The Wreck of the Golden Mary E-Book

Charles Dickens.

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 211

Beschreibung

En route to make their fortunes, the passengers of the Golden Mary suffer a terrifying ordeal when their vessel collides with an iceberg. Now the helpless victims of shipwreck, they turn to the restorative powers of storytelling in a desperate attempt to raise morale. As each takes their turn, from the captain (whose tale is masterfully recounted by Dickens himself ) to the first mate (as told by Wilkie Collins), the Dickensian figures of miser and murderer, orphan and ghost, are brought on board with most remarkable effect. Ingeniously conceived and brilliantly rendered, The Wreck of the Golden Mary gathers together the best of Victorian storytelling, set against a backdrop of the California gold rush.

Leseprobe

THE WRECK OF THE GOLDEN MARY

CHARLES DICKENS

WILKIE COLLINS

PERCY FITZGERALD

HARRIET PARR

ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER

REVEREND JAMES WHITE

Foreword bySIMON CALLOW

Edited byMELISSA VALISKA GREGORY

Edited byMELISA KLIMASZEWSKI

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street, W1W 5PF

www.hesperus.press

The Wreck of the Golden Mary first published in Household Words in 1856

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2006

This electronic edition was published by Hesperus Press Limited in 2023

This edition edited by Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski Introduction and notes © Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski, 2006

Foreword © Simon Callow, 2006

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio Printed in Jordan by Jordan National Press

ISBN: 1-84391-133-7

ISBN13: 978-1-84391-133-3

ISBN (e-Book): 978-1-84391-977-3

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

The Wreck

The Beguilement in the Boats

The Armourer’s Story

Poor Dick’s Story

The Supercargo’s Story

The Old Sailor’s Story

The Scotch Boy’s Story

The Deliverance

Notes

Glossary of Nautical Terms

Biographical Note

FOREWORD

The annual Christmas story published in the 6th December 1856 edition of Household Words, the weekly magazine that Dickens edited for nine years from 1851 to 1859, was written at a moment of gathering emotional crisis for him. The strains of his marriage, long repressed and fought against, were becoming unsustainable. In the summer of 1856 he made the anguished admission to himself that, like his own David Copperfield, he found himself lamenting ‘one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I never made.’ As always, he plunged into ever more work. He had been writing Little Dorrit in instalments since December of 1855; by now he was two-thirds of the way through the difficult, dark novel in which, as Paul Davis acutely remarks, Dickens seems to suggest that ‘the human situation... is an imprisoning muddle’, and he was collaborating with his young friend Wilkie Collins (now deputy editor of Household Words) on a play called The Frozen Deep. This arctic melodrama was exactly the sort of farrago that stirred Dickens deeply in the theatre: a tale of a polar explorer who finds himself on the same expedition as the man who has stolen his lover from him; instead of killing the man, as he intends, he gives his life for him and ends in the arms of the woman he loved. Dickens was closely involved in the writing of the play, suggesting plot elements, character details, dialogue. He prepared for the role with his usual intensity: he designed the play, he directed, he even built the set. It was first performed, privately, in January 1857, to great acclaim, particularly for Dickens’ performance in the central role of Richard Wardour. (He was not to know it, but the play became the instrument of his destiny when, in a revival of the production in August of 1857, he cast in the female roles three professional actresses, Frances Eleanor Jarman and her two daughters, Maria and Ellen Ternan. In the eighteen-year-old Ellen, Dickens finally found his one happiness, the friend and companion for whom he had yearned.)

The Wreck of the Golden Mary reflects both Dickens’ own emotional condition and the mood of The Frozen Deep. On a point of authorship, it is not entirely from Dickens’ own hand. Articles in the magazine were frequently amended by Dickens; the editorial staff formed a kind of collective. This particular story is divided between two narrators, the Captain of The Golden Mary, Ravender, and its Chief Mate, the ringingly named John Steadiman. In a letter enclosing the story, Dickens writes to his close friend Angela Burdett Coutts: ‘I am the Captain of the Golden Mary; Mr Collins is the Mate.’ There is a distinct difference of tone between the two narratorial voices, though the two narrators share an essential sobriety of tone: ‘a person might suppose,’ says Ravender, ‘that I am used to holding forth about number one. That is not the case’, while Steadiman, who takes up the story once Ravender has succumbed to almost fatal fatigue, tells us that he has made up his mind to tell us ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ The tale that both tell is relatively straightforward: The Golden Mary, after a propitious start to the voyage to California, runs into ice floes, and is eventually capsized; after many weeks adrift, the ship’s two lifeboats are sighted and rescued by another ship.

