#charles random

Despite their moments of regret, then, Marryat's prodigal sons are glad to be rid of home and school. They nevertheless discover rigorous substitutes for home and school on shipboard. School on shore is usually an unpleasant affair in his fiction, but Marryat often points out that the public schools were tame compared to shipboard education of the brutal sort. Older midshipmen bully the younger ones without stint; as Jack Easy puts it, "the weak go to the wall."

— Patrick Brantlinger on Frederick Marryat's naval fiction, in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914