he sank into conservatism: Barbara Taylor Paul-Emile explains that after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 Coleridge “expressed shock at the rashness of the action” (59). For a counterargument to Paul-Emile, as well as additional discussion of Coleridge’s relationship to slavery, see Patrick J. Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (76). 62 about the persistence of slavery in a post-1833 circum-Atlantic world.

Immediately after Lucy’s allusion to the Ancient Mariner, what was once

“halcyon weather” breaks into a “heavy tempest”:

[I]t cannot be concealed that ... I must have somehow fallen over-board, or that there must have been wreck at last ... To this hour, when I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness [sic] of briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs ... [T]here was a storm, and that not of one hour nor one day. For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished (35).

Lucy suffers through an onslaught that lasts “not ... one hour nor one day.” Beset by the storm, her “ship was lost, [and] the crew perished.” This fatal “heavy tempest” recalls a key trope (mentioned above) from abolitionist literature and art: slavers caught up in a deadly storm, a divine retribution for an immoral practice. Yet the references to slavery run deeper here. The narration evokes the specific practice of jettison and, in turn, the longue durée of slavery. This passage, I believe, turns not on metaphor but on metonymy.

Lucy is not like a slave but rather part of the larger system of circum-Atlantic slavery; she is caught up within the same oceanic networks that shape her world and that of the West

Indian slave. Lucy herself later cries out, “I see a huge mass of my fellow-creatures in no better circumstances. I see that a great many men, and more women, hold their span of life on conditions of denial and privation” (361).

Reading the first shipwreck as a scene of jettison frames it as part of larger commercial and legal systems. Lucy finds that she “must have somehow fallen overboard.” She herself cannot remember how it happened, as if she was subject to forces beyond her control. She suffers a “nightmare” of the “rush and saltness of briny waves in 63

[her] throat, and their icy pressure on [her] lungs.” Her words recall the Zong incident of

1781 and, by extension, the network of circum-Atlantic capitalism. Faced with a shortage of water, the crew of the Zong threw overboard 130 to 140 slaves. The captain later attempted to collect insurance in Jamaica for his “lost” cargo; legally, he could collect on slaves “lost at sea” but not those who died aboard.9 Ian Baucom argues that the Zong case haunts instances of bodies thrown overboard in the nineteenth century: although the ship itself may not appear by name, its legacy nevertheless informs narratives of helpless drownings at sea (see 62–4 and 69).

We must avoid, of course, conflating Lucy’s experience with the actual jettison of black men and women. Without question, the two events are not isomorphic; Lucy neither is nor becomes a black slave. (Lest we forget, her surname is “Snowe,” which suggests an indelible, intrinsic whiteness.) Thinking of Lucy as a jettisoned slave produces only a distasteful metaphor, but thinking of Lucy as intimately connected to the fate of the suffering, exploited black men and women brings into focus the ebbs and flows of a circum-Atlantic economic network. I invoke the Zong, therefore, because jettison is an integral link in the metonymic chain. Lucy’s figurative wreck stands in for the Zong incident, wherein black bodies suffered for white economic interests. This, in turn, points us to the sinking West Indian economy and the subsequent slave revolts in

Barbados, Demerara, and Jamaica. In sum, jettison ties Villette to a long history of white men profiting at the cost of black bodies.

Villette’s first shipwreck, much like its conclusion, thus speaks of prolonged

9 When the insurers refused to pay, the case was taken to court. In the subsequent decision, the jettison of slaves was criminalized, and the court held that “slaves must henceforth be treated not as inanimate cargo but as human beings” (McCoubrey 321). 64 violence. The jettison imagery recalls not only the Zong incident but also the problematic practices of the West Africa squadron. From 1808–70, Britain awarded Royal Navy captains prize money for the capture of slave ships—but only those ships captured on the open ocean. Hence many captains allowed slavers to leave the coast before pursuit, and, when the chase was underway, the slavers would jettison their human cargo in order to lighten the load. As such, many critics implicated the Royal Navy—and, by extension,

Britain itself—in continued violence toward black men and women. The English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, for instance, decried the role of the Royal Navy in the death of slaves by jettison. He notes that of the 100,000 slaves annually transported to

Cuba and Brazil, “as many perish by a miserable death in escaping from the cruisers as reach their destination” (4).

To render this longue durée of circum-Atlantic violence, Villette reaches outward further still, into the realm of the spiritual. We have seen how the novel’s conclusion, which swallows up the man surnamed Emanuel, raises questions of faith. Similarly,

Villette as a whole makes much narrative fodder from conflicts around religion and conversion. We should not be surprised, then, that the language of Lucy’s wreck echoes that of another shipwrecked Paul—St. Paul the Apostle. Compare the penultimate lines of

Lucy’s narration with the account of St. Paul’s wreck off the coast of Malta:

[Lucy’s shipwreck:] For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away (35).

[St. Paul’s shipwreck:] [W]e cast out with our own hands the tackling of the ship. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was taken away 65

(Acts 27:19–20 [AV]).10

Although Lucy resembles St. Paul in some respects—both are shipwrecked, and both face issues of faith and conversion—at issue here is not metaphor but metonymy. Through St.

Paul Lucy is connected not only to missionary work but also to slavery. For despite contemporary Evangelical and Low Church movements to end slavery, religion was not always on the side of abolition. The apostle, I believe, stands in for the larger network of

Christianity that shaped the West Indies; this, in turn, links Lucy to the longue durée of circum-Atlantic slavery.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the West Indies was a crucial site for missionary work and conversion. The historian Michael Craton estimates that by 1834, there were around 250 missionaries from Britain’s various Christian denominations working across the West Indies: in addition to 100 Anglican ministers, Craton identifies sixty-three Moravians, fifty-eight Methodists, seventeen Baptists, and around a dozen other nonconformist missionaries (see 247). Hundreds of thousands of slaves converted to Christianity. Yet, as Catherine Hall explains, British missionaries to the West Indies occupied a highly ambivalent position: they were white yet allies of the slaves and free blacks; at the same time, they stood apart from both the white plantation owners and the other Englishmen back home (White 218). Such ambivalence characterized the very goal

10 Both passages also recall the shipwreck scene from George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24), namely the throwing overboard of ballast and the absence of natural light: “At half-past eight o’clock, booms, hencoops, spars / And all things … had been cast loose … / For yet [the sailors] strove, although of no great use: / There was no light in heaven but a few stars” (canto II, stanza [51], lines 1–5). We also see the specters of the circum-Atlantic later in the poem, when Don Juan is captured and then sold at a slave market. 66 of West Indian missionary work. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century missionary societies, in the words of Thomas, taught their members “to address the spiritual and not the civil or temporal condition of the enslaved” (14; see also Craton

246). By “temporal condition of the enslaved,” Thomas refers to the current status of the slaves under the laws of a specific nation at a specific time—as opposed to their “spiritual condition,” which derives from their adherence to the universal laws of the Christian

God. Fearing that counteracting “temporal” laws would incite revolution, missionaries would save the slaves’ souls but not their bodies.

Accordingly, missionary societies invoked figures such as St. Paul, who preached to Roman slaves but did not advocate slave rebellion. In a four-part series titled “The

West Indian Controversy” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, John Gibson Lockhart uses the example of St. Paul to argue that slavery cannot be eradicated in one fell swoop; abolition must be a slow, generations-long process without rebellion (688). Lockhart cites

St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians 6:5: “SLAVES, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, even as unto Christ” (688, original italics). Lockhart’s work suggests that to invoke St. Paul was to invoke a specific temporal understanding of West Indian slavery—that, paradoxically, the only way out of slavery is continued slavery. Slaves must be obedient to their masters and labor in order to be saved.

Thus, for Villette, St. Paul metonymically evokes the longue durée of slavery, the idea that the structures of slavery can, must, and will persist. Several periodicals of the period echo this troubling sentiment. In “The West India Question” in Blackwood’s describes a slave rebellion wherein the slaves rose to freedom too quickly; the solution, 67 says the author, is prolonged servitude: to save black men, women, and children from

“the most frightful vices” and racial “extermination,” England “must admit them, by slow degrees, and imperceptible gradations, to the advantages and the destitution of freedom”

(422). The article’s emphasis on “slow degrees” and “imperceptible gradations” raises further questions about the actual progress—if any—made after 1833. Other authors justified such stasis with the fear that slaves were being emancipated into something worse—the capitalist marketplace. See, for example, Carlyle’s 1849 “Occasional

Discourse” in Fraser’s Magazine, which calls for the reinstitution of slavery as a counter to capitalist exchange. Slavery lives on through such hateful thinking.

Like the storm of Lucy’s figurative wreck, this inhumane institution will not subside in “one hour []or one day.” The economic, political, spiritual, and literary networks inaugurated by circum-Atlantic slavery endure for “many days and nights.”

This long life derives in part from the transnational reach of slavery, an institution that can bring geographically distant regions into intimate contact. After 1833, for example, many British abolitionist societies turned their attention toward the United States and the evils of American chattel slavery. Accordingly, Villette’s first shipwreck teaches the reader to think on an oceanic scale, to follow a chain of successive references that move us from the part to the whole, from individual figures (such as Lucy or St. Paul) to transnational systems (such as Christianity and the circum-Atlantic slave trade). In

Lucy’s figurative shipwreck, one girl’s pain is part of something much larger.

DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS

Through metonymic chains, then, we might argue for Villette as a fundamentally political and historical novel. Yet Brontë would be the first to tell us that her novel has 68 nothing to do with the issues of her day. As she explains to her publisher,

You will see that ‘Villette’ touches on no matter of public interest. I cannot write books handling the topics of the day—it is of no use trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral—Nor can I take up a philanthropic scheme though I honor philanthropy—And voluntarily and sincerely [I] veil my face before such a mighty subject as that handled in Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s work—‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ ... To manage these great matters rightly they must be long and practically studied—their bearings known intimately and their evils felt genuinely—they must not be taken up as a business-matter and a trading-speculation (Brontë to George Smith 150).

History, Brontë suggests, must not be approached insincerely. The “evils” of the past and present “must not be taken up as a business-matter and a trading-speculation.” For

Brontë, the representation of contemporary issues comes dangerously close to exploitation. To depict an institution such as slavery runs the risk of myopia, of reenacting, mishandling, or exacerbating the loss. To speak of violence and suffering requires a longer, wider perspective—one that the author may not have in her or his given moment. Hence Brontë denies the political and historical potential of Villette. According to her definition, her novel can never perform the same work as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for how could Villette handle the “mighty subject” of slavery, an issue that must be “long and practically studied—[its] bearings known intimately and

[its] evils felt genuinely”?

The answer, I believe, is through metonymy, which produces historicity of a different kind than metaphor. If metaphor entails a single point of correspondence (i.e., this resembles that), then metonymy entails a constellation (i.e., this is fundamentally linked to all of those). To recognize such historically specific constellations of meaning, we must engage in the strong metonymic reading proposed by Freedgood. Within this mode of reading, metonyms serve as indexes of larger historical, cultural, and political 69 significance, as nodes within larger systems of meaning. Yet some readers might shy away from the sprawl and scope of strong metonymic chains. Far too often, explains

Freedgood, we revert to weak metonymic reading because we fear the “dizzying potential” of metonymy, the radical open-endedness of the device. (The same might be said of the sociopolitical form traced by metonymy, the network.) Yet strong metonymic reading does not entail making connections ad infinitum; this is not interpretation run wild. On the contrary, metonymy possess the “subversive ability to recuperate historical links that are anything but random” (Freedgood 16). (In the same way, networks follow identifiable structural principles such as homophily and friction.11) When read alongside historical context, metonyms can expose hidden or forgotten layers of significance within a novel. Metonymy thus enables us to disrupt traditional understandings of a text.

Searching for metaphors leads only to a game of spot-the-reference: we can uncover single resemblances, but we lack a sense of how everything connects. Instead, we must attend to metonymy, which, through contiguity, posits a network of influence.

Here I build upon the work of Julia Sun-Joo Lee in her insightful American Slave

Narrative and the Victorian Novel (2010). Lee traces the influence of American slave narratives on certain Victorian novelists during the “interabolition period” (1833–63), between the Slavery Abolition Act in Britain and the Emancipation Proclamation in the

United States. Crucially, Lee shifts our gaze from “metaphoric appropriation” to

“metonymic alliance,” laying out a model of trans-Atlantic influence through contiguity

11 On homophily, the tendency for networked actors with like characteristics to form mutual relations, see Kadushin (9). On the friction, see Tsing, as well as my second chapter; on the limits of mobility within networks, see Aguirre, as well as my fourth chapter. 70

(i.e., metonymy) rather than resemblance (i.e., metaphor) (9–10 and 16). In so doing, she establishes certain canonical authors as nodes within the material and imaginative networks through which the slave narrative circulated.

I depart from Lee, though, on the question of authorial intent. Lee’s work suggests that Victorian novelists consciously integrated the generic features of American slave narratives into their writing. This reliance on authorial intent mirrors the dominant trend in reading Villette. Many a critic turns toward Brontë’s biography, tracing the life of the author through that of her protagonist. Admittedly, several tempting parallels exist between Brontë and Lucy, both young, white, English women of the early to mid- nineteenth century. Like her protagonist, Brontë leaves England for the Continent, teaches English at a European boarding school, and falls in love with (but never marries) a spirited, temperamental instructor. In Dinah Birch’s words, Brontë’s “months as a pupil and then teacher at the Pensionnat Heger turned out to be both traumatic and transformative” (64–5). Such “trauma[s]” and “transformati[ons]” fuel symptomatic readings of Villette, the hermeneutics of suspicion that posit the two shipwrecks as psychological traumas. Yet to read Villette as autobiography shackles us to a single chain of causation: everything must come back to Brontë. Meyer writes that it is “not difficult to demonstrate that Brontë was actively engaged, both intellectually and imaginatively, with issues of racial conflict and imperialist history” (29). While I agree that Brontë’s oeuvre evokes problems of race and empire, I’m less certain about Brontë’s agency. Was she consciously crafting a critique of slavery? Or was she simply an actor unknowingly caught within overlapping literary, political, economic, religious, and historical networks? The metonymic chains of Villette suggest the latter. Metonymy forges links to 71 larger circum-Atlantic networks—transnational and oceanic movements that we cannot articulate as a whole. Networks refuse linear causality. What some see as Brontë’s abolitionist sentiments might actually be the traces of a larger system of abolitionist literature.

I thus propose the form of the distributed network as a means to understand

Villette. Unlike a centralized network, wherein all paths must pass through a single, central node, a distributed network features multiple paths of connection. A centralized network is a wagon wheel, organized around a hub, whereas a distributed network is a public transit system, which affords multiple paths of travel between points without passing through a central station. We must stop reading Villette as a centralized network organized around Brontë. On the contrary, Villette’s metonymic chains suggest an oceanic distributed network, wherein the novel can invoke other nodes (missionary work, slave revolt, the ship of state, the Haitian Revolution, jettison, etc.) and other actors

(Coleridge, Wilberforce, Louverture, Dessalines, St. Paul, Stowe, etc.) without the author’s conscious intent.

Recognizing this dispersal of influence enables us to view Villette not in autobiographical isolation but rather as part of a sprawling, dynamic literary marketplace.

Villette shares common ground with the Gothic novel—in particular, the theme of domestic incarceration. The high, lonely walls of the girls’ boarding school close in on

Lucy, isolating and trapping her; the pensionnat echoes the titular house-prisons of Ann

Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817).

Confined to the attic, poor Lucy fears that she is haunted by a disgraced nun who was buried alive. Villette also follows the narrative patterns of spiritual autobiography. Lucy 72 faces pressure to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism from M. Paul and Père Silas

(a Jesuit priest), among others. As such, she often meditates on her faith and religion, pouring her inner doubts and desires into the narrative. Tim Dolin, in fact, dubs Villette a

“confession” in the manner of other mid-nineteenth-century experiments in confessional writing: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), William Wordsworth’s

Prelude (1798, published 1850), and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1833–49)

(Dolin xvi). With its questions of faith in a foreign land, Villette also evokes the missionary tale, a genre that, in addition to justifying the civilizing mission, often includes plots of travel and adventure. Several missionary tales, in fact, dramatize “perils in the sea” and “shipwreck under peculiar circumstances” (Moister 62). It is less, though, that Brontë consciously orchestrates Villette’s ties to these various genres, and more that she writes as part of a heterogeneous literary market. The texts and genres that precede and surround Villette act as nodes in a larger distributed network, pushing and pulling on the narrative shape of the novel.

Take, for example, the shipwreck tale, an immensely popular secular genre unto itself. Maritime historians emphasize the commonplace nature of shipwreck in the nineteenth century. As George P. Landow explains, shipwreck “occurred frequently enough during [the long nineteenth century] that many artistic and literary figures not only could have encountered them in newspaper accounts and other published shipwreck narratives but also could have been acquainted with them more intimately” (42). William

Wordsworth, for example, penned several poems as a cathartic response to the 1805 wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny, which took the life of his brother, Captain John

Wordsworth (see Jacobus 94–113). In brief, shipwreck figures into many literary and 73 visual works from the period.12 We should not be surprised, then, that Villette takes up the charged trope of shipwreck, inheriting all of its historical and symbolic cargo. Much like the shipwreck tale, Villette raises questions about shared humanity, traumatic survival, and untimely death. In fact, the introduction to an 1846 shipwreck anthology—

James Lindridge’s Tales of Shipwrecks and Adventures at Sea (1846)—provides a fitting gloss for a circum-Atlantic reading of Villette:

[The sailor], whose whole life has been marked with strange vicissitudes, chequered with innumerable privations and perils, perishes at last ... by Shipwreck or Famine. No memory of him cherished, who deserves to be extolled the most. We have used our endeavours to remedy this defect, by gathering together the lives ... of those brave men, to whom England is indebted for all its wealth and glory. And, surely, the tale of those who lay slumbering in the depth of the sea, will awaken the thought of the uncertainty of human life (iii).

Although Lindridge describes an ill-fated sailor, his words could also describe a slave—a figure “whose whole life has been marked with strange vicissitudes” and laden with

“innumerable privations and perils.” Like the shipwrecked sailor, the jettisoned slave lies

“slumbering in the depth of the sea”; and like the sailor, the slave is “to whom England is indebted for all its wealth and glory.” Yet both the shipwrecked sailor and the West

Indian slave lie forgotten: “No memory of him cherished, who deserved to be extolled the

12 For literature, besides the obvious example of Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, we might look to The Shipwreck (1762) by William Falconer; “The Witch of Atlas” (1820, published 1824) by Percy Bysshe Shelley (who himself died at sea, when his sailboat capsized during a storm in the Mediterranean); and Don Juan (1819) by Byron (which alludes to a series of actual wrecks; see Venning 308). For visual art, we might look to Dismasted Brig (ca. 1823) by John Sell Cotsman; The Abandoned (1856) by Clarkson Stanfield; Shipwreck (1793) by George Morland; Shipwreck (1843) and Shipwreck Against a Setting Sun (ca. 1850) by Francis Danby; as well as Shipwreck (1805) and Wreck of a Transport Ship (ca. 1810) by Turner. 74 most.” Hence both Lindridge’s Tales and Shipwrecks and Brontë’s Villette seek to

“gather[] together ... lives,” to link through shipwreck the lives of the living (such as

Lucy) with those of the dead. Fictional or otherwise, shipwreck foregrounds contingency and the “uncertainty of human life”—a description not unlike Bruno Latour’s definition of the “actor,” the moving “target” who/that does not act him-/her-/itself but is instead acted upon by an array of networked forces (46). The shipwreck tale, in brief, requires us to think in terms of the distributed network.

In the same vein, we should not be surprised to see Villette metonymically evoking slavery, an immensely popular literary “topic[] of the day.” As Julia Sun-Joo Lee explains, slave narratives “enjoyed bestseller status on both sides of the Atlantic,” and former slaves spoke on lecture tours around Britain (10; see also 11–5). The first British edition of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—released at the same time that Brontë was slowly penning Villette—sold 165,000 copies during its first year of circulation (see Fisch 33).

Wilberforce’s letter (quoted above) was directed to the citizens of Yorkshire. Wilberforce himself also sponsored Brontë’s father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, through St. John’s

College at Cambridge (see Gawthrop 282). The Brontë family subscribed to circulating periodicals, such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Fraser’s Magazine, that raised questions of slavery and the slave trade through articles such as Lockhart’s “West

Indian Controversy.” Blackwood’s, in fact, often figured slave rebellion as an

“approaching storm” (see Thomas 13). Moreover, Brontë possessed a knowledge of the work of J. M. W. Turner, who famously takes up the circum-Atlantic in his Slave Ship,

Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840). On her visit to London in

1849, she viewed a “beautiful exhibition of Turner’s paintings.” Back in Yorkshire, 75

Brontë saw “one or two private collections of Turner’s best water-colour drawings,” which, she says, “were indeed a treat” (Brontë to Rev. Patrick Brontë, 150–1). In addition, Brontë had read John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1834–60), which champions the genius of Turner. In a letter to W. S. Williams, Brontë asks, “[w]ho can read these glowing descriptions of Turner’s works without longing to see them?” One of these

“glowing descriptions” in Modern Painters was Ruskin’s “word picture” of Turner’s

Slave Ship (see McCoubrey 346). Notably, Ruskin’s ekphrastic language echoes Brontë’s description of the second shipwreck in Villette.13 Ruskin and Brontë, moreover, had the same publisher in London: Smith, Elder, and Company.

Thus rather than place Brontë at the center of a network, we must see her—as well as Villette—as actors circulating within and engaging in exchanges with multiple distributed maritime networks: the literary and artistic marketplace, the circum-Atlantic slave trade, the capitalist economy, the Yorkshire community, the abolitionist movement, and the Christian missionary system, among others.

CHAINS AND FLOWERS

For over 150 years, critics have grappled with how Villette resists attempts to understand it. Glen notes a “recalcitrance” to the novel, citing reviews by several nineteenth-century authors (1). William Makepeace Thackeray, for example, remarks,

“That’s a plaguey book that Villette. How clever it is” (qtd. in Allott 198). Yet my goal

13 Ruskin sees a “the fire of the sunset” with “burning clouds,” mirroring Lucy’s exclamation that “the heavens are one flame.” Above Ruskin’s “[P]urple and blue” waves hangs a “shadow[y]” sky of a “fearful hue”; the masts of the ship are “written upon the sky in lines of blood” (376–8). Lucy’s wreck similarly features a “full and dark” sky with clouds of “strange forms”; the “wild,” “bloody” sunrise “rival[s] battle at its thickest.” 76 here is not to resolve this tension but rather to better understand the politics and poetics that give rise to it. The question is not “what history hides behind Villette?” but rather

“how does Villette simultaneously evoke and obscure historical specificity?” I have proposed metonymic chains and distributed networks as tools to answer this latter question; both metonymy and network theory serve as heuristics to unpack the novel’s complex representational poetics and to draw out its deep ties to the circum-Atlantic.

Reconceptualizing shipwreck and slavery in Villette reframes the text as a political and social problem novel on a global scale.

But if Villette is so fundamentally linked to circum-Atlantic networks, then why are the novel’s references to slavery so oblique, so indirect? Put differently, why haven’t we recognized Villette’s ties to slavery until now? To begin, we can never see or understand a network in its entirety. Caroline Levine puts it nicely:

[A]t any moment our knowledge of social interconnections can only be partial: we may intuit the overwhelmingly complex webs of social interconnections in glimpses and hints, but the networks that connect rich and poor, city and world, the dead and the living, are never fully present to consciousness (Forms 129).

Like Brontë, we cannot consciously grasp all the forces acting upon a text, all the ways that a novel connects to the wider world. In the same way, metonymy moves toward the idea of a fundamentally connected world, but one that we can never see or understand in its entirety. For metonymy remains more difficult to spot than metaphor. Whereas metaphor directly lays out a resemblance, strong metonymic reading requires the knowledge of a historically specific context in order to understand the contiguity at play.

We cannot miss the explicit comparison, for example, when Lucy calls M. Paul an infatuated “slave” to Ginevra (189). But to understand M. Paul’s connection with the 77

Haitian Revolution (via Louverture and Dessalines) or Lucy’s connection to West Indian missionary work (via St. Paul), then we must have some knowledge of circum-Atlantic history and oceanic networks. In sum, metonymic chains require us to attend to both form and history—a tall order, given the traditional antagonism between formalist and historicist approaches. Only recently have scholars of the long nineteenth century moved toward a methodological synthesis. Critics such as Levine, Helena Michie, Robyn

Warhol, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Elsie Michie, and Wai Chee Dimock, among others, explore how sociopolitical and aesthetic forms shape our understanding of the past and how certain historical periods are more amenable to certain forms of organization.

Villette thus simultaneously evokes and obscures the circum-Atlantic. The novel’s use of metonymy gestures toward a radically networked world but does so through chains of substitution rather than direct reference. As a result, we receive glimpses, not omniscience. In Levine’s words, “we may intuit ... overwhelmingly complex webs of social interconnections,” but they are “never fully present to consciousness.” I am reminded here of Lucy’s description of the totalitarian girls’ school: “great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers” (127). The passive voice prevents us from pinpointing an agent. To whom belong those “great pains”? They float unclaimed, undoing the work of the flowers: although the chains may be hidden, certain pains remain visible. This description also fits Villette. By invoking circum-Atlantic networks, Villette distributes agency across and beyond its pages. “[G]reat pains” shape the novel, but not necessarily those of the author. Multiple “chains” tie the text to the West Indies, but these connections appear through a glass darkly, encrypted by the figurative “flowers” of metonymy. Yet, ultimately, the complex figurative language cannot suppress the violence 78 and history that shapes the novel. To again borrow Lucy’s words, “it cannot be concealed that ... there must have been wreck at last.”

- - - 79

CHAPTER 2

The “Bond of the Sea”: Conrad, Coal, and Entropy

“Everybody goes into steam.” —Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (1912)

THE “BOND OF THE SEA”

On 12 March 1882 smoke began to issue out of the portside main hatch of the

Palestine, a wooden sailing barque in the British Merchant Navy. Two days later, while the ship passed through the Bangka Strait off Sumatra, her cargo—557 tons of West

Hartlepool coal, mined in northern England and bound for Bangkok—exploded. The sheer force shattered the main decks fore and aft, and the Palestine soon sank in what the official inquiry describes as a “mass of fire” (Sherry 298).1 Luckily, all of sailors aboard—including the second mate, a young Polish emigrant named Józef Teodor

Konrad Korzeniowski—managed to escape in the lifeboats, arriving safely in the port town of Mentok late the next evening.

The Palestine explosion was but one of many events that entangled Korzeniowski in the geopolitical-ecological conflict that played out on the waters of the long nineteenth century: namely, the tension between the imperialist desire for control and the thermodynamic imperative that the world tends toward disorder. The British Empire wanted to become an enclosed, self-sustaining system; by hook and by crook it sought to capture and redistribute the material energy resources—such as coal—that would enable it to propagate across time and space. But as the second law of thermodynamics, laid

1 See “The ‘Palestine’ Inquiry,” appendix B in Conrad’s Eastern World, by Norman Sherry, 297–8. Sherry’s appendix reproduces the official report of the Marine Court of

Enquiry held at the Police Court in Singapore, 2 April 1883. 80 down in the mid-nineteenth century, states, entropy—the measure of disorder, the account of wasted energy, of energy unable to be converted into work—always tends toward a maximum. Hence the very coal that powered and sustained imperial maritime networks would also ultimately unmake them.

As Britain’s oceanic empire irreversibly burned through its nonhuman material resources, it also profoundly affected the human lives associated with them. In the case of

Korzeniowski, his service in the British Merchant Navy transformed him from a Polish emigrant into Joseph Conrad, a British author deeply concerned with the material and ideological networks of empire. Maya Jasanoff traces this tidal transformation in her compelling biography of Conrad, The Dawn Watch (2017): Conrad, she writes, “learned to speak English on British ships”; while in the merchant service he “found a professional niche and social role, became a naturalized British subject, and, sometime toward the end of the 1880s, started to write fiction—the beginning of a lifetime of writing about sailors, ships, and the sea” (93–4). Yet this maritime metamorphosis was not without its darker side. As the man who would become Conrad crisscrossed the world in British sailing ships and steamers, he also experienced firsthand the deleterious effects of an imperial geopolitics—namely the entropic disorder and decay wrought as an empire exploited and expended energy resources. To quote Shakespeare’s Tempest, we might say that

Korzeniowski quite literally “suffer[ed] a Sea-change” (I.ii.464).2 And “suffer” he did, along with many others: if the Palestine incident is any indication, then coal and the

British maritime coal trade produced only violence and loss on a global scale. Conrad’s

2 Conrad was familiar with the works of Shakespeare, and Owen Knowles even suggests that Conrad’s Victory: An Island Tale (1915) “owes a primary debt” to The Tempest (“Literary Influences” 33). 81 maritime service thus enters him into a fraught imperial thermodynamics, an oceanic world-system of energy and entropy that would profoundly shape his literary imagination.

I see the impact most clearly in Conrad’s representations of coal. This small, combustible rock provides a productive entry point into Conrad’s oceanic imaginary, how he draws upon maritime networks and exchanges to craft complex literary worlds. More specifically, coal serves as a catalyst for Conrad’s ecological critique of British oceanic imperialism. I contend that Conrad in his maritime fiction figures coal as a metonym not only for Britain and its oceanic empire but also for the thermodynamic threat of entropy.

Coal is a particularly powerful material metonym for Britain, especially in the long nineteenth century. As the British maritime coal trade flourished, ships and sailors quite literally spread pieces of Britain across the globe. Coal also metonymically links

Conrad’s fiction to contemporary debates about the material futures of oceanic imperialism and the exponential growth of steam-power: how would the engines of empire turn when they ran out of fuel?

I term this metonymic triangulation of the oceanic, the imperial, and the thermodynamic via coal the “bond of the sea.” I borrow the phrase from two of Conrad’s seafaring tales—“Youth: A Narrative” (1898; 71) and Heart of Darkness (1899; 100), both recounted by Conrad’s famous sailor-narrator, Charles Marlow—and I adopt it here to describe not only the metonymic relation of author, text, and nation, but also the radical contiguity of the human and the nonhuman in an imperial thermodynamic system.

For Conrad’s seafaring tales establish a contact zone: these maritime stories, at their core, focus on what happens when a human element (sailors, officers, passengers, etc.) 82 encounters a nonhuman element—one ranging from the material (coal and steam; wood, canvas, and iron) to the ideological (nation and empire) to the meteorological (wind, rain, and tides) to the thermodynamic (energy and entropy).

Like the metonymic chains that I trace in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette in my first chapter, the “bond of the sea” holds us, as readers and critics, accountable for the historical specificity of the oceanic. Brontë’s chains and Conrad’s “bond” each arise out of a particular cluster of oceanic circulations and exchanges across multiple distributed maritime networks that shape British hegemony abroad: the chains register the literary, political, economic, and religious dimensions of the circum-Atlantic slave trade, and the

“bond” captures the geopolitics and thermodynamics of empire in the Indian Ocean and the South Seas. Both oceanic figurations also work to deconstruct a reductive binary division between land and sea. But whereas Brontë’s chains enact a discrete series of semantic substitutions, Conrad’s “bond” registers an actual physical, material connection between nodes. Put differently, while both metonymic chains and “bond of the sea” are figurative, the latter also entails a literal dimension—namely, the actual material and thermodynamic ebbs and flows that constitute Britain’s oceanic empire. So while my first chapter worked to show us how the oceanic imaginary permeates the historicity of a supposedly “landlocked” novel, moving us from land to sea, this chapter moves from sea to land and outward toward the global. By examining a series of overlapping oceanic circulations and exchanges, this chapter helps us see not only the breakdown of the land/sea binary but also the warp and weft of a globalized world.

Specifically, this chapter explores the literary affordances of coal and the “bond of the sea.” To better understand Conrad’s coal-powered metonymic triangulation of the 83 oceanic, the imperial, and the thermodynamic, I take up here two of his seafaring tales built around the presence and absence of coal: “Youth,” a short story based directly on the Palestine incident, and Typhoon (1902), a novella about a steamship’s struggle to survive a massive storm. “Youth” has too much coal: it recounts the fruitless labors of a crew attempting to transport a large cargo of coal halfway around the world; here the always-too-present coal, rather than enabling mobility, ironically affords only friction.

Typhoon, by contrast, has too little coal: despite this being a story about how a steamship can power headlong through a terrible sea-storm, the source of said power goes largely unnamed; if anything, the narration stresses the absence of coal aboard the steamship.

Both tales thus link the human and the nonhuman through the figure of entropy. “Youth” captures the catastrophic inefficiency of a leaky ship, one that wastes the energies of both cargo and crew. Typhoon stresses the threat of entropy even further: it links the material absence of coal to the breakdown of the crew’s bodily boundaries. The coal-powered dissolutions in these two stories ultimately register the depletion of natural and human resources across Britain’s Pacific colonies.

By tracking both the literal and figurative uses of coal in “Youth” and Typhoon, I also make visible the narrative and ontological consequences of open systems. I take seriously the omnipresence of entropy in “Youth” and Typhoon: the thermodynamic leaks, absences, and frictions in these two seafaring stories are not mere plot points but the very real fears of a world beyond human control. In “Youth” and Typhoon I see

Conrad deconstructing the myth of a ship as a closed, lossless system: whereas many critics imagine ships as hermetically sealed human societies—little, floating worlds onto 84 themselves—Conrad’s coal-laden ships, by contrast, suggest a radical openness.3 In

“Youth” we follow the stops and starts of the ill-fated Judea, a perpetually leaky coaling barque, and in Typhoon we are carried along by the Nan-Shan, a steamship that consumes not just coal but also the crew and passengers—what Conrad calls the “human element”

(“Note” vii). Both ships remain vulnerable not only to the oceanic elements (i.e., winds and waves) but also to human hubris and error. The two ships also serve as metonyms for empire—a global system that, despite its best efforts, remained open to entropic loss. The breakdown aboard the coal-powered Nan-Shan, though, operates at a scale far larger than that of the wind-powered Judea. As Conrad moves from sail to steam, the very narration breaks down, dispersing once-unified bodies—not only characters but also objects, dialogues, and descriptions—across the page in abstract prose. Ultimately, then, I explore in this chapter how the “bond of the sea,” paradoxically, spurs dissolution: it draws together human and nonhuman elements only so that they can tear each other apart.

The metonymic, oceanic “bond” captures both the literal and the figurative dimensions of the entropy, and my analysis accordingly moves from the literal to the figurative. I first examine the literal dissolution in “Youth,” the fateful leaking and spontaneous combustion of the coaling barque, and I then consider the more figurative dissolution of steamship, coal, and crew in Typhoon. Although Conrad wrote these stories only four years apart, they each capture unique figurations of empire, energy, and entropy. To preface this analysis, I offer a brief overview of Conrad as a waypoint in literary history, tracing how Conrad’s oceanic imaginary helps us take the pulse of global

3 On ships as sealed, separated systems, see, for instance, Michel Foucault’s description of heterotopias—enclosed, othered spaces within larger spaces; Foucault calls the ship a “heterotopia par excellence” (“Of Other Spaces” 27). 85 transformations. In following section I contextualize coal and the metonymic “bond of the sea”—the means and the method, respectively, that link Conrad and his works to longer, wider imperial and ecological histories.

As I argue across this project, sea stories challenge us to think beyond the sea— but they do so not through metaphor but rather metonymy. Entropy and the Anthropocene are not metaphors; they may be nonlocal, diffuse, and difficult to conceive of on a human scale, but they are undoubtedly actual phenomena contiguous with the oceanic world.4 As

Hester Blum argues, the oceanic affords “new forms of relatedness” (“Prospect” 671).

One such form, I believe, is the coal-powered “bond of the sea.” My work here seeks to trace that metonymic bond, to follow the cybernetic web of human and nonhuman elements, wherein changes to one node profoundly affect another. When most critics discuss Conrad’s maritime fiction, they focus on texts such as The Nigger of the

“Narcissus” (1897), Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim: A Tale (1899), and “The Secret

Sharer” (1910)—stories with overt symbolic and metaphoric overtones. “Youth” and

Typhoon do merit some extant critical attention, but they often just get a line or two because they seem so literal, obvious, or straightforward. (Typhoon, for instance, gets but a single mention in Jasanoff’s 375-page book, and that only amounts to plot summary.5)

But as Blum, Cannon Schmitt, Margaret Cohen, and other oceanic studies critics argue, the literal, obvious, and straightforward elements of maritime texts afford equally rich

4 Timothy Morton, in fact, describes the phrase “climate change” as a metonymic “compression” of the concept of global warming (8). 5 Typhoon, writes Jasanoff, is one of Conrad’s three maritime tales (the others being “Youth” and “The Secret Sharer”) that “t[ake] place primarily on ships in Asian waters and feature[] European seamen facing a challenge”—in the case of Typhoon, “how to get through a storm” (134). 86 interpretive possibilities. As Schmitt suggests, we must embrace the revelatory power of the obvious (see 11–2). If we take seriously, then, the entanglement of not only the human and the nonhuman but also the literal and the figurative in “Youth” and Typhoon, then we might better understand the material, the thermodynamic, and the ecological precarities inherent in the “bond of the sea.”

“I AM THE WORLD ITSELF, COME TO PAY YOU A VISIT”

For literary historians, Conrad serves as a shorthand for the political, economic, and aesthetic shifts at the turn of the century. He stands as a crucial “figure of transition,” to use the words of Amar Acheraïou (253). Conrad straddles the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Victorian and Edwardian ages; he bridges the worlds of sail and steam; he works at the threshold of fact and fiction; he moves between the technical minutiae of realism and the subjective abstraction of Modernism; he navigates between a nostalgic, heroic romanticism and a world-weary skepticism.6 Conrad, in short, helps us see the warp and weft of a constantly changing world. His life and works provide the links between seemingly disparate historical and literary nodes, giving rise to a new, networked understanding of literary history.

The Conradian author function thus also captures key moments of transformation

6 On Conrad’s negotiation of realism and Modernism, see Michael Levenson (179–86). On Conrad’s transition between romanticism and skepticism, see Cedric Watts (Heart of Darkness introduction xi); see also Jacques Berthoud, who writes that Conrad’s work reflects the shift from a Romantic “concern with individual experience” to a “behaviourist, structuralist, Marxist emphasis on its determinants”—in short, a “move from private intentions to public systems” (187). 87 in literary criticism.7 Reflecting on over a century of scholarship, John G. Peters notes that “Conrad’s works have remained consistently at the center of whatever critical trends have dominated literary studies,” be it New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism, narratology, postcolonialism, gender studies, queer theory, and beyond (Critical

Reception 245).8 Indeed, Conrad has long served as a touchstone in a range of changing critical conversations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The eminent

Conradian critic Cedric Watts, in fact, observes that the “customary formula” for introductions to monographs on Conrad is to “defend the need for yet another book”

(review 341). Watts pokes fun at each successive generation of critics for thinking that they have fully unpacked Conradian complexities. Joking aside, Watts nevertheless raises a salient point: we continue to return to Conrad, and we continue to find more to say.9

For me, to write about Conrad is to write about Britain—especially an oceanic,

7 On the ideology of authorship and the discursive nature of the “author function,” see Foucault, “What is an Author?” (esp. 108–13). 8 Given such staying power, Peters ultimately concludes that “[t]he future of Conrad studies looks limitless” (245). 9 Even before F. R. Leavis in 1948 identified Conrad as a canonical author working in the “great tradition” of the English novel, many critics had turned to Conrad’s life and works. Early commentary, Peters tells us, focused on two main areas: “biographical/historical criticism” and “belles lettres criticism” (Critical Reception 1; On contemporary and early critics of Conrad, see Peters, Critical Reception 1–60; Simmons 59–66; and Knowles, “Critical Responses” 67–74). The former strain of criticism continues through today, tracking what Edward W. Said calls Conrad’s “fiction of autobiography.” Many readers take up Conrad’s biography to better understand his literary career. Watts, for example, examines Conrad’s life in relationship to the publishing industry and the literary marketplace in Joseph Conrad: A Literary Life (1989). More recently, J. H. Stape in The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2009) considers how the multiple identities of Conrad— not only a writer, but also a Pole, a Briton, a sailor, a husband, a father, and a friend— shape his literary output. 88 imperial Britain concerned with material energy resources. We commonly posit a connection between author and nation, but there exists a particularly strong metonymic bond between Conrad and his adopted home country—a bond forged, moreover, by historically specific maritime networks and oceanic exchanges. Conrad breaks with the oft-uncritical principle of autochthony that structures much of the field known as

Victorian Studies: more often than not, we simply assign authors to the canon of their nation of birth.10 Even though Charles Dickens, for instance, was read widely in the

United States and France, the critical tradition identifies him as a British author because he was born in Portsmouth. The same goes for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although she lived in and wrote about Italy for a significant part of her life: because she was born in

County Durham, we automatically include her in the British literary canon. Conrad, however, presents a different case: he chose to emigrate from Poland and to become a naturalized subject in Britain; he chose to write in English, having learned the language while serving aboard ships in the British Merchant Marine. The Polish man born

Korzeniowski deliberately and actively allied himself with Britain, becoming in the process the British author we know as Conrad. Hence in place of autochthony and uncritical indigeneity we have a strong metonymic relationship, one that authorizes critical connections between the life and works of the author and those of the nation.

As with my reading of Villette, my analysis here engages in strong metonymic reading, a historicist-formalist method that foregrounds cultural contiguity and, in so doing, affords critical movement beyond the bounds of the text. The “bond of the sea”—

10 For more on the “mystifying and troubling category of autochthony,” see Caroline Levine, “From Nation to Network” (649). Levine notes that Conrad is one of two authors (the other being Henry James) for whom Victorianists make an exception. 89 the full quotation in “Youth,” coincidentally enough, is “the strong bond of the sea”

(72)—draws together not only author, text, and nation, but also the material and immaterial nodes of empire. This networking occurs via coal, the primary material metonym of that oceanic “bond,” for coal catalyzes historically specific transformations at multiple scales—individual, national, and global. As events like the Palestine explosion transformed Korzeniowski into Conrad, coal also shaped Britain into an imperial, industrial hegemon; in the process, coal-based systems accelerated geopolitical and ecological changes, from the opening of international coaling ports (such as the cosmopolitan Port Said, the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, in 1859) to the coming of what John Ruskin in 1884 calls the “Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” the climatological effects of industrial pollution. When Conrad uses coal in his fiction, then, he metonymically invokes a range of extratextual transformations wrought by Britain’s oceanic empire.

We commonly associate a nation with its material exports, but coal was a particularly powerful material and symbolic metonym for Britain, especially in the long nineteenth century. As the British maritime coal trade flourished, ships and sailors quite literally spread pieces of Britain across the globe. This small island nation led the world in the production, transportation, and consumption of coal. British coal, explains Daniel

R. Headrick, was of a quantity, a quality, and a price that gave Britain the competitive edge over any other nation.11 By the first decades of the nineteenth century, Britain produced four-fifths of the world’s coal; by the turn of the twentieth century—when

11 “In an age of coal-burning ships,” writes Headrick, “Britain had the most, the best, and the cheapest steamer coal” (43). 90

Conrad concluded his service with the British Merchant Marine—coal comprised nine- tenths of Britain’s exports by weight (see Freese 69; and Headrick 43).12 Barbara Freese charts the meteoric rise of the British coal industry, which “had already grown relatively large by 1700 just by meeting the domestic and non-iron industrial needs of the nation, but it would expand tenfold by 1830, and double again by 1854. The nation raced to open new coal mines to meet the skyrocketing demand: Between 1842 and 1856 the number of coal mines quadrupled.” Coal fueled a cycle of intense industrialization that swept across

Britain: an increased supply of coal meant cheaper coal, which in turn made steam engines cheaper to construct and to operate, which in turn attracted more people to steam power, which in turn increased the demand for coal, and so on and so forth. Coal, Freese concludes, “had completely permeated society” (66–7).

