Japhet, in Search of a Father was published by Saunders and Otley in 1836 and is Marryat’s most deliberately picaresque novel — a conscious homage to Fielding’s Tom Jones and Smollett’s Roderick Random that follows its hero through a series of comic adventures on land rather than at sea. Japhet, raised in a London foundling hospital, sets out to discover who his parents are, and the quest takes him through a gallery of English society: high and low, urban and rural, criminal and respectable.
The novel’s structure is episodic — Japhet tries various careers (apothecary’s apprentice, quack doctor, gentleman of leisure, soldier) and encounters various social types (the miser, the confidence man, the benevolent clergyman, the scheming lawyer) — in the manner of eighteenth-century picaresque. Marryat’s comic energy drives the narrative forward at a pace that never flags, and his gift for creating memorable minor characters is displayed in every chapter.
The mystery of Japhet’s parentage provides a thread of plot that connects the episodes, and the resolution — when it comes — is characteristically Marryat: satisfying without being entirely plausible, and delivered with enough narrative momentum that the reader doesn’t pause to examine the coincidences. The novel demonstrates that Marryat’s talent was not limited to sea stories — he could write a purely terrestrial comic novel with equal facility — though it has never achieved the popularity of his naval fiction.
Collecting Japhet, in Search of a Father
First edition (Saunders and Otley, London, 1836): Three volumes, cloth boards.
Market values:
- First edition (3 vols): $200–$600
- Victorian reprints: $20–$50