There is a thoroughly Dickensian cast of passengers and crew – a young mother and her angelic child (quickly nicknamed the Golden Lucy), a girl whose fiancé has gone to the bad in the gold mines, an elderly would-be prospector with a name like the cry of a vulture (Rarx), selfish and haughty, who is consumed with avarice; there is also, though he merits only a line in the story, Ravender’s charmingly named black servant, Tom Snow. Throughout there are remarkable passages in the writing, including a quite unforgettable Coleridgean vision of the half-dead mariners on the lifeboats orchestrating their feeble cries with every surge of the waves in the vain hope of being heard through the starless night by a passing ship. The most striking aspect of the story is Dickens’ evocation of the clear-sighted heroism of his two narrators, both of whom – like Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep – perform prodigies of stoical leadership in impossible conditions. Dickens, riven by guilt about his growing revulsion for his wife, longed for the self-respect that is Ravender’s and Steadiman’s birthright. Against the odds, he makes his two flawless sailors credible and moving: his realism extends to the willingness of Ravender to shoot the petulant and hysterical Rarx if he refuses to control himself, and the Captain’s brisk conversation with his passengers on the inadmissibility of cannibalism.

The subject matter inhabits that territory in Dickens’ writing which stands in such contrast to his teeming metropolitan landscapes: the elemental, and especially the element of water. The boy born in Portsmouth and brought up in Chatham had brine in his blood, and the sea voyage is described with every semblance of authenticity: the blackness of the sky – ‘like looking, without a ray of light, into a black bandage put as close to the eyes as it could be without touching them’ – the moods of the sea – ‘all was snug, and nothing complained. There was a pretty sea running, but not a very high sea neither, nor at all a confused one’ – graphically evoked. The wreck itself is shockingly and memorably realised, breaking into Ravender’s dream, with all of Dickens’ characteristic personal violence.

In the end, for all its fascinating reverberations with Dickens and his life, it is simply a yarn (a rather odd one to be serving up at Christmas, it must be said). It culminates with a typically Dickensian redemption, but the tale is mostly a manifestation of Dickens’ insatiable impulse to tell stories. In Chaucerian mode, into which Dickens himself lapses in a number of the pieces he wrote for Household Words and its successor All the Year Round, as well as in The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, his travellers – in this instance following the example of Captain Bligh and the survivors of The Bounty – tell stories to buoy their spirits, and so, out of sheer exuberance, Dickens and his team knock off five stories within the story, one of them in ballad form, one a distinctly scary Flying Dutchman story and two of them tales of sexual frustration gone wrong. The first and most striking of these tells the story of the village blacksmith, Ding Dong Will, and his rapid unhinging under the influence of love. The story is bursting with sexual symbolism and altogether has a quality rarely associated with Dickens: a real smell of sex. If nothing else, then, The Wreck of the Golden Mary is value for money, written by one who told stories, as Saint-Saëns said of his own composing, as an apple bears trees.

– Simon Callow, 2006

INTRODUCTION

When Charles Dickens began The Wreck of the Golden Mary in September of 1856, the Christmas story was not the only wreck in his life. On the stage, Dickens was just beginning rehearsals for The Frozen Deep, a melodrama written with Wilkie Collins about a group of shipwreck survivors marooned in the Arctic. At home, Dickens’ twenty-one year marriage to Catherine Hogarth was also on the verge of ruin. Only one year later, he would fall in love with the young actress Ellen Ternan, departing from his safe domestic harbour in favour of rougher waters. Much like the passengers of the Golden Mary, who find themselves unexpectedly foundering in lifeboats in the open sea, Dickens begins his own journey into uncharted territory in 1856. Perhaps it is no surprise that The Wreck of the Golden Mary remains one of his darkest and most troubling Christmas tales.

