The book follows the nautical adventures of the title character, a low-born illegitimate child of a captain in the Royal Navy, as he enters service as a midshipman during the Napoleonic Wars and rises through the ranks with the help of his influential father.

At this point, the captain receives news that his older brother has died, making him the new Lord de Versely, and before returning to England he grants Perceval command of his own schooner.

During his service in the Navy, Percival still partakes in the merry pranks of his youth, and at one point teams up with a mulatto hotel owner in Curaçao to convince his fellow officers they've been poisoned.

After being saved by another English vessel, he receives a letter informing him of Lord de Versely's sudden death from heart complications and learns that he has been left all of his personal property.

As an early nineteenth century adventure novel, Percival Keene splits its focus between concerns of family and social connections and nautical action and seafaring.

Percival Keene was published a decade after Peter Simple, however, in the second half of Marryat's writing career which many critics regard as his transition into juvenile adventure fiction.

[1] Percival Keene could also be read as a form of bildungsroman novel; there is a great deal of focus on the titular protagonist's education and process of coming-of-age as he matures from age six to eighteen.

Frederick Marryat first entered naval service at age fourteen as a midshipman aboard the Impérieuse, under the command of Lord Thomas Cochrane who may have influenced his writing of Captain Delmar and other characters.

He developed an influential system of maritime flag signalling known as Marryat's Code, and he was "the first important English novelist after Tobias Smollett to make full and amusing use of his varied experience at sea.

[3] Through the formidable size of their fleet, the Royal Navy was able to effectively disrupt France's trade outside of the continent—both through blocking shipping routes in the Atlantic and by seizing French colonies.

At one point, Percival explains that his desire to inherit Captain Delmar's name, "has been the sole object of my ambition,"[6] suggesting that proper social status relating to British identity is key in the novel.

"By transforming piracy into racial warfare in this novel, Marryat expresses his anxieties about the nature of a national identity that would incorporate ethnic others as legal and political equivalents.

A review in an 1842 edition of Ainsworth's Magazine said "the hero is the same preternaturally tricksy, shrewd, successful being—always in scrapes, always on Fortune's high way, but never run over by the many untoward circumstances which travel the same road.

"[10] Other reviewers from the same year were critical of the main character of the novel, with one regarding Percival as "a shrewd, knowing, getting-on fellow, with the most selfish disregard for everything below the sun, save his own interests and advancement,"[11] and another admitting "with all of Capt.

"[12] Some saw the book in a more favorable light, however, noting that it "has a vein of humour and pleasantry which, with all its occasional coarseness, one cannot resist, it is full of life, it has one or two capital descriptions, and it is read through before it is laid down.

Critic Mark Spilka has suggested that Percival Keene might have served as inspiration for part of Hemingway's story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.