Notes and References Introduction: Political, Cultural and Literary Trends (1830-7) 1. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford University Press, 1954) p. 1. 2. Walter Allen, The English Novel (New York: Dutton, 1954) p. 162. 3. Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) p. 229. 4. Louis Cazamian, The Social Novel in England, 1830-1850 (1903; trans. Martin Fido, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) p. 1. 5. David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950) p. 75. 6. Despite the relative tranquillity of the years from 1832 to 1837, reform continued, but it was primarily economic and religious. The only major political reform of this period after the passage of the First Reform Bill was the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which established local government by paid professionals and city councils rather than by squires and magistrates. Economic reforms became increasingly important as the working class and its advocates realized that the First Reform Bill had done nothing to alleviate the misery of the terrible living and working conditions of the poor. Appealing to the humanitarian sentiment behind the abolition of slavery in British dominions (1833), philanthropists and Evangelicals stressed the need to free the urban poor from enslavement by factory owners. The landed interests in Parliament, whose power and wealth were being continually eroded by the industrialists, were only too happy to respond by passing regulatory factory legislation. The Factory Act of 1833 prohibited the employment of children under thirteen for more than eight hours a day in all textile mills and required that these children attend school two hours a day, a requirement to be enforced by travelling inspectors. The half million workers who belonged to the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, however, felt that Parliament was moving too slowly in improving working conditions and planned a general strike in 1834. But the plan failed and the trade union collapsed, anticipating a similar failure of the Chartist Movement in 1848, but also looking forward, however dimly, to the legal recognition of trade unions in 1871 and their subsequent success as a weapon of the working class. One economic reform measure during William's reign which actually increased the misery of the poor was the Utilitarian-sponsored New Poor Law of 1834, the inhumanity of which Dickens would dramatize in Oliver Twist. 7. Roger Fulford, Hanover to Windsor (London: Batsford, 1960) p. 40. 8. Phillip Ziegler, King William IV (London: Collins, 1971) p. 156. 139 140 The Victorian Novel before Victoria 9. Ibid., p. 73. 10. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957) p. 257. 11. See George Levine's The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 5-15. 12. See Eric Partridge's The French Romantics' Knowledge of English Literature (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1924) p. 259. 13. Andrew Sanders, The Victon'an Histon'cal Novel, 1840-1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978) p. 1. 14. In the silver-fork novels of Bulwer and Disraeli, the authors were not so much concerned with the fashionable world as with their favourite subject of romantic alienation. The only exception is Disraeli's The Young Duke, which gives a detailed but somewhat exaggerated view of fashionable London life. 15. loan Williams, The Realist Novel in England: A Study in Development (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974) p. 116. 16. See S. Diana Neill's A Short History of the English Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1952) p. 86. 17. Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830-1847 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963) p. 98. 18. Allan Conrad Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976) p. 60. 19. Cazamian, The Social Novel in England, p. 4. Chapter I: Frederick Marryat 1. Richard Hengist Horne, A New Spin't of the Age (Oxford University Press, 1844) p. 171. 2. Despite the general dearth of Marryat criticism, there have been a few recent studies of Marryat's fiction which will be referred to later in the essay. The most lengthy recent treatment of Marryat's life and fiction is Maurice­ Paul Gautier's Captain Freden'ck Marryat: L'Homme et L'Oeuvre, Etudes Anglaises, 41 (Paris: Didier, 1973). Although Gautier's study suffers from a lack of selectivity, it is impressive in its scholarly thoroughness and valuable for the details it amasses. 3. W. Hannay, Dublin University Magazine, 47 (March 1856) 295. And Melville in Chapter 4 of Typee mentions 'some long-haired, bare-necked youths, who, forced by the united influences of Captain Marryat and hard times embarked at Nantucket for a pleasure excursion to the Pacific'. 4. Joseph Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday, 1924) p. 53. 5. James Hannay, Comhill Magazine (February 1873) 179. 6. Michael Sadleir, Excursions in Victonim Bibliography (London: Chaundy & Cox, 1922) p. 81. 