Like the last two stories that Dickens penned for the special Christmas issue of his weekly periodical Household Words, The Wreck of the Golden Mary is a collaborative effort, containing short fiction and poetry by Dickens’ friends and colleagues woven into his larger narrative. But The Wreck, a grim account of a ship travelling to the California gold rush, lacks the cheerful conviviality of Dickens’ earlier collaborative tales. Instead of sailing to easy street, the Golden Mary crashes into an iceberg, leaving its passengers struggling for survival in treacherous waters. Encouraged by their captain, who believes in the restorative powers of ‘music and adventure’, they fight against exposure, hunger, and depression by telling each other stories. These form the middle part of the Christmas issue and are collectively entitled ‘The Beguilement in the Boats’. But if Dickens’ choice of the word ‘beguile’ highlights storytelling’s pleasures, then it also conveys its fascinating dangers. For the tales told by the Golden Mary’s passengers do not distract them from their plight so much as amplify their isolation and loss. When read as a whole, the stories reverberate with a lonely yearning, a hunger for meaningful human relationships suggestively embodied in the solitary Captain Ravender’s ravenous name.

Weird, bleak, and unsettling, The Wreck of the Golden Mary assembles some of Dickens’ standard Christmas themes: the lure of material wealth, the redemptive innocence of childhood, and the power of the past to haunt and reshape the present. But each tale fails to revive the optimism of Dickens’ most famous Christmas story, A Christmas Carol (1843). Like Tiny Tim, a beautiful young girl nicknamed ‘Golden Lucy’ captures the attention of the ship’s token miser, Mr Rarx. Yet while Scrooge becomes a ‘second father’ to Tiny Tim, Mr Rarx terrifies Lucy. His fixation on the child as a symbol of potential salvation contains none of Scrooge’s newfound awareness and sense of social responsibility.

Indeed, the tone of The Wreck of the Golden Mary persistently lists towards melancholy no matter what the topic. Rather than uplifting the passengers’ spirits, the tales of ‘The Beguilement in the Boats’ intensify the tension in the lifeboats at the very moments when starvation and desperation threaten them most. Percy Fitzgerald’s ‘The Armourer’s Story’ 1 begins with Ding Dong Will, a blacksmith who leaves his reliable male companions for the seductive Miss Mary. The tale ends brutally, with no apparent lesson for the desperate listeners apart from the message that people will kill on account of thwarted desires. Similarly disquieting is Harriet Parr’s ‘Poor Dick’s Story’, another narrative of sexual frustration and heartbreak.

The Wreck of the Golden Mary is not without its literal ghosts as well. Fitzgerald’s ‘The Supercargo’s Story’ tells of the pirate Jan Fagel, whose ship and crew haunt the seas after he kidnaps and drowns the wife and daughter of his nemesis. And in the final and most engrossing tale by Reverend James White, ‘The Scotch Boy’s Story’, a dying boy’s narrative opens the boundaries between life and death. Willy chronicles his journey from haunted to haunter until he gently slips away in Steadiman’s arms. The boy’s corpse, quickly concealed by a distraught Steadiman without explanation, is a dismal reminder that all the passengers may be drifting toward the liminal space from which Willy narrates. Indeed, Captain Ravender himself lies unconscious in one of the boats ‘like a dead man’ for most of the story. Guided into this peripheral state by the ghost of his fiancée, the captain crosses the very boundaries that he hopes the act of storytelling will patrol.

Ghosts play an important role in many of Dickens’ Christmas tales, including, of course, A Christmas Carol. The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future urge Scrooge to re-enter the world of the living by helping him to forge emotional bonds with family members and employees. He even learns to contribute to the welfare of his larger community. By contrast, in The Wreck of the Golden Mary, the ghosts appear to beckon the people who see them towards death instead of life. Captain Ravender proposes the storytelling scheme in order to preserve civilised conduct for the passengers, hoping the act of telling tales will impose order on the frightening limbo they must face. The ghosts, however, undermine this fragile security by revealing just how easy it is to slip into the next world. As the borders between life and death erode, the possibility of chaos in the lifeboats looms ever larger. Scrooge’s spirits are also unquestionably moralistic, guiding him through his transformation to a better self, while the ghosts of The Wreck refuse to instruct. Indeed, in some of the stories, they signify the residual traces of the very human passions that A Christmas Carol wipes away: greed, anger, desire. The act of storytelling redirects these feelings but cannot purge them altogether, as we see at the end of the tale when some of the passengers remain in California for the gold rush, despite having witnessed the unpleasant demise of Mr Rarx. Ultimately, the ghostly visitors of The Wreck of the Golden Mary evoke the spectre of death but do not necessarily point toward redemption.

