The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture

Steve Mentz, Martha Elena Rojas, Steve Mentz, Martha Elena Rojas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317016595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

During the nineteenth century, British and American naval supremacy spanned the globe. The importance of transoceanic shipping and trade to the European-based empire and her rapidly expanding former colony ensured that the ocean became increasingly important to popular literary culture in both nations. This collection of ten essays by expert scholars in transatlantic British and American literatures interrogates the diverse meanings the ocean assumed for writers, readers, and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic during this period of global exploration and colonial consolidation. The book's introduction offers three critical lenses through which to read nineteenth-century Anglophone maritime literature: "wet globalization, " which returns the ocean to our discourses of the global; "salt aesthetics, " which considers how the sea influences artistic culture and aesthetic theory; and "blue ecocriticism, " which poses an oceanic challenge to the narrowly terrestrial nature of "green" ecological criticism. The essays employ all three of these lenses to demonstrate the importance of the ocean for the changing shapes of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture and literature. Examining texts from Moby-Dick to the coral flower-books of Victorian Australia, and from Wordsworth's sea-poetry to the Arctic journals of Charles Francis Hall, this book shows how important and how varied in meaning the ocean was to nineteenth-century Anglophone readers. Scholars of nineteenth-century globalization, the history of aesthetics, and the ecological importance of the ocean will find important scholarship in this volume.

1
William Falconer and the empire of the deep

Siobhan Carroll

“Did Mr. Bowles ever gaze upon the sea?”¹ Byron asks in his Letter to [John Murray], on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’ Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope (1821). Responding to Bowles’ (1819) claim that “poetical beauty” depended “not on art, but NATURE”² – an assertion that Bowles had illustrated by asking his readers to imagine the unpoetical appearance of a ship – Byron springs to the defense of vessels both literary and maritime, taking as one of his key examples the then-famous work of the “poet-sailor,”³ William Falconer. In an argument that strikingly illustrates Margaret Cohen’s description of the intertwined history of literary and nautical craft, Byron cites the “infinite superiority”⁴ of Falconer’s (1762) poem The Shipwreck in order to argue both for the aesthetic value of a human presence in nature and for the role of the artist as more than mere imitator of divine creation. Just as the ocean, without a ship to lend it interest or an artist to study it, would exist merely as a “vast but fatiguing monotony,” so, Byron claims, “in the poem of The Shipwreck… the storm,” is interesting only because of “the vessel”:⁵ the ship it represents and, by extension, the poem which represents it. Falconer, Byron declares, was that rare being, a poet-sailor whose work illustrates the points Byron wishes to make regarding art more generally: “he was a poet, and in the hands of a poet art will not be found less ornamental than nature.”⁶ By using Falconer’s The Shipwreck to refute Bowles’ derogatory allusions to a sailor’s art, Byron elevates the art of the poet, and does so in a fashion that makes readily apparent the possible alliance of these two ostensibly disparate “crafts.”

Falconer was extremely interested in the use to which literature might be put in enabling sailors to navigate national politics. The Shipwreck, his critically acclaimed hybridization of the georgic with the nautical manual, aimed at representing to land-based Britons the concerns of their nautical brethren. In the 1762 version, The Shipwreck ’s overt mission was a linguistic one: the poem aimed, through extensive footnotes and a labeled diagram of a ship, to educate Britons in the language of the sea. In his 1764 and 1769 revisions, Falconer made his poem’s ambassadorial ambitions more explicit, including, for example, an appeal for more vigorous prosecution of wreckers, and enhancing, as I will argue in this essay, his poem’s critique of imperialism in response to rising tensions in the American colonies. Popular in its day, The Shipwreck went on to leave a significant footprint in British popular culture: much-loved, oft-cited, and reprinted well into the twentieth century, Falconer’s poem also continued to have a political purchase in later decades and was cited, for example, in nineteenth-century petitions to increase the number of lighthouses in Britain.⁷

