Perhaps the current literary taste for romance and adventure is due to the feeling that in a strenuous world, full of intense activity,—which is an activity in altruism and moral progress no less than in material affairs,—we are entitled in our reading to some books that are purely amusing and nothing more. Certainly Captain Marryat's tales belong to this school, and of all Captain Marryat's tales none can be considered as more infallibly amusing and more entirely free from any quality of instruction than "Jacob Faithful."
It is the book that made Thackeray happy for a whole day on a Mississippi steamboat, when he was suffering from an attack of ague; and to be so completely and wholesomely amused is a good thing for everybody once in a while. Captain Marryat wrote " Jacob Faithful" in 1834.
"Jacob Faithful" being published in 1834, and, in the judgment of his first generation of readers, he equalled any of his fellows as a novelist pure and simple, that is to say, a writer of entertaining stories of human life, and not only surpassed, but stood apart from all, as a novelist of sailor life, the only one since Smollett, with whom he was compared, and not to his disadvantage, great as was still the reputation of Smollett. Like Smollett, he knew what he was writing about, and he knew more of it, and in more ways, than Smollett, for he had followed the sea for years, as boy and man, from midshipman to commander, in peace and war, and was a sailor from stem to stern. He has had no successor except Clark Russell, who wrote sea novels, and it would be well to compare with those of Marryat, whose technical knowledge he may have inherited, though he certainly has not inherited his boundless invention and his never-failing sense of humor.
Illustrated with 40 drawings by H. M. Brock and an Introduction by David Hannay.
