Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer, and Adventurer

by Tom Pocock

Book Overview

Frederick Marryat was a novelist, for both adults and children, between Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. He was also known as Captain Marryat, naval hero of the great war with France, who went on to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081170355X
• ISBN13: 9780811703550
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Not just a writer - but also a good man in a tight corner!

This thoroughly enjoyable biography has only one drawback - its brevity. Though Marryat is largely known at present as a children's writer, his reputation in his own time rested on a series of adventure novels for adults based on his own very exciting career - he can fairly be claimed to have single-handedly invented the genre of naval fiction and to have set the pattern for Forrester, Kent, Pope and O'Brien. His own life - though cut off relatively early - was as exciting and varied as anything in his fiction: starting with near suicidal action under the legendary Cochrane, at sea almost constantly in the later years of the Napoleonic Wars in opposition to the French and Americans, returning home to develop a signalling system and commence a literary career and later returning to action in Burma, his service there involving the Royal Navy's first use of steamships in action and initiating the decline of the sailing navy in which Marryat had grown up. Marryat seems to have had a natural affinity for action - as a literary lion touring the United States in the 1830s he took time out to help put down a rebellion in Canada, and was once prosecuted for brawling in the streets of London - and his zest for life comes across well in Mr.Pocock's biography. Until Dickens arrived on the scene he was the foremost popular novelist in Britain, and even thereafter was a prominent figure in London literary circles - as he had been at Court earlier. He carried a raffish air of the Napoleonic and Regency periods into the growing respectability of early Victorian society and the account provided here of his discovery by an irate husband in an American lady's hotel room, and of the ingenious manner in which he appears to have extricated himself, hints at even more scandalous events that can only now be guessed at. Throughout the book Marryat comes across as a larger than life character who must have been a delight (and an exasperation) to know and a good man to have by one's side in a tight corner. One regrets however that this biography does not dwell more on the quality and content of Marryat's literary output and provide a better guide to the reader who would like to explore it further. This, and the brevity, aside, this is a most enjoyable book and can be highly recommended to anybody interested in the age of fighting sail, the advent of steam or the early Victorian literary scene.