Coal indeed “permeated” and transformed all aspects of life, not only on British soil but also beyond. Although coal may seem to be wholly terrestrial, it actually provides one of the most significant links between the British nation and the oceanic world. What we call “coal” the English commonly referred to coal as “sea coal” up through the seventeenth century. (The OED does record instances of “sea-coal,” though, in the 1748 edition of Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain and in Walter

Scott’s Rob Roy [1817].13) The usage “sea coal” stems either from the deposits of coal carved out by the North Sea and deposited on beaches, or from the shipping of mined coal via boats. The latter explanation, writes Freese, seems the more probable, for coal

12 Barbara Freese, an energy policy analyst, begins her study Coal: A Human History (2003) with Britain, the nation she identifies as “the first ... to be thoroughly transformed by releasing the genie of coal” (13). 13 See OED, 2d edn., s.v. “sea-coal, n.,” 2a. 91 traveled almost exclusively by water up through the nineteenth century: “Until the advent of railways,” Freese explains, “coal was either moved by water or not moved much at all”

(22; see also 21). And as coal continued to “permeate” Britain, it transformed the nation’s networks and technologies of maritime transportation: “As the heaviest and bulkiest of daily necessities, coal was the nation’s cutting edge cargo, the one that kept forcing it to find new ways to move things.” London’s “growing dependence on coal,” Freese argues, accelerated the English and British shipping industries, spurring the development not only of ships and ports, but also of the general “skills required for the coal trade” (85).14

Freese even suggests that the Royal Navy was founded in part to protect the English coastal coal trade, shipping convoys connecting London to northern coal deposits (86).

Through the sea, Britain and coal wrought changes on a global scale. Britain, explains Headrick, was the first nation “to exploit coalfields in other parts of the world”:

“Coal from Bengal was being used in steamers in the 1830s, from Borneo in the 1840s, and from Natal in the 1860s” (44). Douglas R. Burgess Jr., in his study of steamships’ impact on the British imagination, also describes the colonial transformations wrought by coal: From 1860–75, the Admiralty granted mail and cargo contracts to a range of steam transport companies—the Blue Funnel Line, the Glen Line, the China Mutual Steam

Navigation Company, the Union Steam Collier Company, the Castle Packet Company, and the African Steamship Company—all of which required an exponential increase in coaling stations. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Burgess explains, a standard steamship could travel approximately only 500 miles before refueling (see 227). (For

14 For Britain in the early 1600s, writes Freese, “more ships were used to move coal than everything else combined” (85). 92 reference, consider a common steamer route: down the Suez Canal and across the Red

Sea—around 1,500 miles.15 Even such a simple journey would require multiple coalings.)

Hence coal, argues Burgess, thus transformed not only “Britain’s relationship with her colonies, but [also] the colonies themselves”: “The ships’ constant need for fuel turned traditional ports like Bombay, Calcutta, and Cape Town into coaling stations; others were constructed virtually anew for that purpose, including Karachi, Dakar, Port Said,

Singapore, and Hong Kong” (230). This colonial network of coalfields and coaling stations, in Headrick’s words, “gave Britain a near-monopoly of the world’s steamer coal supplies” (44). Britain’s ample supply of fuel allowed its merchant navy to operate at

“vastly lower prices,” says Burgess, than that of Germany or France. “This advantage, he insists, cannot be understated, “for it ensured British supremacy for as long as they controlled the coal and the refueling stations” (231). Freese offers a similar conclusion: through coal, she says, Britain became “the most powerful force on the planet” (13).

As I see it, coal was also the prime catalyst for what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “friction,” the productive conflict that shapes global interconnection. More than a simple synonym for “resistance,” friction entails the limits and “vicissitudes” that shape the operation of power (6). Tsing argues that friction offers a kinetic figuration of the mechanics of mobility: “A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere.” And we only gain this “grip” when we embrace the limits of friction: to continue the example, “Roads ... made motion easier and more efficient, but ... they limit where we go” (5–6). In the same way, coal provided the

“grip” that allowed the British Empire, at its height, to grasp over a quarter of the world.

15 Distance measured via Google Maps. 93

But empire was never a well-oiled machine, and coal introduced other kinds of frictions—explosions, leaks, engine inefficiencies, to name just three—that equally shaped British oceanic mobility and hegemony.

When Conrad writes about coal, then, he invokes specific oceanic histories and maritime networks of energy, imperialism, globalization. Such is the metonymic power of the “bond of the sea,” which affords critical movement between textual and cultural nodes through recourse to specific maritime histories and discourses. Put differently, if to write about Conrad is to write about an oceanic Britain in the long nineteenth century, then to write about an oceanic Britain in the long nineteenth century is to write about coal. Over the past half century we have seen many extended critical investigations into

Conrad’s maritime world: in whole or in part, studies such as Jerry Allen’s The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad (1965), Norman Sherry’s Conrad’s Eastern World (1966), C. F.

Burgess’s The Fellowship of the Craft (1976), Paul Bruss’s Conrad’s Early Sea Fiction

(1979), Robert Foulke’s “Conrad and the Power of Seamanship” (1989), Lillian Nayder’s

“Sailing Ships and Steamers, Angels and Whores” (1996), John Peck’s Maritime Fiction

(2001), Cesare Casarino’s Modernity at Sea (2002), Peter Villiers’s Joseph Conrad:

Master Mariner (2006), and Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea (2010) all take up Conrad’s maritime fiction and/or seafaring experience.16 Yet despite this long history of reading

Conrad’s maritime oeuvre, literary critics have yet to offer a sustained analysis of the oceanic link between Conrad and coal. To the best of my knowledge, the only direct

16 While there are many eminent female Conradians—Linda Dryden, Mary Morzinski, and Andrea White, to name just three—Conrad studies has long skewed in favor of male critics, and especially so in discussions of Conrad and the sea. My own work here admittedly adds to that imbalance. 94 discussion appears in a very recent chapter from Samuel Perks, who tracks Conrad’s figurations of coal in Victory: An Island Tale (1915): in this novel, argues Perks, Conrad deconstructs and denaturalizes modern energy regimes, equating the alienation of coal- power with the alienation of imperialism. Perks also notes how Conrad’s “lamentation for the increasing redundancy” of the romantic, adventuring hero under imperialism has

“become a well-worn topic within Conrad studies.” He observes, though, how “little scholarship to date has recognized that [Conrad’s] articulation of this lamentation is embedded in the aesthetics of coal”—a puzzling gap, says Perks, especially given how

“[c]oal is central to many of Conrad’s novels and short stories” (252).

Following Perks, I believe that Conrad enters into dialogue with planetary-scale transformations via coal. Indeed, critical forays into imperial energy regimes dovetail nicely with recent work on Conrad and globalization. In her biography of Conrad,

Jasanoff locates his literary career within the context of a radically networked world. She emphasizes the trans- and international connections afforded by Conrad’s fiction, underscoring the urgency and relevance of such thinking for our own present age:

“Conrad captured something about the way power operated across continents and races, something that seemed as important to engage with today as it had when he started to write” (4). Crucially, Jasanoff links Conrad’s global imagination to his formative career at sea: “From the deck of a ship,” Jasanoff writes, “Conrad watched the emergence of the globally interrelated world ... [of] today” (6). Jasanoff’s work in The Dawn Watch helps justify my focus not only on Conrad but also on his seafaring tales: the globalized world that we know today came into being through the maritime networks of Conrad’s age; and, as described above, the author we know as Conrad also took shape through the oceanic. 95

Conrad is thus a key figure in the global turn in nineteenth-century British studies: as with the other authors I consider in this project—Brontë, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson, who all variously take up the forms, genres, and effects of imperial geopolitics and oceanic conquest—Conrad’s fiction repeatedly challenges us to think on a larger scale. And like these authors’ respective renderings of the slave trade, of conquest via longitude, and of physical and narrative maritime labor, Conrad’s representations of coal capture the physical and the ideological violence of the oceanic.

Specifically, Conrad pushes us to think about the ecological violence of the oceanic, about geopolitical exploitation and destruction on a planetary level. Nidesh

Lawtoo remarks that “Conrad wants his readers to think global first, before turning to evaluate local ethical actions.” This approach, says Lawtoo, “aligns Conrad’s ethical thought experiment” with modern “debates about the implications of global catastrophe”

(59). I am reminded here of a remark-cum-threat from Conrad’s Victory, a comment that punctures the naivety of the protagonist with the scope and scale of the global: “I am the world itself, come to pay you a visit” (382). At first glance, the figurative mechanics here seem to be that of metaphor: in this comparison, the speaker—the unsavory Mr. Jones, bearing a “ghastly smile[]”—becomes the world (381). Yet his words also exert a metonymic power: he is part of the violence and immorality that shapes the larger world, and he now brings those forces to bear on the protagonist. Like Mr. Jones, Conrad puts us in contact with the evils of a wider world, disrupting any illusions of isolation, of morality, and of longevity.

Imperialism is one such force that “comes to pay [us] a visit” via Conrad’s prose.

As many critics have shown, Conrad’s fiction captures the cracks in the façade of empire, 96 charting the developing frictions in turn-of-the-century imperial networks. His colonial novels, argues Terry Collits, “represent—at the very moment of high imperialism—the most significant encounter recorded in canonical literature between Europe and Europe’s

Other” (3). Christopher GoGwilt likewise dubs Conrad’s writing “an indispensable guide to the history of colonialism” (“Guide” 137).17 In some studies, Conrad himself also becomes a target, as in Chinua Achebe’s well-known, cutting denouncement of Conrad as a “bloody racist.” Focusing on Heart of Darkness, Achebe argues that Conrad dehumanizes Africans and presents Africa as “a place of negations,” a negative example through which the apparent “spiritual grace” of European civilization becomes manifest

(788 and 783).18 More recent postcolonial assessments of Conard are more tempered, articulating how Conrad’s fiction both critiques and internalizes imperialist ideology, what Benita Parry describes as “Conrad’s double vision” (3). Postcolonialism also challenges us to read “against the grain” of the Conradian archive, to draw out the silences and gaps in the text and challenge the historiography of the colonizer.19 Edward

17 See also GoGwilt’s Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (1995), which uses Conrad’s fiction to deconstruct the concept of a unified Western world, a concept that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century in response to shifts in imperialist power. 18 For a counter to Achebe’s critique and a defense of Conrad’s rendering of imperialism in Heart of Darkness, see Watts, “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of Conrad” (196–209). As Andrew Purssell points out, though, Achebe’s critique is as much about the received interpretation of Heart of Darkness in the North American university classroom as it is about the novel itself: the academic overuse of the novel and continued reliance on stock interpretations produce an equally flat, reductive picture of Africa (86). 19 On deconstructive postcolonialism and reading “against the grain,” see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (13). See also Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” and “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” 97

W. Said calls this “contrapuntal[]” reading, a strategic, “simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (Culture 51, original italics).20

For my project, I am most interested in how Conrad engages with imperialist ideologies of energy and entropy. How does his “double vision” perceive coal and steam power? That is, how does Conrad’s imperial thermodynamics both energize and exhaust his literary world system? And how might a contrapuntal reading of coal draw out the global histories and material networks that shape Conrad’s maritime fiction? Parsing

Conrad’s imperial thermodynamics also raises questions about human-nonhuman relations. GoGwilt reminds us that Conrad writes at a key “moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centur[ies], when European colonial nation-states, along with the

United States, engaged in a planetary scramble for control over the earth’s resources”

(“Guide” 137). And as the British Empire cast its net wide for material resources—coal and iron; timber and ivory; cotton, jute, and other textiles; sugar, wheat, coffee, tea, rice, vanilla, and opium—it placed humans and nonhumans in dynamic but precarious interrelation. Indeed, Conrad’s work, says Lawtoo, “mirrors contemporary anxieties about what William Connolly calls ‘the fragility of things’ and the dicey ‘entanglements’ between human and nonhuman forces these things generate in the Anthropocene”

(Lawtoo 56; and Connolly 7). We must avoid, of course, taking such “entanglement[]” as

20 Said derives the name of this method from counterpoint in music, wherein two overlapping melodies do not negate but rather play off of one another, with neither being privileged over the other. “In the same way,” he says, “we can read and interpret English novels ... whose engagement (usually suppressed for the most part) with the West Indies or India, say, is shaped and perhaps even determined by the specific history of colonization, resistance, and finally native nationalism” (Culture 51). 98 a flat ontology: the control of colonial material resources pales in comparison to the systematic exploitation and dehumanization of colonized peoples. The human and the nonhuman are not isomorphic under imperialism, for sure—but they are mutually constitutive nodes in a complex network of power relations.

“A BAD LEAK IS AN INHUMAN THING”

The Palestine incident was a flashpoint not only in Korzeniowski’s maritime career but also in his literary imagination. Sixteen years later, now a naturalized British subject, Conrad would pen “Youth,” a short seafaring story that borrows heavily from his experiences on the Palestine. Like Conrad of the now-Anglicized surname, “Youth” changes the names of the sailors and the ship; it retains, though, the core identity of the conflict. “Youth” recounts the struggles of the Judea—a British wooden sailing barque— and crew to transport a 600-ton cargo of coal from Falmouth to Bangkok. Mirroring the venture of the Palestine, the Judea’s journey is repeatedly delayed by leaks in the ship’s hull, and the trip ultimately ends prematurely and in failure, with the cargo of coal exploding and sinking the ship in the eastern Indian Ocean. Narrating the majority of

“Youth” is Conrad’s literary surrogate, Charles Marlow—the seaman and steamship captain to whom Conrad would return in two other seafaring frame narratives, Heart of

Darkness and Lord Jim. Set twenty-two years in the past, Marlow’s story is one of disillusionment, of experience stripping away the optimism of his younger days.

The young Marlow’s rough journey aboard the coaling barque disabuses him of romantic notions of sustainability. “I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more,” he tells us, “the feeling that I could last for ever [sic], outlast the sea, the earth, and all men” (95). Wrapped up in the vigor of youth, the twenty-year-old 99

Marlow aspires toward immortality, imagining a life that goes on “for ever,” outlasting not just the rest of humanity but also the planet itself. Yet the older Marlow, our narrator, quickly discredits this line of thought; twenty-two years of maritime service have taught him that this hopeful, perpetual “youth” is in fact a “deceitful feeling,” one that “lures us on ... to vain effort—to death” (95). Youth blinds us to the inevitable decay of all things—in a word, entropy. The older Marlow sees through the disillusionment of youth and its promises of longevity. This new insight arises, I believe, not simply from his years of oceanic experience but specifically from his entanglement with coal—namely, the ordeal of the Judea and the spontaneous combustion and loss of her cargo. Like Conrad himself, Marlow “suffer[s]” a coal-powered “Sea-change.” He now conceives of life and death in thermodynamic terms: youth, he says, is “the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires” (95).21 What once was infinite is now fleeting: in place of a life that will “outlast the sea, the earth, and all men,” Marlow sees now only dying embers in a fire, a “heat of life” that will “grow[] cold” all too soon. The image of a dying fire is quite apt for the second mate of the Judea, a ship that smolders and slowly burns to death in the eastern

Indian Ocean.

Indeed, entropy is the order of the day aboard this ill-fated ship. The 400-ton

21 In the endnotes to the 2002 Oxford edition of “Youth,” Watts identifies the “handful of dust phrase” as an allusion to John Donne’s “Meditation IV,” from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624): “[W]hats become of mans great extent & proportion, when himselfe shrinkes himselfe, and consumes himselfe to a handfull [sic] of dust?” (200n95). The full quotation—especially “consumes” as Donne’s choice of verb before the “handfull of dust” imagery—fits nicely with my thermodynamic reading of human entropy and bodily breakdown in Conrad. 100

British coaling barque exists in a perpetual state of leakiness and inefficiency. It takes on water and loses several sets of crewmen; in the process, it wastes long spans of time, either sitting idle in a repair dock or backtracking to a safe harbor. Delayed and damaged by a storm, the Judea takes sixteen days to travel from London to the Tyne. Because of the delay, the ship loses its reserved berth; it has to spend a month at tier, tied up in the harbor and waiting for both cargo and repairs (see 73). After all of this, the Judea suffers another delay after it is hit by a steam-collier, a small harbor steamship used for transporting coal. The repairs consume three weeks, and the original crew resigns. By this point, three months have passed since Marlow and company left London; they initially estimated that leg of the overall journey to take, at its longest, only a fortnight (see 76).

Recall that the Judea’s ultimate destination is Bangkok, which, after all of these false starts and stops that fail to move the ship beyond the English Channel, seems even further away.

Even after the latest repairs, though, the Judea continues to leak. It nearly disintegrates during a heavy storm in the North Sea and the Channel: “She was working herself loose, and leaked badly ... while we pumped[,] the ship was going from us piecemeal: the bulkwarks went, the stanchions were torn out, the ventilators smashed, the cabin-door burst in. There was not a dry spot in the ship. She was being gutted bit by bit”

(77). Water rushes in as ship components wash away; the crew “pump[s]” around the clock, laboring at the bilges simply to stay afloat. The Judea remains strikingly open, exposed to the elements: Marlow notes in particular here how any kind of barrier—the

“bulwarks” (an extension of the hull above the deck line), the “stanchions” (the upright posts that form a railing around the ship’s perimeter), and the “cabin-door”—are all “torn 101 out” or “burst in” by the storm.22 Put differently, the Judea runs the risk of becoming part of the sea. The “piecemeal” breakdown will soon run out of pieces, and the ship would no longer have an identifiable unity. Faced with such an unmaking, the crew turns the ship back to port once again for repairs.

Two more false starts follow, this time due to frictions among the human element.

The first attempt at a voyage ends within a week: the replacement crew refuses to serve the 150-day passage to Bangkok on a perpetually leaky vessel, one “that wanted pumping eight hours out of the twenty-four” (79). They, too, resign. The second attempt ends even more abruptly: the third crew “simply refused to man the windlass” (the mechanism used to raise the anchor) on a ship that “leaked worse than ever” (79), and the Judea never actually leaves the dock.23 The second and the third crews both refuse to serve, in short, because they know that their labor will be wasted. Thus far all work has been in vain, and the Judea’s journey been delayed for over nine months. And indeed, the second and third crews’ fears prove true: later on, with the Judea ablaze from the unplanned combustion of the coal, Marlow recognizes the irony that “after [pump]ing water out of her to save ourselves from being drowned, [they] frantically poured water into her to save

[them]selves from being burned” (83). The seeming futility of the venture sparks

22 See the appended glossary in Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” and Other Tales (218–25), s.v. “bulwark” and “stanchion.” Discussing Conrad’s technical maritime language, Canon Schmitt notes how critical editions of Conrad’s works often include a glossary; no other author, says Schmitt, so “regularly moved editors to explain what certain words mean” as does Conrad (“Tidal” 17). I will say more about Conrad’s technical maritime language and Schmitt’s mode of denotative reading in my analysis of Typhoon, below; see also my discussion of surface reading and technical language in my coda. 23 Faced with such frequent delay, Marlow remarks that “[i]t was as if th[e] confounded shipwrights had actually made a hole in her” (79). 102 resistance from the crew, a sociopolitical friction that further impairs the mobility and efficacy of the merchant ship.

I am reminded here of the prophetic motto painted onto the Judea’s stern, “Do or

Die.” The youthful Marlow takes these two terms to be mutually exclusive: i.e., without work comes death. But the older Marlow, our narrator, sees in retrospect that “Do” and

“Die” are two terms for the same effect. The conjunction “or” presents a false choice: to work is not productive but reductive; it is to expend energy. At the end of the story, for instance, despite all of the collective work of the crew, they arrive with far less than what they set out with: even with all of the crew’s efforts to plug leaks, balance the ship, and protect the cargo, the Judea and its 600 tons of English coal still end up at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, beyond the grasp of any practical use. Only the human element survives—and barely so, at that. Marlow and the others row their way to a harbor in the

Java Sea, collapsing upon arrival with exhaustion. “I sat weary beyond expression,” he says (96). Marlow looks out at the other survivors from the Judea, their seemingly lifeless bodies strewn across the lifeboats:

Nothing moved ... the three boats with the tired men from the West sleeping, unconscious of the land and the people and of the violence of the sunshine. They slept thrown across the thwarts, curled on bottom-boards, in the careless attitudes of death. The head of the old skipper ... had fallen on his breast, and he looked as though he would never wake. Farther out old Mahon’s face was upturned to the sky ... as though he had been shot where he sat at the tiller (98).

The captain, first mate, and crewmen of the Judea lies motionless “in the careless attitudes of death,” unaware of the world around them. Yet the wooden boats provide neither bed nor coffin; the bodies lie disordered, “thrown” across benches (the “thwarts”) and “curled” on the “bottom-boards.” The first mate’s apparent demise seems particularly 103 unnatural: whereas the other sailors look as if they have died in their sleep, Mahon’s body slumps backward “as though he had been shot.” But if we take this shooting simile seriously in context, then we realize that Mahon himself has pulled the trigger: he has, in other words, worked himself to (near) death. Even the crew’s earliest labors carry the specter of death: when the heavy storm shifts the sand ballast in the belly of the Judea, for instance, the crew must work their way belowdecks to shovel—moving downward for what they call “gravedigger’s work” (73). In a sense, then, to “Do” is to “Die,” to expend energy and inevitably move toward loss.

“Youth” leaves us not to wonder why “Do” and “Die” come together onboard the

Judea, why the crew of the coaling barque is perpetually plagued by such figurative death: “a bad leak,” Marlow explains, “is an inhuman thing” (78). Leaks undercut human agency, challenging any sense of control—or at least, any sense that we have the capacity to make productive change—within a given system. The “bad leak[s]” aboard the Judea, for instance, force the crew to expend ever more time and labor: patching a leak is not an act of salvation but one of loss. Leaks thus break the fiction of a closed system: no matter how hard we work we can never put the pieces back together again, because some of those pieces have slipped beyond our grasp. A “bad leak” is an “inhuman thing,” then, in that it exposes humanity to entropy, the ever-growing account of the energy we inevitably waste when we try to perform work. Yet that wasted energy is not lost or destroyed: as the first law of thermodynamics states, the amount of energy in the universe remains constant. Entropy, then, as Allen MacDuffie clarifies, is the measure of energy

“unavailable to humans” (“Irreversible” 15). Put simply, entropy is a leak par excellence: it moves energy from a system, moving it beyond the realm of human control. 104

In “Youth,” coal is the catalyst for such loss. Conrad repeatedly turns to this nonhuman material to capture the inhumanity of entropy—that is, to capture humanity’s lack of agency in coal-based exchanges. When, for instance, the collier collides with the

Judea at the mouth of the Tyne, “confusion” ensues: as the coal-powered steamship crashes into the coaling barque, the crewmen run about, their “yelling” mingling with the bestial “roar[ing]” of the steam” (75). Marlow watches as “[t]he long-boat changed, as if by magic, into matchwood where she stood in her gripes” (77). But this is hardly

“magic”; real material resources are being expended and destroyed in the collision. Coal here fuels not work (as we might expect) but rather waste: to repair the damage, the

Judea must spend another three weeks docked off the Tyne. And during the collision the

Judea’s crew can do little but sit there and watch as the nameless, “bulky shadow” of the coal-powered steamer emerges from and departs back into the fog (75). The speed and abstraction of the assailant captures the helplessness of those aboard the Judea: how do you hold a “shadow” accountable for damages?

A similar kind of helpless inevitability characterizes the actual burning and loss of the Judea. Once the coal in the belly of the ship begins to smolder, the crew cannot stop the fire: “We tried,” recalls Marlow. “We battened down everything, and still she smoked. The smoke kept coming out through imperceptible crevices; it forced itself through bulkheads and covers; it oozed here and there and everywhere in slender threads, in an invisible film, in an incomprehensible manner ... it poisoned the sheltered places on deck” (82). The leaky Judea once again becomes a site of futile human labor. The smoke from the burning coals writhes its way through cracks and crevices “imperceptible” to the human eye; its movements are “incomprehensible,” unable to be understood, predicted, 105 or prevented by the crew. The coal smoke permeates the ship, “ooz[ing]” seemingly

“here and there and everywhere” at once, regardless of any manmade “bulkheads” or

“covers” designed to contain. Even the “sheltered places” become “poisoned” by the

“inhuman” smoke, made inimical to human life. Again, the crew can do little but watch as the ship goes to pieces before them. Marlow acknowledges the inevitability of the destruction: “There were cracks, detonations, and from the cone of flame the sparks flew upwards, as man is born to trouble, to leaky ships, and to ships that burn” (91). Watts notes the echo here of Job 5:7 (AV)—“man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (“Youth” 199n91)—an allusion that captures the singular destiny of humanity via the imagery of fiery destruction. Yet Marlow expands upon this destiny: humankind is born directly not only into “trouble,” but also into open, entropic systems: “leaky ships” and “ships that burn.”

Especially in the British merchant coal trade, a leaking ship and a burning ship go hand in hand; in the process, human agency often goes by the wayside. In, for example, the case of the Palestine—the ordeal upon which Conrad based “Youth”—the British

Marine Court in Singapore determined that the crew was not at fault for the explosion: the court declared that this was a case of spontaneous combustion. The verdict would not have been surprising for those involved with the nineteenth-century coal trade: as many contemporary reports, pamphlets, and handbooks warned, wet coal can create fire.24

24 A Royal Commission took up an investigation in 1875 of the spontaneous combustion of coal-laden ships, publishing an extensive report a year later. See the Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Spontaneous Combustion of Coal in Ships (1876), esp. the summary of findings (xxiv–xxv). The report cites data specially prepared for the commission by Lloyd’s of London, the publisher of the famous merchant shipping report, Lloyd’s Register: in 1875 seventy coal-laden ships were lost by heat or

106

What might seem like an elemental contradiction here is simply a fact of chemistry: as

Robert White Stevens explains in the 1878 edition of On the Stowage of Ships and Their

Cargoes, “Any coal containing a large quantity of iron pyrites is apt to heat when saturated with water, and after some time to burst into flame” (123). Thomas Rowan offers a similar conclusion in his own pamphlet, Coal. Spontaneous Combustion and

Explosions Occurring in Coal Cargoes, published same year as the Palestine explosion: he notes that “those having practical experience” identify “wet or dampness” as “the one condition beyond all others” responsible for the “heating or firing” coal rich in iron pyrite. To drive home his point, Rowan offers a comparative example: “it was testified to, that the same coal taken from the same working [i.e., the same mine], when protected by covering from rain, remained cool—while another portion of it, uncovered and getting wet, had spontaneous ignition set up” (17, original italics).25 Indeed, the “only prevention” for spontaneous combustion, Stevens warns, is “to keep the coal dry”

(123).26 But this was impossible on the Palestine, a ship that always seemed to be leaking; its journey to deliver the coal to Bangkok was repeatedly delayed, in fact, for over nine months by a series of leaks above and below the waterline (see Villiers 49).

Even with the leaks repaired, though, the damage was already done: the seawater continued to seep through the coal during the Palestine’s sixth-month journey from

Falmouth, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean. The barque fire, with another fifty-four coal-laden ships (of similar construction and cargo) reported missing. 25 Rowan also cites the Royal Commissioners’ report, along with other statistics from sources in chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. 26 Discussing the dangers of different types of coal, Stevens notes that “steam coal, especially when damp,” is “more or less liable to spontaneous combustion” (124). 107 ultimately became one of the many British sailing ships lost at sea to the spontaneous combustion of coal cargo.27

The Judea, then, is the perfect storm of “inhuman” entropy: a dreadfully leaky ship carrying coal. Yet, especially for Conrad—the man metonymically bonded to Britain via the oceanic—leaks are inimical not only to human life, but also to the life of empire.

Like the fate of the Palestine, the story of the Judea highlights the irony that coal—the very material that supposedly enables global mobility and signals imperial power—serves as a source of friction and a catalyst for entropy. The Palestine and the Judea were both bound for Bangkok, a neutral port but a key node in Britain’s global networks of exchange and imperial control. Yet the fraught voyages of the two ships cannot but strike us as tremendous wastes of energy, both figuratively and literally. All of the human labor spent not only in mining the coal in England but also in loading, unloading, repairing, and reloading the Palestine and the Judea and sailing them halfway around the world is all for naught. In thermodynamic terms, the coal explosions expend a tremendous amount of energy. Again, that energy is not actually destroyed, but rather removed from potential human use. These two British ships thus puncture imperialist aspirations toward “youth,” the perpetual immortality imagined by Marlow—i.e., the hope to “last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.” So despite imperialism’s desire to be a closed, self- perpetuating system, the explosions of the Palestine and the Judea recast imperialism as an open system, one that was leaking energy—and humans could do nothing about it.

Both Conrad and Britain are both deeply concerned with “inhuman” leaks via

27 Villiers references an 1892 article in the Shipping Gazette Weekly Summary that reported fifty-seven British coal-laden sailing ships lost due to burning cargo, with another 328, similarly laden, reported as missing (see 50). 108 coal. Especially in terms of anxiety over the lack of human agency, the leaks that plague the Judea, a supposedly watertight coaling vessel of British construction, metonymically recall contemporary debates about the energy futures of the British empire, also a supposedly closed system. As Karen Pinkus describes it, British “[a]nxiety about the finitude of coal seems nearly simultaneous with coal’s development into power” (54).28

One of the most prominent voices addressing such “[a]nxiety” was the British economist and political theorist Stanley Jevons, whose 1865 pamphlet The Coal Question champions coal as a source of national and imperial power. In no uncertain terms Jevons elevates coal above all other British commodities. Coal, he says, “is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do” (2). What praise via metonymy: coal is the “material” representation of the “energy of the country,” a compact, physical surrogate for Britain’s vast thermodynamic endeavors. Jevons continues, noting how coal pulls the nation into the future; “without it,” he says, “we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times” (2). British modernity, in short, depends upon coal.

Yet Jevons also prophetically warns readers about the untenable conditions of coal-powered industry. It is not that Britain will exhaust its own coal mines; in fact, in the preface to the second revised edition, Jevons clarifies that “our mines are literally inexhaustible. We cannot get to the bottom of them.” (Such boundless enthusiasm recalls a certain youthful optimist aboard the Judea.) It is rather that Britain’s current industrial progress is not sustainable: “it is impossible,” he says, that we should go on expanding as we are now doing. Our motion must be reduced to rest” (v–vii). By proposing a “rest,”

28 Many thanks to Clint Wilson for this reference. 109

Jevons does not mean a complete and total stop of British empire and industry but rather an end to exponential—and thus untenable—growth. Britain, as he sees it, must restyle itself as a kind of perpetual motion machine, one that remains “stationary” but, in so doing, also “lasting” for all time (372). Jevons acknowledges the profound global changes wrought by Britain: he notes the British “guardianship of the seas,” among other things, as one of the key forces “stimulat[ing] the progress of mankind” (375). The final lines of The Coal Question, however, invoke the same imperial and thermodynamic anxieties as “Youth”:

If we lavishly and boldly push forward in the creation and distribution of our riches, it is hard to over-estimate the pitch of beneficial influence to which we may attain in the present. But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity (375–6, original italics).

Burning too brightly in the present would condemn Britain and its empire to a dim, inglorious future. Jevons’s imagery conveys at once opulence and waste: “lavish[] and bold” endeavors would spread “riches” across the world. The wording captures the

“beneficial influence” of such “creation and distribution,” but it also denotes a level of excess and exuberance far beyond “maintenance.” Not unlike the Judea of “Youth,”

Britain finds itself at a crossroads of action: ahead lies either an explosive, self- destructive moment of “brief greatness” or a sustainable “rest,” a span of “longer continued mediocrity.”

Even with his reassurances about Britain’s coal supplies and global influence,

Jevons cannot fully counter the anxiety over the future: he sees inevitable change on the horizon—a fate, once again, that humans can do nothing about. To underscore the unsustainability of current material energy relations, Jevons compares coal mining to 110 farming: “A farm,” he says, “however far pushed, will under proper cultivation continue to yield for ever [sic] a constant crop. But in a mine there is no reproduction ... So far then as our wealth and progress depend upon the superior command of coal[,] we must not only stop—we must go back” (178, original italics). Yet, as with the Judea, there was no turning back: Britain charged ahead with “progress” even as its imperial thermodynamic system became riddled with leaks and losses. The result was a vicious cycle. To fuel its continued growth and dominance, Britain built coaling stations across the world’s coastlines and brought additional lands under its control. But such expansion pushed imperial networks to the point of failure, inviting frictions ranging from miscommunication and lack of information to wasteful expenditures such as the

(fictional) loss of the Judea or the (very real) loss of the Palestine. And to make up for such disorder and loss, Britain had to continue to expand and expend energy.

Entropy, in a sense, thus provides the justification for empire. As the British demand for coal exponentially increased, Britain had to conquer more and more lands and consume more and more natural resources. Thomas Richards sees this logic at play in the conclusion to The Coal Question, which asks, “may we not look for an increasing flame of civilization elsewhere? Ours are not the only stores of fuel” (375). Here Jevons, explains Richards, “ends his book with a new kind of call to empire, a call that has since become a war cry: an ecological call for the seizure of new resources” (Richards 93; see also MacDuffie 203). Jevons describes how Britain has “planted the stocks of multiplying nations in most parts of the earth,” in effect sowing the seeds of modern industry. Hence,

Jevons concludes, “it is hardly for us to doubt that they [i.e., Britain’s cultivated colonial holdings] will prove a noble offspring” (375). But, as MacDuffie shrewdly observes, 111

Jevons should not count on any additional “offspring,” for he overlooks the fact that “the industrial system in Britain was already dependent upon the energy resources of its imperial holdings” (203, original italics). It is not that the colonies depend upon the metropole, but rather vice versa.

Hence as the leaky Judea moves from west to east, from metropole to colony, we also witness Conrad’s imperial thermodynamics at work, his “double vision” that perceives the East as both the life and death of Western empire. Through Marlow’s eyes

Conrad presents a contradictory vision. Marlow sees the East as site of loss, inefficiency, and disorder, a land “silent like death” and “dark like a grave” (96)—and indeed, the ultimate “grave” of the Judea, a British merchant coaling barque. Yet he also sees the

East as source of vitality and energy: from the lifeboat of the Judea Marlow spies “all of the East before [him], and all life” (81). By his own admission his mental picture of the

East is that of “the ancient navigators,” an exoticizing, imperialist perspective that sees the land as “so old, so mysterious.” And yet, despite being “so old,” the East to Marlow appears “living and unchanged, full of danger and promise” (98). This oscillation stems, I believe, from this area’s association with coal. As noted by Headrick and Burgess above, in the nineteenth century an oceanic imperial Britain turned to the East for natural resources—namely coalfields and coaling ports.

Wrapped up in coal, then, is the sustainability of imperialism and the future of the

British Empire. Recall Burgess’s words: “British supremacy” hinges on coal—a declaration of both power and vulnerability. Entangled in Britain’s precarious networks of coal are not only the fates of ships such as the Palestine and the Judea, but also the lives of the sailors aboard them. Like Korzeniowski’s seaborne transformation into 112

Conrad, the “inhuman” leaks of oceanic empire alter the fundamental perception of human experience. Consider Marlow’s halting diagnostic narration of the exploding coal cargo aboard the Judea:

[I] immediately became aware of a queer sensation, of an absurd delusion,—and I seemed somehow to be in the air. I heard all round me like a pent-up breath released—as if a thousand giants simultaneously had said Phoo!—and felt a dull concussion which made my ribs ache suddenly. No doubt about it—I was in the air, and my body was describing a short parabola. But short as it was, I had the time to think several thoughts in, as far as I can remember, the following order: “This can’t be the carpenter—What is it?—Some accident—Submarine volcano?—Coals, gas!—By Jove! we are being blown up—Everybody’s dead—I am falling into the after-hatch—I see fire in it (85).

Marlow’s account draws out the actual explosion—what he later admits to occur in “the twinkling of an eye, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second” (85)—into a long, pseudo- stream-of-consciousness ordeal. The piecemeal narration, shot through with interjections, strips the explosion of its fundamental speed. We follow Marlow’s thought process as he talks himself through what is happening, trying to make sense of his sensory perceptions.

He begins with a “queer sensation” and “absurd delusion” that he eventually understands as being airborne. But if his ballistic trajectory his smooth, his narration is not: the line

“my body was describing a short parabola” is conspicuously clunky, a syntactical awkwardness that affords narrative friction. Marlow’s agentive “I” and his body become detached; the latter “describes a parabola” seemingly without him. The two soon reunite, but only to enter into a series of staccato hypotheses, a narrative grasping for clarity. The passively voiced recognition “we are being blown up” drives home Marlow’s helplessness; notably, this passive phrasing appears immediately after Marlow finally pinpoints the cause of this disorder: “Coals, gas!” 113

Ian Watt identifies this passage as a representative example of what he terms

“delayed decoding” in Conrad’s prose: the narrative and temporal disjuncture between an event or phenomenon and a character’s understanding of it. Marlow’s description here

“combines the forward temporal progression of the mind, as it receives message from the outside world, with the much slower reflexive process making out their meaning” (175).

Yet Watt makes entirely no mention of coal, the cause of this narrative and temporal disjuncture. It seems to me, however, a very specific kind of explosion, and that specificity, I argue, directly inflects the delayed decoding here. The narrative breaks down at the precise moment that the coal explodes. Entropy, so violently present here with the spontaneous combustion of the wet coal, unmakes Marlow’s very ability to know or to process information.

Richards, in fact, describes entropy as “primarily an index of information” (80).

He argues that empires maintain control not via force but via information; the challenge was not to conquer but to know. But as the British Empire grew, the fantasy of knowing and recording disintegrated. More and more data streamed into the Foreign Office and colonial consulates, but the issue was now quality, not quantity: Richards tracks this shift from “knowledge”—a knowing that affords unity, efficacy, and organization—to mere

“information,” “scattered disjunct [sic] fragments of fact” that offered no utility (4–5).

Just as we cannot reverse entropy, imperial Britain could not fully reconstruct events at a distance. Coal produces this same irreversible “fragment[ation]” in Marlow’s diagnostic narration of spontaneous combustion: in place of “knowledge” he has only “information,” piecemeal sensory perceptions that offer him neither clarity nor agency.

114

ABSENCE, ENTROPY, AND THE “HUMAN ELEMENT”

Coal propels Typhoon along a similarly inexorable course of disintegration, but the entropic fragmentation here occurs not through presence but absence. If the Judea of

“Youth” had too much coal, the cargo perpetually producing friction, then the Nan-Shan of Typhoon has far too little. The absence is fitting: as Conrad moves from sail (the

Judea) to steam (the Nan-Shan), his prose reflects the subsequently increased and irreversible consumption of natural resources. As oceanic readers looking for coal on the steamer and through the narrative, we come up almost empty-handed. This double absence is striking, especially in a steamship story: for a tale about how a steamship can power headlong through a terrible sea-storm, the source of said power goes largely unnamed. And yet the “bond of the sea” persists: as we shall see, even the absence of coal cannot sever the ties between the oceanic, the imperial, and the thermodynamic.

Typhoon’s narration, if anything, stresses the absence of coal aboard the Nan-

Shan, showing us empty places where the coal should be. Near the beginning of the narrative, Jukes, the first mate, sits on deck sewing canvas into new bags for coal- hauling. He reports that all of the older bags are “worn out of course,” but MacWhirr, the captain, suspects that the majority have actually been lost overboard (21). Though the two accounts may differ in cause, they align in effect: the steamer’s want of a means to load coal. The conspicuous, unexplained absences continue: we later learn that the previous second mate of the Nan-Shan was replaced because he “contriv[ed] (in some manner Captain MacWhirr never could understand) to fall overboard into an empty coal- lighter lying alongside, and had to be sent ashore to the hospital with concussion of the brain and a broken limb or two” (28). More significant than the unexplained fall here is 115 the hollow landing: the former second mate somehow tumbles into an open—and empty—cargo boat used to transport coal. Without the coal to temper his fall, the former second mate suffers bodily injury: if the lighter were full, that is, then he presumably would have fallen a shorter distance. Such emptiness extends into the Nan-Shan itself.

For instance, the only way to access the “coolies” (6)—the 200 Chinese laborers traveling belowdecks on the Nan-Shan—is through an empty coal-bunker. Though emptied of coal, the bunker itself is “coated with coal-dust” and thus “perfectly and impenetrably black” (55). Even the space that would hold the coal remains “impenetrabl[e]” to human vision; the opacity almost renders the room itself absent, with the utter blackness of the coal-dust masking any dimensions or features of the bunker. The absent presence of coal creates a black void in the belly of the Nan-Shan.

The only thing currently inside the bunker is a “heavy iron bar—a coal-trimmer’s slice,” a hooked poker tool that would be used for stowing coal or for scraping cinders from fire-grates (55).29 As the titular typhoon tosses the Nan-Shan about, the coaling tool rattles around in the empty darkness like a “wild beast,” threatening bodily harm to anyone who passes through the bunker (55). Here we have a metonymic displacement of energy: the tool associated with coal power comes alive with a “wild” vigor. But where does that energy come from: from the coal itself, or from the human laborers who work with the coal? Put differently, we see here the effect of the figuration (i.e., the metonymic linking of the slice and energy), but its source remains displaced or abstracted—not unlike the coal itself on the Nan-Shan. The figurative thermodynamics here raise some

29 See the appended glossary in Conrad, “Typhoon” and Other Tales (314–24), s.v. “slice.” 116 questions about energy systems in Typhoon.

To be sure, there’s an overabundance of energy on and around the ship. The Nan-

Shan practically comes alive with energy, its iron and steel taking on the qualities of flesh and blood: the ship’s “flanks ... quiver” with steam; the stoked fires “glow ... like a pool of flaming blood radiating quietly”; and the “pulsation of the engines” rhythmically sounds “like the beat of ... [a] heart” (12, 70, and 66). The narrator even directly compares the moving anatomy of the engine to “the functions of a living organism” (69).

Such lively descriptions, however, metonymically displace the literal source of power on the ship: coal. Standing in for coal is a range of other biological sources culturally linked with power and vigor and mobility. The “flanks” of the ship “quiver” and smoke in equine fashion like the “iron horse” of the railroad.30 And the “blood[y]” fire and heart- beating engine register the life of the human crew—the sailors, engineers, and firemen that labor to keep the fires stoked and the engine running. But these metonymic figurations of life also mark the conspicuous absence of a more literal source of energy aboard the ship. The steam-as-life trope serves as a smoke-and-mirrors act that begs the question of actual, physical coal, the true catalyst for the thermodynamic life—the

“quiver[ing],” bleeding, and “puls[ing]”—of the steamer Nan-Shan.

The one place we do see actual, physical coal in Typhoon is perhaps where we

30 Equating steam power and equine labor, the “iron horse” metonym rose to prominence in nineteenth-century America and Britain following the success of George Stephenson’s 1829 Rocket. The comparative epithet raised questions about the transformations wrought by steam: in Walden (1854), for instance, Henry D. Thoreau decries the “devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town” (256). See also William Reynolds, European Capital, British Iron, and an American Dream: The Story of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad (2002; 4); and Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (2014; 717–9). 117 least expect it in a story about a steamship: on land, in the fireplace of Captain

MacWhirr’s wife: “She reclined in a plush-bottomed and gilt hammock chair near a tiled fireplace, with Japanese fans on the mantle and a glow of coals in the grate” (93). Nestled among commodities from around the globe—materials presumably purchased with the wages from her steamship captain husband—Mrs. MacWhirr wholly benefits from coal, whereas the absent-present coal on the Nan-Shan only creates trouble for Captain

MacWhirr. And given Mrs. MacWhirr’s noted coldness toward and distance from her husband (“The only secret of her life,” we learn, “was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good” [14]), the irony of the scene should not be lost on the reader. All of the material relations suggest an intimacy between land and sea: the maritime coal trade, after all, depends upon the terrestrial production and consumption of coal. Yet material exchanges and interdependencies between land and sea does not equate to nor guarantee emotional intimacy between Mrs. and Captain

MacWhirr. Here the domestic fireplace glowing with coal could not be thematically further from the strangely coal-less spaces of the Nan-Shan. Instead of intimacy, coal affords fragmentation.

It hardly seems the case that Conrad—a seaman with nearly two decades of experience—simply forgot to include a nonfigurative source of thermodynamic, motive power in Typhoon. As Cohen, Foulke, Jasanoff, Cannon Schmitt, Watts, John Mack, and

Zdzisław Najder have all noted, Conrad served variously as crewman, officer, and captain on eighteen different ships—both sail- and steam-powered—across almost twenty years, and his precise, practical nautical knowledge fueled his fiction (see Cohen 200–2;

Foulke, Sea Voyage 137–58; Jasanoff 133–4; Schmitt, “Tidal” 7–29; Watts, Typhoon 118 introduction; Mack 146; and Najder). Other of his maritime works explicitly account for energy resources. The earlier “Youth,” as we have seen, deals almost entirely with transporting a large cargo of coal, and Heart of Darkness includes Marlow and company tracking and replenishing the wood for the paddle steamer: “I had to keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood,” says Marlow, that “we could cut up in the night for the next day’s steaming” (137). And as Marlow steams his way up the Congo River toward the

Inner Station, the Russian trader even leaves a note for him on a pile of firewood, knowing that Marlow is on the “look-out” for fuel: “Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously” (140).

