Jacob Faithful was published by Saunders and Otley in 1834 (the same year as Peter Simple) and marks Marryat’s first departure from naval settings. The novel is set on the Thames — London’s great working river — and follows Jacob, the orphaned son of a Thames lighterman, from childhood through young manhood as he makes his way through a picaresque series of adventures that take him from the river to London society and back again.
The Thames setting gives Marryat an opportunity to display a different kind of expertise from his naval novels: knowledge of river traffic, of the trades and classes that depended on the Thames, of the watermen and lightermen and bargemen who constituted a distinct urban working class. His descriptions of life on the river — the labor, the weather, the constant danger of the tideway — have the same documentary authority that his descriptions of naval life possess.
The novel’s plot is picaresque — a string of episodes rather than a sustained narrative — and its model is clearly Smollett rather than Scott: the comedy is broad, the characters are types (the miser, the bully, the generous sailor, the scheming widow), and the hero’s progress is from innocence to experience rather than from poverty to wealth. Marryat’s comic energy is inexhaustible, and the novel contains set-pieces — the spontaneous combustion of Jacob’s drunken mother, the robbery at the inn, the boxing match — that demonstrate his talent for physical comedy and dramatic narrative.
Collecting Jacob Faithful
First edition (Saunders and Otley, London, 1834): Three volumes, cloth boards.
Market values:
- First edition (3 vols): $300–$800
- Victorian reprints: $20–$50