William Clark Russell
He wrote short stories, press articles, historical essays, biographies and a book of verse, but was known best for his novels, most of which were about life at sea.
Russell campaigned for better conditions for merchant seamen, and his work influenced reforms approved by Parliament to prevent unscrupulous ship-owners from exploiting their crews.
His influence in this respect was acknowledged by the future King George V. Among Russell's contemporary admirers were Herman Melville, Algernon Swinburne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I went to sea as a midshipman, as it is termed, though I never could persuade myself that a lad in the Merchant Service, no matter how heavy might be the premium his friends paid for him, has a right to a title of grade or rating that belongs essentially and peculiarly to the Royal Navy.
We paid ten guineas each as a contribution to some imagination of a stock of eatables for the midshipmen's berth; but my memory carries no more than a few tins of preserved potatoes, a great number of bottles of pickles, and a cask of exceedingly moist sugar.
and they say that Russell can give you from memory the size, armament, and equipment of any ship in the British Navy with details of its personnel, which, as the Yankees would say it 'going some'.Russell had an office job with a commercial company for a few months, after which he decided to attempt a literary career.
Among his works with the Daily Telegraph are the Indian Chief (5 January 1881), and many of his articles were reprinted in volumes to create My Watch Below (1882) and Round the Galley Fire (1883).
From the early 1870s, Russell published novels using various pseudonyms (Sydney Mostyn, Eliza Rhyl Davies, and Philip Sheldon) with modest success.
[1][14] The adoption of the more feminine pseudonyms, according to Andrew Nash, "arose from his perception of the novel as a feminized form and novel-reading as predominantly a female activity.
An obituarist of Russell wrote that since the heyday of such writers as Captain Marryat, Michael Scott and Frederick Chamier some thirty or forty years before, "no one in this country had written of the sea from actual knowledge".
[7] As Richard D. Graham notes in Masters of Victorian Literature, 1837–1897, "Of living authors, William Clark Russell (1844) is the true successor of Marryat, and may even be said to excel the older writer in the power with which he has described the cruel mystery of the sea, its dangers, and the crimes and superstitions of the men who do business upon it".
"[16] His first attempt at a novel of merchant navy life was John Holdsworth, Chief Mate during 1875, which Russell later thought of as "reluctant and timid in dealing with sea topics".
[24] Arthur Conan Doyle made Dr. John Watson an admirer in The Five Orange Pips in which he was "deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea stories" while temporarily back in 221B Baker Street.
… In his best books and in his wonderful short stories he has set down the semblance of sea life and of the changing beauty of the waters as faithfully as such things can be done.
[7]According to Woods, "His descriptions of storms at sea and atmospheric effects were brilliant pieces of word painting, but his characterization was often indifferent, and his plots were apt to become monotonous.
"[1] Among the praise Russell received from his colleagues, he is also far revered by his contemporaries such as Sir Edwin Arnold who said, "he was the prose Homer of the great ocean".
[11] Woods writes that Russell's sea novels "stimulated public interest in the conditions under which sailors lived, and thereby paved the way for the reform of many abuses.
In 1896 the Duke of York (afterwards King George V) expressed his opinion that the great improvement in the conditions of the merchant service was due in no small degree to Clark Russell's writings.
[1]Later, Russell turned his attention to the deplorable provisions that unscrupulous ship-owners provided for merchant seamen on their vessels: "Nothing more atrociously nasty could be found amongst the neglected putrid sweepings of a butcher's back premises".
One such description so horrifically described was the story of Lalla Rookh of Tasmania, a Tasmanian girl who had watched her mother get butchered by the British settlers, her sisters raped and captured, and the men of her family shot dead in front of her.
The Owl, a Birmingham newspaper, wrote the following:The poor wretches were treated like beasts and flogged unmercifully, and their fearful experiences on an outward bound convict ship, so vividly painted by William Clark Russell, were but foretastes of the horrors awaiting them in the penal colonies of Australia.Though this did little to halt the brutish treatment by the British colonizers, Russell's empathy towards those captive people helped to record and reveal the atrocity committed by the British people.
[26] During his last two decades Russell became progressively more disabled by arthritis, generally regarded as a legacy of his years at sea as a youth – "the sailor's enemy", as The Manchester Guardian stated.