Conrad revels in such literal and technical nautical detail. As Cohen and Schmitt have noted, he writes with a distinct maritime realism. Cohen identifies the “pragmatic imagination” at work in Typhoon, which offers a glimpse of Conrad’s “delicate blend of creativity and realism” (204). And while Schmitt admits that Conrad’s prose can be

“fathomless and obscure,” focused on the importance of the “inscrutable,” Schmitt also draws out Conrad’s emphasis on the necessity of exactitude (8). Schmitt points to

Conrad’s own defense of technical language in his collection of autobiographical essays,

The Mirror of the Sea (1906): “to take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech” (18; see also Schmitt 9).

Conrad’s detailed shipboard descriptions, then, provide not just the setting but also tell us exactly how things fit together and function. Consider the opening pages of Typhoon, which provide a veritable blueprint of the Nan-Shan, a description so thorough it practically floats. The very first sentence announces that the ship is a “steamer” (3), and a precise account follows of the ship’s construction, layout, and workings. Built in 119

Dumbarton, the Nan-Shan was “finished in every detail” (7)—and detail is indeed the order of the day: we hear about the parts of the ship “from stem to stern ... from her keelson to the trucks of her two stumpy pole-masts,” and we learn about “her flat bottom, rolling chocks on bilges, and great breadth of beam” (8 and 7). The technical language here signals Conrad’s deep investment in maritime detail. We can get an exact sense of how the Nan-Shan would move in the water: as a wide (“breadth of beam”) and flat- bottomed vessel with additional keels (longitudinal fins) below the waterline (“rolling chocks on bilges), she would be an extraordinarily steady craft.31 Even the quality and craftsmanship of the Nan-Shan’s door locks become a minor plot point (see 9).

After leading MacWhirr (and the reader) on this detailed tour of the Nan-Shan, one of the builders says, “The little straws ... the little straws,” an allusion to the idiom

“little straws show which way the wind blows”—i.e., “small details may have important implications” (9 and 9n). The idiom is of course figurative, but it raises yet another important literal and technical detail: as a steamer, the Nan-Shan need not heed “which way the wind blows.” Steam power, explains Mack, “radically ... recast the terms of the human engagement with the sea” (99). Whereas sailing ships required a negotiation between the vessel, the crew, and the elements, steamships shift the balance of power toward the crew. Hence you would never “tack a steamer as if she were a sailing ship,” explains the ever-straightforward MacWhirr (32): why navigate around and through the wind when a “full-powered steamship” can make a straight—and presumably more efficient—course (31)? Confident in the mobility afforded by the “full-powered steamship,” MacWhirr scoffs at the idea of going around the storm: such a roundabout

31 See the Typhoon “Glossary” (316), s.v. “chock.” 120 route would add “[t]hree hundred extra miles to the distance, and a pretty coal bill to show” (33). MacWhirr’s disregard for environmental frictions is, of course, the catalyst and crux of the conflict in Typhoon: a steamer trying to punch a course straight through a massive sea-storm. The unimaginative captain fails to see any reason why he should not take the shortest possible path to his destination. But the one element that enables this disregard, and the one technical detail that the so seemingly detailed description of the

Nan-Shan leaves out, is coal. MacWhirr’s objection acknowledges that there would be a

“coal bill” for the voyage, but his close attention to resource cost fails to square, from a technical standpoint, with the absence of actual coal on the ship.

At first glance, such an absence seems to undermine the technical precision that

Cohen and Schmitt identify as a hallmark of Conrad’s maritime fiction. But Typhoon, I believe, serves as a crucial test case for what Schmitt calls “denotative reading,” an interpretive methodology that places the “figurative ... resonances” of texts in “close relation to the sheer facticity of fictional worlds” (15).32 Denotative reading challenges us to account for nautical details in a way that doesn’t simply explain them away; we need to consider how a maritime text speaks both figuratively and literally at the same time.

For Schmitt, Conrad’s technical details are not decorative bits of maritime color and authenticity but crucial facts that enable critical interpretation: when we encounter an unfamiliar technical term, we should define it (perhaps using the ever-present nautical

32 Schmitt uses “denotative” here as in “to denote,” to indicate, signal, designate, or identify. Building upon the concepts of “just reading” (Sharon Marcus), “surface reading” (Stephen Best and Marcus), and “strong metonymic reading” (Elaine Freedgood), Schmitt’s “[d]enotative reading would not aspire to replace symptomatic reading but would, rather, force interpretation to account for what is hidden in texts in conjunction with what is plain to see (if one would only look)” (15). 121 glossaries that accompany critical editions of Conrad’s texts), but then we must “press beyond readibility, to prolong the moment of interrupted sense long enough to register interpretive consequences” (19). Schmitt does exactly this in his literalist tracking of the tides in Heart of Darkness, analyzing how the nonhuman ebb and flow of the Thames becomes both the frame and the occasion for Marlow’s storytelling. It is the tides—rather than the human characters, as we might expect—that turn the novella’s comparative critique: by the story’s end the tides literally turn the Nellie (the yawl upon which

Marlow and the frame narrator sit) from the east and the mouth of the Thames, leading out to Africa, to the west and upriver, looking into the dark heart of London (see Schmitt

17–27). In the case of Typhoon, then, it’s not that the ever-technical Conrad made a mistake and simply forgot to mention the coal; it’s rather that the novel makes meaning on a technical level that exceeds the literal burning of coal as fuel.

More specifically, Typhoon situates human life and nonhuman energy within the same thermodynamic system; the two forces become so entangled that the one can stand in for the other. Typhoon posits a fundamental metonymic bond between the passengers and crew of the steamship and the fuel of the steamship. The novel notes the intimate connection between the “coolies” traveling in the cargo hold of the Nan-Shan and the imperial coal trade: these 200 men previously “toiled in coal lighters” or “sweated out in mines, on railway lines ... under heavy burdens” in “various tropical colonies” (7 and 6).

Likewise, the seamen and the coal work so closely together that human life and nonhuman energy function as interchangeable, if not fully isomorphic, in the story.

Again, while coal itself does not appear directly, we see how it directs the movements of both man and machine, drawing the two together. Consider, for example, the ambiguous 122 pronoun antecedents in the description of the Nan-Shan’s engine room: after introducing

“the engines,” “Mr. Rout” (the chief engineer), and “Beale” (the third engineer) as possible grammatical subjects, the narration describes how “[t]hey paused in an intelligent immobility ... There was the prudent sagacity of wisdom and the deliberation of enormous strength in their movements. This was their work—this patient coaxing of a distracted ship over the fury of the waves” (73). The easy reading here is that “They” and

“their” refer to the aforementioned coal-fired steam “engines.” But the plural pronoun could also encompass the work of Mr. Rout and Beale. The engines and the engineers all act as one, starting and stopping together, as if each body is an extension of the others.

(Indeed, earlier the narration notes how “the emergency” of the storm “had lengthened

[Mr. Rout’s] limbs” [69]; and one of his limbs, in fact, moves mechanically, “as if worked by a spring” [71].)

But just as in “Youth,” in Typhoon this metonymic “bond of the sea” proves to be the unmaking of those aboard the ship: the intimacy with coal produces yet another

“inhuman” leak, dispersing once-unified bodies—not only human characters but also nonhuman objects, dialogues, and descriptions—across the page in abstract prose. The narrative absence of coal prompts the figurative consumption of another natural resource aboard the steamer Nan-Shan: the crew and the passengers—what Conrad calls the

“human element.” In his 1919 “Author’s Note” to the collected edition Typhoon and

Other Stories, Conrad admits that his “interest” in Typhoon lies not in “the bad weather” but in “the extraordinary complication brought into the ship’s life at a moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her deck” (vii). In Conrad’s own words,

Typhoon places the “human element” under “exceptional stress”—a figurative pressure 123 not wholly unlike the literal pressure that transforms dead plant matter into the various types of coal.33 Testing the “extraordinary complication[s]” that the “human element” affords, Conrad in Typhoon explores how literal, biological life relates to the figurative, thermodynamic life of the steamship.

Much like coal, the “human element” releases energy at the cost of physical integrity. Put simply, as the element is used up, the material breaks down. Just as coal burns to ash, in Typhoon the narration decomposes bodies into their component parts.

Like coal, the “human element” is a limited resource, and the energy that it creates cannot elide the law of entropy, the tendency that all thermodynamic systems tend toward heat loss and disorder. This, again, is the second law of thermodynamics, laid down by the physicist Rudolph Claudius in 1865: the “bad news,” as Barri J. Gold lightly puts it, that

“[t]he entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum” (6).

Literary critics have found great hermeneutic utility in the figurative dimensions of entropy. Gold tracks the tension between energy and entropy in novels such as Charles

Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Oscar Wilde’s

Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); she equates the form and rhythm of a novel with that of an engine, a machine deeply concerned with work, efficiency, (dis)order, and heat loss. Other critics turn from narrative shape to narrative

33 Freese offers a brief overview of the long process of coal creation: Certain plants from the Carboniferous Period, an era roughly 290–360 million years ago, became trapped in oxygen-poor water or mud (or beneath other plants or oceanic sediments), and thus lacked the oxygen to fully decompose. What remained was black carbon, which, over time, transformed into peat. And then, “[a]fter being squeezed and slow-cooked by the tremendous pressure and heat of geological forces,” that peat eventually hardened into coal (20). 124 message. MacDuffie, in his clever reading of thermodynamic irreversibility in Robert

Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), points to the moral and theological implications of entropy, of “extrahuman” energy: “Entropy,” he explains, “is an almost religious concept, not merely because it owes a good part of its genesis to the Scottish Presbyterian imagination, but because it implies a final record and therefore a final record-keeper” (“Irreversible” 15). Bruce Clarke takes a similar tack, noting how “the Victorian thermodynamicists began to moralize the physical repercussions of the new energy laws ... [i]n the latter half of the nineteenth century”

(25). Crosbie Smith, Ian Higginson, and Phillip Wolstenholme likewise discuss the

“moral economy of the ocean steamship,” analyzing how the Ocean Steam Ship

Company (also known as the Blue Funnel Line) sought both moral and material perfection, seeking to reduce mechanical waste in their ships and economic waste in their business practices in the same way that their Liverpool Unitarian congregation sought to reduce “human ignorance, superstition, disease, and poverty” (446).

Yet entropy is not just a metaphor. Such readings of entropy paradoxically seem to look inward to the text rather than outward to the world; they consign the inevitable dissolution and heat death of the universe to the status of fiction. Conrad, I believe, offers us something other than a metaphorical thermodynamics. Especially in his steamship stories, we see entropy as a real, literal force—a networked actor on the same diegetic level as the characters. Conrad’s textual thermodynamics thus move us beyond closed, lossless human systems—in moral economies, for instance, the ultimate sum total of what we might call “goodness” and “badness” does not change, just the ratios—and toward nonhuman networks radically open to loss, decay, and dissolution. Put simply, Conrad 125 places the human, the nonhuman, and entropy in dynamic interrelation. His representative mechanics more closely resemble real thermodynamic exchanges and expenditures: an actual “element” must be used up. In Typhoon, the “human element” is figuratively spent as a metonymic replacement for coal.

As the Nan-Shan fights through the titular storm, bodies disperse into component parts. This breakdown of corporeal integrity occurs via what initially seems to be synecdoche, a specific type of metonymy: one body part comes to stand in for the rest of the person. The text repeatedly registers MacWhirr’s presence, for instance, as an arm hanging on Jukes’s shoulder or as a pair of lips pressed up against either an equally disembodied ear (Jukes’s) or the engine room speaking-tube (see 42, 46–8, and 52–3).

Hence when “Captain MacWhirr removed his arm from Jukes’ shoulders,” he “thereby ceased to exist for his mate” (48). At other times, though, the seemingly synechdocal body part fails to represent the respective whole body. Put differently, at times we cannot reconstruct the whole from the part. Voices, for instance, become detached from their respective bodies, as when Jukes hears “Captain MacWhirr’s voice ... speaking his name into his ear” (52). The grammatical subject here is not MacWhirr but specifically

“MacWhirr’s voice,” which seems to have come loose from the man himself. To be fair, this dissolution may be due in part to the destructive, obscuring sea-storm, what

MacWhirr repeatedly refers to as “dirty weather” (6). But I believe that these discourses of synecdochal reduction and of irreversible dispersion of bodies and voices also arise out of historically specific concerns over entropy—concerns shared by thermodynamics and imperialism.

We see this figurative atomization in full force in the dark, coal-dusted belly of 126 the Nan-Shan and the 200 “coolies”—the Chinese laborers who work directly with coal.

Their bodily breakdown is not only more pronounced but also decidedly more violent. As the storm tosses the steamship about, Jukes and the boatswain climb through the coal bunker to check on the Chinese men locked in the hold. There, in a space that recalls “the gallery of a mine” (57), the two crewmen discover a terrible scene:

One of the lamps had gone out, broken perhaps. Rancorous, guttural cries burst out loudly on their ears, and a strange panting sound, the working of all these straining breasts ... Jukes saw a head bang the deck violently, two thick calves waving on high, muscular arms twined round a naked body, a yellow-face, open mouthed and with a set wild stare, look up and slide away. An empty chest clattered turning over ... [F]arther off, indistinct, others [i.e., coolies] streamed like a mass of rolling stones down a bank, thumping the deck with their feet and flourishing their arms wildly (62).

These are the men who mine the coal in imperial colonies and who load the coal onto imperial steamships. If such labor hasn’t literally broken down their bodies, the fight here both literally and figuratively finishes the job. Onto a pair of “ears ... burst” the sounds of

200 “straining breasts” fighting for air. For context, the violent motion of the ship has broken open all of the men’s personal trunks—hence the pun on “empty chest”— scattering all of their hard-earned pay (silver dollars) across the floor. A melee ensues, and the coal workers meld into a “mound of writing bodies” (58)—a “mass” of heads, calves, arms, faces, mouths, eyes, and feet. A whole, individual body is impossible to discern. The figures at the edge of the room, in fact, grow not only “indistinct” but also petrified (in the chemical sense), turned from organic to inorganic matter via simile: they

“stream[] like a mass of rolling stones down a bank.”

Just like coal, these petrified bodies get broken down at sea. For to end the fighting, Jukes and other crewmen “charge[] in” to the mine-like hold, “stamping on 127 breasts, on fingers, on faces, catching their feet in heaps of clothing” (77). Again we have bodies in pieces: the Anglo crewmen’s assault reduces the Chinese laborers to mere

“breasts ... fingers ... faces ... [and] feet.” Echoing the figurative transformation from organic tissue to inorganic rock, the living here become like the dead: the laborers “torn out of the ruck became very limp in the seamen’s hands: some, dragged aside by the heels, were passive, like dead bodies, with open, fixed eyes” (78). The narration itself fractures in the face of such violence. Whereas the rest of the scene is focalized around

Jukes—the descriptions all tainted by the Englishman’s racism and distaste for anything foreign—here the laborers’ perspective breaks onto the page in a moment of free indirect discourse: “The coming of the white devils was a terror. Had they come to kill?” (78).

This brief yet poignant shift in focalization gives voice not just to the Chinese laborers but also to all of the colonized peoples exploited in Britain’s scramble to control energy resources.

“EVERY[/]BODY GOES INTO STEAM”

Once again, the bodies bonded to coal suffer an entropic breakdown. But why does the ever so technically minded Conrad continue to render entropy figuratively— here, via metonymic displacement, wherein the laborers associated with coal stand in for coal itself—rather than literally and directly depicting entropy? MacDuffie explains that entropy is a wholly anthropomorphic concept, and that we can understand the inherent tendency toward disorder only in human terms. He cites the mathematician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: “A non-anthropomorphic mind could not possibly understand the concept of order-entropy which, as we have seen, cannot be divorced from the intuitive grasping of human purposes” (277, qtd. in MacDuffie, 128

Ecological 217). In short, we cannot think purely thermodynamically; we need the human as a figurative vehicle. Hence in Typhoon, when the Nan-Shan faces the narrative absence of coal, the story turns to the “human element” on board, metonymically expending those bodies as fuel.

In the same way that steam power entails irreversible consumption—that is, we can never again gather that expended heat for useful work—the human bodies metonymically bonded to coal in Conrad’s sea fiction can never return to their past selves. In “Falk: A Reminiscence” (1901), for instance, the titular steamship captain turns to cannibalism, literally consuming human bodies to survive after his iron-hulled cargo steamer breaks down in the Antarctic. Shipboard discipline also breaks down, and the crewmen refuse to do their duties. “Nobody cared enough to lift a finger ... The organized life of the ship had come to an end,” Falk recalls (190-1). The ship itself begins to rust and rot, sealing the fate of the men aboard. The engines “decay[] slowly into a mass of rust, as the stilled heart decays within the lifeless body” (194 and 190). Hence Falk and a few others, drifting at the bottom of the world on a “corpse of a ship” with ever- dwindling food stores, save themselves by consuming their fellow men. Faced with such radically unsustainable consumption, any semblance of a system breaks down on the steamship: “The solidarity of the men had gone. They became indifferent to each other”

(191). Much like the bodies of the Chinese laborers on the Nan-Shan, the once-unified collective of Falk’s crew loses its communal integrity, in every sense of the word. To recall a phrase from “Youth,” entropy—registered here in the dissipation of discipline and the decay of the ship—is the “bad leak” that prompts “inhuman thing[s].”

In the face of entropy, we cannot go back—we can only slow down. Jevons 129 recognizes as much in The Coal Question. Britain’s fate as a nation and an empire hangs in the balance of coal: “how shortened and darkened will the prospects of the country appear, with mines already deep, fuel dear, and yet a high rate of consumption to keep up if we are not to retrograde” (243). William Makepeace Thackeray offers a similar assessment in an 1860 Cornhill Magazine:

We are the age of steam. We have stepped out of the old world on to Brunel’s vast deck, and across the waters ingens patet tellus [an enormous land stands open]. Towards what new continent are we wending? to what new laws, new manners, new politics, vast new expanses of liberties unknown as yet, or only surmised? ... We elderly people have lived in that prærailroad world, which has passed into limbo and vanished from under us. I tell you it was firm under our feet once, and not long ago. They [i.e., the steam industries] have raised those railroad embankments up, and shut off the old world that was behind them. Climb up that bank on which the irons are laid, and look to the other side—it is gone. There is no other side. Try and catch yesterday. Where is it? (504)34

As Thackeray sees it, the British “age of steam” marks the change from the old world to the new in no uncertain terms. He alludes to the famous steam-powered vehicles of the transportation magnate Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the nineteenth-century Englishman responsible for the Great Western Railway and the ocean steamliners Great Western,

Great Britain, and Great Eastern. Thackeray’s allusion, though, privileges sea over land: it is the “vast deck[s]” of Brunel’s three revolutionary steamships that carry us “across the waters” to “new continent[s] ... new laws, new manners, new politics, [and] vast new expanses of liberties.” The steam-powered change has come hard and fast, says

Thackeray, rendering the past absent if not completely inaccessible: the nigh-ancient

“prærailroad world ... has passed into limbo and vanished.” When we attempt to peek at

34 Mack cites a portion of this passage and provides a translation for the Latin (see 104). 130 the old world beyond the new railroad embankments, it simply does not exist: “Try and catch yesterday,” prompts Thackeray. “Where is it?”

Writing some thirty and forty years later, Conrad has seen Thackeray’s concerns about the “age of steam” play out on a global scale—especially what “vanishe[s]” under the aegis of coal-powered maritime industry. Conrad captures this dynamic in the quotation from his Personal Record (1912) that I take as my epigraph: “Everybody goes into steam” (189). In context, he’s complaining about the waning age of sail: as more and more seamen entered the steamship trade, the craft of sailing began to fall by the wayside. Yet Conrad’s lament also rings true in thermodynamic terms. We’re all part of the same system of energy, and none of us can escape the call of entropy. Every living body shall indeed “go[] into steam”—that is, expend its energy and dissipate. We might recall the false dichotomy emblazoned on the ill-fated Judea’s stern as a motto: “Do or

Die.” As we have seen, work and waste go hand in hand. Futility and loss come to the fore in Conrad’s maritime fiction, especially his stories built around steamships. Whereas sail power entails a negotiation between discrete elements—the human crew, the nonhuman winds and tides, and the nonhuman ship—steam power synthesizes these elements: the human and nonhuman become inextricable. In Typhoon, for instance, we cannot tell not only where one body ends and another begins, but also where human energy ends and nonhuman energy begins.

For Conrad, then, entropy is the means and the end not only of imperialism but also of humankind. The quest for global supremacy destroys both from within. In the words of MacDuffie, entropy “giv[es] the lie” to any hopes of human rationality

“progressively ... subduing the world” (Ecological 214). As an example he offers the 131

French schooner “firing blindly into the Continent” and the pilgrims fruitlessly emptying round after round into a “seemingly immortal hippopotamus” in Heart of Darkness.

MacDuffie ultimately sees in Conrad’s thermodynamic ecology a critique of industrial capitalism, an endeavor that tends toward “monumental forms of waste and inefficiency”

(Ecological 214–5).35 I, however, see Conrad grappling with a related but even more pressing concern, one that exceeds the scale of human endeavors: the Anthropocene, the era of geological, biological, and ecological change caused by humankind. Conrad, in short, captures the planetary effects of imperial exploitation.

Especially now, with our concerns over energy policy and global sustainability, the time is ripe for an ecological reading of Conrad’s maritime fiction. Peters says as much in an afterword from 2013 titled “Future Directions for Conrad Commentary”:

“Most recently,” he writes, “because of the importance of natural settings to the overall effect of so many of Conrad’s works, ecocriticism has ... begun to recognize Conrad’s works as arable land to till” (Critical Reception 245–6).36 Yet Lawtoo, writing in 2016, notes that Conradian ecocriticsm still remains a largely underdeveloped field: “despite

Conrad’s sustained critical and narrative engagement with catastrophes ... and end-of-the- world storms, his name is still surprisingly missing from contemporary discussions about environmental ethics” (43). Only recently, with the appearance of the edited collection

Conrad and Nature in 2019, have the fields of Conrad studies and ecocriticism truly

35 MacDuffie notes how the “entire operation of managers and accountant, waystations, steamboats, agents, rifles, and rivets” in Heart of Darkness is “dedicated merely to keeping a ‘trickle of ivory’ flowing out of the Congo” (Ecological 215). 36 Having just provided a thorough overview of over a century of Conrad commentary, Peters in his afterword speaks with authority about trends and directions in Conrad criticism. 132 engaged in a productive extended exchange of ideas. Lissa Schneider-Rebozo and Jeffrey

Mathes McCarthy, two of the editors of Conrad and Nature, emphasize “Conrad’s importance in understanding the Anthropocene,” the ecological age of “environmental crises that unfurl from human impacts.” Conrad’s texts, they argue, make clear how the

Anthropocene is “a phenomenon of both nature and culture” (8).

We might, then, add a fourth element to the “bond of the sea,” the metonymic triangulation of the oceanic, the imperial, and the thermodynamic: the ecological. As

Conrad brings the world to us via the “bond of the sea,” the threat of the global warming looms large. The coal-based figurations of “Youth” and Typhoon make clear the cascading consequences of an imperial energy regime that exponentially ratchets up entropy. A tiny chunk of carbon can bring down an entire ship. I see the Judea and the

Nan-Shan as test cases for the fate of a coal-burning world. The relationship is synecdochal: what threatens the ship threatens the whole planet. Conrad, in fact, often draws a comparison between a ship and a planet. In The Shadow Line: A Confession

(1916) the captain calls his ship “a planet flying vertiginously on its appointed path”

(107), capturing the vertigo-inducing circulation and “instability” of each.37 Marlow makes a similar comparison in Lord Jim: “When your ship fails you,” he says, “your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, taken [sic] care of you” (121). By this logic, the rough journeys of the Judea and the Nan-Shan—two ships intimately connected with coal—signal a planet on a path toward “fail[ure],” where it would no longer be able to “take[] care” of its inhabitants. Much like Conrad’s coal- bearing ships, our planet is not a closed system. “Every[/]body goes into steam” indeed:

37 See OED, 2d edn., s.v. “vertiginous, adj.,” 1b. 133 the more we burn, the closer we move toward that point of failure wherein the entire system collapses.

In his own maritime career, Conrad seems to resist the pull of steam power. In almost twenty years at sea, Conrad served on steamships for only a fraction of time: five months as a mate of the coastal steamer Vidar in 1887, and a brief stint as a steamboat pilot on the Congo River in 1890. As Cohen explains, though, Conrad hated steam: “he detested the quality of steam travel, and above all how steam took the art and adventure out of the work of the sea” (200; see also 201). In Conrad’s own words, sailing ships

“seem[] to draw [their] strength from the very soul of the world”; they “tak[e] nothing away from the material stores of the earth”—unlike steamships, with their “steel moved by white steam and living by red fire and fed with black coal” (Mirror 59). Hence his proud refusal of steam power in A Personal Record: “I never went into steam—not really” (189). Yet, as we have seen, coal and steam afford not only dissolution but also erasure. They produce amnesia in the same way that, in Thackeray’s description, the “age of steam ... vanishe[s]” the past. Conrad seems to forget how the British Merchant

Marine—a service intimately connected with coal—changed his own material being.

Conrad could never go back to being Korzeniowski. The stutter at the end of his refusal—the “not really”—suggests a creeping doubt: unable to escape the “bond of the sea,” Conrad did indeed “go[] into steam.”

Steam affords abstraction, a haziness that blurs and fragments not only the past but also the present. Several critics, in fact, equate Conrad’s penchant for ambiguity, uncertainty, and skepticism with Impressionism, a Modernist mode wherein the boundaries between objectivity and subjectivity blur. As Peters explains, in Conrad’s 134 prose “subject alters object, object alters subject, and both are altered by their context

(physical, cultural, or personal)” (Critical Reception 216).38 What results, in Andrea

White’s words, is a “growing skepticism about a knowable external world unmediated by a perceiving self” (166). This Modernist, Impressionist rendering of experience warps the dimensions of the narrative world. We see such abstraction in the spontaneous combustion scene of “Youth”—the scene that Watt uses to illustrate “delayed decoding,” the narrative mode wherein the audience must sort out objective and subjective sense impressions of the present on their own. Steam also troubles what critics such as Watts,

Jasanoff, Helen Chambers, and Villiers read as Conrad’s nostalgia—a looking back to the age of sail. Whereas Watts describes the nostalgia in “Youth” as “frank and unashamed”

(Heart of Darkness introduction xvii; see also Jasanoff 283; Chambers 113; and Villiers

102), Michael Greaney sees a “fragile nostalgia,” a precarious relationship between the past and the present (63). Such fragility, says Greaney, extends to the very form of the story: near the conclusion, the frame narrator echoes Marlow’s own speech patterns—but we should remain skeptical, Greaney warns, as to whether this is a sincere synergy or simply the listeners’ “bemused tolerance” of Marlow’s “maudlin sentimentality” (64).39

Conrad’s visions of a steam-powered future, however, are not merely fragmented or fragile—they are almost absent altogether. Consider again the spontaneous combustion scene in “Youth.” After the in-the-moment, Impressionist narration of the actual

38 See also Peters’s foundational study of Conrad’s Modernist tendencies, Conrad and Impressionism (2001). 39 Greaney also reminds us of the “torpid” frame audience in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the sailors literally falling asleep as they listen to the older Marlow’s story (64). 135 explosion, Marlow ominously describes the remains of the Judea: “A portion of several boards holding together had fallen across the rail, and one end protruded overboard, like a gangway leading upon nothing, like a gangway leading over the deep sea, leading to death—as if inviting us to walk the plank at once and be done with our ridiculous troubles” (87). The explosion seems to have set the crew on a singular path—yet

“nothing” lies ahead, except perhaps for death. The same might be said for the men of the

Nan-Shan in Typhoon: MacWhirr’s plan is simply to sail straight through the storm. Ever the empiricist, this steamship captain trusts only what he sees before him in the present:

“the past being to his mind done with, and the future not there yet,” he concerns himself only with facts, which he believes “can speak for themselves” (9). Unimaginative and straightforward to a fault, MacWhirr cannot conceive of a future: “Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of a prophecy till the fulfillment had brought it home to his very door” (6). Hence what critics read as Conrad’s nostalgia for the age of sail might actually be a fear about the future, the age of steam. It is less, then, that Conrad, Marlow, MacWhirr, and company turn to the past out of a sense of bygone romanticism, and more that they look to the past because the future is either too bleak or too impossible to imagine.

- - - 136

CHAPTER 3

Charting Persuasion

When it comes to the navy, Jane Austen knows her stuff. Writing to her sister

Cassandra in September 1796 about their brother Francis’s new ship appointment in the

Royal Navy, she specifies not only the type of vessel but also its gun-rating: “The Triton is a new 32 Frigate, just launched at Deptford” (13). In superscript Austen notes the

Triton’s thirty-two guns, inserting the figure before the ship’s name, as was standard typographical practice in Admiralty documents. And that number of mounted cannon, she knows, makes the Triton a “Frigate,” a specific designation above “sloop” but below

“ship-of-the-line.”

If we take the word of her nephew, then such naval knowledge stood out as an area of Austen’s expertise. In his 1869 memoir about his aunt, James Edward Austen-

Leigh explains that Austen “was always very careful not to meddle with matters which she did not understand. She never touched upon politics, law, or medicine ... But with ships and sailors she felt herself at home” (25). The first half of Austen-Leigh’s claim hardly stands the test of time: over the past two centuries, critics have explored the political and cultural intricacies of Austen’s writing. Through historical and biographical studies such as those by Helena Kelly, Janine Barchas, Deirdre Le Faye, William H.

Galperin, and Maggie Lane, we now see how Austen’s work thoroughly engages with her wider world. Yet one thing was clear from the very start, at least to her nephew: Austen’s understanding of the navy.

More recent critics echo Austen-Leigh, suggesting that naval matters hold a privileged place in Austen’s oeuvre. The most well known is perhaps Brian Southam, 137 who dedicates an entire monograph to tracing Austen’s “enthusiasm for the navy” (7).

Other notable examples include Jocelyn Harris, who declares that Austen was decidedly

“alert to the cult of naval heroism” (91). Barchas recognizes “Austen’s marked preference for the navy” and naval characters in her novels (162), what Penny Gay describes as Austen’s “close acquaintance with Navy culture” (63). Indeed, in an assessment of the field Mary A. Favret observes how “[i]t has become a commonplace to note ... Austen’s esteem for the navy” (166). Southam himself acknowledges the “trust that historians have placed upon Jane Austen as an accurate and dependable eye-witness to the naval matters of her time” (10n): he cites as an example Daniel A. Baugh, who draws upon Austen in his discussion of the eighteenth-century navy as a national institution in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (2002; see 153).

Yet when critics acknowledge Austen’s “esteem for the navy,” such moments often strike me as more biographical lip service than rigorous historicist methodology.

Claude Rawson, for instance, writes that “[t]he Navy is one of the few intrusions from the wider world which Jane Austen allows into the two inches of ivory, and in Persuasion it is especially prominent” (242). I question, though, just how hermetically sealed Austen’s

“two inches of ivory” (as she famously styles her work) are from the discourses and/or

“intrusions” of a “wider world.” As I show in this chapter, the presence of the Royal

Navy in Austen’s literary imagination is less of an inward “intrusion[]” and more of a catalyst for outward growth. Through recourse to histories of oceanic measurement and mobility, I trace how Austen’s writing bears a fundamental connection to a historically specific constellation of naval figures, issues, and practices. Small scalar measurement— even a mere “two inches”—can point us toward a global, oceanic network. Rawson’s 138 latter point, however, is indisputable: no text better showcases Austen’s articulation of naval knowledge than her final completed novel, Persuasion. As I seek to show here, contemporary naval discourse shapes both the content and the form of this novel.

Many historicist readings of Persuasion understand the text in terms of what I call

“Napoleonic time.” For Persuasion, observes Linda Bree, is Jane Austen’s first novel

“set firmly at a particular time,” especially in relation to Britain’s military history. The novel presents a “specifically articulated sequence of months, weeks, and even days ... a time span ... precisely delineated” (10). The story begins in “the summer of 1814” and concludes in February 1815 (Austen, Persuasion 50–1). This interval aligns almost exactly with Napoleon’s nine-month exile to Elba after the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the

“false peace” from 4 May 1814 to 26 February 1815. Many readers note the “obvious significance” of these dates: up to 1814, writes Tony Tanner, “Britain has won the wars against Napoleon ... primarily through her navy ... indeed the whole novel is not properly comprehensible without appreciating the importance of this background” (124).1 Favret, for example, ascribes the novel’s articulation of everyday uncertainty, duration, and trauma to martial and naval violence, specifically that of the Napoleonic Wars. In such historicist readings of Persuasion via Napoleonic time, all naval references point back to warfare.

I, however, am interested in historical temporality of another kind: what I call

“longitudinal time.” Persuasion reflects not just contemporary naval warfare but also a longer history of oceanic conquest: the history of longitude. The novel’s fascination with

1 For more on the concordance between Persuasion’s timeline and the “false peace” of the Napoleonic Wars, see Kelly (250); and Gay (63). 139 charting distance, accumulating moments, and tracking abstract, small-scale spans of relative time (e.g., seconds, minutes, and hours) speaks to its inheritance of over a century of debate about temporal and spatial precision. Whereas Sue Zemka attributes such precision in literature to the clock-time regimentation of the industrial factory (see 2 and 70), I want to suggest an earlier flashpoint for the history of the novel. Like Zemka, I am interested in the interplay of moments and durations their subsequent literary effects in nineteenth-century novels. But literary chronometry, as I see it, arises not out of terrestrial industrialization but rather oceanic mobility. Persuasion is undoubtedly naval, but to advance our understanding of the novel we must look beyond simple surface references to the navy. If we continue to rely upon the Napoleonic Wars as the only touchstone for Persuasion, then we limit the kind of histories we can read in the novel.

Instead, through recourse to the history and practice of longitude, I want to draw out

Persuasion’s wider maritime dimensions, its wider oceanic imaginary.

The quest for longitude sparked the desire to represent precisely the relationship between duration and distance—and that same desire, I argue, runs through Persuasion.

Longitude—the relative distance east or west of a fixed meridian—was notoriously difficult to calculate in Austen’s time: sailors needed to know not only their relative position north or south of the equator, but also the difference between their local time and the current time at a fixed meridian. Persuasion likewise pays very close attention to relative differences in time and space. The importance lies not so much in when or where something occurs in the novel, but rather how long or how far from a given referent that that event takes place. Characters note relative distances or dimensions as a means to mark narrative or thematic shifts: Elizabeth Elliot, once “mistress of Kellynch Hall,” with 140 its park and pleasure-grounds, is now removed thence “fifty miles”—yet she “boast[s] of their space” in Bath, “finding extent to be proud of between two walls, perhaps thirty feet asunder” (55 and 160). Other characters track the time from or until someone’s arrival:

Lady Russell “had not been arrived five minutes” before Anne Elliot relays the events of

Lyme Regis (148); Anne has “two minutes” of warning before an unplanned reunion with

Captain Wentworth (94); and Wentworth begins writing his confessional proposal letter another “[t]wo minutes” after Anne “enter[s] the room” (239).

In effect, the novel turns on a poetics of scale, marking intervals to coordinate actions and to make meaning. Yoon Sun Lee, in fact, calls Persuasion a “scale-making project[]” (172). She explains that scale-making involves more than just geographical, cultural, or historical specificity; rather, it is “the act of representing the conditions of referentiality.” Time and space become “dimension[s] of intersubjective action,” catalysts for characters to position themselves with respect to other peoples, places, and events in such a way that forges meaningful “conceptual linkages.” Austen, explains Lee,

“emphasizes abstract, uniform units of measurement that can be used to calculate distance and coordinate actions in time. Small-scale synchronization is her hallmark”

(172–3).

Austen’s attention to the synchrony of a shared world and to scalar measurement—feet and miles, minutes and hours—creates, in effect, a coordinate system. What results is not completely unlike a map, an abstract representation of relationships, a “connection made visible,” in the words of Franco Moretti. “Not that the map is itself an explanation,” he clarifies, “but at least, it offers a model of the narrative universe which ... may bring some hidden patterns to the surface” (3 and 53). Moretti 141 himself maps out Austen’s writing in Atlas of the European Novel (1999), charting

“narrative complications” or locating beginnings and endings across “Jane Austen’s

Britain” (19 and 12). Yet he is hardly the first—or the last—to map Austen’s novels.

Barchas notes how R. W. Chapman, Austen’s “first serious editor,” meticulously tracked carriage rides in Emma and towns, residences, and streets in Mansfield Park; and how

Vladimir Nabokov intensely charted the “numerical information” in Mansfield Park, diagramming character movement and triangulating the presumed location of the titular estate from its stated distance from real-world cities (2 and 11). Moretti, Chapman,

Nabokov, and Barchas herself all use maps, charts, and diagrams to “reveal patterns in

Austen’s art,” and they can do so precisely because Austen is so precise with her measurements (Barchas 12).

Persuasion’s scale-making thus posits a network—or, more accurately, multiple overlapping networks—of relative time and place. The world of the novel is built upon and around the relative time and/or distance between nodes. Laura Mooneyham White, in fact, equates Persuasion’s “depiction of social and physical space” with Global

Positioning System (GPS) technology, arguing that Anne’s acute awareness of time and space creates a kind of geographic network of culture. White considers how the

“precisions” of Austen’s “geographical imagination” render a consciousness hypersensitive to spatial relations: Anne remains acutely aware of her literal and figurative “placement in relation to others” (par. 1). While White’s formalist analysis largely remains within the bounds of the text, I believe that Persuasion’s GPS-like tracking of time and place also points outward toward larger networks of historical and cultural significance. Lee, I think, would agree: she argues that Austen’s “practice of 142 precise measurement becomes the key to [her] potentially globalizing or transnational imagination.” Austen, through her “focus on small-scale abstract units ... ultimately aims at large-scale ... networks (173). Barchas offers a similar assessment, noting “networks of historic references across Austen’s oeuvre”: “patterns,” she argues, “emerge across

Austen’s history-infused fiction that cannot be accounted for from within individual novels and stories (257 and 256). The afterword to Barchas’s insightful Matters of Fact in Jane Austen (2012) bears the telling title “Jane Austen’s Fictive Network.” There

Barchas examines “the close weave of the emerging social network” among the fictional and nonfictional surnames linked to Austen (255).

For me, I see Persuasion’s meticulous attention to timing and placement metonymically evoking a longer, oceanic history. As with my argument about the wider circum-Atlantic histories registered in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), the fundamental mechanic here is metonymy. I read Persuasion’s very moments, minutes, and hours as metonyms—figurative markers of larger cultural and geopolitical networks of maritime navigation and imperial-naval conquest. The novel’s charting of time and space is culturally contiguous with contemporary developments in both naval timekeeping and archival practice in the Royal Navy. I present here, then, a strong metonymic reading—à la Elaine Freedgood (see 14)—of Persuasion via longitudinal time; I consider the rhythms and delays of the marriage plot against a backdrop not of war but of maritime mobility.

My work draws upon network theory as well as oceanic studies scholarship, which calls for a historically specific, nonmetaphoric approach to maritime fiction. In reading Persuasion through longitudinal time, we can explore distributed systems of 143 influence and locate Austen and her work in a wider oceanic world—specifically, a vision of the global under the aegis of imperial Britain’s naval power. In looking toward a longer, oceanic history of measurement and representation, we gain a more concrete, historically specific understanding of the relationship between duration and distance. We have had discussions of temporality and discussions of spatiality, but longitude affords a thinking of time and space together. At sea, duration is distance, and vice versa.

Longitudinal time thus complicates studies such as Favret’s War at a Distance (2009), which, despite the suggestion of her title, actually collapses distance. For Favret, events

“at a distance” are always already here, enmeshed in the everyday. But such a metaphorical geography ignores very real, historically specific issues of global mobility.

Longitude signifies only if “over there” and “right here” remain distinct entities.

I begin by timing the marriage plot, tracking how Persuasion’s affective alignment of Anne and Wentworth depends upon careful attention to relative duration and distance. From there, to better understand how longitudinal time plays out in the novel, I turn to a specific maritime genre: the logbook. I track a stylistic exchange between the Royal Navy logbook and Austen’s prose. Persuasion, I believe, borrows several generic conventions from the logbook: a plain style, a compression of multiple perspectives into a narrative voice, and, most importantly, a careful attention to time and location. Austen’s ability to capture the patterns of everyday life, the “reiteration of the routine” (Lynch 259), mirrors the prose style of the logbook, which detailed the daily rhythms of labors, winds, and tides. I also see a similarity in voicing: the logbook merges multiple perspectives (the captain, the officers, the boatswain, the various clerks) in a non-omniscient account of events, and Persuasion uses free indirect discourse to blend 144 the characters’ thoughts and speech with that of the narrator. Persuasion also diligently charts characters’ locations and movements with respect to small-scale time—minutes and hours. The novel avoids assigning a specific clock time; instead, it notes a span of time. In the same way, sailors charted longitude not simply by knowing the time in

Greenwich but by knowing the difference between the time in Greenwich and the local time aboard ship. Ultimately, both the logbook and Persuasion deal with finding—and claiming—your place in a wider world.

TIMING THE MARRIAGE PLOT

Persuasion, at its core, works to bring Anne and Wentworth together in the same place at the right moment. Time and distance come into focus via the marriage plot—and vice versa: as feelings proliferate, so do chronotopic markers. Free indirect narration often merges with Anne’s temporal awareness and her sensitivity to Wentworth’s movements. Describing Anne being “stationed” in Uppercross, the narration notes that

“Captain Wentworth, after being unseen and unheard of at Uppercross for two days, appeared again among them ... He had been there [Lyme] for four-and-twenty hours”

(122–3). The narration moves toward temporal precision with respect to spatial proximity: when Wentworth is away, his interval of absence is described as “two days”— an imprecise, non-uniform designation of time (what counts as a “day”? sunrise to sunset? midnight to midnight?); however, when Wentworth returns to Uppercross, where

Anne is staying, the narration specifies his Lyme visit as lasting “four-and-twenty hours”—a granular breakdown that delimits exactly how long he spent in the town. The text’s cartographic and chronographic imaginary, focalized around Anne, works to locate

Wentworth—both a sailor and the eventual good suitor—in relation to Anne. 145

Indeed, Persuasion suggests that a successful marriage plot require one to attend closely to time. Consider the case of Louisa and her poor sense of time—an imprecision that (re)shapes the arc of the marriage plot for the whole novel. Near the end of the visit to Lyme Regis, “Louisa soon grew so determined [to walk along the Cobb, a stone breakwater wall that stretches out into the harbor] that the difference of the quarter of an hour ... would be no difference at all” (137). Here we have our first warning sign at the edge of the sea. Historically, it was a matter of profound importance if even a few seconds were lost during naval timekeeping. Louisa, however, was “determined” that a whole “quarter of an hour” could be ignored with impunity. She subsequently suffers the consequences: in jumping down from the Cobb into Wentworth’s arms, “she was too precipitate by half a second, she fell on the pavement” (138). “[H]alf a second” makes all the difference in this marriage plot. If Louisa had not fallen, then perhaps she and

Wentworth would have continued on their course together toward marriage. Such thinking, of course, is conjecture—but we shouldn’t overlook the fact that a pivotal moment in the marriage plot, a moment that places Wentworth, the good suitor, on a course away from Louisa, begins with the slip of a mere “half a second.” Louisa was “too precipitate,” too quick and too careless, a rashness that causes her precipitation, so to speak. Even the very form of the sentence—the comma splice—enacts the jarring effect of ill timing, a rough moment of transition in an otherwise smooth span of prose.

If Louisa moves too quickly, then the marriage plot, by definition, moves slowly.

Indeed, the fundamental mechanic of the marriage plot is delay—and Persuasion knows a thing or two about waiting. The novel, after all, features a heroine about to age out of marital eligibility: Persuasion is Austen’s only delayed marriage plot, with a whole eight 146 years between the initial courtship and the eventual proposal. Even mere moments— short, nonuniform bursts of time—work to remind the reader of longer spans of duration.