During the last decade, Falconer’s (1762) Shipwreck has attracted the attention of scholars interested in the class politics of Falconer’s poem and the degree to which it illuminates the linguistic politics of nation formation.⁸ Most recently, Margaret Cohen has positioned Falconer’s poem as a significant anomaly in the evolution of representations of the ocean, a work that attempts to “retain the sea as the theater of craft” even as it anticipates Romanticism’s conversion of the ocean to a sublime site of artistic inspiration.⁹ But while these studies have gone some way towards correcting a scholarly perception of Falconer’s poem as merely the bathetic exertions of a minor writer – G.P. Landow, for example, dismissed Falconer in 1982 as a barely competent poet grappling with a subject “too large for the poet’s intellect”¹⁰ – many of the political resonances of this influential representation of the sea have been left unexplored. In particular, the poem’s engagement with imperialism has been neglected, an examination of which, I believe, would do much to address Landow’s charge that no “interpretation commands [Falconer’s] imagination enough to dominate the poem.”¹¹ When Landow writes, of Falconer’s repeated references to “faithless tides,” that Falconer “does not make clear how or with whom the sea could conceivably have broken faith,”¹² he omits the significant role that the ocean played in Britain’s national mythology. Falconer’s poem, which depicts the ship Britannia being devoured by the ocean it risked in the pursuit of Indian, African, and American profits, uses the idea of the ocean as a providential guarantor of Britain’s safety to question the wisdom of the nation’s overseas entanglements. Falconer’s ocean is both the space on which maritime empire relies and the space that can undo that empire; in its furious rebellion against British pretensions to maritime sovereignty, the ocean subsumes the unacknowledged discontents of the sailors and colonists on whom Britain’s overseas ambitions rely.

As I shall trace in the following pages, Falconer’s poem evolved from 1762 to 1769 from a work primarily concerned with the formation of a united Britain to a poem that reacts against the prospect of an expanding empire. Reading the various iterations of The Shipwreck alongside Falconer’s 1765 poem The Demagogue reveals, I believe, the degree to which the developing American colonial crisis contributed to Falconer’s increasing pessimism about Britain’s ability to extend its sovereign power across oceanic space and his concern over the price British colonial ambitions would exact from common soldiers and sailors. Like his contemporary, Thomas Paine, who had also come of age at sea during the 1750s, Falconer not only was aware of the vulnerabilities of the much-mythologized Royal Navy, but he also believed that Britons were insulated by their “recluse situation, surrounded by the sea,”¹³ from the horrors of colonial warfare. In his later revisions of The Shipwreck, Falconer thus determinedly brings the political interests of his maritime subalterns, as well as their language, to the attention of his land-based countrymen and presciently weaves the specter of American colonial rebellion into his depiction of nautical catastrophe. In reading The Shipwreck as an early transatlantic commentary on the challenges facing Britain’s maintenance of an overseas empire, we can see not only the vexed status that the ocean could hold in popular eighteenth-century poetry but also the degree to which the fusion of literary and maritime “crafts” attempted to import the un-national politics of maritime space into the national literary canon.

The language of the sea

Modern critics have been attracted to The Shipwreck because of its use of sea-language. Indeed, from the poem’s first publication in 1762, it was clear that language played an important role in Falconer’s project. Contemporary reviewers noted as much, with the Monthly Review paying homage to Falconer’s successful “versifying [of] his own sea-language,” asking, “What other poet would ever have dreamt of reef-tackles, halyards, clue-garnets, buntlines, lashings, lanyards, and fifty other terms equally obnoxious to the soft sing-song of modern poetasters?”¹⁴

As the Monthly Review ’s list may indicate, Falconer’s extensive use of naval jargon risked overwhelming its readers. In the first edition of The Shipwreck, Falconer clearly anticipates criticism of his poem on that account, but he indicates that the published form of the poem is a compromise between a sailor’s desire to convey maritime experience in its “native” tongue and a poet’s desire to make the poem accessible for a wide range of readers. In the 1762 poem’s advertisement, he apologizes for the extensive framework surrounding the poem, claiming that “it was not his first intention to swell the Work with so many notes.”¹⁵ However, after reviewing “the modern Dictionaries” and finding them “deficient in the technical terms expressed there,”¹⁶ Falconer decided to define the words himself.

