Jack at Sea – All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy
By George Manville Fenn
“I’d like you to bully me and chuck things at me too, sooner than see you sit moping all day as you do, sir. That’s what made me say you put me in mind of my magpie. He sits on his perch all day long with his feathers set up, his tail all broken and dirty, and he has no spirit. He takes the raw meat I cut for him but doesn’t eat half of it. He only goes and pokes the bits into holes and corners and looks as miserable and mouldy as can be.
It’s because he’s permanently shut up in a cage, doing the same things every day, hopping from perch to perch that often—and back over and over again till he hasn’t got a bit of spirit. I’m just the same—it’s boots and knives and plate and coal-scuttles and answer the bells, till I get tired of a night and lie abed asking myself whether a muscular chap like me was meant to go on all his life cleaning boots and knives; and if I was, what’s the good of it all? I’m sick of it, Master Jack and there have been times when I’ve been ready to go and list for a soldier, but I don’t believe that would be much better.
The toggery’s right enough, and you have a sword or a gun, but it’s mostly standing in a row and being shouted at by sergeants. But now there’s a chance of going about and seeing what the world’s like, how it works, and how it goes round, and you say you don’t want to go. Why, it caps me. It does, sir.” “Yes,” cried Jack angrily, “and it ‘caps me,’ as you call it, to hear a good servant like you talk about giving up a comfortable place and want to go on a long and dangerous voyage. Are you not well fed and clothed and paid, and have you not a good bed?”
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George Manville Fenn
George Manville Fenn (3 January 1831 in Pimlico – 26 August 1909 in Isleworth) was a prolific English novelist, journalist, editor, and educationalist.
Biography.
Many of his novels were written with young adults in mind. His final book was his biography of a fellow writer for juveniles, George Alfred Henty. Fenn, the third child and eldest son of a butler, Charles Fenn, was largely self-educated, teaching himself French, German, and Italian. After studying at Battersea Training College for teachers (1851–1854), he became the master of a national school at Alford, Lincolnshire. Fenn later became a printer, editor, and publisher of some short-lived periodicals before attracting Charles Dickens’s and others’ attention with a sketch for All the Year Round in 1864. He contributed to Chambers’s Journal and the magazine Once a Week.
In 1866, he wrote a series of articles on working-class life for the newspaper The Star. These were collected and republished in four volumes and were followed by a similar series in the Weekly Times. Fenn’s first story for boys, Hollowdell Grange, appeared in 1867. A succession of other novels for juveniles and adults followed it. For example, the Star-Gazers (1894) was a three-volume “astronomical romance” for adults. Having become the editor of Cassell’s Magazine in 1870, Fenn then purchased Once a Week and edited it until it closed in 1879. He also wrote for the theatre.
Fenn authored many historical fiction novels, including Crown and Sceptre: A West-Country Story (1889) about the English Civil War, Ned Ledger (1899), focusing on naval combat during War of the Austrian Succession, The King’s Sons (1901) about King Alfred, and Marcus, the Young Centurion (1904), about Julius Caesar. Fenn and his family lived at Syon Lodge, Isleworth, Middlesex, where he built up a library of 25,000 volumes and took up telescope making. His last book was a biography of a great fellow writer of boys’ stories, George Alfred Henty.
George Manville Fenn
