“In a moral point of view I hold that I am right. We are educating the lower classes; generations have sprung up who can read and write; and may I inquire what it is they have to read, in the way of amusement?—for I speak not of the Bible, which is for private examination. They have scarcely anything but the weekly newspapers, and as they cannot command amusement, they prefer those which create the most excitement; and this I believe to be the cause of the great circulation of The Weekly Despatch, which has but too well succeeded in demoralizing the public, in creating disaffection and ill-will towards the Government, and assisting the nefarious views of demagogues, and chartists. It is certain that men would rather laugh than cry—would rather be amused than rendered gloomy and discontented—would sooner dwell upon the joys and sorrows of others, in a tale of fiction, than brood over their supposed wrongs. If I put good and wholesome food (and, as I trust, sound moral) before the lower classes, they will eventually eschew that which is coarse and disgusting, which is only resorted to because no better is supplied. Our weekly newspapers are at present little better than records of immorality and crime, and the effect which arises from having no other matter to read and comment on, is of serious injury to the morality of the country.… I consider, therefore, that in writing for the amusement and instruction of the poor man, I am doing that which has been but too much neglected—that I am serving my country, and you surely will agree with me that to do so is not infra dig. in the proudest Englishman: and, as a Conservative, you should commend, rather than stigmatise my endeavours in the manner which you have so hastily done.”

The intention and the argument here are better than the style. Marryat was better at narrative than exposition, and could at times be as free with the relative pronouns as that distinguished officer, Captain Rawdon Crawley. The confidence Marryat, in common with most of his contemporaries, reposed in the influence of wholesome amusement was doubtless excessive. It has not been found that when the “poor man” [or other reader for that matter], has a choice of Hercules given him between good literature and bad, he will cleave to the first and reject the last. Also, there is a candid confession of the faith “that there is nothing like leather” in Marryat’s confidence that good weekly stories would soothe the discontent which was seething in England before 1848. But in spite of slips of grammar, optimism, and over-confidence, Marryat’s answer to the priggery in Fraser is a creditable manifesto. To desire to kill the trash of The Weekly Despatch was at least a respectable ambition, and a man has a good right to believe in his causes, and his weapons.

CHAPTER IX.

Langham, to which Marryat betook himself for good in 1843, had been in his possession for some thirteen years. Its history, as far as he was concerned, may be taken to have been characteristic of the man. He acquired it, according to Mrs. Ross Church, by exchange—having “swapped” it, after dinner and copious champagne, against Sussex House, Hammersmith. From that period it had been an interesting but unprofitable possession to him. Before he left for America he had already had occasion to complain of the difficulty of getting rent. A tenant had been expelled, and replaced by another of the fairest character. But appearances had proved delusive. Langham had been all along more of a burden than a profit to its owner. In 1843 he seems to have decided to see what he could do with it himself. A passage in his fragmentary life of Lord Napier, quoted by his daughter, shows that he shared to the full the common delusion of men, and the especial delusion of sailors, that it is easy to manage a small property. In this pleasing but fatal belief he set out to see what he could do with the 700 acres of the estate himself. Again I have to acknowledge my inability to give any account of the motives for this sudden (for it appears to have been sudden) decision. Considerations of economy were doubtless of weight with him. The fall in the value of West Indian property had, as has been said, hit him hard. The demands on his purse were as heavy as ever—indeed, to judge from a somewhat plaintive reference in one of his letters—even heavier. He speaks in this place of actions brought by tradesmen to recover money for goods supplied to his sons Frederick and Frank—from which we may conclude that the young men had inherited their share of the paternal faculty for spending money. Their father was driven to express the wish that the value of this necessary was taught in schools. Neither at school nor at home do the young Marryats appear to have gained this knowledge, and in those years the navy, which they had both entered, was no school of thrift. Doubtless they were among the causes which first induced Captain Marryat to betake himself to the country, and then kept him hard at work when he was there.

Langham is in the northern division of Norfolk, halfway between Wells-next-the-Sea and Holt. The Manor House, says Mrs. Ross Church, “without having any great architectural pretensions, had a certain unconventional prettiness of its own. It was a cottage in the Elizabethan style, built after the model of one at Virginia Water belonging to his late Majesty, George IV., with latticed windows opening on to flights of stone steps ornamented with vases of flowers, and leading down from the long narrow dining-room, where (surrounded by Clarkson Stanfield’s illustrations of ‘Poor Jack,’ with which the walls were clothed) Captain Marryat composed his later works, to the lawn behind. The house was thatched and gabled, and its pinkish white walls and round porch were covered with roses and ivy, which in some parts climbed as high as the roof itself.” When Marryat came down to examine his property with an intention of living on it, he found it suffering from all the evils which commonly fall upon the property of absentee landlords. The tenant of the larger of the two farms into which the estate was divided had not only mismanaged his land. Having the house itself at his mercy, he had turned the drawing-room into a common lodging-house, in which tramps and other necessitous persons could have a bed for the modest sum of twopence a night. The windows were smashed or unclosed, and the birds of the air had built their nests in the rooms. This state of neglect was soon changed for the better, and Langham Manor became habitable.

In it Marryat sat down during the last five years of his life, to show in practice the soundness of his theory touching the fitness of sailors for the management of small properties. It will surprise few to learn that the result only proved once more that small properties are not so easily forced to yield a profit. Even before actually coming to live on the estate, Marryat had tried various speculations with his land. The results of his efforts, personal and vicarious, are illustrated in his daughter’s “Life” by the following extracts, taken at random from his farm accounts.

£s.d.
1842.Total receipts15429
Expenditure163706
1846.Total receipts898126
Expenditure2023108