Falconer’s dismissal of “modern dictionaries” is aimed not only at the somewhat suspect maritime dictionaries circulating in 1762 but also at works like Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which had notably eschewed the language of the “laborious and mercantile part of the people” on the grounds that it could not “be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation.”¹⁷ Like the ocean that spawned it, sailor’s language exemplified the foreign influences and mutability Johnson sought to exclude from the English language, and “the dialect of navigation” is therefore, not surprisingly, given as an example in the Preface of one of the dialects excluded from the dictionary. Not only did Johnson deliberately omit nautical jargon from the dictionary, but he also notes that, “in reviewing my collection, I found the word SEA unexemplified.”¹⁸ Johnson corrected his “sea” entry before the dictionary’s publication, but his lack of attention to a word of such importance to English national mythology not only, as Johnson himself notes, has “the appearance of negligence,” but it also fits, thematically, with his desire to exclude from the English nation the corrupting, commercial dialects he associates with “coasts” and “the port.”¹⁹

In introducing his middle- and upper-class audience to the language of the sea, then, Falconer is working against Johnson’s strict definition of an English language and is insisting – both implicitly and explicitly – that his readers regard the sailors he describes as representative of the very essence of British identity. Nor is he particularly subtle in this endeavor: the poem depicts the united crewmen of the ship Britannia struggling bravely against the disaster that threatens to overwhelm them. Nevertheless, in the 1762 version of The Shipwreck, Falconer wears his anxiety over the reception of his linguistic project on his sleeve, begging his readers to accept the difficulties his use of naval jargon may create for them and “censure not severe th’ unvaunted song! / Tho’ jarring sounds the lab’ring verse prolong” (80–81). In the next line he makes the class basis of this appeal clear when he also asks his readers not to take umbrage if “terms uncouth should strike th’ offended ear” (82). In asking his readers to tolerate the “uncouth” terms that load his “lab-ring” verse with the parlance of nautical work, Falconer signals that he is keenly aware, both of the negative reception that may await his use of nautical terms and of his tenuous status as a “laboring-class poet.”²⁰

The resounding success of the 1762 edition of The Shipwreck gave Falconer more confidence when it came to using maritime language in the 1764 version of the poem. In the 1764 Shipwreck, readers are asked to avoid censuring the poet’s “native song” (58) rather than his laboring verse, a change that not only positions Falconer’s nautical language as having emerged organically from his maritime environment but also implicitly claims the British poet’s naval jargon as “native” – that is to say, British. In this edition, Falconer is also less likely to make apologies for his class status: his verses are now “measured” (59) rather than “laboring,” and in his new advertisement, Falconer goes so far as to attack a “Sea-Officer” for being “so ignorant as to mistake the names of the most common things in a ship” in a “fully inadequate”²¹ maritime dictionary.

However, a close reading of the poem also reveals a shift in Falconer’s maritime perspective: if in the 1762 Shipwreck Falconer was primarily concerned with bringing the language of the sea into circulation in national space, in subsequent versions of the poem, he becomes more sympathetic to the anti-mercantile insularity of Johnson’s vision of Britain. Falconer’s Britain will never be divorced from the sea: like the ship that serves as the protagonist of his poem, the imagined community of British sailors Falconer describes has been built in response to the dangerous oceanic space that defines the nation. But, as tensions rose in the American colonies, and Falconer became more concerned with the price paid by sailors for British imperial expansion, his depiction of the Britannia ’s fatal voyage increasingly calls into question the wisdom and ethics of Britain’s pursuit of overseas wealth.

To perish in contagious soils

The political context of Falconer’s changes to The Shipwreck is exemplified in his little-studied 1766 poem The Demagogue, which re-uses some of The Shipwreck ’s nautical metaphors in a pointed satire of Wilkes, Pitt, and Churchill. Reading The Demagogue alongside Falconer’s revisions to his most famous poem provides a crucia...