When, for instance, Wentworth notices Mr. Elliot eyeing Anne, the narration notes that

Wentworth “gave her a momentary glance,—a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, ‘That man is struck with you,—and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne

Elliot again’” (133). This free indirect exchange of a moment blends Anne’s voice with

Wentworth’s perspective. And this moment marks not only the interval from the past—he sees “something like” the Anne Elliot from eight years ago—but also the entrance of the bad suitor, Mr. Elliot, into the narrative action.

As a key component of the marriage plot, the bad suitor deals in delay. Mr. Elliot, with his slippery morals and unsavory motives, often disrupts or defers action, producing duration. Specifically, the bad suitor generates “moments” of delay. These spans of time are abstract and relative: much like seconds and minutes, moments do not denote a specific clock time. Yet, unlike seconds and minutes, moments are not uniform: one moment is not guaranteed to be the same duration as the next. We see the slippery temporality of moments play out during the concert scene in Bath. Anne, Wentworth, and

Mr. Elliot all circulate in the same room. Anne finally locates the “right direction” in which to see Wentworth; Wentworth, however, keeps a watch for Mr. Elliot, and when

Anne’s “eyes fell on him [i.e., Wentworth], his seemed to be withdrawn from her ... It seemed as if she had been one moment too late” (204–5). The presence of the bad suitor interferes with timeliness: Anne here is “one moment too late.” A moment later, she identifies the reason for her belated gaze: Wentworth’s jealousy of Mr. Elliot. “Could she have believed it a week ago—three hours ago! For a moment the gratification was 147 exquisite” (207). Here jealousy, or presumed jealousy, of the bad suitor effects a sudden compression of abstract time—Anne jumps from weeks to hours to moments—that disrupts the good suitor’s advances. Moments proliferate in this scene, disrupting a uniform measure of time: in the presence of the bad suitor, Anne—as well as the reader— cannot track time accurately.

As the concert scene continues, the very narration enacts this struggle for precision in the face of the bad suitor. After catching sight of Mr. Elliot, Wentworth

“only by very slow degrees came at last near enough to speak to her [Anne]” (206);

“They talked for a few minutes more,” but then they are interrupted in a yet another

“moment” by Mr. Elliot: “A few minutes, though as few as possible, were inevitably consumed” (207). Here the narration blends the voices of Wentworth, Anne, and Mr.

Elliot, juxtaposing their conflicting senses of temporality via free indirect discourse.

Wentworth carefully approaches Anne “by very slow degrees,” as if charting naval movement: degrees, of course, being the main unit for measuring latitude and longitude.

Historically, “by degrees” also signifies gradual movement along a given course of action.2 Wentworth’s movement is thus slow and deliberate with respect to Anne: he arrives “at last” not just next to her but specifically “near enough to speak to her.” In naval terms, we might say that Wentworth comes about to engage Anne, changing course to intersect. Now closer together, Anne and Wentworth can talk for “a few minutes more.” Although this span is not terribly specific—how long is “a few minutes”?—it reflects Anne and Wentworth’s move toward longitudinal precision, using uniform

“minutes” instead of the non-uniform “moments” in the lines above. In the same vein, the

2 See OED, 2d edn., s.v. “degree, n.,” 2b. 148 specification “more” functions as a relative marker of progress in the marriage plot, signaling an expansion upon or extension of previous conversations. But then appears

Mr. Elliot in another characteristic “moment” that tips the balance toward temporal imprecision. Having interrupted Anne and Wentworth’s talk, the bad suitor figuratively devours time, irresponsibly “consum[ing]” it in such a manner that renders the good suitor’s actions less effective. The passage, though, seemingly protests this delay in the voices of Anne and Wentworth: it notes that although “[a] few minutes” were “inevitably consumed” in the presence of Mr. Elliot, those lost minutes were “as few as possible.”

This free indirect interjection fights back against the delay and temporal imprecision of

Mr. Elliot.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LONGITUDE, OR, SIX DEGREES OF FRANCIS AUSTEN

To better understand the impact of delay and duration on Persuasion, I turn to a particularly chronometrically minded Royal Navy sailor, Francis William Austen. Francis was one of the first graduates of the newly expanded Royal Navy Academy in

Portsmouth, which sought to standardize naval navigational practice and instruct all cadets in geometry, plane and spherical trigonometry, chronology, and astronomy—all fields required for accurately calculating longitude. Francis studied under headmaster

William Bayly, a respected astronomer who carried out chronometer trials for the Board of Longitude during Captain James Cook’s famous voyages (see Southam 23).

(Chronometers became great objects of concern for Francis himself, a man noted for his

“extreme neatness, precision, and accuracy” [Hubback 3].3) After graduating in 1788,

3 Francis’s uncle—Edward, Lord Brabourne—offers an anecdote in his 1884 edition of

149

Francis joined the HMS Perseverance, where he served under Isaac Smith, a captain noted for his nautical astronomy skills—and yet another sailor who accompanied Cook on his famous voyages. And yes, Francis also happens to be Jane Austen’s older brother.

This is no coincidence. Francis thus serves as a key node in two overlapping distributed networks of influence: the Austen family and navigational history. Recall the letter that opened this chapter, Jane’s observation to Cassandra about Francis’s ship: “The

Triton is a new 32 Frigate, just launched at Deptford.” In talking about Francis’s ship appointment, Jane not only recognizes the specific type of vessel via its gun-rating, but also utilizes standard Admiralty notation for that gun-rating, placing the “32” in superscript before the vessel type. Simply put, Jane’s naval knowledge crystallizes around Francis.

By invoking Francis, then, I want to chart the wider oceanic world that gives shape to Persuasion. While some critics argue for Francis as the inspiration for

Persuasion’s Wentworth—I don’t believe it’s that simple. Francis is more than just a model, more than just a biographical “intrusion[]” (to use Rawson’s wording) into Jane’s literary imagination. Rather, Francis is a catalyst for Jane’s maritime realism and historical contextualization. He is Jane’s point of contact to contemporary naval discourse and navigational practice; he is the first figure in a literary-historical connect-the-dots that ultimately links Jane to Cook, the famed British navigator who reconceptualized oceanic

Austen’s letters: “On one occasion he [Francis] is said to have visited a well-known watchmaker, one of whose chronometers he had taken with him during an absence of five years, and which was still in excellent order. After looking carefully at it, the watchmaker remarked, with conscious pride, ‘Well, Sir Francis, it seems to have varied none at all.’ Very slowly, and very gravely, came the answer: ‘Yes, it has varied—eight seconds!’ (Austen, Letters 1:38, original italics). 150 mobility and who helped an imperial Britain conquer and control the waves. By tracing these “six degrees of Francis Austen,” I chart how Francis’s naval career inaugurates Jane by proxy into a maritime network deeply concerned with precision and mobility. In this section I trace connections between a distributed network of human and nonhuman actors. These figures, objects, issues, and methods form around Jane Austen’s sailor brother a historical constellation—one that will emphasize the historical specificity of temporal and spatial precision in Persuasion.

In 1786, at the age of twelve, Francis entered the Royal Naval Academy in

Portsmouth. Just a few decades earlier, he would have gone directly to sea for his education. Prior to the academy (founded 1729; opened 1733; expanded 1773), the only route for a prospective officer was an unregulated apprenticeship system: he would be shipped out as a “captain’s servant” aboard a selected vessel, subject to whatever lessons the commanding officer felt so moved as to offer. Unsurprisingly, the results varied wildly from captain to captain and ship to ship. By contrast, Francis entered a heavily regulated educational system at the academy, which provided “training under Admiralty control, outside of the prerogative and privilege of the captains” (Southam 18; see also 11 and 20). The academy strove for a more unified, consistent system of training. As described in the academy’s articles of 1773, “the scholars [were] instructed in writing, arithmetick, drawing, navigation, gunnery, fortification, and other useful parts of the mathematicks” (Article XIII in “Rules and Orders, 402–3). The “mathematicks,” explains

Southam, “included logarithms, geometry, plane and spherical trigonometry, navigational calculations, surveying, mechanics, chronology (the science of time measurement)[,] and astronomical observation” (Southam 23). Francis’s education in the two latter fields 151 provides the first link toward an oceanic reading of Persuasion: chronology and astronomical observation were indispensible in tracking longitude at sea. Southam, in fact, notes that the academy placed “considerable emphasis” upon the calculation of longitude, what he calls “the knottiest of all navigational problems” (23).

Indeed, in the Austens’ day it was notoriously difficult to calculate longitude. Part of the complexity stems from the layout of navigational gridlines. Running east-west, latitude lines are parallel, hence the distance represented in each degree of latitude remains constant. Thus regardless of how far north or south you are of the equator, to calculate latitude all you need to know is the angle between the horizon and the noontime sun. By contrast, longitude lines converge at the poles, hence the distance between each varies depending upon your position. The closer to the equator you are, the greater the distance represented in each degree of longitude. Compounding the inherent complexity of navigational geometry were the contemporary methods and materials used for calculating longitude. As Karel Davids notes, sailors had understood the principles behind longitude since at least the 1600s (see 87). They lacked, however, clear, reliable methods and sufficiently accurate instruments and charts.

By the mid-eighteenth century, there were two primary methods of calculation while at sea: lunar distances and chronometry.4 The lunar distances method, explains

Davids, involves comparing the time at which a given distance between the moon and a

4 Besides these two methods, sailors could also calculate longitude by taking bearing from a landmark of known longitude (this, of course, requires them to be near a coastline) or by tracking the magnetic variation of their compass (the angle between magnetic north and true north—but this angle changes depending on one’s location and the time of the year). See Davids, “The Development of Navigational Techniques, 1740–1815” (90). 152 chosen celestial object (the sun, a planet, a star) “is observed on board and the time at which this same phenomenon is observed at a prime meridian ... In order to know the time at which a given true distance is observed at the prime meridian, the seaman consults an almanac in which ... particular points in time are predicted for a certain period in advance, normally a year” (87 and 89). As you might expect from this description, the lunar distances method was labor intensive: it required not only the instruments to calculate local time, altitudes, and lunar distance but also the nautical almanacs predicting lunar distances for a given meridian—and there were still multiple national variations for the prime meridian in the late eighteenth century.5 Further still, this method required that the navigator perform a calculation dubbed “clearing the distance,” a means of deriving the true distance of lunar objects from the apparent distance—that is, the optic distortions brought about by the earth’s atmosphere. By 1797, there were at least forty different formulas for “clearing the distance” (see Davids 89).

By contrast, the chronometry method, although also dependent upon advanced principles of spherical geometry, was relatively simple to calculate: the difference between the local time (determined via the sun or the North Star) and the time (kept with a chronometer) at a known location, such as a meridian correlates directly to the distance east or west of the fixed reference point. Because the earth rotates at a fixed rate (fifteen

5 The French used a meridian over Paris, while the Dutch used both a meridian over Tenerife and one over Amsterdam, with the Amsterdam Admiralty formally recognizing the Tenerife meridian in 1788. During the French occupation of Holland, the Dutch used the meridian at Paris and another at Cadiz. The British used the meridian at the Greenwich Observatory, founded in 1675 but not accepted as the international standard by all seafaring countries until 1884. See Willem F. J. Mörzer Bruyns, “Sources of Knowledge: Charts and Rutters” (74). 153 degree per hour), all sailors had to do was measure the time difference. The problem with the chronometry method, however, lay in the instruments: up until the last two decades of the eighteenth century, sailors had no reliable tool for keeping time at sea. Longcase (i.e., grandfather) clocks were accurate but not portable: the motion of a ship renders it impossible for a pendulum to maintain a regular rhythm. And smaller chronometers were portable but not accurate: without a pendulum, chronometers relied upon a system of springs and escapements, but these metal mechanisms would shrink or expand (and sometimes even vary in flexibility) depending upon environmental conditions.

The quest for an official solution to these problems of precision officially begins in Britain in 1714 with the Longitude Act. Passed during the reign of Queen Anne—a conspicuous coincidence, considering the name of Persuasion’s protagonist—the act offered a reward of up to £20,000 for an invention and/or method that could reliably calculate longitude—the relative distance east or west of a fixed meridian—at sea:

[I]t is well known by all that are acquainted with the Art of Navigation that nothing is so much wanted and desired at Sea as the Discovery of the Longitude for the Safety and Quickness of Voyages [and] the Preservation of Ships and the Lives of Men[.] And whereas in the Judgment of able Mathematicians and Navigators several Methods have already been discovered true in Theory though very difficult in Practice ... others may be invented hereafter ... [N]o such Inventions or Proposals hitherto made have been brought to Perfection (“Act” 927).

“[N]othing is so much wanted and desired at Sea” as a reliable, accurate measure of longitude. While sailors have been able to calculate latitude—the relative distance north or south of the equator—since the time of the ancient Greeks, a dependable system for 154 deriving longitude still eluded navigators in the eighteenth century.6 The 1714 statute makes clear that while some working methods (such as taking bearings, tracking the magnetic variation of the compass, or using “dead reckoning” [see below]) do exist, they leave much to be desired. And while other methods (such as lunar distances or chronometry) are “true in Theory” they are “very difficult in Practice.” In sum, “no such

Inventions or Proposals ... have been brought to Perfection.” And nothing but

“Perfection” will do—especially when the efficacy and, ultimately, the fate of British maritime navigation and oceanic conquest remains on the line.

Precision is indeed the order of the day. The prize money for the Longitude Act, in fact, varies with the “Degree of Exactness”: if the method calculates longitude within one degree of accuracy, the inventor wins £10,000; within two-thirds of a degree,

£15,000; and within half a degree, the full £20,000.7 For reference, one degree of longitude equates to a difference of four minutes between the point of measurement and the point of reference (i.e., the meridian). So, for example, at the equator, where one degree of longitude equals sixty-eight miles, a timekeeper that errs by just one minute could produce a longitude measurement off by seventeen miles. That may not seem like much to us, who live in an age of cars and airplanes, but in the eighteenth century, any

6 On the long history of knowledge around latitude, see Brian W. Richardson, Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyages Changed the World (2005; 32). 7 The statute proclaims that “the Commissioners appointed by this Act ... shall declare and determine how far the same [experiment] is found practicable and to what Degree of Exactness ... [with] a Reward or Sum of Ten thousand Pounds if it determines the said Longitude to One Degree of a great Circle or Sixty Geographical Miles[,] to Fifteen thousand Pounds if it determines the same to Two Thirds of that Distance[,] and to Twenty thousand Pounds if it determines the same to One Half of the same Distance” (“Act” 927). 155 distance at sea could be deadly. The ocean offers no landmarks.

Consider the case of the British Commodore George Anson, who in April of 1741 failed for two weeks to find land because of his inability to calculate longitude. Having run out of fresh food and water, eighty of Anson’s men died of scurvy in that interval (see

Richardson 33). Without an accurate timekeeper, Anson had to rely upon the ominously named method of “dead reckoning,” a practice that estimates longitude based on the ship’s approximate speed and heading. Dead reckoning, however, depends wholly upon accurate sea charts—which Anson did not have. (His charts placed their reference point,

Juan Fernandez Island, at 135 miles west of Valparaiso. In actuality, this island lies 360 miles west of Valparaiso, more than double Anson’s estimated distance [see Williams

54–5].) Dead reckoning also fails to account for ocean currents—a flaw that Anson himself recognized during a navigational mishap in early April: “It was indeed most wonderful,” he recalls, “that the currents should have driven us to the eastward with such strength; for the whole squadron esteemed themselves upwards of ten degrees more westerly than this land [Noir Island], so that in running down, by our account, about nineteen degrees of longitude, we had not really advanced above half that distance”

(Anson 117–8, my italics). Anson, through dead reckoning, believed his ship to be 300 miles west of Noir Island. Imagine his surprise when, in the middle of the night, the cliffs of Cape Noir reared up out of the darkness—just two miles ahead.

Before the navigational developments in the second half of the eighteenth century, sailors were thus restricted to, as Brian W. Richardson puts it, a “world of lines.” Without a reliable scheme for calculating longitude, early oceanic navigators often “stuck to a single line of latitude, the ‘common track,’ when moving east and west” (32–3). Francis 156

Drake, for instance, crossed the Pacific Ocean at 15°N latitude in 1579: as long as he found himself at 15°N latitude every day at both noon and midnight (measuring with an astrolabe or cross-staff the angle between the horizon and the highest point of either the sun or the North Star), he knew that he was still on the same path. But by limiting transoceanic travel to straight lines between predetermined points, the “common track” method also limited sailors’ experience of an oceanic world. The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English navigator William Dampier offers an apt metaphor: “one who rambles about a Country can give usually a better account of it, than a Carrier who jogs on to his Inn, without ever going out of his Road” (qtd. in Richardson 33). For Dampier, to “ramble” is to move toward a more complex understanding of your environs. But for early sailors, limitations in navigational instruments, charts, and methods prevented any kind of nautical “rambling,” and, in the process, reduced—quite literally—the dimensions of the navigable globe. The “world of lines” was a world of limits.

Enter James Cook. In a series of circumnavigational voyages, Cook revolutionized oceanic mobility. His travels, explains Richardson, “created a mathematical, scientific, and textual vision of the world’s places that transcended the opinions and guesses offered by his predecessors.” Cook’s three voyages, from 1768–79,

“create the conditions for exploration that will dominate the nineteenth century”

(Richardson 7). Cook set the standard practices for deriving location at sea and laid the foundations for nineteenth-century naval log-keeping. Joseph Conrad rightly calls Cook one of the “great masters of maritime exploration,” a man who “worked at the great geographical problem of the Pacific”—that is, longitude (Conrad, “Geography” 250).

Cook’s second voyage, from 1772–75, put to the test the chronometry method of 157 longitude calculation. Importantly, Cook carried with him the K-1 chronometer, an exact copy of John Harrison’s H-4 chronometer made by the London watchmaker Larcum

Kendall. (H-4 was the fourth timekeeper that John Harrison, an English carpenter, presented to the Longitude Act board for assessment; it eventually won him the full

£20,000 prize in 1774.8) When Cook returned to Portsmouth in July 1775, he sang the praises not only of the chronometry method, but also of the K-1: “Mr Kendals [sic] Watch has exceeded the expectations of its most Zealous advocate and ... has been our faithful guide through all vicissitudes of climates” (Cook 2:692). Dava Sobel notes that the HMS

Resolution’s logbook contains “numerous references to the timekeeper, which Cook calls

‘our trusty friend the Watch’ and ‘our never failing guide, the Watch’” (qtd. in Sobel,

150).9 Cook and his men calculated that the K-1 altered its rate on average by five- eighths to seven-eighths of a second per day, an impressively small difference that Cook himself calls “very inconsiderable” (Cook 2:47). For comparison, another chronometer on board—one of three cheaper imitations built by John Arnold, who eventually pioneered the mass-marketing of chronometers—lost an average of one minute, thirty- one seconds per day, sometimes varying its rate by up to thirty seconds per day (see

8 John Harrison had no easy route either to his prize money or to official recognition for having solved the problem of reliable timekeeping at sea. For his story, see Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (2005). Sobel’s overenthusiastic title is characteristic of her style, which makes a great effort to shape Harrison’s story into sleek tale of genius overcoming hardship and scandal. Nevertheless, Sobel’s work offers a detailed account of the specific innovations of the H-1, H-2, H-3, and H-4 chronometers and tracks the politics that shaped the decisions of the Admiralty board and the Royal Observatory. 9 Cook also praises both Harrison and Kendall by name in the logbook: “It would not be doing justice to Mr Harrison and Mr Kendall ... if I did not own that we have received very great assistance from this useful and valuable timepiece” (qtd. in Sobel, p. 150). 158

Sobel 156–7). Remember that a minute of error could produce a longitude measurement off by up to seventeen miles. For the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century navigator, every second mattered. Richardson puts it simply: “What mattered for the success of Cook’s engagement was [his] ability to measure” (36).

With chronometric errors reliably reduced to mere fractions of a second, Cook could break free of the world of lines. The “common track” method became a thing of the past. Armed with the K-1 and the chronometric method for determining longitude, Cook and crew no longer needed to hug the coastline to avoid getting lost, nor did they need to keep a continuous record of ship movement for estimation via dead reckoning. Instead, explains Richardson, the crews of the HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure could now

“determine location sporadically” (35, original italics). Precise maritime chronometry afforded a new freedom of movement. Because Cook—and all navigators that followed in his wake—could now reliably calculate longitude at will, he could (as Richardson describes it) confidently “wander” the ocean. With the reliable K-1, Richardson writes,

it was possible for Cook to chart a linear course between two points, and not to have to work his way along a coast or remain in a particular latitude [i.e., the “common track” method], for fear of getting lost in the empty space of the ocean. Cook’s world became a world of points connected back to the coordinate grid rather than to the coasts of continents. The difference here is crucial. Not only can Cook move around the world in a different way, he can also narrate the location of places differently (35).

What was once a single-dimension line transformed into a multi-dimensional area: we move from a world of lines to a world of points, one free from earlier navigational limits.

The K-1 and the chronometry method thus inaugurate for Cook what Carl Schmitt calls a “spatial revolution,” a “new perception of space” that remaps the world. “All important changes in history,” Schmitt explains, “imply a new perception of space. The 159 true core of the global mutation, political, economic, and cultural, lies in it” (29). Cook transformed not only how oceanic information was tracked and collected, but also “how movements and places in the world were imagined” (Richardson 35). Cook’s

“wandering” is one and the same with Dampier’s “rambl[ing]”: it changes the fundamental experience of the oceanic world. For Cook’s newfound navigational mobility transforms not just movement but also narration. As Richardson puts it, because

Cook could now “move from one place to another at will ... [t]he spatial organization of

[his] narrative was no longer linear” (36). His movements arose not out of navigational necessity—i.e., sticking to a coastline or a “common track” to avoid getting lost—but rather out of diagnosis. Working at the confluence of temporal and spatial precision,

Cook’s “wandering” was not a random stumbling across the seas but rather a “spatial revolution,” his own kind of nautical education plot. On his second voyage Cook could loop back, circle around, revisit and return: he swept across the Antarctic Circle and the

Pacific Ocean multiple times—a heuristic circularity not unlike that of Persuasion, which brings back together a more mature Anne and Wentworth after eight years apart.

LONGITUDINAL STYLE, OR, ANNE’S CHRONOMETRIC EDUCATION

In what follows, I want to show how Anne follows in the footsteps of James

Cook. To do so, I turn back to the first degree of connection—Francis Austen—and examine his logbooks from his early commands: the HMS Triton (1797; the same frigate named in Jane’s letter to Cassandra), the HMS Peterel (1799–1800), the HMS St Albans

(1807–08), and the HMS Elephant (1812–13). Persuasion, I argue, enacts its own

“spatial revolution” by borrowing three stylistic principles from Francis’s logbooks: free indirect discourse, collective movement, and diagnostic entries. Through this stylistic 160 accordance the novel locates itself within a longer oceanic history and reveals its deep engagement with precision and mobility.

Francis’s logbooks frequently employ something like free indirect discourse—a style for which his sister is famous, if not the foundational figure. We have seen Jane’s use of free indirect discourse in the “Timing the Marriage Plot” section above, and I will return to its importance in Persuasion below. Here, though, I want to consider Francis’s usage in his logbooks. To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that Jane owes her signature style to her brother. My argument is not about stylistic debt but rather historical context and contiguity. Jane’s use of free indirect discourse in Persuasion (and, arguably, in all of her other novels) places her in intimate contact with naval representational practice. As I argue throughout my project, the fundamental mechanic of the oceanic imaginary is not metaphoric but metonymic. It is less that Persuasion’s style resembles that of Royal Navy logbooks and more that the novel is fundamentally linked to contemporary discourses in navigation, measurement, and oceanic conquest.

Having examined seven years’ worth of Francis’s logbooks, I found that his entries rarely use the first-person singular “I.” The plural “we” does appear from time to time, but the majority of the standard entries lack an identifiable grammatical subject.

Consider, for instance, an entry in one of the Peterel logbooks:

Saw 4 sail of Vessels to the Eastward appearing to be Men of War[.] at 4[AM] perceived them form in a Line on the Starbd. Tack; spoke L’Espain, and hauled up to reconnoitre them. ¼ past 4[AM] bore up towards them, beat to Quarters, and cleared ship for Action. ... hauled to the Wind on the Starbd. Tack and made sail, Cape de Gatt. EbN 2 or 3 Leags. ¼ past 6 Tkd At 9 wore Ship (entry for 9 March 1799, logbook of 161

HMS Peterel [5]v).10

The stylistic effect is not unlike novelistic free indirect discourse, with the officers and crew of the Peterel all speaking through a single, non-omniscient voice. Although, for example, the line “Saw 4 sail of Vessels to the Eastward” is written in Francis’s hand, we cannot say for certain if it was Francis himself who first spied them—most likely not, as he was the commanding officer and may not have kept regular watch with the rest of the crew. The free indirect styling thus disperses action: who in this entry is “haul[ing] to the

Wind on the Starbd. Tack,” “mak[ing] sail, and “w[earing the] Ship” [i.e., steering away from the direction of the wind]? Certainly multiple sailors are involved here, none of which are Francis—again, as commanding officer his labor duties would differ from the rest of the common sailors.11 In historical naval practice, the logbook was indeed an amalgam of voices, perspectives, and actions. The 1808 Regulations and Instructions (the official list of articles governing all policies, principles, and procedures for Royal Navy sailors) instructs captains to employ as many capable officers in taking observations, gathering in effect as many qualified contributing voices as possible (see Regulations, article XVI, 145–8). These sailors would make their own observations, calculations, and

10 According to Francis’s remarks, the action of this entry begins at 3:00 a.m., but he is using the nautical day, which runs twelve hours ahead of the civil day. In other words, the action here takes place around 3:00 p.m. on 8 March 1799. 11 See my discussion of bodily mobility and discipline in my fourth chapter: as with the extended bodies and prosthetic laboring hands aboard the Hispanola in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the logbook entries express a fundamental concern with collective movement. 162 remarks in their own “rough” logs, the contents of which would then be culled and compiled in an official “smooth” log.12

The free indirect styling affords an expanded consciousness of time and space. In blending multiple perspectives with that of Francis, our commander-cum- narrator, the logbook offers him an enhanced understanding of the world around him. The log registers collective movement dispersed over a wide area—sometimes an area beyond the scale of immediate individual perception. For example, during an 1807 voyage to China on the St Albans, escorting a convoy of East India Company ships, Francis tracks the convoy ships’ longitude (calculated via chronometer)

[see Figures 3–5, right].13 Note the variation in position within the convoy: on 29 June 1807, for instance, the

Windham lies at 8°49’W while the Earl Howe lies at

9°3’W. (Each degree [°] of latitude or longitude is Figures 3–5: Francis Austen, facing divided into sixty minutes [’], each of which is further page entries for 29 June and 3 and 5 July 1807, logbook of HM Ship St divided into sixty seconds [”].) Taking their latitude to Albans, AUS/3A, Austen Family be 46°13’N (which Francis notes next to the table), the Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

12 See OED, 3d edn., s.v. “rough, adj. (and int.).,” S5a (“rough logbook”). 13 See Francis Austen, facing page entries for 29 June and 3 and 5 July 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans. 163 two EIC ships stand a striking thirty-four nautical miles (approximately sixty-two kilometers) apart from one another. Yet, despite this distance, the ships still form part of a single convoy—an arrangement not unlike the nodes of a single distributed network, which are fundamentally connected but not centralized. In sum, by tracking movement that is at once collective and distributed, the logbook enables Francis to conceive of movement beyond his immediate perception: he may be in one place, but through the log he can think elsewhere, so to speak. Anne faces the same challenge in Persuasion: how does one learn to conceive of a distributed network, of multiple actors moving with relative distance and duration?

On some days, Francis leaves blank the entries for certain ships [see Figures 6–7, right].14 We could speculate on reason behind this omission: perhaps the

St Albans temporarily lost contact with the given EIC ship, or perhaps the usually fastidious Francis forgot to record that day’s data. What matters to my project, though, is not the cause but the effect: the logbook never pretends to omniscience. Even as multiple voices and perspectives merge into a single free indirect account, we never reach total knowledge. The logbook, Figures 6-7: Francis Austen, facing page entries for 11 and 19 July 1807, rather, serves as a heuristic archive by which to learn logbook of HM Ship St Albans, AUS/3A, Austen Family Collection, to think and act in time with others. Francis had to National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

14 See Francis Austen, facing page entries for 11 and 19 July 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans. 164 learn how to deal with the gaps, how to move in a world that he did not yet know completely. In practice, in fact, the logbook served as a training tool for officers: as noted in the Regulations and Instructions, qualified sailors were instructed to make “Surveys and Observations for their personal Instruction and Improvement.” And when these various lieutenants, masters, mates, and clerks handed in their “rough” logs to be amalgamated into the “smooth” log, the captain would “examine the accounts given ... to correct, improve, or enlarge them” (Regulations 46–7 and sig. 3U2r)—a heuristic process of writing and rewriting that moves toward greater accuracy.

Francis’s logbooks feature several of what I call spatio-temporal “diagnostic moments,” entries wherein Francis reviews his calculations, compares different methods or sources of information, and/or assesses the accuracy of his instruments. Such diagnostic moments shape his narrative of movement in the St Albans logbook. While at sea, Francis often includes two longitude measurements—one measurement by “account”

(that is, by the process of dead reckoning) and one according to the chronometer—which he then compares. Take, for instance, the facing page to the entry for 26 June 1807, where Francis notes and analyzes the difference in measurements:

I take my Departure from the bearing of the Lizard at 8 A.M. considering it to be in Latde: 49°.58’ N. & Long: 5°.11’ West of Greenh.

Course from the Lizard S 37° W. Distance 32 Miles

Latde: by {Acct. 49°.35’ / Obsn. 49°33’} N.— Longde: by {Acct. 5°.40’ / Chron. 5°.42’} W.

Cape Finisterre S 20°.9’ W:—distant 142 Leagues.”15

15 Francis Austen, facing page to the entry for 26 June 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans. These kinds of calculations and comments appear on most of the other facing

165

Translation: at this moment, the St Albans has sailed thirty-two miles from the Lizard, a peninsula in southern Cornwall, on a course 37° west of south (i.e., a compass heading of

157°). Based on the estimated position of the Lizard (and its distance west from

Greenwich) and the speed of the St Albans, the current longitude of the ship is 5°40’W by dead reckoning; the chronometer, however, gives coordinates of 5°42’W. In brief,

Francis discovers a discrepancy of two minutes between the two longitude measurements.

Two minutes may not strike us as a significant difference, but here, just four days into his journey, this discrepancy suggests that the St Albans may already be one nautical mile

(three kilometers) off course. Hence Francis’s constant navigational vigilance: partial degrees can add up over time, an ever-accumulating error. Every minute counts.

With so many variables at play—the assumed location of reference landmarks, the speed of the ship and its course heading, the different methods of measurement, the trustworthiness of the instruments, the accuracy of previous entries in the same log—

Francis must be as precise as possible. His diagnostic entries serve as a means to fight the friction introduced by inaccuracy—the incorrect data, overly complex formulas, and/or faulty instruments that mar maritime mobility. On the way toward the Cape of Good

Hope, for example, Francis remarks that “[b]y the bearing of the Land I find the Watch here gone very correct, and consequently that my Reckoning is 39 Miles of Longde too far to the Westward—which I shall correct accordingly.” In other diagnostic entries, he reviews various longitude calculations: “The Long. by Chronr. brought on till [sic] we were abreast of the NW. Point ... gives 25°.8’ W for its Longde: By Chronr in January

1805, I made the Longde. of it to be 25°.9’ W.—Tofino [sic] in his Charts makes it 25°.3’ pages of his St Albans logbook. 166

W.” (facing page to the entry for 14 July 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans). He compares his most recent measurement (25°8’ W) to his measurement from two years ago (25°9’ W) as well as to the measurement (based on surveys by Vincente Tofiño) given in the Admiralty charts (25°3’ W). Again, the discrepancy is seemingly minor— only a few minutes separate each measurement—but that makes all the difference to

Francis. Similar diagnostic entries occur throughout Francis’s time aboard the St Albans.

On 2 August 1807, for instance, he observes that

[b]y the Chronr. the Ship appears to have been set 40 Miles to the westward of Acct. in the last 24 hours; which with the Difference between the Obsn. at Noon and the Latitude by DR [i.e., dead reckoning] (16 Miles) will give 44 Miles for the set of a Current to the WNW; or nearly 1 ¾ Miles an Hour!!!! (facing page to the entry for 2 August 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans).

Put simply, the chronometer reading (taking into account the force of the ocean current) places the St Albans forty-four miles west-north-west of where the dead reckoning

“Acct.” assumes the ship to be—a discrepancy in distance that merits four exclamation points from the usually reserved Commander Austen.

For my purposes, then, the value of the logbook lies not so much in the specific location of the St Albans but rather in Francis’s explicit tracking of relative differences in time and distance. His world is one not just of minutes and miles but specifically of minutes from or miles between. His mobility—and, by extension, his agency and efficacy as a naval officer—depends upon his ability to assess his relative location, to diagnose his place within a wider world via his logbook, his charts, and his chronometer. In

Persuasion, we see Anne engaging in this same kind of negotiation of mobility. As she moves through the marriage plot, she learns to be a better timekeeper; as a result, she 167 gains a better sense of relative movements in the world around her. She can place herself within the map that is Persuasion. Anne’s chronometric education, in other words, enables her to “wander” like Captain Cook—that is, to move in a way that reshapes her fundamental experience of the world.

At the start of the novel, Anne is a poor timekeeper: she cannot clearly define relative intervals of time. Consider her famous realization, delivered in free indirect discourse after her first reunion with Wentworth: “Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing” (94). Alas indeed: affect warps Anne’s sense of temporality; “eight years” slip away to “little more than nothing” in the span of a single sentence. Her “retentive feelings” cling to the past and effect a return that disrupts uniform measures of time. She cannot resolve the discrepancy between two chronotopes: for Anne the past is at once wholly present (i.e., the relative distance between past and present dissolves to “little more than nothing) yet also something supposedly lost forever: she expects that eight years would produce an

“oblivion of the past—how natural, how certain too!” (94). Lost in this temporal disparity, Anne knows the past is past yet she cannot render a meaningful relative distance from it. In navigational terms, she has lost her point of reference—and recall that longitude only signifies as a relative measure between two coordinates. At this moment the narration notes the “absurd[ity]” of “resuming the agitation which such an interval

[i.e., eight years] had banished into distance and indistinctness!” (94). If the voice of the narrator, then this line gently chides Anne for her temporal “indistinct[ion]” that renders the past as present yet absent. If Anne’s own realization rendered through free indirect discourse, then this line enacts the very collapse of “such an interval,” juxtaposing 168

“distance” and “indistinctness,” which strike me as mutually exclusive from a historical navigational standpoint. The two terms imply either the presence or absence of knowledge, respectively. If we know an object or event remains at a “distance,” then it has a distinct, identifiable relative location; yes, it may not be visible on the horizon, but visibility and “indistinctness” are not one and the same. Regardless of voicing, though, the passage makes clear the discrepancy in Anne’s chronometric imaginary: she feels the past as present yet absent. Such temporal fuzziness affords neither utility nor agency in an oceanic world shaped by discourses of precision and mobility. Anne wanders—but not yet like Captain Cook.

Over the course of the novel, though, Anne improves her chronometric sensibility, and often through lines of spatio-temporal self-diagnosis like Francis. In this same scene, for example, she moves to reconcile the discrepancy between past and present (or, as I suggest above, past as present) in her mind: “she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less.” Certainly some kind of change should have taken place across this span of time: “What might not eight years do?” ponders Anne, via free indirect narration.

“Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals,—all, all must be comprised in it ... It included nearly a third part of her own life” (94). To be clear, these lines appear before Anne’s admission that “eight years may be little more than nothing.” Nevertheless, these lines signal Anne’s nascent recognition not just of relative spans of time but specifically how such spans of time produce meaning through distance—what she might call “changes, alienations, and removals.” Her spatio-temporal diagnostic thinking is not quite yet at the level as that of Francis, but Anne is on her way. 169

Austen’s free indirect narration enables us to read certain lines as moments of self-diagnosis. At the beginning of this same passage, for instance, the text states that

“[e]ight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up” (94). Some might see the repetition here as stuttering, as a symptom of Anne’s temporal uncertainty.

At the same time, however, we can read that brief interjection—“almost eight years”—as significant clarification: Anne’s voice entering into the discourse and moving toward specificity. This same free indirect diagnosis occurs just a few lines later, when we learn that those eight years (or “almost eight years”) “include[] nearly a third part of [Anne’s] own life.” Just like the two minutes that separate Francis’s longitude calculations aboard the St Albans, here what seems like a minor detail in fact registers significant movement: the word “nearly” makes all the difference, and I want to read it as a free indirect interjection by Anne into the narrator’s discourse. Again, Anne’s precision is not on par with that of Francis, but she nevertheless moves toward specificity. One-third of twenty- seven (her present age), while “nearly” eight years, is not exactly eight years. And Anne would certainly want to be specific about her age: at twenty-seven, she runs ever-closer to aging out of marital eligibility.

Indeed, Anne’s entire education plot revolves around her learning to act in time, in every sense of the phrase. She must act before she ages out of the marriage plot, but she also must not act too quickly. After all, the element of embarrassment that defines and inaugurates the arc of her education plot fundamentally deals with poor timekeeping: she submits too quickly to Lady Russell’s advice and breaks off her engagement with

Wentworth. Not unlike the precipitate Louisa, Anne’s haste is her initial undoing. She must learn to act in a more measured fashion—again, in every sense of the phrase. Hence 170 through her spatio-temporal diagnostic moments Anne learns not only about collective movement—that is, calculated action with respect to others’ relative positions—but also about literal measurement: uniform spans of time and space that create meaning through distance and duration. Anne eventually comes to recognize Mr. Elliot as the bad suitor in part through the temporal and spatial inaccuracy that follows in his wake. The narrative, focalized around Anne, often loses track of Mr. Elliot, especially when he lies about his whereabouts—a red flag in a novel and a historical moment both so concerned with temporal and spatial precision. However, near the end of the novel, when Anne spies Mr.

Elliot exactly “three hours after his being supposed to be out of Bath” (237), she realizes that something is wrong. The education plot is working.

By the end of the novel, Anne and Wentworth come to share a chronometric imaginary. Put simply, their senses of time synchronize. The text emphasizes the relative immediacy of their actions, thoughts, and movements with respect to one another. Long gone is the delay that characterized the more than eight years of estrangement. When

Anne arrives at the White Hart and finds that she must keep close company with

Wentworth, “[t]here was no delay, no waste of time. She was deep in the happiness of such misery, or the misery of such happiness, instantly” (239). Later, when Wentworth reappears to leave his fateful letter for Anne—in effect, the good proposal by the good suitor—it is “the work of an instant!” (245). In a moment of free indirect discourse, channeling Anne, the narration subsequently remarks, “The revolution which one instant made ... was almost beyond expression” (245). A “revolution” indeed: in a sense Anne has come full circle, returning through these “instant[s]” to where she was over eight years ago, aligned with Wentworth. 171

These “instants” may initially seem like “moments,” the non-uniform abstractions of time that accrue around Mr. Elliot and draw out his delays. Yet the “instants” here at the end of the novel do not seem to be in the service of delay. Rather, they serve as reference points that begin or end durations. We know, for example, that Wentworth begins writing his letter exactly “[t]wo minutes” after Anne’s entrance and subsequent instantaneous descent into happy misery / miserable happiness (239). More crucially, these instants bring to a close the longer span of years between Anne and Wentworth’s past engagement and present reconciliation. This interval, in Wentworth’s words, “is a period indeed!” “Eight years and a half,” he exclaims, “is a period!” (235). The force of his words suggests that he is keenly aware of the intervening time. Indeed, whereas other characters note a seven- or eight-year gap, Wentworth specifies “[e]ight years and a half.” Not a day should be overlooked. Notably, Wentworth’s description here arises “as if it were the result of immediate feeling” (234). The qualification “as if” suggests free indirect discourse—as if we hear Anne’s reading of the timing of Wentworth’s thoughts and speech.16 In the face of such immediacy, the marriage plot must wrap up without delay.

Anne and Wentworth exhibit a new freedom in their shared temporal imagination.

At the end of the novel, the narration specifies Charles Musgrove’s movements away from them: “In half a minute, Charles was at the bottom of Union-street again” (248).

Here, in a free and indirect phrasing that blends both of their voices, Anne and

Wentworth count down the “half a minute” until they can finally be alone together,

16 Wentworth, in fact, surmises in his proposal letter that Anne “must have penetrated ... and read [his] feelings” (245). 172 tracking Charles’s movement to the end of a specific street in Bath. At this point, such temporal and spatial precision should not catch us by surprise. What is new, however, is their subsequent synthesis of past, present, and future: “the power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed; and prepare it for all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their own future lives could bestow” (248). The passage makes clear that it is not the “power of conversation” between the renewed lovers that will stand the test of time; rather, it is the “present hour” itself that promises to become

“immortal[].” Although the description does not specifically appear in the future tense

(e.g., “future lives would bestow”), the sentence is nevertheless proleptic. At the end of the novel, with the marriage and education plots resolved, Anne and Wentworth can look forward to the future in a way previously unthinkable.

This is not to say, however, that they have forgotten the past: on the contrary, they make clear that after “so many, many years of division and estrangement ... they returned again to the past” (248). The specific inclusion of “again”—perhaps a free indirect interjection by Anne or Wentworth, if not both—clarifies that this is not their first

“return[] ... to the past.” On the contrary, they—Anne, especially—have lived with the trauma of the past for eight and a half years. Now, however, they can move beyond

“division and estrangement.” They now share a sense of collective movement. Put simply, their new reference point—this present, soon-“immortal[]” hour— reconceptualizes their view of previous events. As Persuasion draws to a close, Anne and

Wentworth make clear the relative nature of time and space. They remap via analepsis not only where they are going but also where they have been. 173

In navigating the marriage plot and the education plot, Anne thus rises to the challenge posed by longitude: thinking time and space together. She learns that change is not about loss but about referentiality, about relative duration and distance. At first she fears that has moved so far away from the past so as to be unrecognizable to Wentworth,

“[a]ltered beyond his knowledge!” (95). She herself later exclaims, “I am not yet so much changed!” (235). Wentworth, however, remains an ever-fixed mark in her mind: “the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages,” she admits via free indirect narration. Anne “had seen the same Frederick Wentworth” (95). In such moments Anne denies the passage of time; she denies that she has moved on—not only emotionally, but also physically, leaving Kellynch Hall and Somersetshire, the scene of the original engagement and separation. By the end of the novel, however, Anne recognizes that change and constancy are not mutually exclusive—that’s the trick of longitude, so to speak: to “wander,” but to do so always with respect to a fixed reference.

In the penultimate chapter Wentworth tells Anne, “to my eye you could never alter”

(250). In response,

Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach. It is something for a woman to be assured, in her eight-and-twentieth year, that she has not lost one charm of earlier youth: but the value of such homage was inexpressibly increased to Anne, by comparing it with former words, and feeling it to be the result, not the cause of a revival of his warm attachment (250).

The eight years that she once feared were “little more than nothing” here have produced

“something.” With a knowing smile (and some free indirect voicing), Anne recognizes that she has changed, but such change has also “reviv[ed]” constancy—namely, a return 174 to her “warm attachment” with Wentworth. She can confidently ascribe “cause” and

“result” (i.e., effect) here because she now recognizes the “value” of duration and distance. Change only entails a loss when we have no point of reference, when we fail to understand how and why we have changed. Indeed, the significance of Wentworth’s comment is “inexpressibly increased” because she measures it against a fixed reference point: Wentworth’s “former words,” his admission in Uppercross that Anne was “so altered he should not have known [her] again” (95). Even in a world so concerned with precision, Anne will let this one “blunder” pass.

Unlike Austen’s other novels, which place their heroines in estates, Persuasion concludes with Anne and Wentworth still out in the world, circulating among their connections in Bath. The final chapter charts the character relationships between the newly aligned Anne and Wentworth and their family and friends. The couple becomes our reference point as we gauge the reactions and responses of Sir Walter, Lady Russell,

Mary, Mr. Elliot, Mrs. Clay, and Mrs. Smith. Discussing the social geography at the end of Persuasion, White contends that

[i]f Austen has operated as a cultural geographer throughout the novel, seeking to make sense of people in relation to the places they occupy, by the novel’s end she has allowed her two protagonists the latitude to escape longitude, as it were. Anne and Wentworth are not described as being at any given point of the compass, nor are they at any particular address or estate ... They are not available to the reader’s positioning systems; our readerly radars are useless. For Austen and for her protagonists, this escape from our spatial reckoning must be imagined as a victory (par. 26).

