Life of Frederick Marryat

by David Hannay

CHAPTER V.

From 1830 to his death in 1848 Marryat was a working man of letters, and a busy one. His books were many, and they do not represent all his labours. There was a life of his old messmate, Lord Napier, begun—and stopped—at the request of the widow, and much miscellaneous journalism—if that is the correct description of contributions to magazines. His pen was rapid, and he had no fear of tackling new subjects, so that the length of the shelf which would hold his complete works would be considerable, and the variety of the contents of the edition not small. Sea stories and land stories, plays which never reached the stage, diaries on the Continent and in America, letters of Norfolk farmers, and didactic tales for children all went in.

There is a difficulty in the way of the telling of Marryat’s own life during these busy eighteen years—the not uncommon difficulty, want of information. The biography published by his family leaves much unexplained, for reasons into which it would be useless, even if one had the right, to inquire. The causes of Marryat’s sudden changes of residence, and of his hasty journey to the Continent in 1835, are only to be guessed at. He did not live much in the literary world of his time. Of the eighteen years of his writing activity, several in the middle were spent on the Continent, and several at the end in Norfolk. In a general way one gathers that the question of money was a very important, sometimes a very pressing one, with Marryat. Money earned, inherited, spent—money to be recovered from debtors, and, doubtless, paid to creditors, had much of his attention. It is manifest that he was what Carlyle would have called “a very expensive Herr.” He liked to lead a large life, and to show a gentlemanly indifference to money. By preference he lived in good houses, in good neighbourhoods, and it is not overrash or uncharitable to guess that his income was not always adequate to his expenses. Finally, he was addicted to some of the most effectual of all methods of evacuation. If he did not promote, or have to face, a petition, at least he went through a contested election; and he had Balzac’s mania for ingenious speculations, which ought to have realized wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and did achieve a dead loss with the most unfailing regularity. Like many another sailor before and since, he was sure that he could show the trained farmer how to extract more than he had yet done from the land. He undertook to do so on his small estate at Langham, in Norfolk—with disastrous financial results. That farming speculation was undoubtedly the type of much in his life.

His movements, if not the causes of them, can be followed easily enough. Between 1830 and his departure for America in 1837, he was successively at Sussex House, Hammersmith; at Langham, in Norfolk; then back in London; then in Brighton; then in sudden haste off to Brussels; and from thence to Lausanne. “Frank Mildmay; or, The Naval Officer,” appeared in 1829. Nine months later, when he was fixed on shore, came out the “King’s Own.” In 1830 he acquired a thousand acres of land in Norfolk, which remained in his possession till his death. He exchanged Sussex House for it, but how Sussex House was got we are not told. It cannot have been bought either out of prize money, or the proceeds of the two books he had published already, although his prices were remarkably good for a beginner. Four hundred pounds is the sum said to have been given by Colburn for “Frank Mildmay”—a good deal more than the most sanguine of novices would expect to receive from the most generous of publishers for a first book in these days. Certainly, in 1830, Marryat was working as a man works who has reasons for making all the money he can. He was contributing to the Metropolitan Magazine, and receiving his sixteen pounds a sheet—which, again, is good magazine pay. It did not take him long to acquire a shrewd idea how to deal with publishers, and a distinct understanding of the due privileges of an editor. His knowledge of these important matters is shown conclusively in a letter to Bentley, setting forth the terms on which he would be prepared to edit a new nautical magazine, a proposed imitation of, or rather rival to, the United Service Journal.

“My terms,” he says, with the confidence of a man who knew the market, and his own value in it, “would be as follows: The sole control of the work, for when I do my best I must be despotic or I shall not succeed; to be paid for all my writings at the price I received in the Metropolitan, sixteen guineas per sheet. The editorship I would then take at £400 per annum until the end of the first year, when, if the work succeeded, I should expect an addition of £100, and if it continued profitable, another £100, so as to raise the final pay of the editor to £600 per annum. The stipulations may be talked over afterwards. To choose my sub-editor is indispensable. He must be a nautical man.” Marryat had learnt plainly how necessary it is to be captain of your own ship—and withal he quite understood how to launch the new kind of craft he was about to sail. “The first number must be most carefully got up, to insure success, and the papers ought now to be in preparation. You must, therefore, take but few days to decide, as I tell you honestly I have reason to expect the offer from another quarter, who are now talking the matter over, and I must be allowed to consider myself as unpledged to you after a short time.”

As it is not recorded that Marryat had, like Arthur Pendennis, any George Warrington to guide his literary beginnings, he deserves all the more credit for his spontaneous appreciation of the advantage to be obtained by playing Bacon off against Bungay.

“The offer from another quarter,” which was thus quoted to hasten the decision of Mr. Bentley, was the editorship of the Metropolitan, which he took in 1832, and held until he left England for Brussels. He either received as part payment, or purchased a proprietary right in the magazine, which he afterwards sold to Saunders and Otley for £1,050. For the next four or five years the Metropolitan had the major part of Marryat’s time and work. He had, according to his wish, a nautical sub editor, the E. Howard, who wrote that strange book, “Rattlin the Reefer,” which still continues to be catalogued with Marryat’s own stories. There were contributors to be hunted up—kept up to the mark, more or less successfully—and occasionally soothed down—Thomas Moore for one, who wrote in agony to insist on the necessity there was that he should see his proofs, and also to make monetary arrangements. Of course there were quarrels to be fought out, for in those days no periodical was able to exist without its regular battle. But in the midst of these forgetable and forgotten things—Marryat contributed to the Metropolitan five of the best of his books. “Newton Forster” appeared in 1832, “Peter Simple” in 1833; and in 1834 no less than three—“Jacob Faithful,” “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” and “Japhet in Search of a Father.” Not a little of what, to apply nautical language, may be called dunnage appeared with and after these—a comedy, a tragedy (of neither of which does Marryat seem to have thought highly), and a host of miscellaneous papers collected under the title of “Olla Podrida”—these last being only what Marryat frankly called his “Diary on the Continent”—namely, “very good magazine stuff.”

