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Persuasion features a host of naval characters, back ashore during “‘[t] his peace’” (19), after what will turn out to be a temporary victory over Napoleon. Admiral and Mrs. Croft make an early appearance—first as Mr. Shepherd’s disembodied hope of “‘a rich Admiral’” (19) who would mitigate Sir Walter’s insolvency, an ideal countered by Sir Walter’s dismissive anecdote featuring “‘Lord St. Ives, and a certain Admiral Baldwin’” (22). When the Crofts move into Kellynch, Captain Wentworth—already a character whose narrative has been recounted—appears at Uppercross, where the late midshipman Dick Musgrove is also, temporarily, recalled to life. The trip to Lyme widens the cast of naval characters, to include Captain and Mrs. Harville and Captain Benwick. The novel’s shift to Bath descries, even from Elizabeth Elliot’s elevated vantage, “‘several odd-looking men walking about here, who, I am told, are sailors’” (180). Anne sees the Crofts “wherever she went, . . . occasionally forming into a little knot of the navy, Mrs. Croft looking as intelligent and keen as any of the officers around her” (183). And as Anne walks up Milsom-street with the admiral, he points out Captain Brigden, Admiral Brand and his brother (“‘Shabby fellows, both of them!’” [184]), and Sir Archibald Drew and his grandson, who, because of the peace, has been turned off before he has had a chance at promotion (184). These representatives of the navy range from the ideal to the all too real.
Persuasion’s naval characters have been read—going back to the Hubbacks’ Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (1906)—at least partly through the filter of the characters and careers of Francis and Charles Austen as well as through the images of celebrities such as Captain James Cook and Admiral Nelson (Harris 106–08, 91–99). But another useful context is that of fictional sailors before Austen. The figure of the sailor appeared on stage throughout the eighteenth century, but my focus here is on novels: on sailors in the pages of fiction by Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, and Frances Burney and in lesser-known novels and novellas published in the new century—e.g., Catharine Selden’s The Sailors (1800), TheSailor Boy (1800), Anna Maria Porter’s A Sailor’s Friendship (1805), Eliza Parson’s The Convict, or Navy Lieutenant (1807), and Maria Edgeworth’s “Maneouvring” from Tales of Fashionable...