ABSTRACT
With no parrots, peg legs or buried treasure to recommend it, Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863) is no conventional pirate story. On the contrary, it is a Victorian sensation novel and contains all of the accoutrements typical of the genre: adultery, crime, insanity, some mystery, an obsession with money and – as happens so often with Reade – a graphic, even hysterical social exposé, in this case, of England’s private asylums and the dangerously pliable lunacy laws that delivered patients into their clutches. But in Chapter VIII as sea-captain David Dodd sails back from China bearing his life’s savings (the novel’s ‘hard cash’), his ship is beset suddenly and fiercely by pirates: a ‘wild crew of yellow Malays, black chinless Papuans, and bronzed Portuguese, [who] served their side guns, twelve-pounders, well and with ferocious cries; [while] the white Britons … replied with loud undaunted cheers, and deadly hail of grape’ (164). This is the novel’s only explicit rendering of pirates, and it reads not only as a conflict between brutal marauders and valorous tars but also as one drawn along clear racial lines. Piracy, the scene suggests, is an explicitly racial peril, an outrage committed against ‘white Britons’ by dusky savages at the limits of culture, a threat to English bodies and – perhaps more important – the spoils of empire.