Sadly, even the possibility of rescue fails to bring solace. ‘The Supercargo’s Story’ emphasises the fearsomeness of a pirate preying on small boats in terrible storms, reminding readers that the appearance of a ship may forecast a fate worse than rescue. Meanwhile, in Adelaide Anne Procter’s poem, ‘The Old Sailor’s Story’, a seaman returns home after a wreck to find his wife remarried to his best friend. This melancholy verse suggests that even if the passengers are rescued, perhaps their loved ones will be better off without them. Anything but beguiling, these stories persistently conclude in despair.

One antidote to these sad tales of wrecked and lonely individuals is the manly friendship between Captain Ravender (written by Dickens) and his trusty first mate, John Steadiman (written by Wilkie Collins). Inspired in part by the heroic devotion of Sir John Richardson to Sir John Franklin, who had disappeared on a voyage to the Arctic in 1854, Dickens uses The Wreck of the Golden Mary to explore the benefits of bachelor bonding, perhaps of increased appeal as he became more dissatisfied with his own domestic life. Just as Dickens hands off his story to Collins, Captain Ravender falls ill and relinquishes command of the lifeboats to John Steadiman, who loves him ‘like a brother’ and sees him safely home.

Yet home remains elusive for many of the Golden Mary’s passengers, even after they are rescued. Some die before the lifeboats are discovered. Others, gripped by gold rush fever, determine to stay in California despite their terrifying ordeal. The Wreck of the Golden Mary lacks not only A Christmas Carol’s human warmth, but also its tidy conclusion. Subsequent printings of the story unsettled its ending further by omitting both the middle and final sections of the tale. After its initial publication in 1856, editions of The Wreck of the Golden Mary reprinted only Dickens’ portions and part of Wilkie Collins’ contribution to the story, which include the shipwreck but not the rescue. For decades, the passengers of the Golden Mary were left indefinitely adrift, floating helplessly in their open boats with no deliverance in sight. This Hesperus edition presents the unusual Christmas tale in its entirety, bringing Dickens’ stranded travellers home in print, if not in spirit.

– Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski, 2006

The Wreck of the Golden Mary

Being the Captain’s Account of the Loss of the Ship, and the Mate’s Account of the Great Deliverance of Her People in an Open Boat at Sea

The extra Christmas number of household words conducted by Charles Dickens containing the amount of one number and a half

Christmas, 1856

THE WRECK

BY CHARLES DICKENS

I was apprenticed to the Sea when I was twelve years old, and I have encountered a great deal of rough weather, both literal and metaphorical. It has always been my opinion since I first possessed such a thing as an opinion, that the man who knows only one subject is next tiresome to the man who knows no subject. Therefore, in the course of my life I have taught myself whatever I could, and although I am not an educated man, I am able, I am thankful to say, to have an intelligent interest in most things.

A person might suppose, from reading the above, that I am in the habit of holding forth about number one. That is not the case. Just as if I was to come into a room among strangers, and must either be introduced or introduce myself, so I have taken the liberty of passing these few remarks, simply and plainly that it maybe known who and what I am. I will add no more of the sort than that my name is William George Ravender, that I was born at Penrith half a year after my own father was drowned, and that I am on the second day of this present blessed Christmas week of one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six, fifty-six years of age.

When the rumour first went flying up and down that there was gold in California – which, as most people know, was before it was discovered in the British colony of Australia – I was in the West Indies, trading among the Islands. Being in command and likewise part-owner of a smart schooner, I had my work cut out for me, and I was doing it. Consequently, gold in California was no business of mine.

But, by the time when I came home to England again, the thing was as clear as your hand held up before you at noon-day. There was Californian gold in the museums and in the goldsmiths’ shops, and the very first time I went upon ’Change1, I met a friend of mine (a seafaring man like myself), with a Californian nugget hanging to his watch chain. I handled it. It was as like a peeled walnut with bits unevenly broken off here and there, and then electrotyped all over, as ever I saw anything in my life.

