Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
In his discussion of Joseph Conrad's fiction in The Political Unconscious Fredric Jameson writes:
the sea is the empty space between the concrete places of work and life; but it is also, just as surely, itself a place of work and the very element by which an imperial capitalism draws its scattered beachheads and outposts together, through which it slowly realizes its sometimes violent, sometimes silent and corrosive, penetration of the outlying precapitalist zones of the globe.
This linkage of the sea with capitalism allows Jameson to deal with Conrad's novels (especially Lord Jim and Nostromo) as, to use Jameson's own phrase, socially symbolic acts—the sea is “the privileged place of the strategy of containment” and it provides Conrad a laboratory where “human relations can be presented in all their ideal formal purity.” Jameson has identified nautical fiction's important place in any story of the novel—the confining (yet paradoxically freeing) nature of the sea (and the ship) screens out the extraneous material of the world, forcing confrontation, laying bare power relations and allowing the writer to focus on the human condition. The sea allows for only the essentials: clearly defined hierarchies, and life and death on easy terms. Jameson links Conrad with high modernism and thus with capitalism, but his positioning of the sea in relation to power and history can be, I believe, “read back” and then applied (in a necessarily nascent form) to the literary sea of the eighteenth century.
1 Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981), p. 213Google Scholar.
2 Ibid, p. 210.
3 Ibid, p. 217.
4 McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore, 1987), p. 238Google Scholar.
5 Jameson, Fredric, “Metacommentary,” PMLA 86, 1 (1971): 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Robinson, Charles N., The British Tar in Fact and Fiction (New York, 1911), p. 70Google Scholar.
7 Hunter, J. Paul, “The Novel and Social/Cultural History,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. Richetti, John (Cambridge, 1996), p. 11Google Scholar.
8 Backscheider, Paula R., Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore and London, 1989), p. 197Google Scholar.
9 Robinson, , The British Tar, p. 260Google Scholar. Defoe proposes, in a 1705 letter to a Select Committee of the House of Lords, a wage-control system that would make naval service more attractive to seamen in order to encourage volunteerism (The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. Healey, George H. [Oxford, 1955], p. 74)Google Scholar.
10 Defoe, Daniel, Some Considerations on the Reasonableness and Necessity of Encreasing and Encouraging the Seamen (London, 1728), p. 13Google Scholar. This work is appears on a list of “Works By or Attributed to Defoe,” in Backscheider's Daniel Defoe: His Life.
11 Defoe, , Some Considerations, p. 13Google Scholar.
12 Ibid.
13 Oglethorpe, James, The Sailor's Advocate. First Printed in 1727–28. To Which is Now Prefixed Some Strictures… (London, 1728), p. 8Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Advocate.) Oglethorpe's interest in the lot of the poor led him to found the colony of Georgia as a haven for paupers in 1732.
14 The single best account of Oglethorpe's long association with English anti-impressment agitators can be found in Woods, John A.' essay “The City of London and Impressment 1776–1777” in The Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Historical Society VII (12 1956): 111–27Google Scholar. The irony of impressed sailors fighting to preserve English freedoms is dramatized in dozens of eighteenth-century ballads: see, for example, Palmer, RoyThe Oxford Book of Sea Songs (New York, 1986)Google Scholar and Dugaw, DianeWarrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar. The lively eighteenth-century sub-genre of nautical autobiography often features sailors musing on their burden. Excellent examples of this phenomenon appear in Records of Conscience: Three Auto-biographical Narratives by Conscientious Objectors 1665–1865, ed. Brock, Peter (New York, 1993)Google Scholar, Kelly, SamuelAn Eighteenth-Century Seaman (New York, 1925)Google Scholar and Nagle, Jacob, The Nagle Journal, ed. Dann, John C. (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.
15 At the Court at Whitehal [sic], the Third Day of May, 1672… (London, 1672)Google Scholar.
16 Robinson, , The British Tar, p. 69Google Scholar.
17 Butler, Charles, An Essay on the Legality of Impressing Seamen (London, 1777), p. 2Google Scholar.
18 Butler, , An Essay, pp. 6–7Google Scholar.
19 Jameson, , The Political Unconscious, p. 19Google Scholar.
20 Advocate, p. i.
21 Ibid.
22 Boucé, Paul-Gabriel, “Introduction” to Tobias Smollett'sThe Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Boucé, Paul-Gabriel (Oxford, 1979), p. xliiiGoogle Scholar.
23 Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Holquist, Michael and Emerson, Caryl (Austin, 1981), p. 125Google Scholar.
24 Boucé, Paul-Gabriel, “Introduction,” p. xlvGoogle Scholar.
25 Jameson, , The Political Unconscious, p. 213Google Scholar.
26 Bakhtin, , The Dialogic Imagination, p. 126Google Scholar.
27 Advocate, p. 10.
28 Smollett, , Roderick Random, p. 139Google Scholar.
29 Ibid, p. 139.
30 Dann, John C., Introduction to The Nagle Journal, p. 169Google Scholar.
31 Advocate, p. 11.
32 Scott, Tom, “The Note of Protest in Smollett's Novels,” in Smollett: Author of the First Distinction, ed. Bold, Alan (London, 1982), p. 111Google Scholar.
33 Adams, Percy, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington, 1983), p. 199Google Scholar.
34 McKeon, , The Origins of the English Novel, p. 22Google Scholar.
35 Skinner, John, Constructions of Smollett: A Study of Gender and Genre (Newark, 1996), p. 9Google Scholar.
36 Beasley, Jerry C., Novels of the 1740s (Athens, 1982), p. 151Google Scholar.
37 Kahrl, George M., Tobias Smollett: Traveller-Novelist (Chicago, 1945), p. 17Google Scholar.
38 Barrow, Tony, “The Noble Ann Affair, 1779: A Case Study of Impressment During the American Revolutionary War,” in Pressgangs and Privateers, ed. Barrow, Tony (Berwick, 1993), p. 13Google Scholar.