7. Cynthia Behrman, Victon'an Myths of the Sea (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977) pp. 25-31. 8. Poetic and Dramatic Works, Cambridge Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1898) p. 28. Notes and References 141 9. See Edward Wagenknecht's Cavalcade of the English Novel: From Elizabeth to George VI (New York: Henry Holt, 1943) p. 202. Donald Hawes, though more restrained than Ford, also believes that Marryat deserves rehabilitation, and finds 'one approach . suggested by his friendship with Dickens'. He explores this revealing literary connection in 'Marryat and Dickens: A Personal and Literary Relationship', Dickens Studies Annual, 2 (1972) 39-59. 10. Virginia Woolf, The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950) pp. 43-4. 11. We shall discuss the six sea novels Marryat wrote during William's reign: The King's Own (1830), Newton Forster; or, the Merchant Service (1832), Peter Simple (1834), Jacob Faithful (1834), Mr. Midshipman Easy and Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend (1837). Such critics as Virginia Woolf and Oliver Warner have called these novels Marryat's best and most representative fiction. Most of his fiction after 1837 was written for children. 12. For the authors who dealt with naval characters before Smollett, see Harold Francis Watson's The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama 1550-1800 (Columbia University Press, 1931) pp. 70-98 and 135-61, and Charles N. Robinson's The British Tar in Fact and Fiction: The Poetry, Pathos, and Humour of the Sailor's Life (London: Harper & Brothers, 1909) pp. 185-246. 13. Robinson, The Bn"tish Tar in Fact and Fiction, p. 269. Thomas Philbrick's excellentjames Fenimore Cooper and the Development of Amen·can Sea Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1961) argues effectively that Smollett made it impossible to return to romanticized characters and settings. See pp. 4-7. 14. For example, in Roden"ck Random, Oakhum is the embodiment of brutality while in Peregn·ne Pickle Tom Pipes epitomizes fidelity to a master. Most of Smollett's other seamen can easily be categorized by humours. 15. Hannay, Comhill Magazine, p. 173. Philbrick mentions that Smollett shared the neoclassical distaste for wild, primitive aspects of nature. Storms in Smollett, for example, are chaotic rather than sublime. 16. The best discussion of the sea novels during these thirty years is in Watson, The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama, pp. 161-87. 17. As Robinson says in The Bn"tish Tar in Fact and Fiction: 'The latter half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of its successor are a rather disappointing period in the history of fiction. The full volume of the literature of the war came later' (p. 298). 18. Frederick Marryat, Newton Forster, vol. IV of The Novels of Captain Marryat, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London: J. M. Dent) ch. 47. Since there is no standard edition of Marryat's novels and since they have been published in various editions, reference to the novels will be made by chapter numbers only. 19. Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the English Novel, p. 54. 20. Still other sailors are characterized by their names: Peter Simple who describes himself as 'the fool of the family'; Smallbones, in Snarleyyow, who 'looked like famine's eldest child just arrived to years of discretion' or the 142 The Victorian Novel before Victoria title character ofjacob Faithful who ultimately does prove to be more than faithful to his mentor's values. 21. Conrad has noted that Marryat's novels, 'like amphibious creatures, live on the sea and frequent the shore where they flounder deplorably' (Notes on Life and Letters, p. 54). This criticism of the land episodes is rather strong. The problem with Marryat's land passages is not so much that they 'flounder deplorably' as that they advance little, if at all, beyond Smollett. Technically and thematically, japhet in Search of a Father, Marryat's one land-locked novel of the 1830s (1836), does little more than evoke memories of Peregrine Pickle and Roderick Random. AlthoughJaphet's search for his father seems designed to tie together his various adventures, it is so perfunctorily and sporadically introduced that Japhet's adventures remain as picaresque as those of Smollett's heroes. Furthermore, many of the characters and incidents strongly resemble those of Peregrine Pickle and Roden'ck Random, most often the latter. Marryat's gypsy fortune-teller Melchior, alias Henry de Clare, calls to mind Cadwallader in Peregn'ne Pickle. And Strap in Roden"ck Random, who is both Roderick's friend and later his valet, may have provided the model for Japhet's faithful sidekick, Timoth~ Oldmixon. As in Roden'ck Random, moreover, disguises play a major role injaphet, and both novels culminate with the heroes' discoveries of their true fathers, whose wealth enables Japhet and Roderick to marry the women they love.