But how successful is said “escape”? Our “readerly radars” might indeed fail if we ourselves fail to think historically. If we understand the novel in its wider context, can

Austen fully grant Anne and Wentworth the “latitude to escape longitude”? I know that 175

White speaks metaphorically here, but her language makes clear how actual maritime history has not figured into her own critical “radar.” All three figures—Austen and her two protagonists—occupy a world with a growing global awareness. Perhaps the absence of a specifically pinpointed place at the novel’s end is less a “victory” and more a resistance—a kind of friction that affords privacy (i.e., the united Anne and Wentworth no longer circulate in the marriage market). As I see it, though, it is less that Anne and

Wentworth disappear from the map and more that their point of reference in the marriage plot—the other person—finally shares their same coordinates. Hence our “readerly radars” and “spatial reckoning” break down: we cannot measure distance or duration if our two reference points—Anne and Wentworth—share the exact same location in the exact same moment. The logic of longitudinal style still rules the day.

PERSUASION’S WOMEN AND NAVAL REALISM

By incorporating these elements of longitudinal style—free indirect discourse, collective movement, and diagnostic thinking—into both the marriage and education plots, Persuasion moves toward what I will call naval realism. Although he does not use this exact terminology, Jon Spence highlights a useful example of how maritime mimesis produces a distinct style: “Implicit in Austen’s attention to the surface is her concern with the relationship between reader and author: an artist loses authority when the surface reality is violated. She presents this idea in Persuasion through Admiral Croft’s bluff, sensible remarks about the picture in a shop window ... The Admiral knows more about the laws of ships and the sea than the artist. He perceives something in the picture the artist had not intended: the ship is about to capsize!” (205). Austen, I believe, makes a point of avoiding such ruptures of realism. In Persuasion, she creates a reality effect 176 through the oceanic imaginary: as I argue above, Austen (consciously or otherwise) draws upon contemporary naval navigational discourse to shape her literary worlds.

Out of such naval realism emerge women characters who seem best equipped to navigate this world. Consider, for instance, the attention to detail of Mrs. Croft, who qualifies her claim about the comfortable “accommodations of a man of war”: “I speak, you know, of the higher rates. When you come to a frigate, of course, you are more confined” (103). Like many characters—naval or otherwise—in Persuasion, Mrs. Croft peppers her speech with naval terms. Her interjections—“you know” and “of course”— presume a level of familiarity with such terms. What a layperson might call a “ship” she refers to as a “man of war.” And, much like Austen herself, Mrs. Croft knows the distinctions between such men-of-war: a “frigate” is not one of the “higher rates.” (A frigate could only be a fifth- or sixth-rate ship, the two lowest rankings in the Royal

Navy’s rating system.) Rightly so, Southam cites this same passage in his analysis of

Austen’s “scrupulous[ness] in providing such precise detail” when it came to naval matters (xv).

To be fair, we can point to many other moments in Persuasion that simply demonstrate Austen’s “scrupulous” grasp of naval knowledge. I turn to Mrs. Croft’s snippet of dialogue, though, because it models how Persuasion’s women deploy technical naval discourse to render scale. As Mrs. Croft reminisces about her shipboard lodgings, she also draws attention to distinctions in physical space. As we move upward in the Royal Navy’s rating system, the vessels accordingly grow in size. The “higher rates,” of course, would afford roomier “accommodations”: a first-rate ship would be 177 larger than a second-rate ship, and so on.17 (Compare Francis’s HMS Triton—a fifth-rate of 856 tons burthen [bm], 142 feet long and 36 feet wide—to another ship built in the same yard and launched in the same year: the HMS York, a third-rate of 1,433 bm, 174 feet long and 43 feet wide.18) I see Mrs. Croft’s testimony, then, as less of a throwaway tidbit of historical context and more of a representative realist moment of sentence-level attention to scale and relative measurement.

The ship rating system also appears that the end of chapter 2, and again through the voice of a woman. The narration explains that moving Mrs. Clay out of Elizabeth

Elliot’s reach was “an object of first-rate importance” (57). This moment of free indirect discourse incorporates naval language with the perspective, surprisingly enough, of Lady

Russell—who, perhaps along with Sir Walter, seems to be one of the most decidedly terrestrial characters in the novel, given her initial unflattering opinion of the marriage prospects of a Royal Navy officer. Yet here she deploys a maritime allusion: “first-rate importance,” registering the power and urgency of finding Elizabeth new companions.

Unlike Mrs. Croft’s literal invocation of the rating system, Lady Russell here deploys a metaphor; nevertheless, her naval reference still provides a sense of scale and lays out a course of action.

17 The rating system, ranging from the massive first-rate ships-of-the-line down to the sixth-rate sloops, correlated directly to the number of mounted cannon: the more guns, the higher the rating. For the specific distinctions between rates, see Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1793–1817: Design, Construction, Careers, and Fates (2008). 18 On the measurements of the HMS Triton (1796) and the HMS York (1796), see J. J. Colledge and Ben Warlow, Ships of the Royal Navy: The Complete Record of All Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy (2010; 416 and 456). 178

It is Anne, though, who emerges as the most naval character in all of Persuasion.

Perhaps this may seem like an odd claim to make given that there are actual Royal Navy sailors in the novel. As we have seen, temporal precision was a hallmark of contemporary naval practice, and all of Persuasion’s sailors do indeed have an acute sense of time.

During the visit to Lyme, for instance, Anne notes that Captain Benwick’s wife passed away “last summer”; Captain Harville steps in and offers the exact month—June, and specifies further that Benwick did not know until “the first week in August” (136).

Wentworth, recounting his command of the Asp, tells of a storm off Plymouth Harbor:

“We had not been six hours in the Sound [“the sheltered inlet leading from the English

Channel into Plymouth Harbour”], when a gale came on, which lasted four days and nights, and which would have done for poor old Asp [sic], in half the time ... Four-and- twenty hours later, and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth, in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers” (99 and 99n2). He notes the Asp’s timely arrival in the harbor, missing the storm by “not ... six hours”; without such timeliness, his obituary would have appeared in an equally timely fashion, “four-and-twenty hours later.” Yet while Wentworth does name specific geographical locations here (the sound of Plymouth Harbor), he expresses no interest in relative distance. We have no spatial specifics: the Asp was simply “in the Sound,” and that is good enough for Wentworth’s narration.

By contrast, Anne articulates a sense of both time and space, of both relative duration and distance. As we have seen, she is the prime figure around which Austen’s longitudinal style focalizes. She negotiates both change and constancy, moving ahead but always keeping a fixed reference. Over the course of the novel, Anne learns to “wander” 179 like Captain Cook. In the same way that Cook’s mobility inaugurated a “spatial revolution,” Anne’s chronotopic sensibility fundamentally changes not only the content but also the form of her narrative. Much like Cook on his second voyage, Anne circles back, revisits, and reexamines. She leaves Kellynch Hall at the beginning of Persuasion’s volume 1, for example, only to return at the beginning of volume 2 to reconnoiter with

Lady Russell and visit with the Crofts. In the same vein, Anne goes to visit her old school friend Mrs. Smith, whom she has not seen for twelve years; over the course of multiple visits, Mrs. Smith eventually informs Anne about Mr. Elliot’s nefarious dealings with her late husband. In brief, Anne moves across the same spaces and interacts with the same people again and again and again in order to better know the world around her. This is naval realism at work. Anne follows the principle laid out in the Royal Navy’s

Regulations and Instructions: captains were to make “observations, not only on coasts which being seldom resorted to, are but little known: but on those also which have been much frequented, and have been already surveyed” (Regulations 147).

Circularity characterizes Persuasion, especially Anne’s journey through the marriage plot. In the novel’s own words, “Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot were repeatedly in the same circle” (96). This is a heuristic circularity, one that effects change: through repeated interactions and crisscrossings across shared spaces, Anne and

Wentworth move to reconceptualize their relationship. In Derridean terms, we see that iteration produces transformation (see Derrida, “Signature” 1–24). In his formalist analysis of Persuasion, Matthew P. M. Kerr rightly argues for the sea as a landscape of recurrence in Austen’s oeuvre. He specifically characterizes Persuasion as “a novel concerned with the way in which a new beginning might take the form of a recurrence” 180

(180–1; see also 198).19 Kerr also cites Gillian Beer’s description of Persuasion as “a book about a longed-for and impossible return” (qtd. in Kerr 181). Beer’s phrasing here is key: a “return” would indeed be “impossible,” for it would destabilize the referential distance between past and present. What is possible, though, is a (re)iteration that moves characters not backward but forward.

AUSTEN’S OCEANIC IMAGINARY

In Anne’s debate with Captain Harville, she contends that men embody change whereas women embody constancy. Harville rebuts that “all histories are against [Anne’s argument], all stories prose and verse,” adding that he has never opened a book “which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy” (243). When he admits, however, that all of these stories were written by men, Anne seizes the moment for her own rebuttal: “Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story” (243). Anne’s reply touches upon a core problem: too much of maritime history focuses on men. My research on Austen and

Persuasion seeks to locate women within maritime fiction and oceanic studies—a genre and a field (respectively) traditionally dominated by the study of male authors and characters. I want to show here how Austen has command of both a style and a world most often assumed to be masculine and martial. Her oceanic imaginary challenges us to think differently. Maritime women can and must be more in our readings than just wives waiting for their sailors to return, more than just land-based figures isolated from the circulations and transformations of the sea. Bree, in her footnotes to the 2013 Broadview

19 Many thanks to Samuel Baker for this reference. 181 edition of Persuasion, observes that “many people living in England in Austen’s time had never seen the sea” (125n3). One needs not to have seen the sea, though, to be influenced by it. As Anne demonstrates, anyone—sailor or otherwise—can engage with naval discourse and the history of oceanic conquest.

This is Austen’s oceanic imaginary at work—a mode of representation that registers maritime influence beyond simple surface references to the navy. Indeed,

Persuasion offers a compelling case for a systems- or network-based understanding— what we might call an oceanic reading—of literary history and diffuse webs of influence.

So while I do draw heavily upon the life and writing of Francis Austen in my work, my methodology here entails not usurpation but dispersal. I am not trying to elevate Francis above Jane; I am not trying to place the sailor brother at the center of his sister’s imaginative process and literary world. Rather, I want to position both Francis and Jane as nodes within distributed networks of influence; I want to chart the wider world around author and text that gives shape to the story. My point is not that every single oceanic aspect of Persuasion was a conscious, calculated move on Austen’s part, but rather that she is a node enmeshed in multiple overlapping maritime networks that push and pull on the shape of her narrative. Austen’s oceanic imaginary invites us to rethink connectivity.

I am hardly the first critic to draw connections between Austen’s fiction and

Francis’s life. As early as 1906 we have J. H. Hubback’s Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers, which recounts the lives of Francis and Charles Austen, a younger brother who also served in the Royal Navy. However, as Nigel Nicolson explains, “So famous had [Jane] become that the biography of two distinguished admirals, Francis and Charles Austen had to be published under the title Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers to command the attention of 182 reviewers” (Nicolson 18; see also Hubback). Taking the inverse approach is Park Honan, who begins his biography—the confidently titled Jane Austen: Her Life: The Definitive

Portrait of Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Art, Her Family, Her World (1989)—with

Francis’s ride from the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth back to the Austen family home in Steventon (see 1-10). Francis also serves as a focal point in Southam’s Jane

Austen and the Navy (2000), which details (among other historical connections) “the naval men who became linked to the Austens through marriage,” a “network” including two Lords of the Admiralty and other Flag officers (x). Moving from Austen’s biography to her fiction, Southam explains how, in reading Austen’s oeuvre, he “could sense ... where the war-time [sic] experiences of the sailor brothers had entered into [her] own imaginative life” (x).20 Southam thus tracks all of the historical naval references in

Austen’s novels, examining how the naval inflects the domestic. Gay likewise notes how

Austen makes “creative use” of her family’s naval connections (63).

What Hubback, Honan, Nicolson, Southam, and Gay overlook, though, is how

Francis’s life shapes the very form of Austen’s novels. In this chapter I work to address this gap, deploying a methodology that employs not only historicist concern for contemporary context and situated meaning but also formalist tracking of sentence-level figurations. Through this confluence of historicism and formalism, we can see, as Kerr puts it, the “narrative prospects” of the sea (182). Barchas exemplifies this approach in

20 Southam also notes a “sustained preoccupation” in Austen’s personal letters with “the fortunes of her sailor brothers—their wartime promotions and prize-money, their postings and commands, their comings and goings on leave or active service[,] and, at home, the state of their wives in their pregnancies and the health and happiness of their infant children” (x). 183 her discussion of Austen’s “uncanny precision” in mapping and spatial representation

(73): she suggests that Austen may have gleaned this impulse for cartographic accuracy from none other than Francis, whose 1808 map of St. Helena was published in 1816—the same year that Austen finishes her first draft of Persuasion.21 So yes, Persuasion certainly incorporates aspects of Francis’s naval career, but the novel often exceeds biography, for its representative mechanic is not mimetic but metonymic. Francis’s life provides a catalyst rather than a direct model; his naval career serves as a key node that inaugurates Jane and her work into a maritime network deeply concerned with precision and mobility. Again, we must turn our critical sights to distributed networks of influence.

The oceanic imaginary requires us to move beyond traditional conceptions of authorship. Many of Austen’s readers—academic or otherwise—seem to resist the twenty-first-century call for the death of the author. In their eyes, to dismiss Austen’s genius is to approach blasphemy. What I suggest here, then, is a middle path between death and genius. I see the author as not an island but rather—to borrow John O. Jordan’s annual metaphor for Charles Dickens—a train station. Ideas and discourses arrive at and depart from the author, who is always already just a single stop in larger, overlapping circulations. And sometimes the railroad schedule is so complex that authors may not be aware of each and every arrival and departure. Put differently, the influence becomes dispersed. We become aware of it only through figurative references and representations—such as metonymy. As I argue both here and elsewhere in this project, the wider world registers its presence metonymically, making meaning through a series

21 On the publication timeline of Persuasion, see Bree, “A Brief Chronology,” in Austen, Persuasion (37–8). 184 of semantic substitutions that carry us through and between overlapping networks. The relative distances and durations that shape Persuasion—the seconds and minutes, the feet and miles—point us toward new modes of history.

Esoteric though all of the navigational and chronometric details may seem, we must attend to such historical, contextual technical detail for a better understanding of literary articulations of spatial and temporal accuracy. Here I follow Freedgood and

Cannon Schmitt’s embrace of the opacity—and critical utility—of technical language.

They call for a historicism that delays figural readings in favor of actually understanding the technical ins-and-outs of specific references. Such literal reading, Freedgood and

Schmitt clarify, is not the same as surface reading: “The literal is not the surface or thereness [sic] or the perceptible. Indeed, the literal is ... a research program rather than a reification” (11). The aim of literal reading is, in their words, to “restore obscurity” (4).

Surface reading, by contrast moves against suspicious reading and maintains that all meaning—or, at least, all meaning of available use to the reader—remains on the surface of the text, freely accessible. As Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus—two foundational critics of this methodology—explain, “A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (9). Technical language, then, challenges us to read more and to learn more—to meet that technical language on its own specific terms. We must wear multiple hats as literary historicists. For this chapter, for instance, I have to think not only as a reader but also, in a sense, as an amateur sailor, navigator, and mathematician. This is not to say that I would be of any practical use on a boat, but rather that my technical research has challenged me to extrapolate wider networks of significance from the literary material. By placing literal, denotative, and/or 185 technical meanings in dialogue with the more figural and narrative elements of the text, we open up new archives for analysis.22

The oceanic is one such archive. By considering the specific ins and outs of naval navigation and maritime mobility and thereby recognizing Austen’s oceanic imaginary, we can rethink the chronotope of Persuasion.23 Read alongside and through the history of longitude, Persuasion becomes less a story of life after (or during) a specific moment of war and more about a longer, oceanic history of mobility and imperial conquest. In War at a Distance, Favret identifies a kind of “everyday” wartime trauma in Persuasion, examining prose that “binds together the structures of military violence”—uncertainty, interruption, loss—with the rhythms of domestic life (148–9). She considers the

22 On the one hand, this approach tempers the materialism of historicism. In another article, for example, Schmitt offers a reading of the nonhuman tides in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: his is a literal reading that “is not a materialism: its trajectory does not move from text to objects in history and back again” (“Tidal” 16). Schmitt continues, detailing how his literal reading “traces a textual circuit that begins and ends with fiction but dwells between times among dictionaries, nautical charts, and tide tables” (16–7). I believe that part of my work here follows Schmitt’s nonmaterial historicism: I am interested in minutes and hours—decidedly nonmaterial entities. On the other hand, Freedgood and Schmitt’s approach asks us to spend even more time with material objects and to treat references to them in fiction as more than a polite nod to realism. Their example is the Davy lamp in Emile Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal: it is simply not enough, Freedgood and Schmitt argue, to know what the lamp is (a safety lamp invented for the flammable conditions in a mine); instead, “we have to know how it works, how its design relates to the danger of ‘firedamp’ (flammable gasses, particularly methane), and so on. In other words, denotative reading is extensive and does not end with the definition” (“Denotatively” 3). For my project, then, a chronometer is not just a timekeeper; it a means by which we can better understand discourses of geography, chronography, and mobility in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 23 On “chronotopes”—literally, “time-spaces”—in literature, see M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (1981; 84–258). 186 representations of trauma, suffering, and recovery in Persuasion, linking the novel’s temporality of pain to that of the Napoleonic Wars. She shrewdly observes that modern wartime has no horizon; it is characterized by “endless waiting and unforeseen returns”

(147). Hence when we read Persuasion through the lens of the Napoleonic Wars, Favret argues, “the clock time of historicism, with its clear divisions ... falls apart though the uncertain chronology of affect” (162). True, perhaps: recall the beginning of the novel, when Anne cannot separate past from present (“eight years may be little more than nothing”); the effects of her separation from Wentworth in 1806 stretch through 1814 and into 1815. But Favret’s reading does not seem to account for any growth or development in temporal and spatial awareness. A wartime reading leaves Anne to stagnate, to wander without purpose—precisely because it collapses distance. In breaking the here/there binary, Favret’s proffered chronotope renders referentiality impossible. If the wartime trauma “over there” is always already “here,” enmeshed in the “everyday,” then relative distance and duration fail to signify. But we witness the exact opposite over the course of

Persuasion: as I argue above, an oceanic reading of the novel charts Anne’s development of a spatio-temporal awareness that reconceptualizes her world.

Through free indirect discourse, attention to collective movement, and diagnostic thinking, Persuasion shows Anne not only honing her precision but also revitalizing her mobility and sociopolitical power. An embodiment of Austen’s longitudinal style, Anne learns to wander with purpose and direction. She comes to inhabit not just the abstract, affective wartime temporality posited by Favret, but also the specific, metonymic chronotope of imperialism. Her developing senses of time and of space are culturally contiguous with naval networks of material exchange, circulation, and encounter. As 187

Anne moves through the marriage and education plots, she learns to enact the same discourses of navigation and conquest used by British oceanic imperialists—the men of the Royal Navy that charted the oceans and ruled the waves. At the end of the novel, in fact, Anne becomes part of the “little knot” of the Royal Navy via her marriage to

Wentworth (187): like Admiral and Mrs. Croft, the novel’s main naval couple, where

Wentworth moves, so too will Anne. Persuasion’s closing line notes how Anne must

“pay the tax of quick alarm” when any naval conflict breaks out (258). But Anne, now allied with the navy, can afford a little hastiness. Previously, her haste suggested her naivety, as she rushed into breaking off her engagement with Wentworth. Now, however, such speed suggests her intimate attunement to larger geopolitical currents.

- - - 188

CHAPTER 4

Chanteying Bodies and Narrative Labor

PRELUDE: “WHEN YOU’RE A PROFESSIONAL PIRATE”

In Muppet Treasure Island (1996), arguably the best filmic adaptation of Robert

Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881–82), Long John Silver, played by Tim Curry, extols the virtues of piracy as a professional career:

When I was just a lad, looking for my true vocation, My father said, “Now son, this choice deserves deliberation, Though you could be a doctor, or perhaps a financier, My boy, why not consider a more challenging career?”

Here Silver, following the song’s title, champions the “Professional Pirate.” As he describes it, piracy is a “challenging career”—a “true vocation” more demanding than any in the medical or financial fields. Like many actual sea chanteys from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “Professional Pirate” articulates the omnipresence of work:

Silver’s ballad, which celebrates the Muppet mutineers’ initial seizure of the island, is chock full of references to labor. These pirates quite literally sing the praises of hard work.

But these are, let’s remember, the Muppets, so we should take any claims about rigorous professionalism with a drop of salt water. Even as Silver and his puppet crew teach us about piracy as an organized, disciplined vocation, they also make clear their deep investment in mutuality, reciprocity, and sociality. As the lyrics from the chorus of

“Professional Pirate” attest, maritime labor is also about community:

Hey ho ho! It's one for all for one; And we'll share and share alike with you, And love you like a son. 189

...... When you're a professional pirate, You’re always in the best of company!

“[T]he best of company” indeed: as the chorus of the song tells it, Silver and the Muppets are not only coworkers but also comrades. These professional pirates articulate the interrelation of labor and community. Any aspiring individual can enter into their network of mutual gain: working “one for all for one,” they “share and share alike” with each other. Affect even enters into the mix here, yet another benefit of joining this professional community: the ballad fondly describes the paternal bond that develops between the one and the many, prompting the latter to “love” the former “like a son.”

In addition to advertising these personal and professional perks of piracy, Silver’s song also drives the narrative of Muppet Treasure Island forward. The ballad prompts a key decision for young Jim Hawkins, currently held captive by the pirates: will he remain loyal to Captain Smollett and the other officers of the Hispaniola, or will he join Silver and the “best of company,” helping the pirates advance their goals? The song, it seems, does its work on Jim, at least for the present moment: he accedes to Silver’s demands, falling in line behind the mutineer captain and surrendering his compass to aid in the pirate’s treasure hunt.

In terms of the sociopolitical and narrative affordances of sea chanteys, the

“Professional Pirate” ballad hits it right on the nose. The song captures the complex power relations produced by these songs of maritime labor and leisure. Choral music has long served as a technology for organizing bodies in time.1 Especially for vocal pieces—

1 Many thanks for this idea to Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, who heard a working version of this chapter at INCS 2017. 190 and, historically speaking, sea chanteys were almost always performed a cappella—the integrity and execution of the song depends upon everyone obeying a set tempo, rhythm, and time signature. Choruses compel one voice to join in with the many. Chanteys, though, add an additional dimension of control: spatial movement. Silver, through song, seeks not only to unite voices but also to move bodies in unison.

Shared movement via song is vital for Silver, the one-legged man. Chanteys function prosthetically for him, adding to and extending his bodily control. Prosthesis exceeds mere replacement: the adjective “prosthetic,” in fact, derives from the Greek for

“adding, furthering, advancing, giving additional power” beyond the human.2 In both the

Muppet movie and the original novel, Silver’s chanteying grants him such posthuman or cybernetic power: through song he gains control of the other crewmen’s bodies, which the novel synecdochally figures as hands; these prosthetic hands, in turn, help Silver seize sociopolitical control. The novel’s emphasis on hands, in fact, reminds me of the key mechanic hiding in plain sight in Muppet Treasure Island: the Muppets come to life via prosthetic control; they require a whole range of other bodies—and especially their hands—working together to create their world.

So though it perhaps sounds silly to take Muppet Treasure Island seriously, I think that the film helpfully prefaces many of my questions and concerns about sea chanteys: how they organize and (re)shape not only bodies but also narratives; how they create community and distributed networks of reciprocal relations; and how they capture the oceanic imaginary at work in literary narratives that unfold not only at sea but also on land.

2 See OED, 3d edn., s.v. “prosthetic, adj. and n.” 191

CRITICAL CHANTEY STUDIES

In this chapter I take up selected hauling, heaving, and forecastle chanteys to parse both sociopolitical and narrative structure in two novels, one that we readily recognize as maritime fiction and one that we might not: Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48). Chanteying provides the historically specific politics and poetics that locate both texts within my expanded generic category of maritime fiction. Specifically, I track how these novels’ differently-abled sailors—the one-legged Long John Silver and the hook-handed Captain Cuttle—use chanteys prosthetically, extending their bodies through song and becoming, in effect, crucial high- degree nodes within the social fabric of their respective narrative worlds. And as I trace how Treasure Island and Dombey and Son use chanteys to organize bodies in time and space, I also raise questions about the status of the chanteymen themselves and the narrative labor they perform.

I begin an overview of chanteys and chanteying, providing a history of the genre and a general taxonomy of song types. From there I take up Treasure Island and then

Dombey and Son, considering what Stevenson’s and Dickens’s differently-abled chanteymen can teach us about the dynamic interrelation of bodies, labor, and storytelling. Along the way I myself work to locate chanteying within multiple critical endeavors: oceanic studies, narrative theory, disability studies, and social network analysis.

The chanteying bodies of Treasure Island and Dombey and Son ultimately serve as test cases for my concept of the “oceanic imaginary,” how maritime history and culture shapes both the form and the content of the nineteenth-century novel. As I argue 192 across this project, literary works of the British long nineteenth century draw upon the oceanic in complex and diffuse ways to shape their own fictional worlds. Like my analysis in chapter 1 of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) via the shipwreck tale, I am interested here in what this maritime genre—the sea chantey—can teach us about historicity and connectivity. And as with my discussion in chapter 3 of Jane Austen’s

Persuasion (1817) and longitude, I am interested not only in historicity, but also in style and structure. I work here, then, to draw out the historical specificity and narrative affordances of chanteys and chanteymen in Treasure Island and Dombey and Son.

Carried on the lips and limbs of Silver and Cuttle, chanteys provide a heuristic through which we can better understand social and narrative systems.

My critical approach to chanteys resonates with recent discussions of networks in the humanities and social sciences. Like any sociopolitical form, the network, explains

Caroline Levine, deals with proper arrangement and placement. More than mere synonyms for “connectivity,” networks are “defined patterns of interconnection and exchange that organize social and aesthetic experience” (Forms 112–3). Despite their seeming potential for chaotic sprawl, networks follow systematic ordering principles. In terms of my work here, networks—much like chanteys—dictate when and where something is allowed to move. To be clear, the chanteys themselves are not networks in and of themselves; they are, rather, the catalysts for cohesion, the ties that knot the system together. (In the parlance of social network theory, “ties” describe the connections between nodes [see McLean 17]—a term reminiscent of the actual knotted and woven ropes aboard a ship, the literal connections hauled under the command of the chanteyman.) Chanteys, in other words, afford a cluster a social relations that are always 193 already in process. They produce “a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a translation, an enrollment”—the capacities of cybernetic response that Bruno Latour identifies in social networks (64–5). I find quite productive Latour’s idea of networked movement as “translation,” for to move through a network is to be transformed by it.

Hence his definition of the “actor,” a figure (human or otherwise) that is made to act by external forces: “An ‘actor’ ... is not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it” (46). Chanteying bodies fit the description well: the collective hands move under the direction of the chanteyman, who is himself prosthetically “translat[ed]” across multiple bodies. Networks, in short, provide a form through which we can understand the movement of various actors under chanteying and how that movement transforms them.

When we combine a rigorous attention to sociopolitical form with a keen eye for historical specificity, we get something like Jonathan H. Grossman’s shrewd diagnosis of connectivity and community in Charles Dickens’s Networks (2012). Modeling the kind of historicist-formalist analysis that I undertake here, Grossman examines how literature imagines community in an age of transnational public transport systems. “In Dickens’s hands,” he writes, the novel not only “enable[s] his community, whose individuals were increasingly atomized, to come to know their manifold unseen connectedness, but also, more specifically, could help to produce its self-comprehension in terms of a crisscrossing journeying of characters simultaneously circulating all around” (6). Written during the rise of “an interlocking global passenger network” that relied upon shared temporality (e.g., standardized railroad timetables), the Dickensian novel channels that alignment of shared time and shared movement to render community (187). A chantey is 194 not, of course, the same as a public transportation system, but the form does offer a similar historical “interlock[]” of collective movement and shared temporality. Especially in Dombey and Son, then, chanteys and chanteying provide not only an index but also the means of textual community. At stake in my analysis here are questions of scale and interconnection. How does a novel move between the individual and the collective? And how, for that matter, does a novel create the rhythms of community?

SONGS OF THE SEA

Sea chanteys, the songs of labor and leisure sung aboard merchant ships and whaling vessels, kept seafaring bodies in correct time and in good spirits. Part of the shipboard system of biopolitical control (see Foucault, “Society” 239), chanteys entail a series of techniques that structure the sailors’ lives—delimiting and defining their work, mobility, placement, and sociopolitical organization. In the Royal Navy, where chanteying was not permitted during work, sailors who stepped out of line received lashes. In Britain’s merchant navy, however, sailors self-enacted a form of disciplinary corporal punishment through song: all hands took up the chorus and, in so doing, kept themselves in line with both the work at hand and the social structures of the ship.3

3 Notably, some chanteys make narrative fodder out of shipboard violence and corporal punishment. Consider “Reuben Ranzo,” which recounts the hardships of an inexperienced sailor’s (“Reuben” as in “rube”; see Hugill 175) first naval voyage: He [the captain] took him [Ranzo] to the gangway, Ranzo boys, a-Ranzo! And gave him five and forty, Ranzo, boys, a-Ranzo! The “five and forty” refers to forty-five disciplinary lashes, the rough justice aboard Royal Navy vessels. See “Reuben Ranzo,” in E. David Gregory, The Late Victorian

195

Although specific taxonomies vary among sailors and historians, we can divide chanteys into three general categories: hauling chanteys, using for pulling; heaving chanteys, used for pushing; and forecastle chanteys, sung for leisure and entertainment.4 Heaving and hauling chanteys enforced a rhythmic discipline, with the lead voice keeping other hands in time. When the work was done, forecastle chanteys (ranging from the bawdy to the patriotic) strengthened homosocial bonds between crewmen. Whether sung for labor or leisure, though, chanteys produced a tight-knit collective body that could carry out the material exchanges and circulatons for the distributed markets of an oceanic, imperial, capitalist Britain.

The heyday of modern chanteying was brief yet fruitful. Stan Hugill writes that shipboard “sing-out[s]” and “embryo” chanteys appear as early as the year 1400, and a handful of notable modern chanteys can trace their origins to Elizabethan times (2). The labor-cum-art that is chanteying truly takes shape, though, only in the nineteenth century.

Hugill finds no mention of sea songs from the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries; he notes a resurgence of chanteys, however, in the nineteenth century: a number of sea songs begin to appear around 1815, with the post-Napoleonic peace and the rise of the British Merchant Navy and the American Merchant Marine (see 5-6; see also Frank, Sea 2). Strangely enough, perhaps, the closing decades of the age of sail were actually a golden age for modern sea song. Chanteying aboard merchant ships was in full

Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878-1903 (2010; 128–9, 128). 4 A fourth metacategory is ceremonial and occasional chanteys, work or leisure songs sung at specific moments on a voyage (e.g., leaving port, working off advance pay, pumping the bilge before the final docking, etc.). I base my categories on those of Stuart M. Frank, Sea Chanteys and Sailor’s Songs (2000; 4–9). 196 force by the 1830s, but it began to wane by the early 1870s with the rising dominance of steam power.5 Those four decades, however, produced an impressive archive of chanteying forms, practices, and lyrics. “Of what did the shantyman sing?” asks Hugill.

By way of an answer, he lists a few of the topics taken up by the voice of the ship:

he sang of the girls; of his kind of love ... of beer and rum and whisky; of tough ships and hungry ships; of bucko mates and shanghaiing ... of irrelevant things like soldiers and inland waters, of revolutions and railways and huckleberries ... of people, true and otherwise; more often than not about legendary figures ... but also of only-too-real figures ... like the shanghaiing crimps ... Great names like Napoleon [among others] ... were included in his songs. He sang of places with romantic names ... [and of p]eculiar expressions, too, many of them Negro or of minstrel source (34–5).

The list ranges from the mundane (“huckleberries”) to the exceptional (“Napoleon”), from the local to the global, and from the fictional to the historical.6 In short, concludes

Hugill, the chanteyman “sang of everything and anything” (35).7

This wide variety of lyrical content recalls chanteying’s polyphonic genealogy.

Sea chanteys arise out of a confluence of multiple cultural and ethnic practices, all brought together by imperialist-capitalist networks of hard labor (both paid and enslaved) and exchange. The folk music historian Frank Howes describes how chanteying was

5 The folk music historian Frank Howes offers a more conservative estimate of the heyday of chanteying: from 1835–65; see Howes, Folk Music in Britain—and Beyond (1969; 212). 6 One of my favorite chanteys is “Boney,” a tongue-in-cheek catalogue of the French military leader: e.g., “Oh, Boney marched to Moscow, / Lost his army in the snow” (“Boney,” in Hugill 333–4, 333). 7 Hugill emphasizes how chanteys were a fundamental part of maritime life: “To the seamen of America, Britain, and northern Europe,” he writes, “a shanty was as much a part of the equipment as a sheath-knife and a pannikin” (1). 197 hardly an Anglophone phenomenon: he notes “Greek ... German, Norwegian, Swedish,

French, Welsh, [and] Finnish” chanteys, as well as ones of “pidgin English with Chinese and Hindustani words” (212). The maritime historian Stuart M. Frank, himself a chanteyman, describes how the practice of using song to structure shipboard, dockyard, and waterside work “descend[s] from West African traditional worksongs,” acquired by

British and American merchant sailors from “black stevedores in the American cotton ports” (Sea 1). Black sailors, too, played a vital role: in the late eighteenth-century they served in increasing numbers on British and American merchant ships, bringing their singing traditions with them. Hence “[b]y the nineteenth century,” writes W. Jeffrey

Bolster, “white sailors spent a significant amount of time singing in ... a characteristically black style”; the call-and-response format “punctuated” by “vital melodic accents”

(“yelps and hitches” and “hollers”) shares more with African and African-American labor songs than those of Europe (217). Frank comments that these African and African-

American traditions “mingled haphazardly” on the ship “with Anglo-Scots-Irish genres, popular minstrel songs, and various other European and American musical influences, resulting in a distinctive occupational type” (Sea 2). To this list of origins and influences

Hugill adds railroad work-songs, American and Caribbean plantation work songs, war marches, and songs of Asian and Oceanian indentured laborers (see 13–20). In short, the modern sea chantey, as Bolster puts it, arises out of “[i]nterracial musical exchange”

(217).

Despite this rich archive of primary material, though, very little has been written about the importance of sea chanteys—not just to literary history, but also to the general 198 cultural history of the British long nineteenth century.8 My work here, then, also serves as a recovery project, bringing renewed (if, apparently, not some of the first) literary-critical attention to this historical maritime genre, specifically in a British, long-nineteenth- century context. For my guides to chanteying, I look not only to Frank, the director and chief curator of the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, MA and one of the founders of the annual Sea Music Festival and Symposium in Mystic Seaport, CT, but also to Hugill, the well-known (at least, in chanteying circles) chronicler of maritime folk history and veteran sailor once described as “the last working shantyman” (Moffatt n. pag.).9 Frank and Hugill offer strikingly complex histories of chanteying and chanteymen. Their work stands out from other maritime folk music collections in that the application and context for a given song receives as much attention as the actual melody and lyrics. Other notable and often referenced primary collections, such as W. B. Whall’s Sea Songs and Shanties

(1910) and William Main Doerflinger’s Shantymen and Shantyboys (1951), favor anecdotes and flavor text over substantive analysis. Put simply, Frank and Hugill provide

8 Anita Gonzalez devotes a short section to sea chanteys in her entry on working-class performances and communities in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (2015; see 42-4). To the best of my knowledge, extended literary-critical discussions of sea chanteys are few and far between. In a 1973 Southern Folklore Quarterly article, for instance, Robert J. Schwendinger examines the correspondences between Herman Melville’s prose and nineteenth-century sea chanteys. Frank also takes up Melville in a 1985 New England Quarterly article, parsing chanteying in Omoo (1847) and Moby-Dick (1851). In the edited collection Fictions of the Sea (2002), Valerie Burton reads “Ratcliffe Highway,” the bawdy forecastle ballad, and other such chanteys in her detailed analysis of gender relations and maritime industry in nineteenth-century sailortowns. And in a 2012 Conradiana article, Brandon Walsh posits a connection between the shouts and yells of chanteys and mechanized shipboard noises in Joseph Conrad’s early work. 9 On Hugill’s authority and authenticity as a chanteyman, see Alan Villiers’s foreword to Hugill’s Shanties from the Seven Seas (ix). 199 the historical specificity and rigor upon which my own analysis depends.

Frank and Hugill make evident two main biopolitical principles of chanteying that shape my present reading of Treasure Island and Dombey and Son. First, chanteys utilize narrative. “All British and American and most Scandinavian, French, and German shanties had a theme or pattern telling some sort of consecutive story,” writes Hugill (32).

We would expect the ballad-like forecastle chanteys to recount a tale, but even the common working songs relied on the power of a story. And power is indeed the correct word here: “A good yarn and a rousing chorus,” says Frank, could make “the work more efficient and lighter for all hands” (Sea 1). Hugill offers a similar bit of wisdom: as “the sailor’s adage declare[s], ‘A good song was worth ten men on a rope’” (30). Second, then, chanteys turn on collective movement built via disciplinary rhythm and repetition. If chanties are stories, then they are stories designed to produce sweat and control. Work chanteys, as Frank explains, “coordinate[d] rhythms” and “unif[ied] efforts,” leading “ten or twenty or eighty men ... in working rhythmically together” (Sea 1). Hugill places a similar emphasis on rhythm and efficiency: in order for chanteymen to effectively

“lighten labour,” “strict tempo had to be kept,” especially during the choruses, wherein the men would all heave, haul, pull, pump, or march in unison (41 and 31). The repetition inherent in choruses helps synchronize the crew, who would internalize the controlling tempo: with every repetition, the collective action falls on the same word or beat.

The work and the story reinforce one another, a disciplinary synergy captured in the very lyrics of some hauling and heaving chanties. In “Rolling King,” for instance, a anchor-raising capstan chantey, the solo carries the story while the repetitive choruses focus on the task (and ultimate destination) at hand: 200

My wife is standin’ on the quay, Heave away, heave away! The tears do start as she waves to me, And I’m bound for South Australia. Heave away! Heave away! Heave away you Rolling King, For I’m bound for South Australia.10

In other instances, the narrative was of the work itself. Consider “Handy, Me Boys,” a chanteying standard that tells of past, present, and future shipboard labors:

Oh, up aloft wid tautened leach, Handy, me boys, so handy! Hand-over-hand gang ye must reach. Handy, me boys, so handy!

Oh, stretch it aft an’ start a song, Handy, me boys, so handy! A damn fine song an’ it won’t take long. Handy, me boys, so handy!

Sing an’ haul, an’ haul an’ sing, Handy, me boys, so handy! Up aloft this yard we’ll swing. Handy, me boys, so handy!

Up aloft that yard must go, Handy, me boys, so handy! For we are outward bound ye know. Handy, me boys, so handy!11

Hugill identifies “Handy, Me Boys” as both a hand-over-hand and a halyard chantey: it

10 “Rolling King,” in Hugill (150–1, 150). Hugill sheds no definitive light on what a “rolling king” might be, but he notes one version with the replacement words “ruler king.” Another explanation, I think, might come from sea chanteys’ joint heritage with the folk songs of lumbermen: logs might be “roll[ed]” downriver. 11 “Handy, Me Boys (Handy, Me Girls) [version A],” in Hugill (357–60, 359). 201 was used when hoisting smaller triangular sails on the lines between the masts or between the foremast and the bowspirit, or when raising or lowering “yards” (spars perpendicular to the mast upon which square sails were fastened). The lyrics mirror that same work. In the first and second verses I quote here, the “Hand-over-hand” gang must “reach ... aloft,” pulling the line until the “leach” (the trailing edge of a sail) is “taut[]” and properly “stretch[ed] ... aft.” The third and fourth verses have a similar meta quality to them: to carry them “outward bound,” the men sing about hauling up the yard as they actually haul up the yard. The song frames the interrelation quite succinctly: “Sing an’ haul, an’ haul an’ sing.” The story of the work and the song that dictates the actual rhythm of the work go hand in hand.

In a certain sense, the whole narrative telos of a chantey depends upon the given task: the men would sing until the work was done. (In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins notes how a chantey had “seemingly no end to it all but the patience of the singer” [163].)

A chanteyman, then, might have to improvise, to extend the verse narrative to match the timeline of the labor (see Hugill 32). Rhythm and repetition are again the orders of the day. Even when the singer was ad-libbing solo verses, all of the men would know exactly when to heave or haul. In the one-line, never-changing refrain to “Handy, Me Boys,” for instance, the pulls always come on the two “handy[s]”—one at the start of the chorus and the other at the end, both on the downbeat. The “direct and compelling rhythm” of the chantey, to borrow Howes’s words, keeps the bodies in line for the duration of the story

(214).

In addition to the two principles of chanteying that Frank and Hugill directly discuss, I would like to surface a third concern, one that will become more evident, I 202 hope, through my analysis of Treasure Island and Dombey and Son: chanteys afford not just physical but also sociopolitical power. Hugill states that the chanteyman “was essential to the easy working of the ship.” Yet unlike the officially designated captain and officers, says Hugill, there was no official rank of chanteyman; he was, instead, “self- appointed” (30). Much like Silver and Cuttle, as we shall see, the chanteyman just shows up and takes control. He takes into his hands the whole workings of the ship and, in the process, inaugurates both himself and the other sailors into a sociopolitical system of disciplinary control. Put differently, chanteying enacts a classic Foucauldian performance of power: through the labor and leisure songs the collective singers enter into the sociopolitical discursive field of the merchant ship (see Foucault, Discipline). In her 1888 collection Music of the Waters, Laura Alexandrine Smith writes that the “chanty [sic] ... mastheads the topsail yards when making sail, it starts and weighs the anchor, it brings down the main tack with a will, it loads and unloads cargo, it keeps the pumps a-going; in fact ... does all the work where unison and strength are required” (xxiii–xxiv). Smith’s description features a key metonymic displacement of disciplinary labor: as she frames it, it is not the actual crew that hoist the sails, weigh the anchor, ship the cargo, or pump the bilge; it is the chantey—and, by further metonymic extension, the chanteyman and the crew who have internalized the “will” of the song, the ship, and the captain.

As we shall see, three biopolitical principles of chanteying—narrative work structure, collective movement via rhythm and repetition, and sociopolitical control— come to shape life and labor (especially questions of mobility, placement, and organization) in Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Dickens’s Dombey and Son.

203

CHANTEYING BODIES: THE “DEAD MAN’S CHEST” (AND HANDS)

Stevenson would be the first to admit that he, too, was a “professional pirate.” As he built the swashbuckling world of Treasure Island, he plundered the works of a range of authors. He acknowledges the extent of his borrowing in an 1894 issue of McClure’s

Magazine: “No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe ... The stockade, I am told, is from [Frederick Marryat’s]

Masterman Ready.” And noting his “debt to Washington Irving,” Stevenson admits that

“plagiarism was rarely carried farther” (Stevenson, “Appendix” 234–5). Although not mentioned in the McClure’s article, Stevenson also lifted several piratical names, facts, and figures from Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724). Stevenson thus filled his pages in a manner not unlike how Captain Flint’s men fill the hold of the Walrus. All of this looting sets the scene, making the novel convincingly grim and gripping—in a word, piratical.

We might then easily dismiss Treasure Island’s infamous sea chantey, “Dead

Man’s Chest,” as just another piece of nautical window dressing. After all, it isn’t even a real song: Stevenson takes the chantey’s name from Charles Kingsley’s travel book, At

Last (1841; pub. 1871), which refers to a Caribbean island that English buccaneers call

“The Dead Man’s Chest”; and the lyrics, by Stevenson’s own admission, are “[his] own invention entirely” (Stevenson to John Paul Bocock 6:56).12 Much like the rest of

Treasure Island, the macabre chantey seems designed, as Stevenson puts it, to “fetch the kids”—to spark the imaginations (and open the pocketbooks) of young readers. And

12 An 1887 Saturday Review review of a chantey songbook quotes “Dead Man’s Chest” and argues that Stevenson’s “terrifying and desperate stave” is what would result if chanteys were written by poets (qtd. in Stevenson to John Paul Bocock 56n3). 204 indeed, the 1883 book version Treasure Island was Stevenson’s first “popular success” in the literary market (Rhead xvii).

