ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 establishes the evangelical movement’s relevance to the world of sailors in order to examine Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready, which sees the eponymous evangelical seaman protect and provide for a middle-class British family when they are shipwrecked on a Pacific island. Recognizing Masterman Ready’s publication history as coeval with Chartism, this chapter argues that in Masterman Ready we see an articulation of Christian faith and the sailor that attempts the management of class tensions within Britain. The heterotopic Pacific setting of Masterman Ready positions the island at the junction of two narrative trajectories: the colonial, in which the desert island is the site of Western resourcefulness and the re-establishment of civil society; and the evangelical, in which the island functions as a retreat from the world that enables spiritual reflection and growth. The Seagrave family’s emergence from this island isolation strengthened in both practical survival skills and faith is attributable to the self-help precepts and evangelical focus of Ready, and thus, Masterman Ready inverts the convention of middle-class Christian outreach to the lower class. The potential radicalism of the sailor’s agency is contained by Ready’s death, a willing sacrifice that enables the Seagraves’ survival but that subordinates working-class interests to those of the middle class. By the novel’s end the faith learned from Ready, combined with the growing political power of the middle class, establishes the representative Seagraves as exemplary colonists; the agency of the Christian sailor, meanwhile, is circumscribed to the coral island on which Ready is buried.
