Britain as Savior in The Wreck of the Golden Mary” by Richard Hall

Britain as Savior in The Wreck of the Golden Mary

Richard Hall, Brigham Young University

Good stories come from good storytellers. Charles Dickens attempted to assert himself above all other sto-

rytellers in his 1856 Christmas edition for Household Words. As Anthea Trodd notes, this story would be “an

example of well-led and disciplined writing” amongst his collaborators to create what he thought would be his

best collaborative story yet (203). Dickens constructed this Christmas special to impress readers with his ability

to gather various writings under his command. To maintain a vision of “clear hierarchy,” Dickens launches his

collaborative story into the sea, with his main character being the “captain,” and longtime friend and co-writer

Wilkie Collins “the first mate,” and binding together contributing writers (202, 207). This built-in frame was the

foundation for the shared tales that create The Wreck of the Golden Mary.

Dickens strategically depicts himself as a Tar, or British seaman, in this Christmas story to achieve

immediate British approval. Trodd recognizes that Dickens most likely chose a “nautical fiction” to frame his

hierarchical story because Victorian Britain had such a “strong national dependence on the seaman” (203).

Envisioning himself as a Tar emphasized the fact that Dickens was writing a ship filled with interesting sto-

ries. The Wreck’s plot follows an idealistic captain (Dickens), leading emigrants (other writers) in the beautiful

Golden Mary , only to crash into an iceberg. While the captain and first mate coddle the survivors, the survivors

exchange stories until they are finally rescued. This unfortunate ending to the Golden Mary reflects what Jude

Piesse sees as “a deep sense of uneasiness in many mid-Victorian minds about the consequences of mass migra-

tion in Great Britain” (38). Indeed, as harsh an ending as a shipwreck in the South Atlantic sounds, a crashing

emigrant ship would reflect Dickens’s inherent nationalism, appealing to skeptics of emigration.

While the shipwreck survivors are sharing stories to pass time and maintain optimism, each survi-

vor also expresses their Christian beliefs. Each storyteller embodies a different variation of Christianity. The

magnanimous, charitable Captain William Ravender and his first mate John Steadiman, whom Collins claims

achieve “courage under Providence”, largely contrast the Scottish apprentice who familiarizes himself with

Christian teaching, but also prides himself on what James White says are “of the supernatural kind” (27, 58).

express an instilled Christian thought process; the strength of their Christian faith reflects their national con-

nection. I will use the frame of the collaborative story and two works to articulate how the further a character’s

identity departs from Britain, the more obscure and refracted their Christianity becomes. This shows that Victo-

rian Britain inextricably connects national loyalty with Christian faith.

Nationalist and Christian Relevance in The Wreck

That Dickens would simultaneously celebrate the British Tar while disapproving of emigrants may

sound contradictory, but it is understandable after examining his view on transnationalism in the mid-1850’s.

Sean Grass observes in a Household Words piece written only months previous to The Wreck that Dickens

displays his “anxiety regarding racial otherness” (9). Grass realizes that Dickens sees Britain as a safe place—

leaving Britain tarnishes virtues that he perceives as tethered to the nation. While Grass admits that Dickens

“never really disliked the Continent [Europe],” he views other countries as complacent compared to Britain’s

impressive conquest of the world, its goal to “consume the other” European nations (3, 11). In The Wreck, D

ickens shares with all British Victorians a deep sense of national superiority. For Dickens, there is no way you

can maintain virtue and exit his nation.

In The Wreck, three writers, Dickens, Collins, and Fitzgerald, have narrations given by Tars. These

characters are the most respected by the crew, and are also the most aware of other nations. Trodd thoroughly

emphasizes that “the Tar’s openness, his evident honesty and fidelity, made him an appropriate hero for melo-

drama” (211). It is apparent in their stories that the writers encapsulated the British portrayal of the Tar, showing

their national superiority and wariness of foreign threats. For example, Dickens’s captain, William Ravender,

takes great lengths to antagonize the emigrant Mr. Rarx, complaining about the passenger’s “fits” (21). The fric-

tion between Ravender and Rarx derives from Rarx’s “ungovernable nature” (19). Here Dickens intentionally

uses “ungovernable” to emphasize Rarx’s loss of patriotism and retrograde towards incivility, contrasting with

Ravender’s innate sense of communal bonds. The brave, amiable protagonists in The Wreck a re distinctly aware

of the country that made them who they are, just as their Victorian setting expects.