Yet I believe that “Dead Man’s Chest” provides more than just nautical flavor for commercial ends. The fictional chantey does offer a degree of real maritime authenticity.

More importantly, though, it teaches us how to better understand Treasure Island’s shipboard power relations. In this section I analyze how the “Dead Man’s Chest” chantey—which follows the historical form of heaving, hauling, and pumping songs— makes visible (or, perhaps more accurately, audible) the politics of corporeality and labor that shape the novella. My test case is, of course, Long John Silver, the one-legged man who rises from cook to mutineer captain through his command of song and language. I argue for Silver’s chanteying as a form of prosthesis: through song he commands multiple bodies, granting him, in effect, not only a replacement for his missing leg, but also control of nineteen sets of hands—hands that, for a time, help him seize sociopolitical control of the ship and the island. Like Peter Capuano, I want to “[t]ak[e] the nineteenth-century novel’s fascination with hands seriously.” Doing so “brings into relief a crucial moment in the history of embodiment that has remained largely unrecognizable to us” (3). Analyzing the materiality of hands, Capuano “seek[s] to exchange the metaphorical critical model ... with something more literal” (14). In the same way, the multiple hands of Treasure Island—both the actual appendage but also the synecdoche for the common working sailor—challenge us to stay with the literal, to parse the actually existing politics of embodiment on board the ship.

Although a member of the crew, the one-legged Silver cannot—or, perhaps more accurately, does not—perform the same physical work as the rest aboard the Hispaniola. 205

He always stands aside as the other hands heave and haul. To be sure, Silver is otherwise highly mobile while aboard the ship: he makes efficient use of his crutch, and he traverses the decks via specialized ropes, pulling himself along even “in the heaviest of weather.” Jim Hawkins, our narrator for most of the novel, recalls how Silver “had a line or two rigged up to help him across the widest spaces—Long John’s earrings, they were called; and he would hand himself from one place to another ... as quickly as another man could walk” (97). (Compare this mobility to Silver’s impeded movement on the island, where the one-legged man must work doubly hard to navigate the sand with his crutch

[see 216].) The nickname “Long John’s earrings” figures the ropes as part of Silver’s body—or, at least, as a prosthetic extension.13 But I am less interested in how Silver

“hand[s] himself from one place to another” via his own hands, and more interested in how he does so with the hands of the other crewmen. For despite his impressive mobility via the accessible “earrings,” Silver never joins the crew as they take other ropes in hand, those that raise the anchor, hoist the sails, etc. Instead, Silver takes on the job of chanteyman: he leads the songs that direct those hands heaving and hauling. As a chanteyman, he serves as a crucial node in shipboard community, drawing together the lives around him via labor.

As the crew of the Hispaniola prepares to set sail, Silver inaugurates a metonymic

13 William Newton explains that the stereotypical image of pirate fashion—including gold hoop earrings—derives largely from fiction, including the art and illustrations of Howard Pyle (1853–1911) as well as popular characters such as J. M. Barrie’s Captain Hook, who wears pieces of eight in his ears (218). Newton does acknowledge, though, that real pirates may have worn earrings for a variety of superstitious and homeopathic reasons (including better eyesight and avoiding seasickness). In this sense, earrings function as prosthesis, aiding and exceeding the capacities of the normal seafaring body. 206 chain of labor: he provides the voice that moves the hands that turn the winch that raises the anchor.

“Now Barbecue, tip us a stave,” cried one voice. “The old one,” cried another. “Ay, ay, mates,” said Long John, who was standing by, with his crutch under his arm, and at once broke out in the air with the words I knew so well — “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—” And then the whole crew bore the chorus: — “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” And at the third “ho!” drove the bars before them with a will (95).

Here the able-bodied sailors of the Hispaniola, with Silver to the side directing them, gather around the capstan, a barrel-shaped winch on a vertical axis. Each grips a “stave,” a wooden bar slotted into sockets around the head of the capstan. Beginning on the final

“ho!” the sailors push as one body, turning the winch to hoist the anchor. Hauling anchor was a slow, repetitive, and arduous process. On some smaller merchant vessels—a schooner, for example, such as the Hispaniola, with her crew of only twenty-one—the laborious march around the capstan could involve the entire crew (see Frank, Sea 7).

The passage here moves from the oral to the aural to the physical, tracing a progression of voices (the two sailors, then Silver, followed by the whole crew in chorus) to a group of hands that “dr[i]ve the bars before them with a will.” Even the chantey itself gains a physical presence: Jim, our narrator, describes how the “whole crew bore the chorus,” as if carrying a tune involves carrying actual weight. Indeed, the passage articulates the imbrication of song and labor. Note the double meaning of “stave,” which is both the literal wooden lever (also known as a “handspike” or “manspike”) used to turn the capstan and a figurative staff—i.e., a musical staff. “[T]ip us a stave” thus simultaneously means “sing us a song” and “let’s get to work.” 207

At the helm of this physical operation stands Silver, keeping time and directing work through the chantey. The passage takes care to note the “crutch under his arm,” reminding us of Silver’s missing leg. We are also reminded of Silver’s lowly position as ship’s cook (via his nickname, “Barbecue”), a role traditionally assigned to an injured seaman. Yet through his prosthetic chanteying performance the conspicuously one-legged man gains control of surrogate bodies. As the men “dr[i]ve the bars before them with a will,” it is the “will” of Long John Silver.

Although the “Dead Man’s Chest” chantey is itself fictional, it affords a historically specific set of labor relations. John Sutherland, the editor of the 2012

Broadview edition of Treasure Island, tells us that “[s]cholars have scoured nautical songbooks in vain” to find Stevenson’s historical source of inspiration for the “Dead

Man’s Chest” chantey. The song, says Sutherland, “remains, alas, an insoluble puzzle”

(253–4). With due respect, I believe that Sutherland and his scholarly crew take the wrong approach: the chantey is not a historical “puzzle” to be solved. Unlike the directions on Flint’s treasure map, the lyrics are not some cryptic code that, when unraveled, will point us to a single, specific point of origin. Hence rather than treating the song as a “puzzle,” with secrets held within, I treat “Dead Man’s Chest” as a metonym, an index of larger historical, cultural, and political significance beyond the bounds of the text.14 Building upon Elaine Freedgood’s concept of strong metonymic reading, I trace in chanteys what she calls the “ideas in things.” Freedgood’s “thing[s]” under examination

14 As in my preceding chapters, I emphasize metonymy over metaphor as the dominant mechanic of the oceanic; the modus operandi is one of connectivity and contiguity, not resemblance. Chanteys are not mirrors of the sea; they are fundamental pieces of culture that connect us to historical circulations and exchanges. 208 are all material (e.g., mahogany furniture, cotton curtains, and colonial tobacco leaves), but I want to extend her methodology to the immaterial and the ephemeral. A chantey, of course, has a very material impact, but it itself is not a material “thing.”

Here in the capstan scene, the specific form and content of the “Dead Man’s

Chest” chantey metonymically invokes multiple maritime systems of labor: namely, it combines different elements of heaving and hauling chanteys. If we take the scene at face value, then “Dead Man’s Chest” is a capstan chantey, a subtype of heaving chantey. The passage, after all, explicitly names the capstan as the mechanism used to raise the anchor.

The dialogue recalls Hugill’s description of capstan labor at the start of a sailing voyage: with the crew at the capstan bars, the mate would question, “What about a song there?”

(or, as Hugill more colorfully puts it, “Who’s the bloody nightingale aboard this packet?”) and “there and then the self-appointed shantyman would roar forth the opening solo of his shanty” (30). The Treasure Island passage begins with the same call-and- response around the capstan: a crewman asks for Silver to “tip us a stave,” and the one- legged man obliges, “at once ... br[ea]k[ing] out” in song.

As explained by Frank, capstan chanteys were “sung primarily to allay boredom and promote morale” during the arduous task of heaving up the anchor (Sea 7). Such seems to be the case with the men aboard the Hispaniola: one mate specifically asks for

“[t]he old one,” suggesting that “Dead Man’s Chest” is a perennial crew favorite and providing a specious history for the chantey. “Dead Man’s Chest” also tells a story in ballad-like fashion, another capstan chantey hallmark that Frank identifies. As I note earlier, many types of chanteys recounted a story, but narratives were particularly helpful in holding attention during the long march around the capstan. And what an attention- 209 grabbing story this is: although we never hear the song in full, we can piece together that

“Dead Man’s Chest” tells a tale an ill-fated crew dying one by one. In Silver’s verse only fifteen of a presumed seventy-five remain; “Drink and the devil had done for the rest”

(164).15 Chanteymen also punctuated choruses with yells, shouts, and vocalizations to break up the monotony of capstan labor.16 Hugill cites two examples from heaving songs that sound strikingly familiar to the “Yo-ho-ho” chorus of “Dead Man’s Chest”: “Yo ho, heave ho!” and “Yo heave ho, round the caps’n go” (Hugill 28; see also 29).17 Richard

Henry Dana Jr., in his memoir Two Years before the Mast (1840), likewise recalls how

“all hands manned the windlass” (a capstan-like winch on a horizontal axis) “and the long-drawn ‘Yo, heave, ho!’ ... soon brought the anchor to the bows” (430). The repeated

“ho!” of the “Dead Man’s Chest” chorus is thus perhaps a truncation of “hove,” the nautical verb for (among other things) heaving up the anchor at the capstan.18

Yet the lyric form of “Dead Man’s Chest” also recalls hauling chanteys, in particular the repetitive call-and-response choruses used to time rope pulls. Whereas capstan chanteys, explains Frank, frequently have a solo of multiple lines followed by a chorus of two or more lines, hauling chanteys “are typified by a one-line call-and-

15 Our narrator Jim overhears additional lyrics later in the novel: “But one man of her crew alive, / What put to sea with seventy-five” (163). 16 At a later performance of “Dead Man’s Chest” in the novel, Jim notes how this “old, droning sailor’s song” has a “droop and a quaver at the end of every verse” (163): the “droop and a quaver” might be some kind of low vibrato—certainly not out of the ordinary in the realm of chanteys, and possibly a cue for hands to heave or haul. 17 Hugill, unfortunately, does not provide a specific name for the heaving chanteys from which the first example comes, but the second is a version of “Yeo Heave Ho!” (see Hugill 240). 18 See OED, 2d edn., s.v. “heave, v.,” I.10. 210 response format, with a single line sung as a solo, followed by a one-line refrain joined by all hands” (Sea 4; see also 7). Note the similar structures of “Dead Man’s Chest” and a traditional short-haul chantey, “Haul on the Bowline,” one of the oldest working songs of the sea:

Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest, Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Haul on the bowlin’, the bully ship’s a-rollin’, Haul on the bowlin’, the bowlin’ haul! Haul on the bowlin’; Kitty, you’re me darlin’, Haul on the bowlin’, the bowlin’ haul!19

As noted above, chanteys afford repetition, not only in word but also in tune and action.

Both “Dead Man’s Chest” and “Haul on the Bowline” use a call-and-response structure, with the same chorus following each solo line.20

If we hear “Dead Man’s Chest” as a hauling chantey, then we draw out the physical power inherent in the song’s performance. Consider how Smith describes the movement of “Haul on the Bowline” in Music of the Waters:

At the word Haul, which terminates each couplet, the tars give a tremendous jerk on the rope ... At the last word every man will throw his whole strength into the pull, all singing it in chorus, quickly and

19 “Haul on the Bowline,” in Doerflinger, Shantymen and Shantyboys (1951; 9–10, 10). Hugill notes that “Haul on the Bowline” (or some version of it) is possibly “the most ancient of the shanties,” perhaps appearing some time in the fifteenth century (265). 20 Repetition and consonance also form a tight soundscape across each song: “Dead Man’s Chest” features repeated “m” and “d” sounds, as well as the numerous “Yo-ho- ho[s]” and “bottle[s]”; “Haul on the Bowline” likewise turns upon the regular use of “h” and “b” sounds, the breathy starts to the frequent “haul[s]” and “bowlin’[s]” that structure the song’s movement. 211

explosively, and so jump by jump, the sheet [i.e., the line attached to the bottom corner of square sails] will be hauled taut at last (14).

Unlike the march around the capstan—a slow, steady grind—short-haul chanteys such as

“Haul on the Bowline” demand “quick[] and explosive[]” movement. “[E]very many will throw his whole strength into a single pull. Again, repetition affords power: because the same word (“Haul”) “terminates each couplet,” every working sailor would know the cue to pull—meaning that all of the hands could pull as one collective body. In her narrative setup to her entry on “Haul on the Bowline,” Smith notes how the mate calls out for the men to “‘[p]ull with a will,’” calling, “‘Together, men! Altogether now!’” (13). The

Treasure Island passage notes a similar coordination of movement in the chorus: all of the men “dr[i]ve the bars before them with a will ... at the third ‘ho!’” The alignment of bodies via hauling even seems to shape the very setting of the novel: readers interested in the geography of the titular island might recall “Haulbowline Head,” a cliff face at the southwest corner of the map (see 2, 165, and 165n1). Chanteys and maps are, after all, both about placement and coordination.

Hence Silver, as the chanteyman, commands not only “tremendous” corporeal power but also multiple types of corporeal power: i.e., the associated movements and labors of heaving and hauling. Moreover, his singing provides the means by which shipboard bodies are organized in both time and space. Recall, for instance, how the rhythm of “Handy, Me Boys” coordinates bodies in time as the lyrics locate the crew within shipboard tasks. Some stanzas even read like instruction manuals, noting what and when to haul:

To set the sail haul out each sheet, Handy, me boys, so handy! Haul upon the fall lads, two blocks meet, 212

Handy, me boys, so handy!21

As the men “Sing an’ haul, an’ haul an’ sing,” they pull on specific ropes at specific parts of the ship. The “sheet” denotes a line attached to the lower corners of the main square sails; the men pull on the two downbeats (the “fall[s]”) of the chorus until the “two blocks meet”—i.e., until the two mobile, wooden parts of the pulley system come together, denoting that the sheet (and, by extension, the sail) is taut.22 The song even warns the men when to stop:

I thought I heard the Old Man say, Handy, me boys, so handy! Another pull an’ then belay, Handy, me boys, so handy!23

Traditionally the closing verse of the chantey, the lines here prompt the men for one final pull before they stop and secure the rope (“belay”).24 The “Old Man” appears in multiple working chanteys as a general name for an authority figure, usually a ship’s officer.

Interesting, though, here that authority is filtered through and grounded in the chanteyman. The first line conveys not a direct order from the “Old Man” but the chanteyman’s own interpretation and delivery of it: “I thought I heard the Old Man say.”

What results in Treasure Island, then, is a centralized network of maritime labor and discipline with Silver at its heart. The “Dead Man’s Chest” and its attendant bodies demonstrate the prosthetic power of chanteying: through song the ship and its crew come

21 “Handy, Me Boys,” in Hugill (359). 22 See the entry for “sheet” in Dean King, with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes, A Sea of Words (1995; 332). 23 “Handy, Me Boys,” in Hugill (360). 24 See the entry for “belay” in King (93). 213 to function as extensions of Silver’s own body. On board the Hispaniola Silver’s authority reigns supreme, surpassing even that of Captain Smollett. As Jim describes it,

“It was as plain as day. Silver was the captain ... All the crew respected and even obeyed him.” (115). Chanteying, as we have seen, fosters the obedience that Jim describes, but the “respect” and shipwide rapport also stems from Silver’s use of voice and narrative:

Silver, Jim says, “had a way of talking to each” member of the crew that endeared him to them. For instance, “‘Come away, Hawkins,’ he would say; ‘come and have a yarn with

John’” (97).

One particular crewman under Silver’s thumb is Israel Hands, the ship’s coxswain

(i.e., steersman) and an “experienced seaman” who, at least initially to Jim’s eyes, “could be trusted at a pinch with almost anything” (97). I read Hands as a synecdoche twice over: he is part of the whole crew of the Hispaniola, the representative hand, so to speak, of the other deckhands; and “deckhand” itself synecdochally refers to a common laboring sailor, a man who lived “before the mast” in the forecastle (pronounced “foc’s’le”), the forward section of a ship.25 As such, Hands provides a barometer of Silver’s degree of control. We meet Hands soon after Silver’s first performance of “Dead Man’s Chest.”

Hands falls in line and performs his duty, as Silver would say, “hand over hand” (88).

And later, when Hands wants to prematurely spring the mutiny, Silver rebukes him:

“Israel,” said Silver, “your head ain’t much account, nor ever was. But you’re able to hear, I reckon; leastways, your ears is big enough. Now, here’s what I say: you’ll berth forward, and you’ll live hard, and you’ll speak soft, and you’ll keep sober, till I give the word; and you may lay to that, my son” (104).

25 See the entries for “before the mast” and “‘foc’s’le’ or forecastle” in King (92 and 168). 214

Silver commands Hands to stick to the plan, to maintain the steady pace that has already been set. Hands and the other hands must continue their labor before the mast: “you’ll berth forward,” declares Silver, “and you’ll live hard.” Notably, Silver makes clear that importance of Hands’s sense of hearing: no action shall be taken until the men hear Silver

“give the word.” The rebuke recalls the labor at the capstan during the performance of

“Dead Man’s Chest”: as chanteyman, Silver sets the pace and signals the start of movement (“the third ‘ho!’”). When Hands attempts a rebuttal—“Why, we’re all seamen aboard here” (i.e., the mutineers-in-waiting could sail the ship without any officers)—

Silver reminds him of his place as a laborer: “We’re all foc’s’le hands, you mean” (104).

Once Silver leaves the deck of the Hispaniola, though, his control wanes. As soon as the men see the long-awaited island, shipboard discipline breaks down: “The slightest order was received with a black look, and grudgingly and carelessly obeyed.” Silver attempts to temper emotions with song: “he kept up one song after another, as if to conceal the discontent of the rest” (114). The text offers no clues as to what kinds of songs Silver sings (or if they are even chanteys), but one thing is clear: as the Hispaniola nears land, Silver’s voice loses power. The facade that Silver worked so hard to maintain crumbles: “Mutiny,” Jim realizes, “it was plain, hung over us like a thundercloud” (114).

An index of Silver’s waning power is again the coxswain Hands, left behind to hold the schooner for the mutineers. Without Silver on board, though, to maintain order,

Hands gets drunk and murders another mutineer. And when Jim finally returns to the

Hispaniola, he spies telltale signs of laxity in duty and discipline: in addition to the myriad dirty handprints on the bulkheads belowdecks, Jim encounters an injured, inebriated Hands “propped up against the bulwarks, his chin on his chest, his hands lying 215 open before him on the deck” (171). The idle hands of an idle Hands accomplish no work.

On shore, Silver fares no better. The land strips him of the efficient mobility he enjoyed while aboard the Hispaniola. The extent of his disability thus depends upon the setting. At sea, I argue, the one-legged chanteyman is decidedly not disabled. On land, however, it is a different story: Silver not only struggles through the sand with his crutch

(see 216), but also loses the ability to move his surrogate bodies—those of the other crewman once held under his sway via prosthetic chanteying. Jim, in fact, notes how

Silver himself must now labor to stay alive, “keeping the mutineers together with one hand, and grasping, with the other, after every means possible and impossible, to make his peace and save his miserable life” (198). Jim’s metaphor is particularly resonant when read in the historical context of chanteying labor: no longer can Silver command other hands; he must use his own.

The status of Silver’s physical ability thus bears a fundamental connection to the narrative of Treasure Island, and vice-versa. Silver’s bodily condition prompts his prosthetic chanteying, which, in turn, helps move not only the ship (via the crew) but also, in a sense, the plot: after all, the mutiny that shapes the course of much of the action in the novel depends wholly upon Silver’s ability to maintain sociopolitical control. In the words of Michael Bérubé, “disability ... demands a story.” Disability, he explains, “has complex relations to the conditions of narrative” because disability “compels us to understand embodiment in relation to temporality” (570). Put differently, disability is not a static fact but rather a dynamic condition of embodiment; its degree and nature depend upon context. Narrative affords the same kind of contingency: as a literary text 216 rearticulates the events of the chronological story (the fabula), this emplotment (the syuzhet) inevitably reshapes and transforms the original meaning. Hence when we approach narrative from a disability studies angle, says Bérubé, we can “reread the role of temporality [and] causality” (576).26 In the case of Treasure Island, then, we must take seriously how Silver’s embodiment shapes narrative causality, and vice-versa. As the peg-legged chanteyman organizes bodies in time via song, he reshapes his own story of embodiment.

In rethinking embodiment via Silver, we might also put to the test David T.

Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s concept of “narrative prosthesis.” Mitchell and Snyder argue that disability is “a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytic insight.” They posit that a narrative seeks to “resolve or correct—to ‘prostheticize’—a deviance marked as improper to a social context” (49 and 53). In other words, representations of disability in literature are never truly about disability; they are, as Alice Hall puts it, “quick metaphorical shortcut[s]” that tell readers “something about the main, non-disabled protagonists” (66).

To a certain extent I agree here: Silver’s peg leg is a prompt for chanteying, and chanteying in turn shapes the warp and weft of the “main, non-disabled” characters’ stories (i.e., that of Jim Hawkins) and leads us to the often violent circulations of capital and empire.

Yet I would qualify this claim: I maintain that Silver—and, as we shall see,

26 Coincidentally enough, it was in Bérubé’s seminar as an undergraduate that I first encountered not only disability studies but also narratology and the Russian formalist concepts of fabula and syuzhet. For more on the distinction between story and discourse, see Victor Shklovsky’s 1921 essay “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary.” 217

Cuttle—are not actually disabled while chanteying. Bérubé, I think, would agree: “in the rendering of disability as exceptionality,” he writes, “the disability itself effectively disappears” (569). Silver’s singing is prosthetic, but not in the reductive sense as characterized by Mitchell and Snyder. The narratives of Treasure Island and Dombey and

Son never mark the bodily differences of Silver and Cuttle as “improper to a social context.” On the contrary, their embodiment provides the very conditions of sociality. In place of physical labor they sing, and this singing extends their bodies, granting them control over multiple surrogate bodies. Again, prosthesis exceeds mere replacement. In the words of David Wills, whose study Prosthesis (1995) laid the foundations for that area of disability studies, “prosthesis is inevitably about belonging” (15). Through chanteying Silver and Cuttle carve out their niches in their textual social worlds.

Silver, for instance, is a highly professional pirate: his buccaneering is less a chaotic, improvised struggle and more an organized, premeditated endeavor. Piracy was a business, and—at the risk of sounding too presentist—every successful business person must network. The economist Peter T. Leeson offers a useful concept for parsing the sociopolitical mechanics of Silver’s professional and economic networking: the “invisible hook.” The piratical analog to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” the invisible hook describes the tendency toward social and economic cooperation: in pursuing their own interests, all individuals—even pirates—inevitably serve others interests.27 The invisible hook pulls together a professional community; under its auspices, individual goals

27 Leeson distinguishes Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” from the “invisible hook” in two ways. First, whereas the hand deals with legitimate markets, the hook describes criminal social groups. Second, whereas the guidance of the hand produces wealth, the hook induces “parasitic” action, “not creating but siphoning” wealth (4). 218 become collective goals: pirates band together to avoid costs, to offset risk, and to maximize profit. Hence professional piracy, in theory, gives rise to a distributed socioeconomic network, one in which an individual’s actions shape the actions of those around her or him. Such hypothetical cooperation enacts, as Leeson sees it, a “system of democratic checks and balances” (20).28 Pirates democratically elected their leaders and voted on all matters that would affect general crew welfare. Consider the various professional “rules” and “rights” observed by the Treasure Island pirates (192): Silver first rises to power through an ostensibly democratic election; later, he is impeached by committee (a formal legal procedure that culminates in the delivery of the “black spot”) but then reelected after a rousing stump speech (see 194–7).

Yet despite such politicking, Treasure Island never leaves us in doubt as to who truly stands at the helm: Silver. Despite being impeached by a “full council,” Silver wins back unanimous support, with cheering to boot: “‘Silver!’ [the men] cried. ‘Barbecue for ever! Barbecue for cap’n!’” (194 and 197). The guidance of the invisible hook may create a professional pirate community in Treasure Island, but I am less certain that it engenders the balanced democracy proposed by Leeson. For Silver plays both sides of the conflict, eventually double-crossing the same men that he leads to mutiny aboard the Hispaniola, the same men who so sincerely (re)elect him. What we have, then, is not a distributed but rather a centralized socioeconomic and sociopolitical network. Life and labor—and, in fact, narration—in Treasure Island revolve around Silver. Imagine a wagon wheel: the

28 Leeson implies that professional piracy entails more organization than its legitimate counterparts. He contrasts the “autocratic authority” and frequent abuses of power aboard eighteenth-century British merchant ships with the democratic governance developed by pirate communities (15). 219 peripheral nodes turn according to the movement at the center. The key to understanding such governance, I contend, lies in chanteys, which can be at once seemingly democratic yet also despotic, raising all voices in chorus but controlling all bodies in labor. It is no coincidence that the chanteyman and the pirate-in-chief are the same character in

Treasure Island. Even though Silver is, arguably, a minor character in the novel—he drives the story, but the actual narrative voice never focalizes around him—he plays a central role in the sociopolitical life of Treasure Island.

INTERLUDE: FROM PEG LEG TO HOOK HAND TO OCEANIC IMAGINARY

Captain Cuttle shares much in common with Silver: both sing sea chanteys, both use a prosthesis for a missing appendage, and both are minor characters (or, at least, they are not protagonists). Yet Cuttle offers a different account of sociopolitical organization: his chanteying produces not a centralized but a distributed network. Moreover, the primary affective state of Cuttle’s chanteying is positive: whereas Silver wants to keep everyone under his thumb, Cuttle works to bring multiple characters into better relation with one another. These differences are due in part to a double difference in genre: first,

Silver channels the disciplinary labor of heaving and hauling chanteys, whereas Cuttle invokes the sociality of the forecastle chantey; second, Treasure Island is a straightforward maritime adventure tale, whereas Dombey and Son is a narrative amalgam of the Bildungsroman, the marriage plot, the education plot, and the detective plot. If this were a different Dickens novel—something decidedly grimmer, say, like

Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), or the unfinished

Mystery of Edwin Drood (ca. 1870)—then perhaps Cuttle’s chanteying would take on the hegemonic and politicking character of Silver’s chanteying. But despite Dombey and 220

Son’s grim and somber moments, Cuttle circulates within and between a number of redemptive, upward-moving plot lines. As Helena Michie observes, even Cuttle’s drinking habit—which could easily presage a darker end, as similar alcoholic addictions do in other Dickens novels—never suggests “(for long) that his will be a tragic ending”

(610). Accordingly, his chanteying affords not sweaty, disciplined bodies, but cheerful, socially integrated ones.

Cuttle recasts oceanic discipline in a positive register. His chanteying theatrics invert what Greg Dening, in his analysis of the mutiny on the Bounty (28 April 1789), calls “Mr Bligh’s Bad Language.” Dening describes the mutiny as disciplinary public theatre, with Bligh dishing out verbal abuse (e.g., “you damn’d scoundrel”) at any moment that called his authority into question; his 1805 court-martial charged him with

“tyranny, unofficerlike conduct and ungentlemanly behaviour” and noted that he used a

“great deal of action with his hands, as if he was going to knock any person down, without particular meaning to it” (59-60). Cuttle, by contrast, uses decidedly “good language,” songs of sociality and courtship; his hook hand works not to meaninglessly

“knock any person down” but to purposefully lift them up. Instead of the naval hierarchy that Commander Bligh—and, for that matter, mutineer captain Long John Silver—so tyrannically defend, Captain Cuttle shows us the transformative powers of the distributed network. What results is a twofold networked “translation” (to borrow Latour’s wording) via the oceanic imaginary. As the hook-handed, chanteying captain pulls together the narrative and social systems of the novel via song, he performs a politics of embodiment that reworks the disciplinary nature of chanteying. In the process, this minor actor turns

Dombey and Son—an ostensibly “landlocked” novel—into maritime fiction. 221

For a novel that at times feels so nautical, Dombey and Son has little actual water.

Oceanic events—such as Walter’s voyage to Barbados and shipwreck in the western

Atlantic, Gills’s subsequent shipbound search to find Walter, or Walter and Florence’s later voyage to China—occur offstage, beyond narrative discourse. The novel does not relay what happens at sea in real time: voyages are only recounted after the fact, when the characters involved are back on terra firma. Even the oceanic exchanges of the titular company—the Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for

Exportation, to use the novel’s full title—appear only in glimpses. The novel begins with the promise that “[r]ivers and seas were formed to float [the firm’s] ships” (12), yet none of those bodies of water seem to wend their way into the actual prose. If we look for directly narrated waterborne events, the best we can come up with is perhaps the indefatigable Mr. Toots and his little river boat, The Toot’s Joy.

This direct oceanic occlusion is not unlike the frontispiece to the novel, wherein smoke obscures a map of “THE WORLD” [see Figure 8, below]. In that same frontispiece, though, the novel offers its best substitute for the oceanic: Captain Edward

Cuttle. Cuttle, the narrator tells us, “had been a pilot, skipper, or a privateersman, or all three perhaps; and was a very salt-looking man indeed” (56). “[A] very salt-looking man indeed”—the frontispiece confirms this report: surrounded by maritime paraphernalia,

Cuttle sits in the back room of the nautical instrument shop The Wooden Midshipman.

His hook hand occupies the very center of the oval illustration; set against a stark white backdrop, the hook stands out from the rest of the shadowy room. Cuttle’s own attention seems to mirror this visual focalization: his gaze is directed less at Rob the Grinder, hunched over a book, and more at his own metal appendage. 222

Figure 8: Phiz [H. K. Browne], frontispiece to Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848), iii.

He is thus a “very salt-looking man” in a sense other than just appearance: he focuses on the hook, the prosthetic replacement for a hand most likely lost in maritime service. The novel does not specify how Cuttle lost his hand. As Trey Philpotts explains, though, “hooks were considered aesthetically unacceptable” in nineteenth-century

Britain, hence “they were primarily worn by men working in manual trades and crafts” 223

(70). Given Cuttle’s extensive nautical résumé—he “had been a pilot, skipper, or a privateersman, or all three perhaps”—the likelihood that he lost a hand serving in maritime “manual trades” seems high. Everyday shipboard or dockside labor offered a range of dangers by which sailors could lose a hand. The hook serves as a material metonym for this maritime world; it provides a constant physical reminder of Cuttle’s connection to oceanic networks of labor, mobility, and corporeality. Cuttle’s carbuncles offer a similar metonymic reminder. As Michie notes, Cuttle “is remarkable for the knobs on his face and for Madeira drinking, but we are never invited into a narrative of his past”

(610). The narrative never grants a full backstory to this minor character; all that we have are the symptomatic carbuncles. Yet, like the hook, these “knobs” posit a maritime past and a wider oceanic world via a metonymic chain of cultural contiguity: Cuttle’s carbuncles signal his frequent consumption of Madeira wine, and Madeira was frequently used as ballast on packet ships, the wine slowly aging as the ships sailed the seas.

The hook exemplifies Cuttle’s—and, by extension, Dickens’s—oceanic imaginary. In the same way that the hook occupies the center of the frontispiece, the ocean lies at the center of Dombey and Son’s narrative world. For both Cuttle and

Dickens are “very salt-looking m[e]n indeed”: Cuttle perpetually looks toward the sea, filtering his view of the world through the oceanic. And Dickens likewise “delighted in the life of the sea,” incorporating the maritime elements that shaped his life into his fiction (Philpotts 3).29 Two maritime-minded men, Cuttle and Dickens draw upon oceanic

29 As Philpotts explains, Dickens “was born in a seaport town (Portsea), where his father was a naval pay clerk, and it was in another seaport town (Chatham) that he spent some of the happiest years of his youth. He took his middle name—‘Huffam’—from a naval rigger (his godfather) who, like Captain Cuttle, lived in Limehouse near the London

224 history and culture both as a source for narrative content and as a heuristic for narrative form. So although Cuttle does obscure “THE WORLD” map with pipe smoke in the frontispiece, over the course of the novel he ultimately helps us grasp a wider oceanic world—one not bounded to the traditional limits of the shoreline. While Silver’s sociopolitical control remains yoked to the binary division of land and sea, Cuttle makes clear how maritime discourse shapes mobility and sociality on land.

While Cuttle’s metal prosthesis is often an occasion for brief bits of humor, I want to take the hook as a serious prompt for how Cuttle makes sense of professional, social, and narrative systems across the novel. In her discussion of literacy and orality in

Dombey and Son, Gillian Gane remarks that Cuttle’s hook is “never anything but funny”

(99). I do not necessarily disagree; I never fail to laugh, for instance, when Cuttle unscrews his hook and screws in interchangeable cutlery attachments at the dinner table

(see 138 and 737). But the hook is no mere prop, and it affords more than just comedy.

From the hook I derive two related heuristics for oceanic reading. First, metonymic replacement: the hook not only replaces Cuttle’s hand but also, as Philpotts explains, marks him as a laborer. As with Silver, though, we never see Cuttle do much literal work across the course of Dombey and Son. He does replace Gills as the steward and acting manager of The Wooden Midshipman for much of the novel, but even in this shop that the text repeatedly figures as a ship or as ship-like (e.g., “the shop itself ... seemed almost to become a snug, sea-going, ship-shape concern, wanting only good sea- room, in the event of an unexpected launch, to work its way securely, to any desert island in the world” [47; see also 496]), this hook-handed sailor accomplishes little in terms of

Docks” (3). 225 actual business. But if we read Cuttle only as a small business owner (not unlike Silver the professional pirate), then of course he seems unproductive, and we overlook the metonymic resonances to other historical forms of labor. Like his hook-hand, Cuttle replaces one thing for a culturally related thing: unable to perform maritime labor, he instead enacts narrative labor. Gills charges Cuttle, in fact, not with running the business as such but rather with “keep[ing] a home in the old place for Walter” (390). Cuttle’s concern is with care of those around him. During his tenure as steward of the

Midshipman he accordingly spends most of his time engaged in domestic and social rather than economic circulations and exchanges. Hook-handed labor is still actual labor, not just a semblance of such.

Hence the second heuristic offered by the hook: literalism. The hook challenges us to think literally, to draw out the interpretive possibilities of the surface. Across the novel, Cuttle’s hook always remains a hook. Put differently, this particular prosthesis seems to resist (or, at the very least, to avoid) Dickens’s penchant for metaphorization.

For a counterexample, we can look to Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) and the peg-legged

Silas Wegg, a “wooden” man whose wooden leg grows notably erect at the prospect of personal gain. Wegg, we learn, is “so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected—if his development received no untimely check—to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months” (53-4). And when Mr. Boffin tempts him with a story of hidden gold, “Mr Wegg’s wooden leg started forward under the table, and slowly elevated itself as [Mr. Boffin] read on” (476). With unsubtle symbolism the wooden tumescence metaphorizes Wegg’s lust for money. Yet Dickens is hardly as 226 heavy handed with Cuttle in Dombey and Son. If anything, the metal hook is just another part of the sailor’s body. At one point in the novel, Walter shakes the “true hand” of

Captain Cuttle. The narration does not directly specify which hand this is, but in a subsequent paragraph identifies it as “the hard hand of the Captain” (757–8).

The hook, in sum, asks us to think the literal and the figurative together—as in my denotative reading of coal in chapter 2. We can read Captain Cuttle as a sailor and remain open to the interpretive possibilities of the surface. Such is the challenge and opportunity presented by chanteys: what happens when we confront a historical genre where we don’t have to dig (or dive)? In reading chanteys as chanteys, we move toward a critical hermeneutics other than that of suspicious reading.

In the same way, oceanic studies calls for a renewed attention to the actual lived experiences and exchanges of maritime history and culture. In the words of Bernhard

Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, “the ocean itself needs to be analyzed as a deeply historical location” (2). My analysis of entropy aboard Joseph Conrad’s fictional steamships and coaling barques (chapter 2), for instance, or my reading of discourses of longitude and naval navigation in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (chapter 3) demonstrate the critical utility of this turn to technical maritime history. Life and labor at sea provide a distinct field of historical referents, and we must avoid subsuming the historicity of the ocean to that of the land. As Klein and Mackenthun put it, the “transformative power” of the sea “is not merely psychological or metaphorical—as its frequent use as a literary motif might suggest—but material and very real” (2). My interest lies with Silver and Cuttle as sailors and chanteymen. To quote Hester Blum, “THE SEA IS NOT A METAPHOR” (670)—and, for me, neither are Silver and Cuttle. We could, perhaps, make the leap from sailors to 227 factory workers, framing Treasure Island as a kind of industrial allegory: recognizing the affinity between a shipboard mutiny and a textile mill strike requires no great stretch of the imagination. Or we could see Cuttle, as some critics already have, as a personification of the industrial factory system that melded human and nonhuman into a single, cybernetic assemblage (see Sussman and Joseph 619–20). But such leaps would entail the

“hydrophasia”—a critical failure to see the oceanic as the oceanic—diagnosed by

Margaret Cohen in The Novel and the Sea (2010; 14). To jump to readings of Long John the Chartist or Captain Cuttle the Cyborg would be to overlook Silver and Cuttle as sailors and chanteymen. We would skip over a valuable archive of oceanic history and materials: sea chanteys at the end of the age of sail.

As in my other chapters, I seek here to synthesize the concerns of formalism and historicism. My oceanic-studies focus on the literal and historical dimensions of the oceanic does not preclude consideration of literary form and figuration. On the contrary, I believe that the literary imagination in the long nineteenth century draws upon maritime culture in diffuse and dynamic ways. Even in texts and narratives that unfold largely on land (such as Dickens’s Dombey and Son), the oceanic imaginary crafts complex literary systems out of maritime forms and histories. In the case of sea chanteys, their specific social, political, and aesthetic structures can teach us much about the specific networking of bodies, labor, and storytelling in the long nineteenth century—and vice versa.

THE “LOVELY PEG” AND NARRATIVE LABOR

Cuttle’s use of chanteys and sea songs provide a heuristic through which we can better understand the novel’s social and narrative systems. The hook-handed old salt breaks into song at key moments, organizing bodies while moving the story along. Cuttle 228 thus performs what I will call narrative labor: although he cannot physically heave and haul as he would on a ship, he can knot together different social strands and narrative plot lines, ultimately creating the collective social body of the multiplot novel. Cuttle functions as a social nexus, an intermediary who fosters and facilitates chains of connections between a range of characters: dyadic relationships, for instance, between

Sol Gills and Walter, Walter and Mr. Dombey, Mr. Dombey and Florence, Florence and

Mr. Toots, Mr. Toots and Walter, Walter and Mr. Carker, Mr. Carker and Rob, Rob and

Florence, Florence and Bunsby, and Bunsby and Mrs. MacStinger, among others. And, crucially, he serves as an avuncular guide and guardian for Walter and Florence, presiding over the progression of their marriage plot.

In this section I want to explore how Cuttle inaugurates and highlights these dyadic relationships via song and how, in the process, he locates himself in the narrative.

Through chanteying Cuttle becomes, in the words of Georg Simmel, the “Tertius

Gaudens” (“the third who enjoys”), transforming dyadic ties to triadic systems of mutual relation (Simmel 154; and Kadushin 23). His chanteying, in short, serves to mark the formation and/or transformation of social bonds, and it helps us track the novel’s process of community formation. Whereas Silver’s chanteying registers the centralized network of professional piracy, Cuttle’s chanteying speaks of the distributed systems and multiplex connections of the multiplot novel.

Ever the chanteyman, Cuttle brings those around him together in chorus. And as songs form around him, so too do social bonds. When, for instance, Walter learns that the firm is sending him to Barbados, Walter seeks the counsel of Captain Cuttle, “that powerful mediator” (233). Walter reveals his impending departure to Cuttle, charging the 229 captain with the care of his uncle, Sol Gills, to whom he has not yet told the news. Cuttle shall be Walter’s “one friend at home who knows [his] real situation,” someone who can help “[i]n case any means should arise of lending me a hand.” The two effectively confirm the commission through song:

So hurrah for the West Indies, Captain Cuttle! How does that tune go that the sailors sing? “For the Port of Barbados, boys! Cheerily! Leaving old England behind us, boys! Cheerily!” Here the Captain roared in chorus: “Oh cheerily, cheerily! Oh cheer—i—ly!” (237)

Here we see (and hear) Cuttle in his role as narrative catalyst. His presence prompts this sea song, which in turn registers the formation and transformation of social relations (i.e.,

Walter’s impending distance and Cuttle’s subsequent stewardship of Gills). Yet it is not

Cuttle but rather Walter who begins the song. The hook-handed sailor joins in at the chorus, when all the men would either heave or haul. Although we might expect Cuttle— certainly the more nautically experienced of the two—to lead the song, his role as chorus makes sense in the context of the narrative progression of Dombey and Son. In the words of the novel itself, Cuttle is a “powerful mediator,” a social intermediary rather than a leading protagonist. His narrative labor here entails moving Walter along the course of the plot. Cuttle will serve as the helping “hand ... at home” that allows Walter to sail for

Barbados.

Even the very lyrics of Cuttle’s chorus propel Walter outward into the oceanic world. In the endnotes to the 2002 Penguin edition of Dombey and Son, Andrew Sanders glosses Cuttle’s “roar[ing]” simply as “[t]he chorus of a popular sea-shanty” (972n5); he 230 offers no specific title. Philpotts, however, referencing Hugill, suggests that the Cuttle and Walter’s song is not a single specific chantey but rather an amalgam of two historical sea songs. The verse echoes “The Farewell,” a contemporary popular song by Richard

Cobbold, in both lyrics (“The sailor is leaving Old England once more”) and sentiment (a young sailor leaving his love); and the chorus appears to come directly from “Cheerily

Man,” a multipurpose chantey used for both heaving and hauling.30 Hugill cites one version that should sound familiar:

O haul pulley, Yoe! Cheerily men. O long and strong, yo ho! Cheerily men. Yo-ho and with a will, Cheerily men, Cheerily, cheerily, cheerily, O!31

Echoing the chorus of “Dead Man’s Chest,” the chantey that moves bodies “with a will,” the various shouts here—“Yoe!,” “yo ho!,” “Yo-ho”—capture the chanteyman’s capacity for embellishment. Historically, chanteymen would add shouts, warbles, yodels, and the like to working songs. Doerflinger notes the poentential for “variations, grace notes, unexpected stresses and holds, high breaks ... and other effects” (x). Hugill calls these yells “hitches” and describes them as “the very essence of the shantyman’s art.” He acknowledges, though, that “[t]hese yells had no real functional value except ... to stimulate the crowd for the next pull” (29). But such prompting seems to be quite

30 Richard Cobbold, “The Farewell,” in Valentine Verses: or, Lines of Truth, Love, and Virtue (1827), qtd. in Philpotts (203). See also “Cheerily Man,” in Hugill (234–7). On the uses of “Cheerily Man,” see Hugill (234). 31 “Cheerily Man,” in Hugill (237). 231 functional, as it aids in unity and helps transition from one movement to the next—hence, perhaps, the term “hitch”: vocalizations as connections. (Hugill offers no further explanation of the name.) Cuttle’s stylized “Oh cheer—i—ly!” functions as a kind of hitch: it isn’t a vocalization per se, but it does prompt the next (narrative) movement:

Walter’s departure, “Leaving Old England behind ... For the Port of Barbados.”

Through the chorus, then, Cuttle not only registers the presence of the wider oceanic world that shapes the novel but also provides an index of social relations. The same cheerful chorus, for instance, later ironically serves a highly practical purpose:

Cuttle, hiding from Mrs. MacStinger and desiring some means of “holding communication with the outside world,” teaches Rob the Grinder a “secret signal ... instructing him to whistle the marine melody, ‘Oh cheerily, cheerily!’” whenever the terrifying landlady approaches (494). As I note above, tragedy seems not to touch Cuttle nor his chanteys: the irony of a “cheer[ful]” warning emphasizes his near-constant sociability; even when threatened he fosters positive affect. In another example of cheerful sociability, Cuttle’s chorus, “roared” out after Walter’s verses, prompts a nearby sailor to join in:

The last line reaching the quick ears of an ardent skipper not quite sober, who lodged opposite, and who instantly sprung out of bed, threw up his window, and joined in, across the street, at the top of his voice, produced a fine effect. When it was impossible to sustain the concluding note any longer, the skipper bellowed forth a terrific “ahoy!” intended in part as a friendly greeting, and in part to show that he was not at all breathed (237).

