Abstract
William Price, the brother of Fanny, the heroine of Austen’s Mansfield Park, is a remarkable young man.1 A midshipman in the navy, he has, at nineteen, ‘an open pleasant countenance, and frank, unstudied, but feeling and respectful manners’ (p. 19). Everyone at Mansfield Park, even the novel’s villain, Henry Crawford, is struck by ‘the warm hearted, blunt fondness of the young sailor’ (p. 196). To some extent, William is being set up as a foil to Henry, the honesty of the sailor being played off against the deviousness of the gentleman. Austen’s enthusiasm for William, however, goes well beyond the basic requirements of the plot. Every word he speaks offers ‘proof of good principles, professional knowledge, energy, courage and cheerfulness — every thing that could deserve or promise well’ (p. 196). And when a direct comparison is made with Henry, the narrator runs to excess in representing William’s sterling qualities:
a lad who, before he was twenty, had gone through such bodily hardships, and given such proofs of mind. The glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made [Henry’s] habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast; and he wished he had been born a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence with so much self-respect and happy ardour, instead of what he was! (p. 197)
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Notes
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).
Lydia, in Pride and Prejudice, ‘saw all the glories of the camp; its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet’. J. David Grey, ‘Military (Army and Navy)’, in J. David Grey (ed.), The Jane Austen Handbook (London: Athlone Press, 1986), p. 308.
Rowland Grey, ‘The Navy, the Army and Jane Austen’, Nineteenth Century and After, 82 (1917), pp. 172–3.
On Austen’s naval connections, see also John H. and Edith C. Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (London and New York: John Lane, 1906),
David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), and
Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), pp. 159–227.
See David Loades, ‘From the King’s Ships to the Royal Navy’, in J.R. Hill (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 24–55.
On Nelson, see Captain A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain, 3rd edn (London: Sampson, Low Marston, 1899),
Carola Oman, Nelson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947), and
Christopher Hibbert, Nelson: A Personal History (London: Viking, 1994).
See Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 13–147.
See Nicholas Tracy, ‘Nelson and Sea Power’, Nelson’s Battles: The Art of Victory in the Age of Sail (London: Chatham Publishing, 1996), pp. 8–37.
Peter Kemp (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 597.
Something of the nature of Nelson’s achievement is conveyed in J. M. W. Turner’s The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, painted in 1823–4. It attracted a great deal of criticism because of the inaccuracy of its nautical detail, but what it lacks in accuracy it more than makes up for in conveying the intensity of hand-to-hand fighting. See James Taylor, Marine Painting: Images of Sail, Sea and Shore (London: Studio Editions, 1995), p. 93. The era of Trafalgar and the French Wars is returned to repeatedly in modern-day sea fiction (in the tradition that leads from C. S. Forester to Patrick O’Brian), but such works are always escapist fantasies; they can never offer any real sense of urgency or anxiety. In the case of Mansfield Park, by contrast, first published in 1814 when the final victory over Napoleon was still a year away, there is inevitably a sense of tension, for the very survival of the country depends upon the conduct of young men such as William Price.
Robert Southey, Life of Nelson, cited in Colin White (ed.), The Nelson Companion (Stroud: Bramley Books, 1997), p. 182.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 182.
On how the biographies of military heroes reflect the period of their production, see Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
See David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), p. 295.
David Aldridge, ‘Horatio Nelson’, in John Cannon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 676.
The heading to chapter 46 of Captain Marryat’s Peter Simple reads: ‘O’Brien tells his crew that one Englishman is as good as three Frenchmen on salt water — They prove it.’ Cited in Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 49.
Jane Austen, Sanditon (London: Dent, 1968), p. 26.
E. J. Hobsbawm, in Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London: Penguin, 1990; first published 1968), pp. 24–5, provides a concise account of the position in the eighteenth century: ‘Ships and overseas trade were, as everyone knew, the lifeblood of Britain, the Navy its most powerful weapon. Around the middle of the eighteenth century the country owned perhaps six thousand mercantile ships of perhaps half a million tons, several times the size of the French mercantile marine, its main rival. They formed perhaps one tenth of all capital fixed investments (other than real estate) in 1700, while their 100,000 seamen were almost the largest group of non-agricultural workers.’ Naval and general maritime supremacy might have been achieved by the middle of the eighteenth century, but 1835 is widely recognized as the date when Britain achieved overall and unquestionable economic supremacy.
