Post Captain - Austen's Naval Officers

From dissolute lieutenants to rich post captains

Much of Post Captain hinges on whether Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are worthy suitors for Sophia Williams and Diana Villiers. Initially, the answer is yes, at least for Jack, who is flush with cash. But when Jack’s fortunes change, Mrs. Williams takes her family to Bath to prevent Sophia from making a bad match. Jack solves his problems by getting promoted and getting prize money; Stephen recovers his standing with Mrs. Williams when she learns he has a castle in Spain and is not just a surgeon but a physician. In other words, in addition to love, what drives the marriage plot of Post Captain are questions of money, rank, and status.

As Dad pointed out two weeks ago, that makes Post Captain the most Austenian of O’Brian’s novels. Since money, rank, and status were the themes of my first book about naval officers,¹ I thought I’d share today some of the ways that I’ve mined Austen’s novels for insights into naval officers’ social status.

Novels can be primary texts like any other: they were written in a certain time and place. But since they’re deliberately constructed works of imagination, historians have to treat them differently than other kinds of texts. In Austen’s case, she’s clearly an expert observer of the navy: two of her brothers were naval officers (a theme for a future post). And of course she is the greatest observer of the social niceties of the British gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century.

O’Brian borrowed key elements of the plot of Post Captain from Austen’s most naval novel, Persuasion. The lead male character, Captain Wentworth, came from a middling background, like most naval officers. He didn’t have a family fortune so he had to make his own way. We learn that before the novel’s actions, Wentworth had earned a promotion from lieutenant to commander just like Aubrey in Master and Commander, but unlike Aubrey, he was left ashore without a ship. While ashore (and now we’re into the plot of the novel) he falls in love with Anne Elliot, whose father is the vain baronet Sir Walter Elliot. The plot hinges on the social acceptability of Wentworth to the Elliots. Anne’s father discourages her from accepting Commander Wentworth’s proposal: “He thought it a very degrading alliance,” while Anne’s friend Lady Russell “received it as a most unfortunate one.” Wentworth behaves as a gentleman through the whole affair, but Sir Walter and Lady Russell (much like Mrs. Williams in Post Captain) cannot see past their prejudice against naval officers. For them, naval officers were uneducated and rough, lacking both funds and connections.

Ciarán Hinds as Captain Wentworth in the BBC’s 1995 Persuasion.

But then: Wentworth gets a ship and is promoted to post captain. Even more importantly, he wins a fortune in prize money. Suddenly, Sir Walter and Lady Russell can get on board with him as Anne’s husband: “Captain Wentworth, with five-and-twenty thousand pounds, and as high in his profession as merit and activity could place him, was no longer nobody.”

The actual relationship between Wentworth and Elliot is more complicated than that, but the heart of the matter is that Wentworth gets a promotion and wins prize money that makes him suitable for Elliot’s family—again, you can see Aubrey’s arc in Post Captain clearly.

Wentworth apparently exemplifies a rigid understanding of social status: unemployed commanders are worthless; rich post captains are worthy. Elsewhere in Austen’s novels, she lays out all the rungs on the ladder, and not just for naval officers. In Sense and Sensibility, Edward Ferrars explains to his future mother-in-law how he became a clergyman:

We never could agree in our choice of a profession. I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the army. That was a great deal too smart for me. The law was allowed to be genteel enough; many young men, who had chambers in the Temple, made a very good appearance in the first circles, and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had no inclination for the law, even this less abstruse study of it, which my family approved. As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was first started to enter it—and, at length, as there was no necessity for my having any profession at all, as I might be as dashing and expensive without a red coat on my back as with one, idleness was pronounced on the whole to be most advantageous and honourable, and a young man of eighteen is not so earnestly bent on being busy as to resist the solicitations of his friends to do nothing. I was therefore entered at Oxford and have been properly idle ever since.²

Austen was acutely sensitive to the finest distinctions among the professions.³ She understood their prospects, their career arcs, and the expectations they placed on their practitioners. She knew this because she lived this. In addition to her two naval brothers, her father was a clergyman, as were three of her brothers (though one went on to a career in banking).

But Austen wouldn’t be one of the greatest novelists in the English language if she had maintained such a simplistic view of how humans assign social status. She knew that any individual might begin inside a rough framework of status and rank, but then move up and down based on character and behavior. In other words, not all of her naval officers are fashionable men of rank who move into ever-more-elite company in lockstep with their rank.

Fanny Price’s father in Mansfield Park is a disabled lieutenant who drinks heavily, swears, threatens his niece, and reads only the Navy List and the newspaper. (The Navy List was literally a list of every officer and ship in the navy. A real page-turner!) In the same novel, Admiral Crawford wastes no time in moving his mistress into his house after his wife dies. I’m sure Austen fans can think of other examples.

The point is, Austen understood that you could plot a person’s position on the social hierarchy in at least three dimensions. As she showed in Sense and Sensibility, there were generally-accepted rules about which professions rank where, and what the pros and cons of each were from both a career and match-making perspective. Yet within each profession, there were rich and poor men and genteel and uncouth men.

Moreover, and here is Austen’s true genius, she satirizes the entire system even while showing how it worked. Let’s go back to Persuasion, where we initially thought that Wentworth proved his worth to Elliot by getting promoted and getting rich. Actually, that’s how he proved his worth to Anne’s friend Lady Russell and father Sir Walter—Anne kept loving him the whole time. And Austen makes it clear that both Lady Russell and Sir Walter are reprehensibly superficial, focused entirely on the wrong things. What Austen tells us to value is the durability of the two lovers’ feelings for each other, not the changes in Wentworth’s fortunes … but because they live in the social world that they live in, they struggle to transcend its rules.

1. Click on that link at your own peril.

2. Me too! The passage is from chapter 19.

3. Usually defined in eighteenth-century Britain as the law, medicine, the church, the army, and the navy.