The effect of the chorus is near instant: the unnamed skipper “instantly sprung out of bed” and into action, loudly “join[ing] in” and “produc[ing] a fine effect” on the collective sound. The unnamed skipper makes only this brief appearance in the novel. His cameo, though, spurred by Cuttle’s chorus, reminds us how Dickens’s multi-plot novels 232 achieve a reality effect in part through the various minor lives that make up the narrative world. As soon as the skipper sings his part in the chorus, his disappears just as quickly as he appeared.

Chanteys and sea songs, in fact, might help us think through narrative emplacement, the arrangement of literary characters within and through the text. In his analysis of characterization and emplacement in the realist novel, Alex Woloch describes what he terms “character-space,” how our sense of a character is inherently tied to narrative form. Character-space “marks the intersection of an implied human personality

... with the definitively circumscribed form of a narrative.” In theory, explains Woloch, a character is a fully fleshed persona; in practice, though, that persona appears only through whatever space the narrative affords. Put differently, emplacement doesn’t simply locate characters; it creates them—or, at the very least, it dictates the only means by which we can come to know the “implied human personality.” “Our sense of the human figure (as implied person),” writes Woloch, “is inseparable from the space that he or she occupies in the narrative totality” (13). Woloch’s particular interest lies with what he calls “minor” characters: nonprotagonist figures that largely “disappear[]” into the text (not unlike the unnamed skipper); “what we remember about the [minor] character,” writes Woloch, “is never detached from how the text, for the most part, makes us forget him” (38).32

Woloch’s study raises many useful questions, including (in his own words)

“[h]ow does the text organize a large number of different characters within a unified symbolic and structural system?” (14). Silver and Cuttle might offer some possible

32 “Otherwise,” Woloch continues, “the minor character emerges only out of the wreck of the text as a whole, like the single gifted actor in a poor production, whose very talent calls our attention to the shoddiness of the show” (38, original italics). 233 answers. I am particularly interested in how these fictional chanteymen work to shape and structure the narrative around them, organizing bodies in a manner not unlike that of chanteys themselves. Silver’s and Cuttle’s narrative labors prompt a further question about emplacement and minorness. If, as Woloch argues, the concept of character-space helps us see how nonprotagonist characters jostle for the limited narrative space within a text, then what happens when ostensibly minor figures figuratively and prosthetically extend their presence throughout the text? Through chanteying Silver and Cuttle carve out their character-spaces within in the communal text. Yet chanteying might actually elevate these two nonprotagonists beyond Woloch’s classification of “minor” characters: they hardly “disappear[]” into the text as easily or as readily as Woloch’s definition suggests (or as quickly and fully as the unnamed skipper). If anything, their prosthetic connections—i.e., how Silver and Cuttle extend themselves into the larger sociopolitical body—continually surface their presence throughout each respective narrative.

In the case of Cuttle, the specific historical resonances of his narrative labor might shed further light on his relation to emplacement and minorness—that is, the narrative world Cuttle helps create and his relative place within it. The socializing effect of

Cuttle’s narrative labor stems in part from the specific type of his sea song: forecastle chanteys, those sung for shipboard entertainment and amusement and supposedly separate from the work of heaving and hauling. Frank notes how “no particular rules govern[ed] what was sung on shipboard to fill the leisure hours ... But by far the largest number of songs sung during leisure hours at sea were popular songs of all kinds imported from generic culture” (Sea 9). Frank cites the Kendall Whaling Museum’s survey of song transcriptions in around 1100 sailors’ journals from 1795–1895. The study 234 identified 460 unique songs, with the “overwhelming majority” of songs being

“professionally-composed, commercially-motivated songs of one sort of another: parlor songs, minstrel ditties, and patriotic anthems, most of them from immediately contemporaneous general culture.” The identified songs, writes Frank, “constitute a kind of rogues[’] gallery ‘hit parade’ of the middle nineteenth century,” including works by

Charles Dibdin, among others (Sea 9).

A key figure in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical and maritime culture, Dibdin was an “actor, singer, novelist, multi-instrumentalist, theatre manager, songwriter, publisher, and pioneer of the one-man show” (Newman, Jensen, and Kennerley 1). He wrote around ninety sea songs, having, in his own words, undertaken “three voyages to sea, as surgeon of a man of war, to teach [himself] sea- phrases” (qtd. in Newman, Jensen, and Kennerley 1). Although only a small portion of his overall work, these sea songs profoundly shaped the popular image of the navy and

British seafaring in the opening decades of the nineteenth century and beyond (see

Newman, Jensen, and Kennerley 4). Isaac Land describes how Dibdin’s influence upon maritime culture and maritime fiction “flourished” well into the nineteenth century: he cites an 1853 Illustrated London News that refers to contemporary sea songs and nautical melodramas as “our Dibdins” (204). Land notes that the “great majority” of Dibdin’s audience had no actual experience with seafaring: his example is none other than

Dickens, whose “occasional use of a Dibdin lyric showed an awareness of, and perhaps affinity for, the songwriter.” Land recalls Raymond William’s remark that Dickens was

“the characteristic novelist of the overheard snatch of speech on the metropolitan street”

(qtd. in Land 209n29). In the same way, suggests Land, “Dibdin is remembered, above 235 all, for having given a voice to certain kinds of marginal characters” (209).

In Dombey and Son, that “marginal” (or, to use Woloch’s term, “minor”) character is Captain Cuttle. Cuttle channels Dibdin via the omnipresent ballad of “Lovely

Peg,” a fictional song about waterside romance that Cuttle deploys as a prompt for Walter and Florence’s own progression through the marriage plot. Early in the novel, Cuttle and

Gills fantasize that Walter will one day marry Florence Dombey, the daughter of his employer. Later on, after Walter helps rescue the lost Florence, Cuttle adopts the fantasy as a course of action. To aid his plan, he

purchase[s] a ballad of considerable antiquity, that had long fluttered among many others, chiefly expressive of maritime sentiments, on a dead wall in the Commercial Road: which poetical performance set forth the courtship and nuptials of a promising young coal-whipper with a certain “lovely Peg,” the accomplished daughter of the master and part-owner of a Newcastle collier. In this stirring legend, Captain Cuttle descried a profound metaphysical bearing on the case of Walter and Florence; and it excited him so much, that ... he would roar through the whole song in the little back parlor; making an amazing shake on the word Pe-e-eg, with which every verse concluded; in compliment to the heroine of the piece (129–30).

According to Sanders’s endnote, the “ballad of considerable antiquity” is Dibdin’s

“Saturday Night at Sea” (1789; see 967n3), a popular sea song also known as

“Sweethearts and Wives.” The song follows three sailors as they leisurely reminisce about their loves back on shore. With their work done (“No duty call’d the jovial tars”), they bond over a shared “can” of grog. Notably, one of the sailor’s loves is named “Peg,” and another sailor uses the phrase “heart’s delight”—the very phrase that Cuttle uses as a nickname for Florence throughout the novel (Dibdin, Songs 34–5; and see, for example, 236

Dickens, Dombey 589, 725, and 873).33

Yet Cuttle’s “Lovely Peg” also recalls Dibdin’s The Waterman (1774), a comic ballad opera about two men fighting for the love of one woman. Our hero Tom Tug, the titular waterman and a hopeful bachelor, works to woo his employer’s daughter,

Wilhelmina; Wilhelmina, we learn, was supposed to be named Margery—i.e., Margaret, the full name from which the nicknames “Peggy” and “Peg” derive. The working-class

Tug, however, finds a rival in the foppish Robin, and the two compete in Doggett’s Coat and Badge Race (an annual rowing contest on the Thames, held every year since 1715) to win Wilhelmina’s heart. The competition recalls that of Walter and Mr. Toots, who both imagine a future with Florence. Mr. Toots, in fact, acquires a “six-oared cutter”—a rowing racing boat—in an attempt to model himself after Tom Tug and subsequently impress Florence (437).34

As with Walter and Cuttle’s “Port of Barbados” chantey, the “Lovely Peg,” I believe, is not an allusion to a specific song but rather an amalgam of representative themes and tropes from the genres of nautical melodrama and the popular maritime ballad. The amalgamation demonstrates Cuttle’s penchant for invention and improvisation—key qualities, say both Frank and Hugill, of an effective chanteyman (see

Frank, Sea 3; and Hugill 32). E. David Gregory likewise notes how improvisation was a hallmark of a well-versed chanteyman: “a given song would be sung with different words

33 I quote Dibdin’s “Sweethearts and Wives” from the 1841 collected edition of his Songs, Naval and National (see 34–-5). Notably, this edition includes sketches by none other than George Cruikshank, Dickens’s own longtime illustrator. 34 On Dibdin’s The Waterman and Mr. Toots, see Philpotts (317). Oddly, perhaps, Philpotts notes the allusion to The Waternman here with Mr. Toots but does not make any discussion of the ballad opera in relation to Cuttle’s repeated uses of the “Lovely Peg.” 237 and sometimes a different tune, by different [singers] or even, on occasion, by the same

[singer]” (125). We cannot say for sure, then, if the “young coal-whipper” and

“Newcastle collier” are Cuttle’s interpretation of the characters from The Waterman, allusions to some other chantey or popular maritime ballad, or elements entirely of his own invention. Philpotts likewise notes Dickens’s own willingness to “fabricate details,” even in a novel that draws heavily upon real social, political, and personal experiences.

“[A]lthough Dickens often quotes real songs, Philpotts explains, “at other times he conflates motifs from several songs, as in the ‘ballad of considerable antiquity’” (6).

What matters here is not pinpointing every single reference (if that is even possible) but rather understanding how Cuttle’s imagination—and, by extension, his narrative labor— functions along particular generic lines.

Yet Hugill, mentioning Dibdin by name, also notes that the “imitations” of sea songs by landsmen (such as Dickens’s “fabric[ation],” the “Lovely Peg” ballad) would never be sung on a working ship (38). He goes into no further detail, but I believe this apparent antagonism stems from two causes: first, popular landborn “imitations” closely mirrored the form of actual working sea chanteys; and second, there was a “general taboo” about mixing labor and leisure songs aboard ship (Baker and Miall 56). As

Gregory explains in his history of Victorian folk songs, “Many shanties evidently had multiple uses” (127). That said, hauling and heaving chanteys remained separate from forecastle chanteys. Noting the superstitious nature of sailors, Hugill warns (on the very first page of his study, in fact) that “[t]o sing a shanty when there was no heaving or hauling would be courting trouble” (1).

But Dibdin’s Waterman and, I would argue, Cuttle’s “Lovely Peg” do exactly 238 that: make narrative fodder by mixing labor and leisure, work and entertainment. The

Waterman, in fact, opens with a ballad about labor, sung by gardeners as the two working-class watermen, Tom Tug and Mr. Bundle, sit back and enjoy their breakfast:

LABOUR, lads, e’er youth be gone, For see apace the day steals on; Labour is the poor man’s wealth; Labour ’tis that gives him health; Labour makes us, while we sing, Happier than the greatest king. Then labour, lads, e’er youth be gone, For see apace the day steals on (Aiij[1r], original italics).

Here labour not only makes the characters “Happier than the greatest king” and figuratively “wealth[y],” but also, arguably, makes the characters—full stop. The comma and caesura between the fifth and six lines tempts me to read the fifth line as a standalone claim: “Labour makes us ... while we sing.” Such “mak[ing]” via song exemplifies the enactive narrative labor I see and hear in Captain Cuttle.

Woloch offers a similar concept in his discussion of the politics and poetics of character-space: “the labor theory of character.” To explain the emplacement of minor characters, Woloch looks to nineteenth-century industrialization, which “constricts full human beings to increasingly specialized roles.” The realist novel, he argues, similarly reduces nonprotagonist characters to their functions; it “creates a formal structure that can imaginatively comprehend the dynamics of alienated labor, and the class structure that underlies this labor” (26–7).35 While I agree with Woloch about the specialized work performed by minor characters (especially in relation to developing the socionarrative

35 Woloch ultimately concludes that “minor characters are the proletariat of the novel” (27, original italics). 239 world of the protagonist), I want to look elsewhere than the nineteenth-century factory system for historically specific ideologies and practices of labor and identity. My oceanic reading of Cuttle’s sea songs and chanteys offers an expanded take on emplacement and emplotment, one that traces new confluences of the professional, laboring world and the affective, social world.

Cuttle imagines a story for Walter and Florence, one that follows the conventions of a forecastle chantey and maritime ballad—more specifically, a story of lovers met, parted, and reunited. Many choruses of the “Lovely Peg” subsequently populate Dombey and Son, lending a kind of rhythm or tempo to the progression of Walter and Florence’s relationship and, later, actual courtship. After Walter’s rescue of Florence, for instance,

“[t]he Captain ... appeared to entertain a belief that the interview [between Walter and

Mr. Dombey] at which he had assisted was so very satisfactory and encouraging, as to be only a step or two removed from a regular betrothal of Florence to Walter; and that the late transaction had immensely forwarded, if not thoroughly established, the ... hopes” that Walter, following Cuttle and Gills’s fantasy, would indeed marry his employer’s daughter. Cuttle, so “[s]timulated by this conviction” (and, I would add, by his role as a social intermediary) subsequently “favour[s Walter and Gills] with the ballad of ‘Lovely

Peg’ for the third time in one evening,” this time attempting “to make an extemporaneous substitution of the name ‘Florence’” (156). The best that Cuttle can do is swap “Peg” for

“Fle—e—eg” (156), but smooth execution matters less here than the repetition and the hitch-like attempt at improvisation: this is Cuttle’s third performance of “Lovely Peg” in a single night; moreover, he tries his hand at adapting the song lyrics to the present context, as actual chanteymen did in historical practice. 240

Even outside the marriage plot, Cuttle’s performances of “Lovely Peg” continue to signal sociality in progress. He shares personal information to Walter, or instance, between “the repetitions of lovely Peg” (233); when he breaks the news of Walter’s departure to Gills, he uses “the romantic legend of Lovely Peg” to soften the blow (256); and he later runs into the wedding party of Bunsby and MacStinger—two characters he introduced to each other—while singing “Lovely Peg” (see 921). And, at the end of the novel, celebrating the culmination of his marriage prophecy, offers one final “prodigious roar” of the “Lovely Peg,” with Gills and Mr. Toots joining in on the chorus (947; see also 946). By the same token, when Cuttle is left alone without his “little society of the back parlor,” one of his first thoughts is that there “was no audience for Lovely Peg, even if there had been anybody to sing it, which there was not; for the Captain was as morally certain that nobody but he could execute that ballad, as he was that he had not the spirit, under existing circumstances, to attempt it” (497). Indeed, Cuttle is the only one who can effectively “execute that ballad” because he is such a “powerful mediator.” If the ballad signals social connectivity, then it follows that a highly connected character should sing it. To be clear, Cuttle does quote (and misquote) other historical working chanteys and popular sea songs in Dombey and Son: “Mariners of England” (364); “Heart of Oak”

(137 and 364); “Rule, Britannia” (593); “Bay of Biscay” (600); and “The Sailor’s

Consolation” (745; see 990n9), among others. But he continually returns to the “Lovely

Peg” to signal and structure his narrative labor. Especially in regard to the Walter-

Florence marriage plot—the narrative strand that prompts numerous renditions of

“Lovely Peg”—Cuttle “labour[s] with such great designs” (240). Cuttle locates himself in the narrative via such “great designs”; his own character-space depends upon how he 241

“arrange[s] the[ir] future and adventures” (237).

Cuttle’s sea songs and chanteys thus help us grasp the formation and affordances of the collective body of characters in Dombey and Son. Under the aegis of chanteying, one body becomes prosthetic for another—a kind of metonymic chain of labor and embodiment. The series of dyadic relations that Cuttle inaugurates links one character to the next. Chanteys thus afford subordination and empowerment at once. In a certain sense, everyone but the chanteyman becomes disabled by a chantey: the crew’s movements are restricted to a certain time and space, both set by the voice of the chanteyman.36 The chanteyman, by contrast, gains prosthetic power and bodily ability, as we have seen with Silver. Yet the collective body also becomes empowered via chanteying: individual bodies amass until they create an assemblage capable of the task at hand. The collective chanteying body, in other words, can now move and do things that it could not before. We see this aspect in Cuttle and crew: any narrative task or goal— marrying Walter and Florence, for instance—requires a collective of characters moving not necessarily in unison but always within the same social system. And any such system requires a “powerful mediator,” a figure who, to borrow Cuttle’s words, will “pull [all] together with a will” (394).

- - -

36 Many thanks for this idea to Sophia Hsu, who read an early draft of this chapter. 242

CODA

Ahoy! Or, Looking for an Oceanic Reading

To read maritime fiction as a literary historian requires a certain willingness to be at sea. In one sense this is a play on words: confusion—a figurative “being at sea”— serves a heuristic purpose; disorientation forces us to reorient ourselves. In a far more literal sense, though, maritime fiction challenges us to think like a sailor, to understand specific terms and references in context. Consider, for instance, the technical descriptions embedded within William Clark Russell’s dramatic and adventurous (and fictional)

Wreck of the “Grosvenor” (1877):

The fore-topsail was snugged as well as bunt-lines and clew-lines, hauled taut as steel bars, could bring it; and besides, there were already three reefs in it. And yet it stood out like cast-iron, and all hands might have danced a horn-pipe upon it without putting a crease into the canvas with their united weight. We had to roar out to Duckling to put the helm down, and spill the sail, before we could get hold of it; and so fiercely did the canvas shake in the hurricane as the ship came to, that I, who stood in the bunt, expected to see the hands out at the yard-arms shaken off the foot-ropes, and precipitated into the sea (1:164–5).

A rough translation from sailor to English might read as follows:

Despite a series of measures aimed at reducing the pull and power of the second upper square sail on the forward mast (the “fore-topsail”)— namely, the bottom and corner ropes (“bunt-lines and clew-lines”) pulled taut, and the canvas of the sail itself shortened by a series of three folds (“three reefs”)—the sail continues to catch the wind. The wind stretches the sail so tight, in fact, that all of the crew could dance vigorously upon the canvas and not crease it.1 The crew shouts at the chief mate to turn the

1 The “horn-pipe” was a dance traditionally associated with sailors since the eighteenth century; it was originally introduced to promote blood circulation and thus to prevent scurvy. See Ian C. Bradley, The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan (2016; 208n379). 243

tiller (“put the helm down”) so as to move the ship out of parallel with the wind and reduce the tension on the canvas (“spill the sail”). As the ship turns into the wind (“came to”), our narrator, who stands upon one of the ropes securing the sail, sees how fiercely the change in direction shakes the sail—so much so that he expects to see the crewmen aloft, those furling the sail on its horizontal spar (“yard-arms”), shaken off the ship and into the sea.

While my translation hardly makes for page-turning prose—the parenthetical-laden denotative sentence might be another type of “awkward[]” historicizing syntax that

Helena Michie gestures toward—it traces how the passage lays out the exact actions and reactions by the sail, the ship, and the crew as the hurricane rages on.2 The storm, strangely enough, occasions not chaos but order: the wind and waves provide the means by which the narrator demonstrates the precise mechanics of sailing. In fact, the sailing techniques here are fairly routine. Yes, the situation is precarious: sailing during a storm always carries risk. The actual maneuvers, though—reefing canvas and changing tack to

“spill” the wind—are standard fare for sailing. It is, then, the technical language—the defamiliarized descriptions of ropes and sails and movements and sailors—that creates the drama.

Indeed, you probably understood the general gist of the passage without my translation, but at issue here is not merely summary but rather style and engagement. The series of technical descriptions gives rise to a kind of maritime realism, a sense of authenticity jointly crafted by the author and the readers. Russell fully rigs the ship: it’s

2 See Helena Michie, “Victorian(ist) ‘Whiles’ and the Tenses of Historicism” (2009; 275). At the end of her discussion of the often stilted or “clumsy” ways that historicists syntactically render simultaneity, Michie looks toward instances of “meanwhile” sentences that do not use numerical dates (289; see also 275 and 285). 244 not just a “sail” that billows; it’s a “fore-topsail ... snugged” by “bunt-lines and clew- lines.” These technical details produce a Barthesian reality effect.3 And we, the readers, must then think like a real sailor, sorting out the lines and sails and yards in our head—is the hallmark labor of what Margaret Cohen calls the “cunning reader.” We have another play on words here: Cohen uses “cunning” not only in the sense of clever or crafty, but also in the sense of “to cun,” to steer a ship (81). Like the sailors in the passage, we too must make practical, interpretive decisions based on the information at hand, using our knowledge to assess the dangerous or efficacious courses of action. Unlike the sailors, we of course have the luxury of skipping over the storm passage—but then we lose out on a sense of movement, a fundamental piece of the story.

From Cohen’s cunning reading we can advance to Cannon Schmitt’s “denotative reading”: a mode that uses literal and technical details as basis for figurative interpretation (“Tidal” 15). Schmitt stresses that while technical details do produce a

Barthesian reality effect, they also do more than that. Here, for instance, a denotative reading of the Wreck of the “Grosvenor” passage might first recognize the literal tension that runs through all parts of the ship: the sail stretches to the very limit, its canvas “like cast-iron” and the lines “hauled taut as steel bars.” The naturally flexible materials—the woven canvas and braided rope—become decidedly inflexible. And from literal tension we denotative readers move to figurative tension: the taut sails and lines—a ship stretched to its limits—foreshadows the mutiny of the Grosvenor’s crew, when the once obedient hands become themselves inflexible. A denotative reading, in sum, synthesizes the literal and the figurative, paradoxically using the surface to register depth.

3 On the “reality effect,” see Roland Barthes’s 1968 essay of the same name (141–8). 245

Schmitt, in fact, describes denotative reading as a version of “surface reading,”

Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s counter to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Surface reading deals not in latent, hidden, or absent meaning, but instead embraces the manifest features of a text, building a reading upon the literal.4 Schmitt addresses, though, the inherent contradiction in terms that is “surface reading.” In the literary-critical enterprise, to read is always to interpret, always to look for depth. Surface reading, he explains, thus suggests an impossibility (not to mention an awkward spatial prepositioning): being immersed in a surface. In practice, then, actual surface reading entails a shift in how we view our methods rather than a complete abandonment of those methods: it “understands the surface as promising what depths used to promise: the surprise attendant on an unveiling” (15). Hence the work of denotative reading, which “unveil[s]” the latent meaning already present in the technical surface of the prose.

Denotative reading only works, though, if we have some means to plumb the depth of the surface—some means, that is, of identifying and defining the technical language. (The very name of Schmitt’s concept foregrounds the need to “denote,” to indicate, signal, designate, or identify the specific technical denotation.) This often comes in the form of a dictionary or glossary: for instance, in my translation of Russell’s nautical passage above, I consulted a dictionary designed as a reader’s companion to

Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring novels set during the Napoleonic Wars.5 The need for

4 On the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and reading repressed meaning in a text, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970; 9); see also Rita Felski, “Suspicious Minds” (2011; 215–34). 5 See Dean King, with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes, A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian’s Seafaring Tales (1995). 246 definition is often doubled for literary historicists, who labor to understand the work not only of a different time period but also of a different discipline. In my third chapter, for instance, I had to sort through not just how longitude works but specifically how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century navigators and hydrographers understood the principles of chronometry and spherical geometry.

But what happens when, during the course of a denotative reading, our dictionary fails us? Put differently, what happens when we ourselves fail to recognize language as specifically maritime, historical, and technical? This final section of my project offers a metacritical reflection on oceanic reading and maritime historicism, taking up a discrepancy in my own archival research as a case study. Structurally, it progresses in a manner not unlike that of strong metonymic reading (as I will detail below): as Helena so nicely put it, this coda “mov[es] intuitively where it seem[s] to need to go.”6 I have attempted to add some rhetorical signposts throughout, but I also want to preserve— perhaps even reenact—the historicist reading experience of not knowing exactly where we’re going. A kind of critical serendipity exists in following the connections of the moment.7

For we often encounter textual elements and traces that, for the contextually uninitiated, readily refuse immediate understanding. My favorite example comes from

6 Many thanks to Helena for this clever observation (see Michie to Mark Celeste, “RE: Celeste Coda [FULL DRAFT 9 Mar 2019],” 14 March 2019, Rice University webmail). As always, Helena diagnoses the structural and methodological moves of my work with concision and style. 7 On a further meta note, Helena most likely did not expect her email about my coda to become part of my coda (my apologies, Helena)—but this inclusion enacts the presentist poetics of the archive (which I describe further below): our writing is always structured by other writing proximate in time and space. 247 my experience reading the Royal Navy logbook of Charles Le Strange for the HMS

Princess Royal. In the entries for 20 and 21 April 1864, alongside the meticulous charting of winds, tides, and sails, there appears a mythical figure in blackletter font:

[20 April:] P.M. 1.50 Tacked. Young gentlemen at gun drill. Trained men at gun drill. 5.40 Shortened and furled sails. 5.50 Proceeded under steam. 7.50 Neptune came on board.

[21 April:] A.M. 1.15 In fore and aft sails. Made sail to the topgallant sails. Stopped. 9. Neptune employed christening his children on their crossing the Equator for the first time.

Of all things that might appear in a nineteenth-century naval logbook—an official, objective account of a voyage—the Roman god of the sea was not at the top of my list.

What was happening here? I attempted to be Cohen’s cunning reader, but there was nothing to cun, no crafty “performing description” to work through as a reader (75).

Denotative reading proved equally futile: “Neptune,” alas, did not appear in my nautical dictionary. Moreover, the reference struck me as more figurative than literal. Clearly an actual Roman deity didn’t climb aboard a nineteenth-century Royal Navy ship. At the time, though, I could offer no working theory to explain otherwise.

I eventually did make sense of these entries, although completely by accident.

While skimming through a history of naval ship construction in Peter Padfield’s Rule

Britannia (1981), I stumbled across a reference to the “crossing the line” ceremony, a two-day initiation ritual: sailors who have previously crossed the equator (the “trusty shellbacks”) induct the others who have not (the “slimy pollywogs”) under the watchful eye of King Neptune (portrayed by a costumed senior sailor). Padfield describes a ceremony from the 1850s: The sailor playing the part of Neptune hides under the bowsprit, and the quartermaster, standing “in the chains” (i.e., among the lower vertical 248 ropes that secure the mast to the outside of the ship), pretends to see Neptune rise from the deep. Buckets of water and fire hoses drench the “pollywogs” as Neptune climbs over the rail. In Padfield’s example, Neptune approaches the captain and delivers a “short and flowery speech asking after the health of the Queen, her consort Prince Albert, and the royal family, and about the latest news”; a toast follows. Thus concludes the first day.

The next morning, Neptune presides over the “pollywogs” as they are blindfolded, drenched yet again, unceremoniously shaved, tied up with rope, and dunked in the ocean

(39; see also 40–1). Hence the appearance of Neptune on the Princess Royal was neither a figment of Le Strange’s imagination nor a one-off event; it was a time-honored tradition of nautical hazing.

Never would I have guessed, though, about such a spectacle, nor would I have been able to extrapolate this history from the mere context of Le Strange’s log entry. In retrospect, the scene seems to demand a literal reading: Neptune here is indeed real, an actual part of historical naval practice and not a figurative figment of Le Strange’s mind

(e.g., a metaphor for a heavy squall or a compensatory fantasy to counter boredom at sea). Perhaps, then, my initial attempt at denotative reading seized upon the wrong term.

The sign of the technical here is not “Neptune” but Le Strange’s specific reference to

“crossing the Equator for the first time.” This literal spatial description, though, is so mundane so as to almost disappear—especially alongside the seemingly fantastical and figurative appearance of King Neptune. Yet, in retrospect, I’m not entirely convinced that denotative reading offers much help here: even when we understand how the Neptune reference “works,” so to speak, we cannot follow the same kind of technical, mechanical cause-and-effect that we see in Russell’s description, with winds and ropes and hands all 249 interlinked in a literal system of mobility.

What ended up solving the Neptune mystery for me was something closer to

Linda K. Hughes’s concept of “sideways” reading, a methodology that moves laterally across material texts and textual materials (see 1–2). Hughes originally coins the term to describe reading the paratext of Victorian periodical articles: we can move across the material (or digital) page to surrounding articles and advertisements, or across print runs to proximate issues or sister publications. I see a similar “sideways” orientation to my reading resolution for the Neptune entry: I went from the material page of Le Strange’s naval logbook to the material page of Padfield’s naval monograph. Admittedly, my two texts weren’t physically right next to one another, as in Hughes’s original sense of paratextual movement; moreover, I sidled my way across noncontemporaneous texts

(e.g., Le Strange’s 1864–66 log and Padfield’s 1981 study), whereas Hughes never directly discusses reading temporally “sideways.” Yet Hughes’s sideways reading and my Neptune reading both turn upon the critical power of serendipity, upon the aleatory connections we make when we happen to read two things—related or unrelated—in the same place at the same time.

What happens, though, when we cannot readily move between text, context, and paratext? Or, more precisely, what happens when our attempts to plumb the depths of a surface—be it literal or technical or material—carries us back toward a hermeneutics of suspicion? All nonsymptomatic methodologies of the surface—readings variously cunning, denotative, and sideways—work most effectively when they work inductively, starting with primary evidence and then building toward a larger theory. The inverse, I discovered, does not work: we cannot go looking for oceanic history in a maritime text, 250 even if secondary theories and histories tell us that it should be there. In my original plan for this coda—not originally a coda, in fact, but a full fifth chapter—I wanted to examine the portside and shipboard spread of venereal disease in the years around the Contagious

Diseases Acts (1864; rev. 1866 and 1869), and I wanted to do so using popular maritime novels of the period.

I took my cue from a range of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century secondary writings, all of which enforce the idea of the libidinous “Jack Tar,” a libertine sailor figure with a woman in every port and a wife in none. In her landmark study

Prostitution, Race, and Empire (2003), Philippa Levine writes that British sailors had

“worryingly high rates of VD.” British soldiers, too, suffered from sexually transmitted diseases in the nineteenth century, but Levine, citing contemporary reports by colonial military surgeons, writes that “‘Jack on shore’ ... was even less likely than his army counterpart to attend to questions of hygiene or to act cautiously. On leave, his first two stops were ‘the liquor shop and afterwards the public brothel.’ He was, moreover, victim to ‘very inefficient treatment till he reaches port again’” (285).8 Unlike the army, which set up visible and permanent camps, the ever-circulating sailors were seen as a

“temporary and often a fleeting presence”—and hence their sexual behaviors and transmissions were less policed (Levine, Prostitution 286). Judith R. Walkowitz clarifies, though, that sailors did tend to form long-standing relationships with specific prostitutes

8 See “Resolution on the Report of Lock Hospitals in British Burma for the Year 1876,” Report on Bassein 25, ref. no. V/24/2297, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London, qtd. in Levine, Prostitution (285); and J. A. Crawford to junior secretary to Board of Revenue, 30 September 1867, ref. no. P/435/52, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London, qtd. in Levine, Prostitution (285). 251 in specific ports. She cites Bracebridge Hemyng’s “Prostitution in London,” part of the

1862 supplement to Henry Mayhew’s multivolume London Labour and the London Poor

(1851). Hemyng quotes a prostitute from Stepney, a district of London: “I know very many sailors—six, eight, ten, oh! more than that. They are my husbands. I am not married, of course not, but they think me their wife while they are on shore” (4:230, qtd. in Walkowitz 29). Despite these standing relationships, though the prospect of actual marriage to Jack Tar is out of the question: though she styles her regular sailorly paramours as “husbands,” this woman’s interjected appeal to common sense (“of course not”) emphasizes that she never thinks of them as actual domestic partners. Valerie

Burton likewise notes how “wives and families are absent from the accounts of Jack’s world” (“Myth” 182). This itinerant, libidinous, and possibly disease-carrying figure was not just “Jack Tar” but, as Burton puts it, “bachelor Jack.” And the “single man,” in

Myna Trustram’s words, “presented a problem to military authorities insofar as he caught venereal disease and led a dissolute life unrestrained by wholesome domesticity” (1).

Hence the creation of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which, as Mary Spongberg explains, were designed in part to protect male sailors from their irrepressible “sexual needs that could only be satisfied by resorting to prostitutes” (132).

I was on the lookout, then, for sailors with venereal disease—not unlike the actual ship’s surgeons of the nineteenth century. During the Napoleonic Wars, ship’s surgeons earned a base pay of a mere £5; they could double that, though, for every one hundred cases of venereal diseases treated and officially entered in the sick list (see Estes 39). And they apparently had ample chance: in The Health of the Royal Navy Considered (1862),

Gavin Milroy observes that “about one-half of all of the entries on the sick-list are due to 252 ailments of a slight, or at least non-serious nature, and consist mainly of venereal complaints,” as well as minor wounds and skin conditions (14–5). By the end of the century, the infection rate was reduced from “one-half,” but not fully zeroed: Royal Navy reports for the years 1897-99 show that venereal disease still accounted for a quarter of all disease suffered by sailors (see Gatewood 37). Hence the proleptic warning of The

Seaman’s Medical Guide, which went through at least eleven editions by 1863: venereal diseases “are sometimes the most troublesome, and too often the principal complaints on board ship, especially at the commencement of the voyage” (85). The specification here about the “commencement of the voyage” implies the portside carousing with prostitutes.

An earlier handbook, in its sixteenth edition by 1819, offers a more direct warning: “the adage ‘Prevention is better than cure’ is specially applicable to Venereal diseases, which affect not merely the victims themselves, but frequently, by transmission, their future posterity. Seamen should be advised to avoid association with loose women” (Burland

111). Studies from the twentieth century identify the same source of sailorly infection.

The maritime medical historians Christopher Lloyd and Jack L. S. Coulter write that

“[v]enereal disease in one form or another was the most prevalent complaint in the Navy of the nineteenth century. The high rate of incidence was undoubtedly due to the traditional habits of the sailor and the social conditions prevailing in the ports, more especially in the home ports” (4:197).

These primary and secondary nonliterary readings primed my eyes for a specific set of social, biological, and economic connections: clearly sailors, prostitutes, and venereal diseases all circulated within the same networks. I knew what I was looking for.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I couldn’t find a single instance of prostitution or 253 venereal disease in popular maritime novels from the nineteenth century, including The

King’s Own (1830), Peter Simple (1834), Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), and Percival

Keene (1842) by Frederick Marryat, and John Holdsworth, Chief Mate (1875), The

Wreck of the “Grosvenor” (1877), and Jack’s Courtship (1884) by Russell. Surely the cultural imagination in the years around the Contagious Diseases Acts would be fraught with references to such things? The acts, after all, were designed to police prostitution and limit the spread of venereal disease, especially among Britain’s army and navy. And yet there was nothing.

Or, more accurately, I found nothing. All of my cunning, denotative, and sideways moves turned up little. Using Google Books, Project Gutenberg, LION

(Literature Online), Hathi Trust, and other such full-text databases, I searched digital versions of the novels for a variety of keywords. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my initial search for “venereal disease” offered no results—but I expected as much: even if popular fiction lacks the poetics of what we traditionally deem literary, it still had enough finesse not to blatantly announce that a character suffers from syphilis or gonorrhea. “Disease” turned up some results, but these instances were either metaphorical and/or unrelated (e.g., the

“disease” of insanity suffered by one character). I pressed on. Knowing the technical and historical context offered additional search vocabulary: surgeons sometimes treated venereal disease with doses of mercury and calomel; one nineteenth-century medical guide suggests washing the infected area with equal parts brandy and water or with

“sweet oil” (Seaman’s Medical Guide 91). Yet searches for these terms turned up nothing, as did searches for specific symptoms of venereal disease (what we might call my attempt at literal symptomatic reading): fevers, swellings, blisters, buboes, sores, 254 discharges, chancres, and the like (see Seaman’s Medical Guide 85–90; and Leach 49).

Slang terms were next, wonderfully imaginative euphemisms courtesy of my maritime glossary and primary readings: “bumboat” (a small boat used to ferry material stores and garbage—as well as prostitutes—from ship to shore); “doxy” (a prostitute, and a term perhaps derived from “dock”); “fire-ship” (a ship “filled with combustibles and explosives” deliberately set alight and “set to drift among enemy ships to destroy them”—but also slang for a prostitute); and “yard” (literally, the horizontal wooden spar upon which the sail is hung; figuratively, a penis).9 Again, though, the searches found nothing of use. (The maritime novels featured plenty of “yards,” but none of them penises.) In all of my trolling through the databases, the best I could come up with was

“sea sickness.” Yet this malady, while indeed metonymically related to venereal disease

(in that both were associated with sailorly movement), demanded not a surface reading but a suspicious reading—and a tenuous one at that. Maybe “sea sickness,” I thought, was some sort of displaced, deeply coded figure for venereal disease? The only catch: it was never the sailors in the novels who developed sea sickness, only the landlubbers.

With “sea sickness,” then, my suspicious reading became overreading; I displaced my own historicist desires onto a primary text that couldn’t support that particular reading. I felt like these nineteenth-century maritime novels should say something about venereal disease and prostitution—but a hunch does not a thesis make. Carolyn Steedman

9 On the portside etymology of “doxy,” see OED, 2d edn., s.v. “doxy, n.1.” On “fire- ship,” see King (165). Interestingly, the ties to prostitution in the entries for “bumboat” and “doxy” do not appear in my 1995 edition of Sea of Words; they have been added to the most recent (2012) edition. And on “yard” as a euphemism for “penis,” see Seaman’s Medical Guide (85). 255 describes a similar transference between history and memory in Dust (2002), her metacritical meditation on archival work: the description of the Bartons’ parlor in

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) does not include a rag rug, yet Steedman

“remember[s] a rag rug” (113, original italics). She attributes this misremembrance to a previous paper of hers that discussed both the Barton’s parlor and the rag rug in relation to nineteenth-century working-class domestic spaces. Steedman, though, learns from her mistake. “[T]he rag rug,” she writes, is both literally and figuratively “made from the torn fragments of other things.” It “carries with it the irreducible traces of an actual history, and that history cannot be made to go away; but ways of writing it and wanting it (and what it represents) are actually somebody else’s story” (128, original italics). The

“somebody else[]” here is Steedman. She expects the working-class parlor to have a rag rug, a domestic object crafted from scrapped loom-ends of textile production (such as in the mills of Gaskell’s Manchester). But this expectation—her readerly desire to carpet the

Barton’s parlor—ignores other material and economic histories. In the mid-nineteenth century, textile offcuts went not to domestic parlors but to paper mills. So even though the rag rug becomes a symbol of the working classes by the end of the nineteenth century, the mid-century Bartons would not have had one, especially in an economy of scarcity, one with a “shortage ... of the traditional symbols of the poor, their rags.” Hence the “absent rag rug,” Steedman concludes, “is the truth of Gaskell’s novel” (136, original italics).

In the same way, the absence of venereal disease and prostitution in maritime novels registers a historical and archival truth: venereal disease often elided or went unrecorded in the official record. When my search in the novels failed, I turned back to 256 my nonliterary primary texts and secondary histories. As Michael Crumplin explains, nineteenth-century British sailors often hid or failed to report symptoms not only because venereal disease was “considered shameful” but also because the sailors would be fined: during the Napoleonic Wars, any sailor diagnosed with venereal disease was “fined fifteen shillings, paid to the surgeon” (77; see also Estes 39). (And fifteen shillings at that time “amounted to much of [the common sailor’s] monthly wage” [Pappalardo 65].) The

Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 made similar provisions for commercial sailors: men deemed unfit for duty—including via venereal infection—would have their pay withheld

(see Leach 14 and 71).

Even if a surgeon made his diagnosis, it still might not appear in the official record. As James Duncan Gatewood explains in his survey Naval Hygiene (1910), repeat cases of gonorrhoea in a given sailor, or cases deemed insufficiently severe to merit excuse from duty, “were not regularly admitted and therefore are lost for statistical purposes.” He concludes, in fact, that “[w]hile it may appear that all cases of the venereal diseases should ... be available for statistical purposes ... it is certain that a perfect report from a mathematical point of view is impossible” (6–7). As seen in a merchant ship surgeon’s handbook from the end of the long nineteenth century, pay took precedence over archival fidelity: “Fees for the treatment of venereal disease should always be demanded, and in advance, for obvious reasons. If the patient refuses, a slight reference to the undesirability of entering such a case in the medical log-book is a gentle and perfectly permissible form of blackmail which generally succeeds” (Elder 82). The

“undesirability” refers not just to the “shameful” reputation of venereal disease but also to the affected sailor’s mobility. Gatewood offers an explanation: “There are some cases 257 of venereal disease that are never discovered. This is largely due to the influence of the

‘restricted list’—a list of all men having venereal disease and through which they are deprived of the much-desired liberty. It is a list kept by regulation and represents in part an attempt to prevent the spread of disease on shore” (6). A diseased sailor, in short, is not a mobile sailor, and an immobile sailor is hardly a sailor at all.

The absence of venereal disease and prostitution, then, is the truth of Marryat’s and Russell’s novels, and (in Steedman’s words) it “shapes the rhythms and structures of the tale” (136). In terms of genre, Marryat’s and Russell’s novels signal their alliance with the adventure tale and the Bildungsroman via the marriage plot. Consider Marryat’s

Mr. Midshipman Easy, which is more or less a marriage plot novel that just happens to take place at sea. The novel traces how the spoiled, immature Jack Easy becomes disciplined and mature—and thus a suitable candidate for marriage—while in maritime service. While leading a boarding party boat for the HMS Harpy, Easy ends up capturing an additional enemy ship; he frees the prisoners aboard the ship, including the de

Rebieras: a wealthy Sicilian couple and their two daughters. Later, while the Harpy patrols the Mediterranean, Easy’s boat (conveniently) wrecks on the coast of Sicily; there he (conveniently) ends up saving the Sicilian family again, this time from bandits. Later

Easy comes to the rescue a third time in his own ship—named the Rebiera, and operating under a privateer’s license—when the leader of the bandits escapes the prisoner galley ship. Over the course of these multiple maritime encounters, Easy falls in love with the one daughter, Agnes. Her father consents to the marriage mainly because of Easy’s heroism, but also because of Easy’s “qualifications and ... property”: by the novel’s end the midshipman inherits a large estate in Hampshire. By way of conclusion, the novel 258 invokes all the signs of normative patriarchal and domestic futurity. The story can and does end, in other words, because Easy and Agnes wed, and “she conformed at once to the religion of her husband, proved an excellent and affectionate wife, and eventually the mother of four children, three boys and a girl” (322 and 386–7). Russell’s Jack’s

Courtship follows a similar narrative course with another protagonist sailor Jack. In

Andrew Nash’s words, “the prospect of marriage forms the whole trajectory of the plot”

(110): Jack follows Florence to sea to prevent her marriage to a rival suitor, who

(conveniently) becomes “horribly sea-sick” (!) and must leave the ship (Russell, Jack’s

2:109). Jack’s heroism after a later shipwreck earns him the approval of Florence’s father and her hand in marriage.

These two literary Jacks prove my initial view of Jack Tar skewed. Their narratives contradict the narrative of “a dissolute life unrestrained by wholesome domesticity,” the story that, due to my secondary reading, I wanted to find. My colleagues wanted (me) to find it, too: one suggested that I read W. S. Gilbert and Arthur

Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore; or, The Lass that Loves a Sailor (1878) for the “secret” shared between Little Buttercup, an older “bumboat woman” (!), and young Captain

Corcoran—my colleague’s implication being that the “secret” was, of course, venereal disease (Gilbert and Sullivan 29 and 2). The “secret,” alas, turned out to be a case not of disease but of mixed-up identity (years ago, while babysitting, Buttercup accidentally returned the low-born Corcoran to a high-class family). We were all misremembering things, affected by our desire to find the pieces to a plot that, on the surface, sounds so convincing. Indeed, venereal disease was my rag rug: I had assumed it to be there, but in so doing overlooked the other historical conditions by which it would not be there. 259

Networks of infection did shape sailors’ lives, but these were not the only systems present. As much as overlapping networks afford transitive relationships, they can also efface potential connections. The absence of disease and prostitution in Marryat’s and

Russell’s novels speak silently, perhaps, of an exchange between the tastes and mores of the literary marketplace, the discursive webs of of imperialism, and the subjectivity of nostalgia: why would these two authors—men who served in the Royal Navy and the

Merchant Marine, respectively—tarnish the image of the British tar, especially in an age when the sailor metonymically symbolized British sea power and imperial control?

