Sparkle of life

Frederick Marryat, one of the most brilliant, and the least fairly recognized, of English novelists, was born in Westminster, on the 10th July, 1792, some seven months before the outbreak of the Great War. He was the second son of Joseph Marryat, M.P. for Sandwich, chairman of the committee of Lloyds, and Colonial Agent for the island of Grenada. His mother was a Bostonian, of a loyalist family. Her maiden name was Geyer—or according to Mrs. Ross Church’s life of her father, Von Geyer—and the family is said to have been of Hessian origin. The Marryats themselves were a Suffolk stock.

In Marshall’s “Naval Biography,” which appeared during Marryat’s own life, the novelist is said to have descended from one of the numerous Huguenot refugees who settled in the Eastern Counties during the persecutions of the sixteenth century. The family version of its history, as given by Mrs. Ross Church, contains a longer and more splendid pedigree, going back even to knights who came over with “Richard Conqueror.” These things, though set forth with faith[12] no doubt, are to be received with polite reserve by the judicious reader. For the rest, whatever the remote origin of the Marryats may have been, they were during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very distinctly middle-class people—dissenting ministers, doctors, or business men—manifestly of good parts and industry. Some of them wrote sermons and printed them. Thomas Marryat, the novelist’s grandfather, was a doctor and the author of a medical book. His father was, as the places he held show, a prosperous man; and the future novelist entered the world under fairly favourable circumstances. There was, it is clear, no want of money, and the family were active people with a marked tendency to use their pens.

As no detailed life of Marryat was written until long after his death, when no witnesses were left who could speak with knowledge, there is an almost absolute want of evidence as to the character and probable influence of his family life. If we are to argue from his stories, it was hardly to be called happy. These guides may not be entirely safe, and yet they afford evidence of a kind not to be lightly dismissed. A writer whose pictures of home and school life are habitually disagreeable, cannot have had many pleasant memories of his own to look back on. With Marryat this was the case. In all his earlier stories, and until he became decidedly didactic, and religious, in his later years, he described the relations of parents and children, of schoolboy and schoolmaster, as either indifferent or hostile, or as contemptuous even when affection is not absent. Peter Simple, Mr. Midshipman Easy, and Newton Foster are the sons of men[13] whom they may like, but cannot respect, of whom two are maniacs, and one is a harmless imbecile. Their mothers are either utterly shadowy or repulsive. “Frank Mildmay,” the first and the most autobiographical of his stories, is also the most destitute of kindliness. Something may be allowed for rawness in the author, and something for direct imitation of the earlier Smollettian model. Marryat, too, publicly protested that he was not the “Naval Officer” of this first story. But, by his own confession, he put many of the incidents of his own life into it, and we may safely conclude that what is wholly wanting in the story was not prominent in his own experience. Now what is wanting is any trace that Frank Mildmay had the smallest filial regard for his father, or was conscious of any maternal influence, or thought of his home life with affection, or of his school as other than a place of torment. That is not how men write when they look back kindly on their first years. If Thackeray and Dickens drew such different pictures of boy and school life, we know why. It is not necessary to rack the scanty evidence about Marryat’s early years, to find reason for believing that his father was probably a hard and dry man of business, whose prosperity never melted the provincial dissenter quite out of him. Of his mother there is nothing to be supposed at all.