His extraordinary industry in 1834 can be confidently accounted for by the need of money. In 1833 he had taken effectual means to lighten his purse by standing for Parliament. The constituency chosen for the venture was the Tower Hamlets, and Marryat stood as a Reformer. Although the year immediately following the passing of the Reform Bill was as good a one as he could well have found in which to try in that character, he was not successful. His reforming zeal was possibly too purely naval for the constituency, and he was wanting in the very necessary readiness to say ditto to a popular fad. Marryat seems to have considered that his dislike of the press-gang was claim enough to the character of Liberal Reformer. But in the midst of profound peace the press-gang was not a burning grievance, and on some other points he took a line not likely to prove pleasing to the sentimental among the Liberals, for whose votes he was asking. He could not be got to show a burning interest in the sorrows of the slave. He took up the logically strong, but practically ineffective, position of the man who declined to be troubled for the slave while there was so much suffering unremedied at home. This might be a very sensible decision, but unfortunately it was discredited by the fact that it had been a favourite one with the slave-holders, whose tenderness for sufferers at home was never heard of till their own property in the West Indies seemed to be in danger. On another question, which proved a trying one to candidates till very recently, Marryat took a disastrously sensible course. He was called upon to give his opinion of the practice of flogging in the navy—and committed himself to the side of discipline most fatally. “Sir,” he said to a heckler, who wanted to know whether the “gallant captain” would be capable of flogging him or his sons; “Sir, you say the answer I gave you is not direct; I will answer you again. If ever you, or one of your sons, should come under my command, and deserve punishment, if there be no other effectual mode of conferring it, I shall flog you.” After that it is not surprising to hear that “Captain Marryat and the Chairman left the room together, amidst a tumult of united applause and disapprobation”—in the midst, in fact, of an uproar, in which the part of the meeting which admired his pluck was engaged in shouting against the other part which detested his good sense. There was something of Colonel Newcome in the politics of Captain Marryat, and he had not the good fortune to contend against a Barnes Newcome. His parliamentary ambition had to take its place with the other schemes of his life which came to nothing. A plan for the establishment of brevet rank in the navy, which he sent in about this time to Sir James Graham, was part of his activity as a political naval officer. It also came to nothing, and nobody can well regret that it was still-born.

After the misspent energy of 1833, Marryat had to make up by hard pen-work. He settled in Montpelier Villas, Western Road, Brighton, and there, in 1834, wrote his three books. The effort was a severe one, and he felt the effects later on, when fatigue, and possibly questions of money, had induced him to go abroad. He had not yet altogether given up thinking of Parliament—or, at least, if he had ceased hoping to sit as member, he kept up his correspondence with ministers on those naval affairs which he understood. He forwarded observations on the Merchant Shipping Bill of that year—one of our portentous list of shipping measures—to Sir James Graham. His volunteer help was well received, and the First Lord, one of the ablest men who ever was at the head of the department, invited him to come to Whitehall and talk the Bill over. This invitation may be taken as a proof, among others, that if Marryat remained unemployed, it was mainly by his own wish. He had already, by his writing on the manning of the navy, and, in less public ways, shown that in professional matters, at least, he was an excellent man of business. Sir James Graham was not the man to have refused employment to an officer of proved ability if he had wished for it, but it is tolerably plain that Marryat had other irons of a more attractive kind, for the moment, in the fire.

The particular iron which he had heating in Norfolk—the estate at Langham—was not likely to relieve him from the necessity of making every penny he could by his pen. “No rent,” was his return in 1834, and as a rule ever after—till he took it in hand himself, and then it still realized him a steady yearly deficit. This year of “no rent” was also a year of legal unpleasantness in connection with his father’s memory—which he bore in a fashion to be recommended to the imitation of all who suffer from similar misfortunes. “As for the Chancellor’s judgment,” he wrote to his mother, who had plainly been hurt, “I cannot say I thought anything about it; on the contrary, it appears to me that he might have been much more severe if he had thought proper. It is easy to impute motives, and difficult to disprove them. I thought, considering his enmity, that he let us off cheap, as there is no punishing a Chancellor, and he might say what he pleased with impunity. I did not, therefore, roar, I only smiled. The effect will be nugatory. Not one in a thousand will read it; those who do, know it refers to a person not in this world, and of those, those who knew my father will not believe it; those who did not will care little about it, and forget the name in a week. Had he given the decision in our favour, I should have been better pleased, but it’s no use crying; what’s done can’t be helped.” With that piece of the philosophy of the elder Faithful, Marryat ends as neat a statement of reasons for not making a fuss, and as admirable an estimate of the relative unimportance of any man’s private affairs in a busy world, as will be found by much searching.