William Clark Russell
William Clark Russell (24 February 1844 – 8 November 1911) was an English writer best known for his nautical novels.
At the age of 13 Russell joined the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy, serving for eight years. The hardships of life at sea damaged his health permanently, but provided him with material for a career as a writer. He wrote short stories, press articles, historical essays, biographies and a book of verse, but was known best for his novels, most of which were about life at sea. He maintained a simultaneous career as a journalist, principally as a columnist on nautical subjects for The Daily Telegraph.
Russell campaigned for better conditions for merchant seamen, and his work influenced reforms approved by Parliament to prevent unscrupulous ship-owners from exploiting their crews. His influence in this respect was acknowledged by the future King George V. Among Russell's contemporary admirers were Herman Melville, Algernon Swinburne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Life[edit]
Early years[edit]
William Clark Russell was born in New York in the Carlton House Hotel, Broadway,[1] one of four sons of the English composer Henry Russell and his first wife, Isabella Lloyd (1811?–1887).[2]
It was from Isabella, "who was a relative of the poet William Wordsworth" and writer herself,[1] that Russell inherited his love for literature and talent as a wordsmith. Additionally, he was the half-brother of the impresario Henry Russell and the conductor Sir Landon Ronald.[3]
A letter in the collection of Robert Lee Wolff provides a scalding condemnation of Russell's father, stemming from his father's abandonment of his family.
Career[edit]
Journalism[edit]
Russell had an office job with a commercial company for a few months, after which he decided to attempt a literary career. His first attempt was a five-act tragedy, Fra Angelico, which was staged unsuccessfully in London during 1866.[1] At the same time, he began work as a journalist in order to provide a stable income for himself and his family. In 1868, he began his journalism career and was the editor for The Leader for a brief period of time until 1871 when he joined the Kent County News.[1] and during the next two decades wrote for a variety of newspapers including The Newcastle Daily Chronicle, The Kent County News, and most importantly for him, The Daily Telegraph, for which he wrote articles for about seven years using the pseudonym "Seafarer".[1][12]
At his time with the Daily Telegraph he planted the seeds of what would be his legacy, his masterful prose of the sea. Among his works with the Daily Telegraph are the Indian Chief (5 January 1881), and many of his articles were reprinted in volumes to create My Watch Below (1882) and Round the Galley Fire (1883).[13]
Writer[edit]
There is much confusion around Russell's career, possibly a result of his writings being published anonymously or under various pseudonyms, so much so that even his immediate family were unaware of the full extent of his writings. From the early 1870s, Russell published novels using various pseudonyms (Sydney Mostyn, Eliza Rhyl Davies, and Philip Sheldon) with modest success.[1][14] The adoption of the more feminine pseudonyms, according to Andrew Nash, "arose from his perception of the novel as a feminized form and novel-reading as predominantly a female activity."[14] Adopting many feminine pseudonyms in his early works was a result of the Victorian era belief that certain genres were destined only for certain genders.[14] His early attempts at novels set on land only proved to be a failure, obscured by the nautical novels that had established him as a master of the niche during his time. In conjunction, his poetic and artistic prose and description of the sea facilitated his literary success.
The stories of an old seaman at Ramsgate gave him the idea of writing about life at sea, drawing on his own experience. An obituarist of Russell wrote that since the heyday of such writers as Captain Marryat, Michael Scott and Frederick Chamier some thirty or forty years before, "no one in this country had written of the sea from actual knowledge".[7] As Richard D. Graham notes in Masters of Victorian Literature, 1837–1897, "Of living authors, William Clark Russell (1844) is the true successor of Marryat, and may even be said to excel the older writer in the power with which he has described the cruel mystery of the sea, its dangers, and the crimes and superstitions of the men who do business upon it".[15]