The stark difference between the frame story’s plot and the embedded stories can come off as discon-

nected when read linearly. Melisa Klimasezewski opposes Trodd’s argument that Dickens successfully used his

63 ous or future attempts. Klimasezewski declares that “readers do not realize how many narrative layers the text

has just traversed. Other times, the shift is jarring as readers may pause or reread a paragraph to try to determine

exactly who is speaking” (825). To her, the story’s compilation continually describes a world where “discipline

and order will always break down,” rebuking Dickens’s narrative superstructure (833). However, what Klima-

sezewski fails to recognize is that these conflicting narratives appropriately align themselves with British na-

tionalism. The stories Klimasezewski identifies as clashing are actually revealing the clash between nationalists

and emigrants.

Other critics note how neither the co-authors nor Dickens are using The Wreck as a disgruntled dialog

between each other, but rather as what the work was originally created for: a Christmas story. Piesse suggests

that The Wreck’s Christmastime setting is the perfect conduit to “elucidate the relationship between emigration

and nation” during the Victorian era, “specifically through Christmas ‘frame-stories’” (38). While noting that

this collaborative story does have reflections to Dickens and his relationships with the contributing authors,

Piesse makes the helpful connection between The Wreck and its Victorian readers as not simply another Dick-

ens-led collaborative story, but more specifically a Christmas story. All of the dates in the collaborative story

lie “within the dense time zone of Christmas” (52). The Wreck was never intended to be read as interactions

between Dickens and his co-authors; its first and foremost purpose was to be a Victorian Christmas story. The

Wreck r elies upon Christianity as a cohesive device to bond differing views on emigration within the passen-

gers. Victorian readers could see these survivors having “a community of face-to-face relations supplementing

and stabilizing links to an overarching English nation,” through a Christian lens (52).

It is more plausible that a collaborative story fronted by Dickens would collectively make Christianity

a textual focal point. Mary Lenard makes it clear that Dickens had a clear influence on Christian beliefs and

practices, even claiming that “many commonly practiced English and American Christmas customs derive from

the Victorian, Dickens-influenced, understanding of Christmas” (338-339). The Wreck has many references to

Christianity, and Dickens’s vast popularity provides a sound board that consequently refracts the story’s project-

ed ideas. Lenard suggests that in the 1850s Dickens was the most capable writer to advocate Christian morals,

stating that “no other writer . . . was able to move his readers to moral action” as he did (339). While the plot

does not feature a conversion or apostasy, the crew’s continual submission to Christianity and the Scottish boy’s

64 While admitting both likes and dislikes for Christianity, Todd Dransfield describes Dickens as a Chris-

tian who uses the religion to establish “a code of conduct and action guiding one’s relationships with others”

and “ennoble relationships and work” (499). For Dickens, Christianity embodied the communal spirit he wanted

Great Britain to embrace, utilizing his celebrity to spread his beliefs. Dransfield thoroughly analyzes an article

Dickens wrote for Household Words o n members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who at that

time were immigrating to the United States. Dickens observes the “irony in England’s best” fleeing the country

to practice a religion promoting English ethics (494). On the surface, Dickens’s tersely opposes these emigrants,

but he actually values their religious zealotry. Dransfield notices that “larger cultural values” were “conflated

with religious discourse,” implying that basing social conduct on religious morals aligned the Victorian-aged

Brit into ideal community conduct (492). Christianity was appealing not just to Dickens, but to all Victorian

journalism because it successfully gave a moral code to promote civil obedience, personal progression, and uni-

versal inclusion. Dickens and his contemporaries praised religious radicalism, as often the Christian sects would

promote a “more humane, domestic, and liberal culture” (Dransfield 501). In the search for a better nation, radi-

cal Christianity theology strengthened the morals a new Victorian ideal pursued.

Regardless of the four authors being analyzed in this essay—Dickens, Collins, Fitzgerald, and White—they

unanimously implicate Christianity as the modal capacity for the shipwreck survivors. Now that the connection

between Christianity and nationalism has been clearly identified, we can take a deeper look at three passengers

of the Golden Mary and their implied relationship with Great Britain by analyzing their Christian references.

Even with Dickens and Collins co-writing the fame story to characterize the Golden Lucy, their collaborated

person correlates with Fitzgerald and White’s individuals in their embedded stories by linking nationalism and

Christianity.

Three Passengers of the Golden Mary

The ship’s supercargo, the storyteller concocted by Percy Fitzgerald, offers the most Christian ties to an

embedded story in The Wreck. T he supercargo relays a seaman’s yarn about the dreaded pirate Jan Fagel and

his shocking demise. While kidnapping his enemy’s wife and children on Christmas day, Fagel meets his de-

mise by miraculously falling off his own ship, lost forever in a tempest. The Christian undertone seeps so deeply

into the story that it becomes an overtone. The supercargo’s antagonist is so dreadfully powerful that the story-

the supercargo’s story, Christmas night has polarized the righteous and the wicked. The beautiful, pious woman

asks God to “find judgments for this man” while Fagel cannot comprehend her religious piety, branding her as a

“witch” and “sorceress” (49).