39 Williams, Glyndwr, introduction to A Voyage Round the World by George Anson (London, 1974), p. ixGoogle Scholar.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. 23.
42 In a note from the Department of Grim Irony, those few who survived Anson's voyage were given lifetime protections against further impressment as a reward (Hutchinson, , The Press Gang Afloat and Ashore, p. 104Google Scholar).
43 Robinson, , The British Tar, p. 70Google Scholar.
44 Richmond, Herbert, “The Naval Officer in Fiction,” in Essays and Studies (London, 1945), p. 16Google Scholar.
45 An illuminating (and perhaps representative) opinion on the fate of the impressed is seen in Johnson's comment to Boswell upon hearing a false report that his servant had been taken up by a press gang: “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned….” Boswell, James, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Chapman, R. W. (New York, 1980), p. 246Google Scholar.
46 Smollett's description of the life-sapping conditions of the tender, “loss of blood, vexation and want of food, contributed, with the noisome stench of the place, to throw me into a swoon” (p. 140), is corroborated by another 1748 text, John Cleland's notorious Fanny Hill. Fanny at one point describes a client in this way: “Meanwhile, by the glimpse I stole of him, I could easily discover a person far from promising any such doughty performances as the storming of maidenheads generally requires, and whose flimsy consumptive texture gave him more the air of an invalid that was pressed than of a volunteer on such hot service.” (Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. by Wagner, Peter [New York, 1986], p. 170)Google Scholar. Cleland was revising Fanny Hillin prison when Roderick Random first appeared, but his reference to “invalids” suggests he is thinking of the account of Anson's circumnavigation, which also appeared in early 1748.
47 Smollett, , Roderick Random, p. 1Google Scholar.
48 Robinson, , The British Tar, p. 268Google Scholar. He identifies both Roderick and Morgan as part of the educated gentleman class of surgeon.
49 Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992), p. 123Google Scholar.
50 Ward, Edward Ned, The Wooden World Dissected: In the Character of a ship of War… (4th ed.; London, 1749), p. 45Google Scholar. Ward's satirical look at the Royal Navy first appeared in 1707.
51 Smollett, , Roderick Random, p. 416Google Scholar. Boucé calls this section of the novel “a grand finale of financial felicity” (“Introduction,” p. xix).
52 Smollett, , Roderick Random, p. 420Google Scholar.
53 McKeon argues that “all narratives that come under the influence of picaresque and criminal biography are likely to exploit the analogy between physical and social mobility” (Origins of the English Novel, p. 248). In Roderick's case, this is more than an analogy—his physical mobility (freedom from the press) is predicated on his social mobility.
54 Beasley claims that Smollett's account of the horrors of eighteenth-century sailing life is still considered “one of the most graphic and authentic we possess.” (Beasley, Jerry C., “Smollett's Art: The Novel as ‘Picture,’” in The First English Novelists: Essays in Understanding, ed. Armistead, J. M. [Knoxville, 1985], p. 145)Google Scholar.
55 Richmond, , “The Naval Officer in Fact and Fiction,” p. 16Google Scholar.
56 Jarrett, Derek, England in the Age of Hogarth (Frogmore, 1976), p. 42Google Scholar.
57 Tuchman, Barbara, The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution (New York, 1988), p. 129Google Scholar.
58 Linebaugh, , The London Hanged, p. 130Google Scholar.
59 Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), p. 65Google Scholar. Colley is correct that the Admiralty did not actively seek out landmen_when it was recruiting, but her adverb “rarely” is perhaps too strong. Daniel A. Baugh notes that in one particular mobilization in the summer of 1739, a nine-ship fleet, manned through a combination of volunteers and the press, contained 21% landmen. (“The Eighteenth Century Navy as a national Institution, 1690–1815,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, ed. Hill, J. R. [New York, 1995], p. 138)Google Scholar. Colley makes only one other brief reference to impressment, noting that it was “the element or arbitrary compulsion” that caused protest riots late in the eighteenth century (p. 303). Colley is right that the “black legends” are exaggerated in first half of the century, but the growth of the Royal Navy was so dramatic by the 1790s that Colley's use of mid-eighteenth-century statistics on naval manning to suggest a general condition for the years covered by her study is somewhat misleading.
60 Rodger, N. A. M., The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York, 1986) p. 14Google Scholar.
61 As William Warner points out, “once the Novel is given a modern, relatively scientific epistemological mission—to be realistic in its representation of social and psychological life—one must ask, what constitutes realism? What form of writing should serve as the paradigm for novelistic mimesis?” (“Licensing Pleasure: Literary History and the Novel in Early Modern Britain,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. Richetti, John [New York, 1994], p. 21)Google Scholar. Since I can't even attempt to answer this question, and since Ian Watt so complicated the term realism when he applied it in The Rise of the Novel, I am satisfied to conclude that Smollett achieves a functional realism in his depiction of impressment—that is, it sounds plausible enough that without a counter-depiction the reader has no reason (and, perhaps more importantly, no means) to question its veracity.
62 According to Bouce, “some 6,500 copies of Roderick Randomcame off Strahan's presses from January 1748 to November 1749.” By 1770 the novel had gone through eight editions (“Introduction,” p. xiv).
63 Fielding, Henry, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. by Bender, John and Stern, Simon (Oxford, 1996), p. 761Google Scholar.
64 McKeon, , Origins of the English Novel, p. 410Google Scholar.
65 Bakhtin, , The Dialogic Imagination, p. 15Google Scholar.