I am a single man (she was too good for this world and for me, and she died six weeks before our marriage day), so when I am ashore, I live in my house at Poplar. My house at Poplar is taken care of and kept shipshape, by an old lady who was my mother’s maid before I was born. She is as handsome and as upright as any old lady in the world. She is as fond of me as if she had ever had an only son, and I was he. Well do I know wherever I sail that she never lays down her head at night without having said, ‘Merciful Lord! Bless and preserve William George Ravender, and send him safe home, through Christ our Saviour!’ I have thought of it in many a dangerous moment, when it has done me no harm, I am sure.

In my house at Poplar, along with this old lady, I lived quiet for best part of a year: having had a long spell of it among the Islands, and having (which was very uncommon in me) taken the fever rather badly. At last, being strong and hearty, and having read every book I could lay hold of, right out, I was walking down Leadenhall Street in the city of London, thinking of turning to again, when I met what I call Smithick and Watersby of Liverpool. I chanced to lift up my eyes from looking in at a ship’s chronometer in a window, and I saw him bearing down upon me, head on.

It is, personally, neither Smithick, nor Watersby, that I here mention, nor was I ever acquainted with any man of either of those names, nor do I think that there has been any one of either of those names in that Liverpool House for years back. But, it is in reality the House itself that I refer to; and a wiser merchant or a truer gentleman never stepped.

‘My dear Captain Ravender,’ says he. ‘Of all the men on earth, I wanted to see you most. I was on my way to you.’

‘Well!’ says I. ‘That looks as if you were to see me, don’t it?’ With that, I put my arm in his, and we walked on towards the Royal Exchange, and, when we got there, walked up and down at the back of it where the Clock Tower is. We walked an hour and more, for he had much to say to me. He had a scheme for chartering a new ship of their own to take out cargo to the diggers and emigrants in California, and to buy and bring back gold. Into the particulars of that scheme I will not enter, and I have no right to enter. All I say of it, is, that it was a very original one, a very fine one, a very sound one, and a very lucrative one, beyond doubt.

He imparted it to me as freely as if I had been a part of himself. After doing so, he made me the handsomest sharing offer that ever was made to me, boy or man – or I believe to any other captain in the Merchant Navy – and he took this round turn to finish with:

‘Ravender, you are well aware that the lawlessness of that coast and country at present, is as special as the circumstances in which it is placed. Crews of vessels outward bound, desert as soon as they make the land; crews of vessels homeward bound, ship at enormous wages, with the express intention of murdering the captain and seizing the gold freight; no man can trust another, and the devil seems let loose. Now,’ says he, ‘you know my opinion of you, and you know I am only expressing it, and with no singularity, when I tell you that you are almost the only man on whose integrity, discretion, and energy –’ &c., &c. For, I don’t want to repeat what he said, though I was and am sensible of it.

Notwithstanding my being, as I have mentioned, quite ready for a voyage, still I had some doubts of this voyage. Of course I knew, without being told, that there were peculiar difficulties and dangers in it, a long way over and above those which attend all voyages. It must not be supposed that I was afraid to face them; but, in my opinion a man has no manly motive or sustainment in his own breast for facing dangers, unless he has well considered what they are, and is able quietly to say to himself, ‘None of these perils can now take me by surprise; I shall know what to do for the best in any of them; all the rest lies in the higher and greater hands to which I humbly commit myself.’ On this principle I have so attentively considered (regarding it as my duty) all the hazards I have ever been able to think of, in the ordinary way of storm, shipwreck, and fire at sea, that I hope I should be prepared to do, in any of those cases, whatever could be done, to save the lives entrusted to my charge.

As I was thoughtful, my good friend proposed that he should leave me to walk there as long as I liked, and that I should dine with him by and by at his club in Pall Mall. I accepted the invitation, and I walked up and down there, quarterdeck fashion, a matter of a couple of hours; now and then looking up at the weather cock as I might have looked up aloft; and now and then taking a look into Cornhill, as I might have taken a look over the side.

All dinnertime, and all after dinnertime, we talked it over again. I gave him my views of his plan, and he very much approved of the same. I told him I had nearly decided, but not quite.

‘Well, well,’ says he, ‘come down to Liverpool tomorrow with me, and see the Golden Mary.’ I liked the name (her name was Mary, and she was golden, if golden stands for good), so I began to feel that it was almost done when I said I would go to Liverpool. On the next morning but one we were on board the Golden Mary. I might have known, from his asking me to come down and see her, what she was. I declare her to have been the completest and most exquisite beauty that ever I set my eyes upon.