Abstract
On St George’s Day, 23 April 1856, the Baltic Fleet of the Royal Navy assembled at Spithead for a Royal Review. The official purpose was to celebrate the end of the Crimean, or Russian, War. It can be argued, however, that the real intention was to offer a theatrical display of sea power, a message to the rest of the world, including Britain’s ally in the war, France, that Britannia now more triumphantly than ever ruled the waves. A leader in The Times the following day caught the mood:
Not three years have elapsed since the last great naval review at Spithead, yet no one could witness the magnificent spectacle of yesterday without feeling that in naval matters we have gone through a whole century of progress … We have now the means of waging a really offensive war, not only against fleets, but harbours, fortresses and rivers — not merely of blockading, but of invading, and carrying the warfare of the sea to the very heart of the land.1
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Notes
Cited in Andrew Lambert and Stephen Badsey, The War Correspondents: The Crimean War (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994), p. 304.
Andrew Lambert, ‘The Shield of Empire, 1815–1895’, in J. R. Hill (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 185.
On the transition from sail to steam and associated technological changes, see Fred T. Jane, The British Battle-Fleet: Its Inception and Growth Throughout the Centuries (London: Conway, 1997; first published 1912),
Basil Greenhill and Ann Giffard, Steam, Politics and Patronage: The Transformation of the Royal Navy, 1815–1854 (London: Conway, 1994), and
C.I. Hamilton, Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
On changing attitudes towards punishment, see John Winton, ‘Life and Education in a Technically Evolving Navy, 1815–1925’, in Hill, op. cit., pp. 259–65, and, for a more general discussion of life in the Victorian navy, Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864: A Social History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965), and
Henry Baynham, Before the Mast: Naval Ratings of the Nineteenth Century (London: Hutchinson, 1971).
For an original and impressive discussion of the nature of authority, discipline and punishment, see Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), in particular pp. 55–87 and 147–56.
On the 1867 Reform Act, see Anna Clark, ‘Gender, Class and the Nation: Franchise Reform in England, 1832–1928’, in James Vernon (ed.), Rereading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 230–53, and
Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (London and New York: Longman, 1983), pp. 343–59.
On the gentleman in the nineteenth century, see Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).
On the loss of the Birkenhead, see Peter Kemp (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (Oxford, New York and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 84–5, and a first-hand account by Corporal William Smith, in
James W. Bancroft, Deeds of Valour: A Victorian Military and Naval History Trilogy (Eccles: House of Heroes, 1994), pp. 81–90.
On the subject of a national and racial ideal, see H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 106.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers (London: Dent, 1997).
Marion Shaw, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell, Tennyson and the Fatal Return’: Sylvia’s Lovers and Enoch Arden’, Gaskell Society Journal, 9 (1995), p. 51.
Coral Lansbury, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis (London: Paul Elek, 1975), p. 178.
Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993), pp. 517–21.
Anthony Trollope, How the ‘Mastiffs’ Went to Iceland (New York: Arno Press, 1981).
Anthony Trollope, John Caldigate (London: Trollope Society, 1995).
On nineteenth-century yachting see, Robin Knox-Johnston, History of Yachting (Oxford: Phaidon, 1990).
Anna Brassey, cited in Ludovic Kennedy (ed.), A Book of Sea Journeys (London: Collins, 1981), p. 57.
Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London: Minerva, 1992), p. 154.
Wilkie Collins, Armadale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
On the changing image of the pirate in the Victorian period, see the essay on Treasure Island in Jan Rogoziñki, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Pirates (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997), pp. 343–5.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 232.
On Russell’s life and career, see John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longman, 1988), pp. 547–8.
William Clark Russell, John Holdsworth, Chief Mate (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1895).
William Clark Russell, The Wreck of the ‘Grosvenor’, An Account of the Mutiny of the Crew and the Loss of the Ship When Trying to Make the Bermudas (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1895).
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Peck, J. (2001). Mid-Victorian Maritime Fiction. In: Maritime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_8
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