Abstract
Charles Dickens’s maternal grandfather, Charles Barrow, was a music teacher until 1801 when he obtained a position as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. He rose to the position of Chief Conductor of Monies in Towns, but in 1809 had to flee the country when he was discovered to have embezzled several thousand pounds from his employer. One of his sons, Thomas Barrow, was also employed in the Navy Pay Office, starting work on the same day as John Dickens, the novelist’s father, who married Elizabeth Barrow in June 1809. Charles John Huffam Dickens — Huffam after his godfather, a naval rigger — was born in Portsmouth in 1812. His father was subsequently posted to London, Sheerness and Chatham. It was the years in Portsmouth, however, that were the most exciting: the country was at war and the town was bustling with activity. John Dickens’s work included ‘the paying of sailors and artificers, involving large sums, with hand-outs often made by candlelight and on board ship’.1 A reliable employee, John’s pay rose rapidly from £78 to £231 a year. He moved to London after the defeat of Napoleon, and his career continued to progress; by the time of his well-known imprisonment for debt, he was earning in the region of £440 a year. On his release from prison he was granted retirement by the Admiralty and an annual pension.
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Notes
Michael Allen, ‘John Dickens’, in Paul Schlicke (ed.), Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 169. The biographical details in this chapter about Dickens and his family are derived from this volume.
On Dickens’s use of maritime themes and images in his novels, see William J. Palmer, ‘Dickens and Shipwreck’, Dickens Studies Annual, 18 (1989), pp. 39–92.
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), p. 25.
On the transition to steam, see Basil Greenhill and Ann Giffard, Steam, Politics and Patronage: The Transformation of the Royal Navy, 1815–54 (London: Conway, 1994). Almost inevitably, a consequence of Pax Britannica was that, by the late 1830s, military expenditure, which had been more than 60 per cent of government spending at the time of Waterloo and 40 per cent in the immediate postwar period, shrank to less than a quarter of the total. The army was allowed to stagnate more than the navy, but by the mid-1840s ‘naval professionals and politicians alike were beginning to question whether Britain’s vaunted supremacy could be maintained in the face of growing French naval power and into the age of steam navigation’.
See Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (London and New York: Longman, 1983), p. 203. But, even making every allowance for such complications in the overall picture, these were years when the British dominated the sea.
On mapping the seas, see N. Merrill Distad, ‘Oceanography’, in Sally Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (Chicago and London: St James Press, 1988), pp. 554–5.
See John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ed. Jan Morris (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 33: ‘Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England.’
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York: Verso, 1994).
See the summary of Arrighi’s argument in Ronald R. Thomas, ‘Spectacle and Speculation: The Victorian Economy of Vision in Little Dorrit’, in Anny Sadrin (ed.), Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 39–40.
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London: Dent, 1997), p. 667.
See Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest, and Sea Power During the ‘Pax Britannica’ (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 8–12.
On joint stock companies, see Michael J. Freeman and Derek H. Aldcroft, Transport in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 66, 83, 199, 204, 265–6, and
H. L. Malchow, Gentlemen Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 10, 12.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
On the construction of the middle-class individual in the Victorian period, see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989).
‘With a main strand of Romanticism justly understood to be a systematic naturalising of the supernatural, dying in the nineteenth-century novel follows suit by internalising metaphysics as psychology.’ See Garrett Stewart, ‘The Secret Life of Death in Dickens’, Dickens Studies Annual, XI (1983), p. 179.
On the search for the North-West Passage, see Ann Savours, The Search for the North West Passage (London: Chatham, 1999), and
Robin Hanbury-Tenison (ed.), The Oxford Book of Exploration (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 242, 253, 262–3, 284, 290, 292.
On Sir John Franklin, see Richard Julius Cyriax, Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition (London: Methuen, 1939).
An original perspective on the Franklin expedition is offered in Andrea Barrett’s novel The Voyage of the Narwhal (New York: Norton, 1998).
On savage desires in Dickens’s fiction, see Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), where he considers the many references to cannibalism in Dickens’s novels, particularly in David Copperfield.
The most interesting discussion of cannibalism in nineteenth-century life and literature can be found in H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 41–105.
On The Frozen Deep, see Schlicke, op. cit., pp. 243–5, and Andrew Gasson, Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 65–6.
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Peck, J. (2001). Dickens and the Sea. In: Maritime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_5
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