Demonizing this foreign private procures a clear link between nationalism and Christianity with “The

Supercargo.” Several times Fitzgerald describes Fagel as a satanic servant, with the supercargo claiming that

“he had sold himself to the Evil One, which I think for myself more than likely, for he cared neither for God

nor man” (47). Fitzgerald clearly contrasts the foreign pirate to the British Tar, one who Trodd states was an

“instantly recognizable sign of virtue in a mystified world” (211). Fagel’s “devilish” and “wicked” descriptions

emphasize his antithetical relationship to the British Tar (48). Additionally, Fitzgerald depicts the story in a

Dutch setting. This is notable due to the poor naval history shared by the Dutch and English. These two global

maritime powers warred against one another for a combined 15 years between 1652 and 1784. It is easy to cari-

caturize a sailor associated with a country deeply antagonized in English history. Although Fagel is condemned

through what he perceives as a “sorceress’ canting,” it wasn’t until a British cruiser approached and “fired into

the English vessel” that he fell off the boat, never to be seen again (49). The woman and child’s Christian deliv-

erance relied upon the British intervention. Once crime was inflicted upon Her Majesty’s Ship the evil captain

received holy retribution.

Comparing Fitzgerald’s supercargo to contributor Reverend James White’s story ironically describes

the most bizarre, ambiguous Christianity. His main character, a Scottish apprentice known as Willy Lindsey,

recalls the events that led to his sister’s unexpected death. On the night of her birthday, she left the house,

promising she would “no matter [well] or ill, dead or alive—in the body or in the spirit—she would aye come

back that night” (60). She never returned. The only potential evidence of her whereabouts was “prints o’ feet

that answered to [her] size” next to the local lake. With no other explanation, Willy and her family assumed she

drowned. However, on his sister’s ensuing birthday, he relays this strange occurrence:

“We saw the faint image o’ a bonny pale face—very sad to look on--[with] lang tresses o’ yellow hair hanging

straight down the cheeks, as if it was dripping wet, and heard low, plaintive sobs; but nothing that we could

understand. My [mother] ran forward, as if to embrace the visitor, and cried “Jean! Jean! O, let me speak to you,

my bairn!” But the flame suddenly died away. . . and we saw nothing there.” (61)

How does this strange visitation coincide with the Christian ideology Willy professes? It looks like it is

never meant to be explained. Willy’s amoral ghost story eludes to a motivation that is separate from religion—

an aimless haunting that primarily commemorates his sister’s passing, but additionally reveals Willy’s inepti-

tude to express Christian faith. When contextualizing the story with the few Christian references he offers, the

story is unresolved. Reflecting upon his old home, Willy remembers “the cheery fire, and the heather bed in the

corner, and the round table in the middle, and the picture of Abraham and Isaac on the wall, and my fishing-rod

hung aboon the mantelpiece” (62). The warm, matter-of-fact attitude Willy uses when mentioning Abraham and

Isaac suggests that Christian traditions belong in his home, but simultaneously, the reference ruptures from the

list of familiar family items. The brief referral perplexes the reader, implying that while Willy assumes that he is

a home-bred Christian, he is not qualified to be identified as one.

More evidence for Willy’s ambiguous Christianity arises when he cites two other Bible stories his

mother told him as a child: David’s defeat over Goliath and King Saul’s visit with the witch of Endor (59). Most

parents would teach their children the bravery of David over the giant Goliath, but few would teach them about

the mischievous evil Saul enacts when reaching out to the Witch of Endor. These references do not reveal that

his mother had poor choice in Bible stories, but rather it foreshadows the upcoming supernatural occurrence

of his sister’s death and haunting. Both stories feature mythical beings, a giant and a magician, who transcend

realistic explanation. Steadiman notices that Willy brings with him “a few books, chiefly of the wild and super-

natural kind” (58). Willie is foreshadowed to be a mystical and ominous storyteller, one whose belief system is

ambiguous and unbelievable for the survivors. Though the biblical reference may at first sound like an appeal

to Christian thought, they actually demonstrate Willy’s non-Christian foundation. Willy’s purported Christianity

misleads not only the passengers but the reader as well, failing to offer a substantial explanation of the story.

Looking at the piece’s national subtext, we see it resembles Willy’s faulted, ambiguous Christianity.

