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Naval Impressment in Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Daniel J. Ennis
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 232 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 2000

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References

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12 Ibid.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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