Introduction

The nineteenth century heralded the great age of the literary pirate, even as piracy in the real world was on the wane. While piracy has been identified as the ‘third oldest profession’ (Stanley 22) and pirates continue to plague sea traders to this day, the 1800s saw a lull in pirate activity, particularly in the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps as a direct consequence of the decline in pirate attacks close to home, the pirate underwent a metamorphosis in the nineteenth-century literary imagination in both British and American literature. Representations of the pirate shifted from the dangerous, uncouth cutthroats like the notorious Blackbeard, to the brooding Romanticism of Byron’s corsair and the swashbuckling charisma of figures such as Captain Hook and Long John Silver.