Willy is first depicted by Captain Ravender, simply describing him as “a Scotch boy, poor little fellow” (Dick-

ens 10). The condescending comments coming from the British Tar, the most powerful character in the story,

express the boy’s second-class nature and allowed him into their social circles, mainly to employ entertainment

for the passengers. It’s true that he was a poor little fellow, being an apprentice and “nice, delicate, almost

feminine-looking boy, of sixteen or seventeen,” and that he was well loved by the crew, especially the sympa-

58). However, Klimasezewski believes the voyagers’ affection for the Scot is misleading—untrustworthy. Willy

unfortunately dies the night he capitulates his ghost story, and Steadiman hides his corpse from the passengers

until he can dispose of his body while asleep. Klimasezeswki recognizes this act as “hardly purging cannibalism

from the narrative” (97). Klimasezewski is quick to undo the seemingly cordial ties this very distinctly Scottish

emigrant had in relation to the majority English crew. The first mate fears the passengers cannibalizing after the

Scots’ death, but not after the passing of another beloved youth, a three-year-old named Golden Lucy . Even

though Scotland is associated with Great Britain, the Scottish character in The Wreck i s viewed with novelty

while alive, and utility while dead. Scotland’s affiliation with Great Britain is represented as poor, sickly, ill, and

altogether Great Britain’s fair-weather inducer: an entertaining sideshow at best, and a vestigial appendage at

worst.

Far from vestigial is the other youth on the Golden Mary, lovingly known as Golden Lucy. Rather than

being an esoteric character, Golden Lucy lays at the core of both Ravender’s and Steadiman’s narratives. Piesse

recognizes that Golden Lucy’s collaborative recounting is the prime example of “synchronous temporality”

where passengers bond over repeated chronicling of the darling child (52). The simultaneous recapitulation of

Lucy’s characterization reflects a forming union between passengers “allied to an overarching model of English

national identity” (52). For the passengers, Lucy is much more than a sweet, innocent child. She is the fulcrum

for company morale and community, even attracting the love of Mr. Rarx, a gold-hungry man Ravender recog-

nizes as seemingly unable “to care much for any human creature” (Dickens 10). Lucy personifies British ideolo-

gies Dickens and other Victorian writers appreciated. She is the penultimate sign of nationalism.

As well as nationalism, Golden Lucy exudes Christianity’s most appealing attributes, making her the re-

ligious focal point as well as the primarily British epicenter. At age 3, Lucy is the youngest passenger on board

and more importantly, the most innocent. Immediately after the shipwreck, the survivors place their morale

upon the child, defining their success not by saving themselves, but wholly upon saving the child, “to save her

at any cost, or we should all be ruined” (18). Golden Lucy’s mother, the affable Ms. Atherfield, sing “soft, melo-

dious” tunes to lull her beloved child to sleep, simultaneously increasing the survivors’ morale (18). The pasto-

ral, transcendent character eventually dies on the lifeboat, and Captain Ravender eulogizes her by referring to a

biblical daughter. He states that Christ “raised the daughter of Jairus the ruler, and she was not dead but slept,”

of Golden Lucy. Once Steadiman attains the narrative, he envisions Lucy angelically floating ahead of him, di-

recting and encouraging him until his rescue. It appears that, like the daughter of Jairus, Golden Lucy rises from

sleep as a testament to Christian hope. She is an ennobling icon, a light for the survivors to rely on after their

voyage dissipates.

After the survivors are delivered, there is a strange interaction between Steadiman and Golden Lucy’s mother

in the final section of the story. Years later Steadiman finds himself in New York, when he runs into the fellow

survivor. His reunion leaves him with an uncanny discovery:

“I had hardly sat down at table, before who should I see opposite but Ms. Atherfield, as bright-eyed and pretty

as ever, with a gentleman on her right hand, and on her left—another Golden Lucy! Her hair was a shade or two

darker than the hair of my poor little pet of past sad times; but in all other respects the living child reminded me

so strongly of the dead, that I quite started at the first sight of her.” (Collins 77)

The scenario juts out of an overall smooth ending. As if she never died, a Golden Lucy materializes

before Steadiman. Contrary to the ghostly manifestations described by characters throughout the story, this

manifestation is physical. Steadiman’s captain, Willaim Ravender, repeatedly applauds his first mate as reliable

and capable. If the reader deems Steadiman as credible, this implies that Ms. Atherfield really has borne her

previous child’s doppelganger. However, it is difficult to accept Steadiman’s vision as realistic; he gives no new

name for the seen child, nor does he bother to discover one. Steadiman cares more about the re-existence of

Golden Lucy than the current existence of what he is seeing. The reader at this point is forced to declare wheth-

er Steadiman hallucinated or the child was inconceivably identical to the first Golden Lucy. I suggest that the

second Golden Lucy, like the first Golden Lucy, symbolizes the Christian hope found in nationalism, but with

an expatriate twist: the nearly identical second Golden Lucy represents America’s mimicry of its parent nation,

Great Britain.