The simpler answer, though, is that the rollicking image of the libidinous

“bachelor Jack” was a myth—albeit a convincing one. Burton argues as much in her assessment of how both nineteenth-century authors and later critics (including, initially, me) rely on a flat, stock account of Jack Tar; in the process, she says, they overlook actually existing relations of domesticity and masculinity (see “Myth” 182n9). Burton works to deconstruct the stereotype of “bachelor Jack,” noting how later nineteenth- century changes in global trade and technologies of mobility (e.g., steam power) exposed seamen to terrestrial discourses, integrating the supposedly undisciplined “Jack” into domestic and patriarchal structures.

We could expand Burton’s critique by moving outside of a heteronormative matrix. While the myth of Jack Tar makes much of men’s relations with portside women, we must not overlook, in Paul Baker and Jo Stanley’s words, “the hidden history of gay life at sea”—a history that challenges us to rethink our assumptions about the ship as a 260 site of normative masculinity and sexual relations.10 A comparative lack of evidence of maritime homosexuality hardly equates to an absence of maritime homosexuality: as

Baker and Stanley suggest, gay shipboard relations may have been so commonplace or so minor of an official offence as to not enter into the record; although maritime historians love to make much of male sailor’s relations with female prostitutes, this might signal less a “vigorous heterosexuality” and more a “human desire for intercourse.” Baker and

Stanley suggest, in fact, that homosexuality may have been more efficient for the navy, allowing sailors to fulfill their desires aboard ship rather than losing men to portside women: “If men must have sex,” write Baker and Stanley, “let them do so in ways that are convenient to the organisation for which they work” (36–7).11 The gay sailor is, of course, another cultural stereotype, but one that highlights how past sexual desires complicate present archival desires.

Underrepresented and supposedly hidden identities—such as gay Jack Tar—invite a suspicious reading. Gaps in the archival record ask us to think about the underlying power structures that record certain voices while silencing others. And what we do with those silences, Michie explains, often constitute the disciplinary fault lines between

10 See Paul Baker and Jo Stanley, Hello Sailor! The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea (2014), esp. “Sailor Jack: the Other Side: Popular Ideas of Seafaring Men” (1-26) and “When Queer was Covert” (27–48). 11 For an example, Baker and Stanley cite the famous maritime historian N. A. M. Rodger, who, in his study of the Georgian Royal Navy, notes that there were only eleven court martials for sodomy at a time when the Royal Navy consisted of some 70,000- 80,000 sailors, seventy-five percent of whom were unmarried; if anything, though, the comically low ratio—11 to 70,000-80,000—protests too much about the apparent absence of homosexual relations at the time. See N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (1986; 79); and Baker and Stanley (36). 261 literary critics and historians: literary critics “see all kinds of texts as productions of unconscious as well as conscious desires.” In Michie’s journey through nineteenth- century honeymoon diaries, the latent content speaks just as loudly as the manifest, and even certain moments on the surface—“euphemisms, blanks, awkward syntax ... mistakes in spelling or chronology ... [and] prose ... suddenly complex, garbled, or purple”—may register deeper personal desires and feelings, if not social mores and taboos (Honeymoons xvii and xvi). Multiplicity here is key: symptomatic reading in the archive produces not the truth but a truth. If anything, it calls attention to the many epistemological levels entailed in historical knowledge. Michie, for instance, traces such a sprawling

“knowledge tree” of nineteenth-century sexuality: our reading of one woman’s sexuality is shaped not only by her experience and knowledge, but her partner’s experience and knowledge, her ideas about marriage and reproduction and pleasure, her “informal advice networks” of family and friends, her family physician, contemporary academic knowledge, modern academic knowledge, and “[o]ur knowledge of all of the above,” plus some further branches still (Honeymoons 106–7; on archived and archival desires, see 102–5). Archival work entangles us in all of these levels seemingly at once: when we

“do a reading” or make a historical discovery, we may not be able to pinpoint from whence that knowledge comes.

Historicity blurs the lines between surface and depth. While Michie, by her own admission, engages in symptomatic reading (see Honeymoons xvii), her meta-archival claims hold perfectly true for surface reading. Surface reading works inductively: rather than applying some preexisting suspicion or ready-made deduction, a surface reading of a given text produces a theory of interpretation idiosyncratic not only to that given text but 262 also to that given literary historian. Often serendipitous and presentist, surface reading makes meaning out of what happens to be there at the time. The surface, especially to our literary critical eyes, always already has depth. As Marcus explains in her discussion of

“just reading” (yet another methodology that “attends to what texts make manifest on their surface”), our act of “interpretation is inevitable” when reading: even when attending to the givens of a text, we are always only—or just—constructing a reading.”

Surface methodologies thus do not “make an inevitable disingenuous claim to transparently reproduce a text’s unitary meaning” (3 and 75). Nor do they, as John

Kucich fears, render a completely ahistorical sense of the work.12 Just ask any undergraduate student who has read a nineteenth-century novel: part of the challenge is just figuring out what is going on plot-wise. We have to sort through not only the cast of characters but also the assortment of nineteenth-century things, places, events, and references—a task that, as diligent undergraduate (and graduate) readers will attest, often requires many journeys back and forth between the text and the explanatory notes, the text and the OED, the text and Google, etc.

So while surface reading can be an entirely formalist affair—that is, a reading built solely out of evidence from the primary novel—many styles of surface reading readily carry us beyond the bounds of the text: cunning reading, denotative reading, sideways reading, and just reading, as well as Elaine Freedgood’s “strong” metonymic reading (a methodology that structures much of my dissertation), all ask us to think about the historical things we encounter in a historical text as literally those things. Even

Kucich, in his thorough “praise of suspicion,” notes that surface reading “only becomes

12 See John Kucich, “The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion” (2011). 263 problematic when it takes a categorically—and unnecessarily—anti-historicist turn” (71).

Indeed, I find it difficult to parse the literal plot of a nineteenth-century text and not think historically. There’s often something historically specific—for instance, entailment (Jane

Austen, Pride and Prejudice [1813]), the coaching inn (Charles Dickens, The Pickwick

Papers [1836–37]), the Battle of Waterloo (William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

[1847–48]), Chartism (Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton [1848]), press gangs (Gaskell,

Sylvia’s Lovers [1863]), the Reform Acts (George Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–72], and, of course, the Pacific and Caribbean guano trade (Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister

[1876])—that shapes the plot. To borrow a vague but useful phrase from my undergraduate students, we often need to think about “how things were back then” to register the significance of particular narrative events and structures.

No historicist approach, of course, ever fully produces “how things were back then”; rather, we get the traces of the past filtered through the concerns of the present.

The effect is not unlike historical reenactment, which produces a subjective version of a historical narrative. In Alexander Cook’s words, “We can never be Them” (489, original italics). Even when we’re “just reading” the surface, we’re inherently transforming that surface in our eyes. Reenactment is where the historical meets the personal; our processes of representing the past inevitably take shape around the things that strike us as variously timely, confusing, important, entertaining, etc. For Cook, reenactment highlights the contingency of historical “truth”: history, he says, is the “outcome of a fragile investigative procedure” (494). But Cook, by discipline, is a historian. As a literary critic,

I see in reenactment not “fragil[ity]” but robustness. After all, we build our whole livelihood on rereading texts and histories, and every rereading produces another iteration 264 of that text or history. The result is not reductive but expansive. As Jacques Derrida muses in his own study of archival death and desire, “there would be no future without repetition” (Archive 80).

A hermeneutics of the surface thus looks forward as much as it looks backward, and it embraces the presentist contingencies of literary historicism (and the idiosyncrasies of literary historicists). As we move cunningly, denotatively, or sideways across the surface, we encounter unfamiliar things in need of translation and explanation; those interpretations, though, always take shape around our present desires—the histories that we want to find, the histories that we go looking for. The catch, though, as we have seen with my surface scourings of Marryat and Russell, is that we might not be able to find what we go looking for. So as much as the surface affords fluidity and intimacy, inviting us to just read what is already there, the surface also affords resistance and distance, often in the form of historical specificity. In the process of negotiating that friction, though, we often discover adjacent texts and histories that we may not have found otherwise. A kind of critical serendipity lies in the surface.

As a project that recovers actual oceanic structures, styles, and histories, my dissertation by and large resists symptomatic reading; instead I follow the surfacing call of cunning, denotative, sideways, just, and (especially) strong metonymic readings and their critical utility in opening up new oceanic archives for literary history. These methodologies do not simply report back on the literal; they do not simply present things as they are (or as they were). This is not the antiquarianism or positivist historicism that 265 the anonymous V21 Collective caricatures in its 2015 manifesto.13 I disagree, in fact, with V21’s take on the “show-and-tell” state of Victorianist historicism: anyone who has worked in an archive will tell you that showing and telling is radically transformative act, and one highly receptive to theoretical rigor. My strong metonymic oceanic readings hardly present ready-made objects for “show-and-tell.” As my four chapters and this coda show, finding things—or, in fact, not finding things—within the depths of the surface is always a dynamic, transformative process.

Steedman captures the inherent complexity of archival work with an apt waterborne figuration: “There is the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of

Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has ended up in the record office you are at work in.” Hence our “craft,” says Steedman, “is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater” (18). From the trickle of archived material texts and objects we must extrapolate the flow of the “river of Everything.” Yet this “great, brown” river is also always “moving” (albeit slowly); “strandless” (i.e., without shoreline), it exceeds any attempt to fully know, contain, or direct it. Writing history, especially in relation to imaginative fictions, is an inherently creative, subjective endeavor; we are not, as V21 would have us, “antiquarian[s]” but rather “conjure[rs].” All archival work ties the literal to the figurative. Even Steedman’s very description of archival work models this synthesis. On the one hand, her description of “the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything” is an abstract metaphor for (capital H) History, the boundless network of original, unadulterated historical experience. Yet Steedman, a British

13 See V21 Collective, “Manifesto of the V21 Collective,” http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses. 266 historian working in and on Britain, surely draws upon her specific experiences in British archives to craft her waterborne figuration. On the other hand, then, Steedman’s description metonymically recalls the actual qualities and histories of the Thames, not only a river wide, brown, and relatively slow moving, but also a river that literally and figuratively exceeds its banks: literally, it has flooded London several times (hence the current barrier system); and figuratively, it has sent British colonizers out into the world’s wider oceans, leaving a variety of archival “flotsam” in their wake.

The oceanic is my archive, and through strong metonymic reading and other historicist hermeneutics of the surface I work to “conjure” specific, actually existing cultural connections across time and space. I take as the clarion call of oceanic reading that piercing shout from the topmast: ahoy! As the OED describes it, the shout— variously a noun, an interjection, and a verb—“attract[s] attention to someone or something, especially from a distance.”14 An oceanic reading does exactly that: it calls attention to connections that function at distances variously spatial and temporal; it helps us see how authors, texts, and histories engage one another across multiple overlapping networks of cultural contiguity. And in many senses that distance must persist for things to have any meaning. In literary terms, it’s not that Austen’s Persuasion, for instance, is a logbook; it’s rather that the novel is fundamentally connected to the logbook. In political terms, globalization and geopolitical networks do figuratively shrink the world, but, much like in the practice of longitude, the whole system falls apart if “here” and “there” denote

14 See OED, 3d edn., s.v. “ahoy, int. and v.,” A1. The OED entry also notes that “ahoy” is “orig. and chiefly Nautical. Now archaic or humorous”—a description that captures the distance between past and present uses of the term. You might rightly laugh (or groan), then, when you receive one of my many emails that begin with “ahoy.” 267 the same thing. And in academic terms, the very working premise of historicism is distance; the methodology posits critical value in explaining specific contexts to readers at some kind of temporal remove. Even if archival work entails some kind of historical reenactment, we can never fully close the gap between past and present.

The ahoy! of oceanic reading also captures some element of desire, exclaiming our delight and surprise in finding some kind of connection—even if it wasn’t exactly what we set out to look for. As we have seen, we might find (or fail to find) the oceanic in surprising or unexpected places. “Landlocked” texts such as Austen’s Persuasion,

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and Dickens’s Dombey and Son might have much more specific things to teach us about maritime history and culture than do actual seafaring stories, such as those by Marryat and Russell. Consider the sheer number of nineteenth- century British novels that use maritime culture and events as means to shape and advance the narrative: the marine father and sailor brother (William) who connect Fanny to Portsmouth in Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814); the icebound journey through the

Arctic Ocean that frames Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); the shipwreck and shipboard kidnapping in Walter Scott’s romance The Pirate (1822); the riverboat journey that carries Martin and Mark to the swampy settlement of Eden in Dickens’s Martin

Chuzzlewit (1842-44); the naval mutiny that sends another sailor brother (Frederick) into exile in Gaskell’s North and South (1855); the drowning of Maggie and Tom after their boat capsizes in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860); the prison hulks and the shipping insurance firm in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61); the whaling trade and the threat of naval impressment in the village of Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1863); the mysterious shoreline Shivering Sands (not to mention the Robinson Crusoe-quoting 268

Gabriel Betteredge) in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868); the attempted escape- cum-elopement by ship of Felix and Marie in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875); the concluding steamboat chase in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sign of the Four (1890); the speculative horrors of the castaway tale that is H. G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau

(1896); and the Count’s shipborne journeys to and from England (and our heroes’ subsequent monitoring of Lloyd’s List) in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1898). This is hardly an exhaustive list, but it gestures toward how thoroughly the oceanic imaginary permeates the British novel in the long nineteenth century. From a critical standpoint, this list also captures the range of literary historical connections we might make if we but keep our weather eye open for oceanic surfaces.

For a long time literary critics seemed to share (consciously or otherwise) the terrestrial perspective outlined by the narrator in Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers: “in most ... parts of the island [i.e., Britain], at five miles from the ocean, [the ‘thinker’] has all but forgotten the existence of such an element as salt water.” The full quotation begins, though, with the admission that “[s]omehow in this country [i.e., the fictional

Monkshaven, modeled on the coastal port of Whitby] sea thoughts followed the thinker far inland” (8). For us, that unnamed method—the “[s]omehow” that bridges the divide between land and sea—is oceanic reading. The ambiguity in Gaskell’s “somehow,” though, captures some of the resistance of oceanic surfaces: we might be surprised at how readily “sea thoughts follow[] the thinker”—be it a nineteenth-century author or a twenty-first century reader—“far inland,” but we need to know how to look for such a

“follow[ing].” Oceanic reading demands both technical knowledge and patience; we must be willing to remain on and with the surface, prolonging that experience and spending 269 time working through the complexities of what literally lies on the page before us. When we encounter “Neptune,” for instance, we must embrace the heuristic confusion of being at sea. To again quote Schmitt, the oceanic textual surface readily affords “the surprise attendant on an unveiling.” So when the V21 manifesto calls for surface readings that reconceptualize nineteenth century studies, as well as for methodologies that readily embrace surprise, oceanic reading answers with its own call: ahoy.

- - - 270

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa.” Massachusetts Review 18.4 (Winter 1977): 782–94.

Acheraïou, Amar. “Society.” Joseph Conrad in Context. Ed. Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 253–60.

Aguirre, Robert D. “‘Affairs of State’: Mobilities, Communication, and Race in Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 37.1 (January 2015): 1–20.

“An Act for Providing a Publick Reward for Such Person or Persons as Shall Discover the Longitude at Sea.” [July 1714], 13 Anne, c. 14. The Statutes of the Realm: Printed by Command of His Majesty King George the Third. 11 vols. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1822. 9:927–8.

Anson, George. A Voyage Round the World, in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV. Ed. Richard Walter. 3d edn. London: Printed for John and Paul Knapton, 1748.

Allen, Jerry. The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1965.

Allott, Miriam, ed. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 2007.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. 1971; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. 85–126.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. edn. New York: Verso, 2016.

Austen, Francis. Logbook of His Majesty’s Ship Elephant [26 November 1812 to 24 April 1813]. AUS/4. Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

—. Logbook of His Majesty’s Sloop Petterel [sic; 13 April 1800 to 18 October 1800], AUS/2A. Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

—. Logbook of HMS Elephant [1813]. AUS/5. Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

—. Logbook of HMS Peterel [1799–1800]. AUS/1. Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. 271

—. Logbook of HMS Triton [15 June to 10 August 1797]. AUS/15. Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

—. Logbook of HM Ship St Albans [4 April 1807 to 11 September 1808]. AUS/3A. Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Austen, Jane. Letters of Jane Austen, Edited with an Introduction and Critical Remarks. Ed. Edward, Lord Brabourne. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1884.

—. Persuasion. Ed. Linda Bree. Peterborough ON: Broadview, 2013.

— to Cassandra Austen. 18 September 1796. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. 11–3.

Austen-Leigh, James Edward. A Memoir of Jane Austen. London: Richard Bentley, 1870.

Avery, Simon. “Politics.” The Brontës in Context. Ed. Marianne Thormählen. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012. 261–8.

Baker, Paul, and Jo Stanley. Hello Sailor! The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Baker, Richard, and Antony Miall. Everyman’s Book of Sea Songs. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1982.

Baker, Samuel. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2010.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981.

Barchas, Janine. Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2012.

Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 141–8.

Baucom, Ian. “Specters of the Atlantic.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (Winter 2001): 61– 82.

272

Baugh, Daniel A. “The Eighteenth-Century Navy as a National Institution, 1690–1815.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy. Gen. ed. J. R. Hill, consultant ed. Bryan Ranft. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. 120–60.

Berthoud, Jacques. Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993.

Bérubé, Michael. “Disability and Narrative.” PMLA 120.2 (March 2005): 568–76.

Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” The Way We Read Now, special issue of Representations 108.1 (Fall 2009): 1–21.

Birch, Dinah. “Charlotte Brontë,” The Brontës in Context. Ed. Marianne Thormählen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012). 61–7.

Blum, Hester. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 670–7.

—. The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997.

Bradley, Ian C. The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016.

Bree, Linda. Introduction to Persuasion, by Jane Austen. Ed. Bree. Peterborough ON: Broadview, 2013. 7–37.

Brendon, Piers. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008.

— to George Smith. 30 October 1852. Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Ed. Margaret Smith. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. 150–1.

— to Rev. Patrick Brontë. 31 July 1848. Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Ed. Margaret Smith. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. 150–1.

273

— to W. S. Williams. 31 July 1848. Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Ed. Margaret Smith. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. 112–5.

Bruss, Paul. Conrad’s Early Sea Fiction: The Novelist as Navigator. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1979.

Bruyns, Willem F. J. Mörzer. “Sources of Knowledge: Charts and Rutters.” Maritime History. Ed. John B. Hattendorf. 2 vols. Malabar FL: Krieger, 1997. 2:69–77.

Burgess, C. F. The Fellowship of the Craft: Conrad on Ships and Seamen. Port Washington NY: Kennikat, 1976.

Burgess, Douglas R., Jr. Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagination. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2016.

Burland, Charles. The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide. 16th edn. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1819.

Burnham, Michelle. “Oceanic Turns and American Literary History in a Global Context.” Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion. Ed. Hester Blum. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 151–71.

Burton, Valerie. “‘As I wuz a-rolling down the Highway one morn’: Fictions of the 19th-Century English Sailortown.” Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture. Ed. Bernhard Klein. Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2002. 141–56.

—. “The Myth of Bachelor Jack: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and Seafaring Labor.” in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour. Ed. Colin Howell and Richard J. Twomey. Fredericton New Brunswick: Acadiensis, 1991. 179–98.

Cant, Serena. England’s Shipwreck Heritage: From Logboats to U-boats. London: Historic England Publishing, 2013.

Capuano, Peter. Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2015.

Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution: A History. 3 vols. London: James Fraser, 1837.

—. “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 40.240 (December 1849): 670–9. 274

Carroll, Siobhan. An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Casarino, Cesare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis. Theory out of Bounds 21. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Chambers, Helen. Conrad’s Reading: Space, Time, Networks. New Directions in Book History. Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Chambers, Iain. “Maritime Criticism and Theoretical Shipwrecks.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 678–84.

Chaplin, Sue, and Joel Faflak. “Introduction: Defining Romanticism.” The Romanticism Handbook. Ed. Chaplin and Faflak. Literature and Culture Handbooks. London: Continuum, 2011. xiii–xxxiii.

Clarke, Bruce. Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2004.

—. Neocybernetics and Narrative. Posthumanities 29. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Clarkson, Thomas. History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, A New Edition, with Prefatory Remarks on the Subsequent Abolition of Slavery. London: John W. Parker, 1839.

Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge, Including the Dramas of Wallenstein, Remorse, and Zapolya. 3 vols. London: William Pickering, 1828. 2:3–38.

Colledge, J. J., and Ben Warlow. Ships of the Royal Navy: The Complete Record of All Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy. Philadelphia: Casemate, 2010.

Collits, Terry. Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2005.

275

Connolly, William E. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2013.

Conrad, Joseph. A Personal Record. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1912.

—. “Author’s Note.” Typhoon and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1925. vii–xi.

—. “Falk: A Reminiscence.” “Typhoon” and Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. 103–200.

—. “Geography and Some Explorers.” The National Geographic Magazine 45.3 (March 1924): 241–74.

—. Heart of Darkness. “Heart of Darkness” and Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. 100–87.

—. Lord Jim: A Tale. Ed. John Batchelor. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983.

—. The Mirror of the Sea. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1906.

—. The Shadow Line: A Confession. New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1917.

—. Typhoon. “Typhoon” and Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. 1–102.

—. Victory: An Island Tale. London: Methuen, 1917.

—. “Youth: A Narrative.” “Heart of Darkness” and Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. 69–99.

Cook, Alexander. “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History.” Extreme and Sentimental History, special issue of Criticism 46.3 (Summer 2004): 487–96.

Cook, James. The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. Ed. J. C. Beaglehole. 3 vols. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Costello, Leo. J. M. W. Turner and the Subject of History. Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2012. 276

Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009.

Cresswell, Tim. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge, 2006.

—. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28.1 (February 2010): 17–31.

Crumplin, Michael. “Surgery in the Royal Navy during the Republican and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815).” Health and Medicine at Sea, 1700–1900. Ed. David Boyd Haycock and Sally Archer. Woodbridge UK: Boydell, 2009. 63–89.

“Current History.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 40.237 (September 1849): 357–62.

Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative. Rev. edn. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1868.

Davids, Karel. “The Development of Navigational Techniques, 1740–1815: General Background.” Maritime History. Ed. John B. Hattendorf. 2 vols. Malabar FL: Krieger, 1997. 2:87–93.

Dening, Greg. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996.

—. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988. 1–24.

Desai, Gaurav. “Oceans Connect: The Indian Ocean and African Identities.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 713–20.

Dewey, Colin. “Annus Mirabilis to the Ancient Mariner: Oceanic Environments and the Romantic Literary Imagination.” Coriolis: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Maritime Studies 1.2 (2010): 4–22.

277

—. “Crafty Sailors, Unruly Seas: Margaret Cohen’s Oceanic History of the Novel.” Review of The Novel and the Sea, by Margaret Cohen. Criticism 56.4 (Fall 2014): 861–70.

Dibdin, Charles. Songs, Naval and National, of the Late Charles Dibdin. Ed. Thomas Dibdin. London: John Murray, 1841.

—. The Waterman; or, the First of August. Cawthorn’s Minor British Theatre. 6 vols. London: John Cawthorn, 1806. 5:Aiij[1r]–Diij[4v].

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Ed. Andrew Sanders. London: Penguin, 2002.

—. Great Expectations. Ed. Angus Calder. London: Penguin, 1985.

—. Our Mutual Friend. Ed. Adrian Poole. London: Penguin 1997.

Doerflinger, William Main. Shantymen and Shantyboys: Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman. New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Dolin, Tim. Introduction to Villette, by Charlotte Brontë. Ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. ix–xxxv.

Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1997.

Edmondson, Belinda. Caribbean Middlebrow: Isure Culture and the Middle Class. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009.

Elder, A. Vavasour. The Ship-Surgeon’s Handbook. 2d edn. 1906; London: Bailliere, Tindall, and Cox, 1911.

Estes, J. Worth. “Stephen Maturin and Naval Medicine in the Age of Sail.” A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian’s Seafaring Tales, by Dean King, with John B. Hattendorf and Estes. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. 37–56.

Favret, Mary A. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009.

Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (Summer 2011): 215–34.

278

Fisch, Audrey A. American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.

—. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–7.

—. “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Gen ed. François Ewald and Fontana. English series ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 1997.

—. “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Vintage, 2010. 101–20.

Foulke, Robert. “Conrad and the Power of Seamanship.” The Great Circle 11.1 (1989): 14–27.

—. The Sea Voyage Narrative. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Foy, Charles R. “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713–1783.” Early American Studies 4.1 (Spring 2006): 46–77.

Frank, Stuart M. “‘Cheer’ly Man’: Chanteying in Omoo and Moby-Dick.” The New England Quarterly 58.1 (March 1985): 68–82.

—. Sea Chanteys and Sailor’s Songs: An Introduction for Singers and Performers, and a Guide for Teachers and Group Leaders. Sharon MA: Kendall Whaling Museum, 2000.

Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006.

Freedgood, Elaine, and Cannon Schmitt. “Denotatively, Technically, Literally.” Denotatively, Technically, Literally. Ed. Freedgood and Schmitt. Special issue of Representations 125.1 (Winter 2014): 1–14.

Freese, Barbara. Coal: A Human History. Cambridge MA: Perseus, 2003.

Galperin, William H. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

279

Gane, Gillian. “The Hat, the Hook, the Eyes, and the Teeth: Captain Cuttle, Mr. Carker, and Literacy.” Dickens Studies Annual 25 (1996): 91–126.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1857.

—. Sylvia’s Lovers. Ed. Frances O’Gorman. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014.

Gatewood, James Duncan. Naval Hygiene: Prepared by Direction of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, and Published by Permission of the Navy Department. London: Rebman, 1910.

Gawthrop, Humphrey. “Slavery: Idée Fixe of Emily and Charlotte Brontë.” Brontë Studies 38.4 (December 2013): 281–89.

Gay, Penny. “Emma and Persuasion.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. 2d edn. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012. 55–71.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983.

Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971.

Gilbert, W. S., and Arthur Sullivan. H.M.S. Pinafore; or, The Lass that Loved a Sailor. An Entirely Original Comic Opera, in Two Acts. San Francisco: Bacon, 1879.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. New York: Verso, 1993.

Glen, Heather. Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002.

GoGwilt, Christopher. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995.

—. “Joseph Conrad as Guide to Colonial History.” A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad, ed. John G. Peters. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. 137–61.

Gold, Barri J. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010.

280

Gonzalez, Anita. “Negotiating Theatrics: Dialogues of the Working Man.” The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Ed. Nadine George-Graves. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. 35–55.

[Gordon, George], Lord Byron. Don Juan: In Sixteen Cantos, with Notes. Halifax UK: Milner and Sowerby, 1837.

Greaney, Michael. Conrad, Language, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.

Gregory, E. David. The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878–1903. Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010.

Grocott, Terence. Shipwrecks of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras. London: Chatham Publishing, 1997.

Grossman, Jonathan H. Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012.

Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Ed. Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. 37– 44.

—. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Ed. Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. 45–86.

Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830– 1867. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.

—. White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. Cambridge: Polity, 1992.

Hagen, Joel B. “Eugene Odum and the Homeostatic Ecosystem.” Traditions of Systems Theory: Major Figures and Contemporary Developments. Ed. Darrell P. Arnold. New York: Routledge, 2014. 179–96.

Hamilton, James. Turner and the Scientists. London: Tate, 1998.

281

Harris, Jocelyn. A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2007.

Headrick, Daniel R. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988.

Hechter, Michael. Containing Nationalism. 2000; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004.

Hemyng, Bracebridge. “Prostitution in London.” London Labour and the London Poor. Ed. Henry Mayhew. 4 vols. New York: Dover, 1968. 4:210–60.

Herman, Arthur. To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.

Heywood, Christopher. “Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights.” The Review of English Studies 38.150 (May 1987): 184–98.

Ho, Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. California World History Library. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2006.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital: 1848–1875. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975.

—. The Age of Empire: 1875–1914. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.

—. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. New York: Vintage, 1994.

—. The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962.

—. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2d edn. 1992; New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012.

Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life: The Definitive Portrait of Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Art, Her Family, Her World. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.

Howes, Frank. Folk Music in Britain—and Beyond. London: Methuen, 1969.

Hubback, J. H. Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers. London: John Lane, 1906.

Hughes, Linda K. “SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47.1 (Spring 2014): 1–30. 282

Hugill, Stan. Shanties from the Seven Seas: Shipboard Work-Songs and Songs Used as Work- Songs from the Great Days of Sail. Mystic CT: Mystic Seaport, 2014.

Huntress, Keith. A Checklist of Narratives of Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea to 1860, with Summaries, Notes, and Comments. Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1979.

Hutchings, Kevin, and Julia M. Wright, eds. Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870: Gender, Race, and Nation, Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies. Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2011.

Jacobus, Mary. Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012.

Jakobson, Roman. “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles.” Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. Ed. René Dirven and Ralf Pörings. Cognitive Linguistics Research 20. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. 41–7.

Jasanoff, Maya. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. New York: Penguin, 2017.

Jenson, Deborah. “Living by Metaphor in the Haitian Declaration of Independence: Tigers and Cognitive Theory.” The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Ed. Julia Gaffield. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2016. n. pag.

Jevons, W. Stanley. The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines. 2d rev. edn. London: Macmillan, 1866.

Jordan, John O. “Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century.” SEL 52.4 (Autumn 2012): 937–93.

Kadushin, Charles. Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012.

Keane, Patrick J. Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: “The Ancient Mariner” and “Robinson Crusoe.” Columbia MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1994.

Kelly, Helena. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Kerr, Matthew P. M. “A ‘first return to the sea’ in Persuasion.” Essays in Criticism 64.2 (April 2014): 180–201.

283

King, Dean, with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes. A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian’s Seafaring Tales. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

Klein, Bernhard, and Gesa Mackenthun. “Introduction: The Sea is History.” Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. Ed. Klein and Mackenthun. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1–12.

Knowles, Owen. “Critical Responses: 1925-1950.” Joseph Conrad in Context. Ed. Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 67–74.

—. “Literary Influences.” Joseph Conrad in Context. Ed. Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 33–41.

Krishnan, Sanjay. Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2007.

Kucich, John. “The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion.” Victoriographies 1.1 (2011): 58–78.

Land, Isaac. “‘Each Song was Just Like a Little Sermon’: Dibdin’s Victorian Afterlives.” Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture. Ed. Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018. 204–19.

Landow, George P. Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

Lane, Maggie. Jane Austen’s England. London: Robert Hale, 1986.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005.

Lawtoo, Nidesh. Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 2016.

Leach, Harry. The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide. 2d edn. Board of Trade, 1868; rprt. Sydney: Thomas Richards, 1869.

Leary, Patrick. The “Punch” Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian England. London: British Library, 2010.

284

Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948.

Lee, Debbie. Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Lee, Julia Sun-Joo. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010.

Lee, Yoon Sun. “Austen’s Scale-Making.” Studies in Romanticism 52 (Summer 2013): 171–95.

Leeson, Peter T. The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009.

Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Le Strange, Charles. Logbook of HMS Princess Royal [1864–66]. MS 232. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston TX.

Levenson, Michael. “Modernism.” Joseph Conrad in Context. Ed. Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 179–86.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015.

—. “From Nation to Network.” Victorian Studies 55.4 (Summer 2013): 647–66.

Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Lewis, Alexandra. “Current Trends in Brontë Criticism and Scholarship.” The Brontës in Context. Ed. Marianne Thormählen. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012. 198–206.

Lindridge, James. Tales of Shipwrecks and Adventures at Sea: Being a Collection of Faithful Narratives of Shipwrecks, Mutinies, Fires, Famines, and Disasters, Incidental to a Sea Life. London: William Mark Clark, 1846.

Livesey, Ruth. Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016.

285

Lloyd, Christopher, and Jack L. S. Coulter. Medicine and the Navy, 1200–1900. 4 vols. London: E. and S. Livingstone, 1963.

[Lockhart, John Gibson]. “The West Indian Controversy.” Part 4 of 4. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 16.95 (December 1824): 682–93.

Lynch, Deidre. “Austen Extended / Austen for Everyday Use.” Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks. Ed. Rivka Swenson and Elise Lauterbach. Newark DE: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2008. 235–65.

MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014.

—. “Irreversible Transformations: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Scottish Energy Science.” Representations 96.1 (Fall 2006): 1–20.

Mack, John. The Sea: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion, 2011.

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007.

Marryat, Frederick. Mr. Midshipman Easy. London: Richard Bentley, 1838.

Martineau, Harriet. Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgwood. Ed. Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1983.

Mason, Nicholas. Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2013.

Matthews, Gelien. Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2006.

McCoubrey, John. “Turner’s Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin, and Reception.” Word & Image 14.4 (October-December 1998): 319–53.

McLean, Paul. Culture in Networks. Cultural Sociology. Malden MA: Polity, 2017.

McGann, Jerome J., ed. Victorian Connections. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1989.

286

Mee, Jon. Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–1830. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011.

—. “Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century.” SEL 53.4 (Autumn 2013): 913–40.

Mentz, Steve, and Martha Elena Rojas. “Introduction: ‘The Hungry Ocean.’” The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture. Ed. Mentz and Rojas. Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies. New York: Routledge, 2017. 1–14.

Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996.

Michie, Helena. “Drinking in Dickens.” The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens. Ed. Robert L. Patten, John O. Jordan, and Catherine Waters. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018. 597–612.

—. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009.

—. “Victorian(ist) ‘Whiles’ and the Tenses of Historicism.” Narrative 17.3 (October 2009): 274–90.

Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. “Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction.” Climate Change and Victorian Studies, special issue of Victorian Studies 60.4 (Summer 2018): 537–42.

Milroy, Gavin. The Health of the Royal Navy Considered, in a Letter Addressed to the Rt. Hon. Sir John S. Pakington. London: Robert Hardwicke, 1862.

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000.

Moffatt, Simon. “The Last Shantyman.” Profiles. BBC Liverpool (website). Last modified 25 July 2008. .

Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Moister, Rev. William. Missionary Stories: Narratives, Scenes, and Incidents, Illustrative of the Providence and Grace of God in Connection with the Propagation of the Gospel in the Heathen Lands. London: T. Woolmer, 1889.

287

Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. New York: Verso, 1999.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Posthumanities 27. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Najder, Zdzisław. Joseph Conrad: A Life. Trans. Halina Najder. Rochester NY: Camden House, 2007.

Nash, Andrew. William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel: Gender, Genre, and the Marketplace. Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace 6. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Nayder, Lillian. “Sailing Ships and Steamers, Angels and Whores: History and Gender in Conrad’s Maritime Fiction.” Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920. Ed. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996. 189–203.

Newman, Ian, Oskar Cox Jensen, and David Kennerley. “Introducing Mr Dibdin.” Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture. Ed. Jensen, Kennerley, and Newman. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018. 1–19.

Newton, William. “‘Gay and brisk’: Constructing a Pirate’s Image for Children.” Pirates in History and Popular Culture. Ed. Antonio Sanna. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2018. 213–24.

Nicolson, Nigel. The World of Jane Austen. London: Phoenix Illustrated, 1997.

Osterhammel Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014.

Padfield, Peter. Rule Britannia: The Victorian and Edwardian Navy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Pappalardo, Bruno. How to Survive in the Georgian Navy: A Sailor’s Guide. London: Osprey, 2019.

Paul-Emile, Barbara Taylor. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge as an Abolitionist.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 5.2 (April 1974): 59–75.

Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983.

288

“The Past, the Present, and the Coming.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 35.205 (January 1847): 1–14.

Peck, John. Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719–1917. Basingstoke UK: Palgrave, 2001.

Perks, Samuel. “‘He Can’t Throw Any of His Coal-Dust in My Eyes’: Adventurers and Entrepreneurs in Victory’s Coal Empire.” Conrad and Nature: Essays. Ed. Lissa Schneider- Rebozo, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, and John G. Peters. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. New York: Routledge, 2019. 252–68.

Peters, John G. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001.

—. Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013.

Philpotts, Trey. The Companion to “Dombey and Son.” The Dickens Companions. Series ed. Susan Shatto and David Paroissien. Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2014.

Pinkus, Karen. Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2016.

“A Professional Pirate.” Lyrics by Cynthia Weil and music by Barry Mann. Perf. Tim Curry with Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson, Kevin Clash, Bill Barretta, Mak Wilson, and Mann. Muppet Treasure Island: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Angel Records, 1996. compact disc.

Purssell, Andrew. “Critical Responses: 1975–2000,” in Joseph Conrad in Context. Ed. Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 83–90.

Ramli, Aimillia Mohd. “From Pasha to Cleopatra and Vashti: The Oriental Other in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.” Brontë Studies 35.2 (July 2010): 118–27.

Rawson, Claude. “Satire, Sensibility, and Innovation in Jane Austen: Persuasion and the Minor Works.” Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” Ed. Harold Bloom. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. 227–56.

Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon, 2004.

Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea. [London]: W. Winchester and Son, 1808. 289

Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Spontaneous Combustion of Coal in Ships, Together with the Appendix, Minutes of Evidence, and Index. London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1876.

Reynolds, William. European Capital, British Iron, and an American Dream: The Story of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad. Ed. Peter K. Gifford and Robert D. Ilisevich. Akron OH: Univ. of Akron Press, 2002.

Rhead, Louis. Introduction to Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1915. xvii–xix.

Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. New York: Verso, 1993.

Richardson, Brian W. Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyages Changed the World. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996.

Robson Catherine, and Carol T. Christ. Introduction to The Victorian Age. Ed. Robson and Christ. Vol. 5 of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th edn. 6 vols. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. 1017–41.

Rodger, N. A. M. The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. Glasgow: Fontana, 1986.

Rooney, Paul Raphael. Railway Reading and Late-Victorian Literary Series. Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Rowan, Thomas. Coal. Spontaneous Combustion and Explosions Occurring in Coal Cargoes. London: E. and F. N. Spon, 1882.

“Rules and Orders.” 1 November 1773. Rprt. in The Naval Chronicle 15 (London, 1806): 401–7.

Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1879.

290

—. The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution, February 4th and 11th, 1884. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1884.

Russell, William Clark. Jack’s Courtship: A Sailor’s Yarn of Love and Shipwreck. 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1884.

—. The Wreck of the “Grosvenor”: An Account of the Mutiny of the Crew and the Loss of the Ship when Trying to Make the Bermudas. 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1877.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage: 1994.

—. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966.

Sandner, David. “The Little Puzzle: The Two Shipwrecks in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.” English Language Notes 36.3 (March 1999): 67–75.

Schmitt, Cannon. “Tidal Conrad (Literally).” Victorian Studies 55.1 (Autumn 2012): 7–29.

Schmitt, Carl. Land and Sea. Trans. Simona Draghici. 1954; Corvallis OH: Plutarch Press, 1997.

Schneider-Rebozo, Lissa, and Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy. “Conrad, Nature, and Environmental Criticism.” Conrad and Nature: Essays. Ed. Schneider-Rebozo, McCarthy, and John G. Peters. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. New York: Routledge, 2019. 1–18.

Schwendinger, Robert J. “The Language of the Sea: Relationships between the Language of Herman Melville and Sea Shanties of the 19th Century.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 37 (1973): 53–73.

The Seaman’s Medical Guide, in Preserving the Health of a Ship’s Crew; Containing Plain Directions for the Use of the Medicines in the Cure of the Diseases &c. 11th edn. London: George Philip and Son, 1863.

Sedgewick, Augustine. “Against Flows.” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 4.2 (Fall 2014): 143–70.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1908.

291

Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Eastern World. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005.

Shklovsky. Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965. 3–24.

—. “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965. 25–60.

Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, 1950.

Simmons, Allan H. “Critical Responses: Contemporary.” Joseph Conrad in Context. Ed. Simmons. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 59–66.

Smith, Crosbie, Ian Higginson, and Phillip Wolstenholme. “‘Avoiding Equally Extravagance and Parsimony’: The Moral Economy of the Ocean Steamship.” Technology and Culture 44.3 (July 2003): 443–69.

Smith, Laura Alexandrine. The Music of the Waters: A Collection of the Sailors’ Chanties, or Working Songs of the Sea, of All Maritime Nations. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co., 1888.

Smith, Vanessa. Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 13. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998.

Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker, 2005.

Sonoi, Chine. “Coleridge and the British Slave Trade.” The Coleridge Bulletin n.s. 27 (2006): 27–37.

Southam, Brian. Jane Austen and the Navy. London: Hambledon and London, 2000.

Spence, Jon. Becoming Jane Austen. London: Hambledon and London, 2003.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Ed. Ranajit Guha and Spivak. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. 3–32.

Spongberg, Mary. Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth- Century Medical DIscourse. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997. 292

Stape, J. H. The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad. New York: Vintage, 2009.

Starkey, David J., and Matthew McCarthy. “A Persistent Phenomenon: Private Prize-Taking in the British Atlantic World, c.1540-1856.” Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State Formation in Global Historical Perspective. Ed. Stefan Eklöf Amirell and Leos Müller. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 131–51.

Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2002.

Stevens, Robert White. On the Stowage of Ships and Their Cargoes. 7th edn. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1878.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. “Appendix B: Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘My First Book.’” Treasure Island, by Stevenson. Ed. John Sutherland. Peterborough ON: Broadview, 2012. 231–9.

—. Treasure Island. Ed. John Sutherland. Peterborough ON: Broadview, 2012.

— to John Paul Bocock. [mid-November 1887]. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Bradford A Booth and Ernest Mehew. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995. 6:56–7.

Stewart, David. Romantic Magazine and Metropolitan Literary Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Strauss, Claudia. “The Imaginary.” The Missing Psychology in Cultural Anthropology’s Key Words. Ed. Naomi Quinn and Strauss. Special issue of Anthropological Theory 6.3 (September 2006): 322–44.

Sussman, Herbert, and Gerhard Joseph. “Prefiguring the Posthuman: Dickens and Prosthesis.” Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (September 2004): 617–28.

Swann, Mandy. “‘The Destroying Angel of Tempest’: The Sea in Villette.” Brontë Studies 38.2 (April 2013): 145–56.

Tanner, Tony. “In Between: Persuasion.” Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” Ed. Harold Bloom. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. 107–42.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. “Roundabout Papers—No. VIII: De Juventute.” The Cornhill Magazine 10 (October 1860): 501–12.

293

Thomas, Sue. Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in “Jane Eyre.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1910.

Trustram, Myna. Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005.

V21 Collective. “Manifesto of the V21 Collective. .

Venning, Barry. “A Macabre Connoisseurship: Turner, Byron, and the Apprehension of Shipwreck Subjects in Early Nineteenth-Century England.” Art History 8.3 (September 1985): 303–19.

Villiers, Peter. Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner. Dobbs Ferry NY: Sheridan House, 2006.

Walkowitz, Judith R. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982.

Walsh, Brandon. “Broken Songs and Machine Noise in Joseph Conrad’s Early Work.” Conradiana 44.2–3 (September 2012): 211–26.

Watson, Tim. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011.

Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979.

Watts, Cedric. “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of Conrad.” Colonial and Imperial Themes, special Issue of Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 196–209.

—. Introduction to “Heart of Darkness” and Other Tales, by Joseph Conrad. Ed. Watts. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. xi–xxvii.

—. Introduction to “Typhoon” and Other Tales, by Joseph Conrad. Ed. Watts. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. vii–xxl. 294

—. Joseph Conrad: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

—. Review of Conrad: The Moral World of the Novelist, by R. A. Gekoski. Literature and Its Audience II, special Issue of Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 341.

“The West India Question.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 31.191 (February 1832): 412–23.

Whall, W. B. Sea Songs and Shanties. 4th edn. Glasgow: James Brown and Sons, 1920.

White, Andrea. “Conrad and Modernism.” A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad. Ed. John G. Peters. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. 163–96.

White, Laura Mooneyham. “The ‘Positioning Systems’ of Persuasion.” Persuasions (online journal) 27.1 (Winter 2006): n. pag.

Wilberforce, William. A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire. London: Printed by Luke Hansard and Sons for T. Cadell, W. Davies, and J. Hatchard, 1807.

Williams, Glyn. The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s Voyage Round the World. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

Willis, Sam. Shipwreck: A History of Disasters at Sea. London: Quercus 2008.

Wills, David. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995.

Winfield, Rif. British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1793–1817: Design, Construction, Careers, and Fates. Rev. edn. Yorkshire: Seaforth, 2008.

Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003.

Youngquist, Paul, and Frances Botkin. “Introduction: Black Romanticism: Romantic Circulations.” Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic. Ed. Youngquist and Botkin. Special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis Series (October 2011): n. pag.

Zemka, Sue. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011.

- - -