#john forster

As for who was influencing whom, that question is easy to answer. Marryat was first on the scene, writing in a Dickensian vein with picaresque heroes and colorful characters sketched from life before Dickens was a household name. Marryat published his nonfiction travelogue Diary in America years before Dickens’ equivalent American Notes (which was clearly inspired by Marryat.) According to the English professor Louis Parascandola, Marryat “was the first nineteenth century writer to publish his novels serially in his own magazine, the Metropolitan, an important precedent for later authors like Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray.”

The first meeting between Marryat and Dickens was arranged by their mutual friend, the artist Clarkson Stanfield. Stanfield wrote to Dickens at the beginning of 1841, “I have before told you that my friend Captain Marryat is very anxious to have ‘what all covet’, the pleasure of your acquaintance and, if therefore you have no objection to meet him, will you come and take a beef steak with me on Wednesday 27.” Dickens replied, “I shall be delighted to join you and know Marryat.”

Dickens and Marryat seem to have immediately hit it off, enjoying each other’s wit and theatrical personalities. As Marryat’s biographer Tom Pocock describes it:

The two men took to each other at once. They shared a recognition of the absurd and could present it entertainingly, sometimes mixed with pathos and even tragedy. But while Marryat re-created the world that he himself had experienced in his books, Dickens’s imagination erupted with cavalcades of characters and panoramas of widely varied scenery. Dickens did not see Marryat as a rival but recognised his skill in presenting the world of the sea and seamen, which he himself could only try to imagine. Thanking Marryat for sending him his latest novel, Dickens wrote, ‘I have been chuckling, and grinning, and clenching my fists and becoming warlike for three whole days past.’

It seems clear that Dickens and Marryat would be close friends, and Marryat himself might be a less obscure writer in the present day, except that his association with Dickens was so brief. By 1843 Marryat had sequestered himself at his country estate in Langham, Norfolk, far from the literati of London with the transportation methods of the day. Marryat’s biographies and Florence Marryat’s Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat are full of entreaties from his friends begging Marryat to return to London to socialize with them and attend various events. He rarely agreed to travel, and by 1848 he was dead.

John Forster, Dickens’ friend and biographer, writes in The Life of Charles Dickens: “There is no one who approached [Dickens] on these occasions [dancing at parties with the Dickens children] excepting only our attached friend Captain Marryat, who had a frantic delight in dancing, especially with children, of whom and whose enjoyments he was as fond as it became so thoroughly good hearted a man to be. His name would have stood first among those I have been recalling, as he was among the first in Dickens’s liking; but in the autumn of 1848 he had unexpectedly passed away.”

For all the brevity of Dickens’ relationship with Marryat, they were close enough for Dickens to share some juicy gossip. In a letter to Forster, Dickens shines a rare light on Marryat’s rocky marriage. There is an anecdote about Marryat, “as if possessed by the devil,” teaching “every kind of forbidden topic and every species of forbidden word” to the overly sheltered sons of a baronet, and the “martyrdom” he suffered with his wife. Catherine (Kate) Marryat, as described by Dickens, is a violent, temperamental woman who beats her maid and has “no interest whatever in her children.” 

Although Victorian propriety omitted names, as Marryat’s biographer Oliver Warner notes, “The reference might be considered vague enough— except to those who knew Marryat. To them, it must have been so clear that in later editions Forster left out all references by which Kate might identify herself.” Dickens’ 20th century biographer Walter Dexter also names the troubled couple as the Marryats.

Charles Dickens is the only person whose documented, surviving correspondence mentions the fact that Marryat spoke with a lisp. Marryat’s daughter Florence mentions no such thing, and Marryat never gave a speech impediment to his leading characters, but Dickens quips about an old fresco, “I can make out a Virgin with a mildewed Glory round her head and … what Marryat would call the arthe of a cherub.” (A few online articles about Marryat make a lot of hay over this sole mention of a lisp, and they can all thank Charles Dickens for spilling the tea.) Poor Marryat, who reminisced in a laudanum haze about all of his old friends in his final months, including “Charlie Dickens”, did he anticipate this reveal? He really should have known that Dickens had a wit that could be as mocking and caustic as his own.

Principal References (not including Marryat’s own books):

Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat, Florence Marryat (1872)

Life of Charles Dickens, John Forster (1872-1874)

Captain Marryat: A Rediscovery, Oliver Warner (1953)

Puzzled Which to Choose: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat, Louis J. Parascandola (1997)