This confusing anecdote at The Wreck’s e nding reveals the Victorian notion that the United States is

a child nation to Great Britain. Robert Lougy analyzes the United States’ relationship with Great Britain as

“homesickness,” a longing to connect with their original form (110). He observes that Dickens’ view of Ameri-

ca depicts a nineteenth century nation “rejecting the notion of loss or division” and failing to fully embrace the

which physically forms itself into a double of their first pride and hope. Steadiman’s reborn Golden Lucy is

America’s imperfect mimicry of British nationalism, and more fittingly, British Providence.

Though Golden Lucy is Dickens’s creation, she encapsulates the correlation Victorian culture had be-

tween British greatness and Christian morals. With this idea, we can follow a common thread tying the frame-

work stories with its embedded counterparts. Trodd claims that storytelling is “the ultimate mark of civiliza-

tion,” accrediting the captain’s strength and dexterity to coordinate such civilized storytelling at such a perilous,

unscripted moment (205). However, Piesse adds more to the conversation, saying that this organized, civilized

effort reflects the “national identity” of communal nationalism (40). While referencing the Christian remarks

mentioned throughout the piece, I have been able to identify the corollary between Christianity and nationalism

in The Wreck of the Golden Mary. The further the character is separated from “the concreteness of England rath-

er than the relative abstraction of Britain”, the stranger and less coherently Christian they become. The children

and lesser powers of the British empire seek and fail to resemble the nation, but it appears that their “mercy of

Providence” is not valiant enough to replicate it (Collins 69).

Works Cited

Collins, Wilkie and Charles Dickens. The Wreck. The Wreck of the Golden Mary: Being the

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

at Sea. Household Words, Christmas 1856, pp. 1-77. fadedpage.org . 22 Jun 2018, www.fadedpage.com/show-

book.php?pid=20180640 .

.. The Deliverance. The Wreck of the Golden Mary: Being the Account of the Loss of the Ship, and Mate’s Ac-

count of the Great Deliverance of Her People in an Open Boat at Sea. Household Words, Christmas 1856, pp.

1-77. fadedpage.org . 22 Jun 2018, www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180640.

Dransfield, Scott. “Charles Dickens and the Victorian ‘Mormon Moment’”. Religion and the Arts, v

ol. 17, 2013, pp. 489-506. EBSCO, web.b.ebscohost.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfview-

er?vid=0&sid=7316fe25-8 cfc-409b-8903-f93979bb44f5%40pdc-v-sessmgr02\.

Fitzgerald, Percy. The Supercargo. The Wreck of the Golden Mary: Being the Account of the Loss of the Ship,

and Mate’s Account of the Great Deliverance of Her People in an Open Boat at Sea. Household Words, Christ-

mas 1856, pp. 1-77. fadedpage.org. 22 Jun 2018, www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180640 .

Klimasezewski, Melisa. “Rebuilding Charles Dickens’s Wreck and Rethinking the Collaborative.” Stud-

ies in English Literature, vol. 54, 2014, pp. 815-833. Proquest, search-proquest-com.erl.lib.byu.edu/

docview/1635182796?accountid=4488.

Laugy, Robert E. “Nationalism and Violence: America in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit.” Dickens and

the Children of Empire, edited by Wendy S. Jacobsen, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 105-116.

Lenard, Mary. “The Gospel of Amy: BiblicalTeaching and Learning in Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit.” Journal

of Christianity and Literature, vol. 93, no. 2, Spring 2014, pp. 337-355. EBSCO , www.web.a.ebscohost.com.

erl.lib.byu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=11&sid=d523 700f-bd76-4d72-9e5b-5156ca3c2fd5%40sdc-v-

sessmgr06.

6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 37-60. Project MUSE, muse-jhu-edu.erl.lib.byu.edu/article/504933.

Trodd, Anthea. “Collaborating in Open Boats: Dickens, Collins, Franklin, and Bligh.” Journal of Victorian

Studies, v ol. 42, no. 2, Winter 2000, pp. 201-225. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3829245.

White, Rev. James. The Scotch Boy. The Wreck of the Golden Mary: Being the Account of the Loss of the Ship,

and Mate’s Account of the Great Deliverance of Her People in an Open Boat at Sea. Household Words, Christ-

mas 1856, pp. 1-77. fadedpage.org. 22 Jun 2018, www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180640.

“Untitled,” Qinlei Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison