The Sea in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature | Anita Moss (essay date 1983)
Anita Moss (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: “Captain Marryat and Sea Adventure,” in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall, 1983, pp. 13-15 and 30.
[In the following essay, Moss offers a brief overview of two sea adventure stories by Marryat: Masterman Ready and Mr. Midshipman Easy.]
By the time that Charles Dickens had published A Holiday Romance (1868), the stock features of sea adventure stories were so well-known that his nine-year-old character, the would-be writer Robin Redforth, can tell the adventures of one Captain Boldheart and his encounters with cannibals, pirates, and worst of all, the Latin Grammar Master (who gets boiled in a pot by the cannibals). As Harvey Darton suggested, Redforth probably subscribed to The Boys of England, a magazine whose aim was to enthrall the youthful male reader with “wild and wonderful but healthy fiction.”1 This wild and wonderful...
[The entire page is 2850 words long]
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