It is Herman Melville, writing some years later, who has the most acute grasp of the importance of hierarchy in the navy. In White-Jacket, in particular, there are chapters elaborating the principal divisions of the seamen and the hierarchy of officers on an American man-of-war, gradations of rank that are essential for the ordered running of a ship; were it not so, ‘the crew would be nothing but a mob’. See Herman Melville, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (Evanston, IL and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1970), p. 9. Part of Melville’s project is to draw attention to the levels of brutality that are commonplace in the American navy, especially the amount of corporal punishment inflicted by lieutenants. Melville points out that ‘few or no similar abuses were known in the English navy’ (p. 141). His explanation for this, and for the fact that American officers are generally disliked by their crews, is that English officers, ‘from their station in life, have been more accustomed to social command; hence, quarter-deck authority sits more naturally on them. A coarse, vulgar man, who happens to rise to high naval rank by the exhibition of talents not incompatible with vulgarity, invariably proves a tyrant to his crew’ (p. 141). The explanation might be more complex than this, but the point here is that Melville, if only indirectly, finds in the British naval hierarchy an apt reflection of the British class system. This aspect of the navy helps explain why a great deal of ‘Sea writing in the nineteenth century was aggressively reactionary and backward looking’.
See Jonathan Raban, The Oxford Book of the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 18.
Authors recalled, sometimes with bitterness about the present, how things used to be. There is a clear case of mythologizing the past throughout Charles Robinson’s The British Tar in Fact and Fiction: The Poetry, Pathos and Humour of the Sailor’s Life (London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909). For example: ‘Brave men and true were the old seamen — those alike who walked the quarter-deck and those who were the “undistinguished crew”, as Falconer calls them, the “jolly lads” of the ballads, who lived on the lower deck, and worked the ship in conflict with the elements and with the enemies of king and queen’ (p. 340).
Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (London: Longmans, 1885; first published 1841), pp. 108–9.
William Falconer compiled the first sea-dictionary, An Universal Dictionary of the Marine, in 1769. Nineteenth-century dictionaries that have been republished in recent years include Admiral W.H. Smyth, Sailor’s WordBook: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Termsb (London: Conway, 1991; first published 1867), and
Captain H. Paasch, Paasch’s Illustrated Marine Dictionary (London: Conway, 1997; first published 1885).
Austen’s novel might be considered in relation to Maria Edgeworth’s novel Manoeuvring, published in 1809. It describes a mutiny against a negligent captain. Order is only restored when the crew realize their dependency upon the admirable Captain Walsingham, a professional improving his social position through the acquisition of prize money. See Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 185, for a discussion of Edgeworth’s novel. This is part of a section, pp. 179–87, where Sales deals with naval themes in Austen, specifically in Persuasion.
On ‘interest’, see Michael Lewis, ‘The Naval Hierarchy: “Interest”’, in A Social History of the Navy: 1793–1815 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 202–27.
On prize money, see Lewis, ‘Inducements: Prize and Freight’, in ibid., pp. 316–40, and John O. Coote, The Norton Book of the Sea (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 75–7.
On drink, see Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (London: Collins, 1968), pp. 256–7.
Jane Austen, Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1985).
Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideolgy, Interest, and Sea Power during the Pax Britannica (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 8–12.
The theories of Joseph Schumpeter are elaborated in Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (New York: McGraw Hill, 1939), and Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947).
See Peter Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp. 3–4.
Richard Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (London and Toronto: Dent, 1912), p. 212.
See a number of the essays in Judy Simons (ed.), Mansfield Park’ and ‘Persuasion’, New Casebook series (London: Macmillan, 1997).
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Peck, J. (2001). Jane Austen’s Sailors. In: Maritime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_3
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