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 fiction invariably included bold adventurous sea captains who battled bloodthirsty pirates led by a...