The Good Seaman Is Known in Bad Weather: Navigating National and Imperial Crises in British Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Situated at the intersection of British imperial and literary histories, this paper will focus on a selection of largely forgotten poems written by British authors in occasion of the premature death of Princess Charlotte of Wales in 1817 and the Indian Rebellion in 1857–58, which were similarly described as national and/or imperial ‘catastrophes’ by their contemporaries. Both of these nineteenth-century events have received serious attention from historians and, albeit to a lesser extent, from literary critics, but their impact on nineteenth-century poetry remains regrettably understudied. Whereas critical discussions of poetry composed for the demise of Charlotte tend to focus on the work of canonical voices such as Byron, the available scholarship on the influence of the Indian Uprising (or ‘Mutiny’) on Victorian literature is usually concerned with works of fiction, which leaves much noncanonical poetry on these subjects underexplored. In an attempt to redress this imbalance, my paper sets out to interpret texts authored by normally overlooked poets, with a view to exploring the ideological import of the nautical and meteorological imagery often deployed to represent and cope with political disasters affecting nineteenth-century Britain. At the same time as performing close readings of obscure poems, I aim to bring into focus the generally downplayed imperial content and overtones of pre-1870 poetry and suggest ways in which the study of the poetic responses to similar moments of crisis for the British nation and empire in the nineteenth century may help us historicise the development of imperial ideology prior to the period of so-called ‘high’ or ‘new’ imperialism (c. 1870–1914)