CAPTAIN FREDERICK MARRYAT AND THE FLORAL TELEGRAPH; OR, A FORGOTTEN CODER AND HIS FLORAL CODE

Victorian Literature and Culture (2014), 42, 209–233.C© Cambridge University Press 2014. 1060-1503/14 $15.00doi:10.1017/S1060150313000454

CAPTAIN FREDERICK MARRYAT AND THEFLORAL TELEGRAPH; OR, A FORGOTTEN

CODER AND HIS FLORAL CODE

By Daniel Wuebben

It treats of Flowers, and of their mystic lore,Love’s lore and their’s; and of the sylphs that roamUnseen of man, and, all unknown before,It gives a Language without Words; to soarBeyond the mean it teaches, and it showsHow Love may reign triumphant, as of yore;

—From the dedication to The Floral Telegraph

THIS ESSAY EXAMINES THE FLORAL TELEGRAPH; A New Mode of Communication by FloralSignals, a rare Victorian novel published anonymously in 1836 and reprinted in 1850 witha new tagline – The Floral Telegraph; Or, Affection’s Signals. The reprint includes anascription to Captain Frederick Marryat, Royal Navy (1792–1848) (See Figure 5). Themajority of Marryat’s biographers, scholars, and archivists have doubted the posthumousascription. Here, I challenge the critical consensus and argue that Marryat did indeed writeThe Floral Telegraph published in 1836 and that the attribution of 1850 is correct. I beginwith a biographical sketch of Marryat, a brief synopsis of the novel, and a review of its scant,mostly skeptical reception. I then argue that the “floral code” presented in the text resembles(albeit through parody) Marryat’s famous codebook for maritime flag signals and that theCaptain’s acknowledged interest in botany and horticulture gave him the fluency necessaryto create the Table of Flowers (See Figure 6). In addition, Marryat had a strong relationshipwith the novel’s publisher, Saunders and Otley, and he was the editor of the Metropolitan,a literary magazine which ran a favorable review shortly after The Floral Telegraph wasfirst published. The narrative also reflects Marryat’s stylistic tendency to satire and parodyand his ideas about literacy and widespread publication seem to be inversely reflected in theironic digressions of the unreliable narrator, Horace Honeycomb, and the diatribe againstthe “cursed and abominable art of Printing” (117) offered by the inventor of the floral code,Floribel. I conclude my essay by viewing The Floral Telegraph as representative of earlyVictorian issues of literacy, affect, and disembodied, long-distance communication in theage immediately preceding the advent of the electromagnetic telegraph.

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210 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Figure 5. Title page from The Floral Telegraph: Or, Affection’s Signals (London: Saunders & Otley, 1850).

Captain Frederick Marryat and The Floral Telegraph; Or, a Forgotten Coder 211

Figure 6a. The “Table of Flowers” from The Floral Telegraph (London: Saunders & Otley, 1850), 138-9.


Figure 6b. Continued.


Biographical Sketch of the Captain

FROM THE TIME HE COULD WALK, Frederick Marryat was determined to go to sea. His mother,Charlotte, was a renowned gardener and the first female fellow of the Horticulture Societyof London. His father, Joseph, served in Parliament for the borough of Sandwich, was aChairman at Lloyd’s of London, and an agent for Grenada in the West Indies. Despite thiscomfortable upbringing, young Frederick repeatedly ran away with dreams of sailing over thehorizon. Finally, in 1806, his parents accepted the inevitable and Frederick’s father acquiredfor his fourteen-year-old son the position of midshipman on the Imperiuse, a 48-gun frigatecommanded by Lord Cochrane. For the next twenty-four years, Marryat advanced in rankas he toured the coasts of France, Portugal, and Spain, traveled to Bermuda, waged war inBurma, and sailed back to Great Britain again. In 1830, after an illustrious career, Marryatretired from the Royal Navy with the rank of Captain.

After leaving the service, Marryat spent the rest of his life in a restless state. As onebiographer notes: “Now he was a novelist, now a farmer, now yearning for the sea again; atone time he was on the point of buying a castle in Hungary, at another he thought of campingin the desert for a year or two” (Lloyd 251). Marryat mingled with high society and attendedroyal receptions with King William IV (Warner 97) and King Leopold in Belgium (Pocock212); he dabbled in the arts and sciences as a member of the Royal Society and as a friendof Charles Dickens, George Cruikshank, and Charles Babbage. He made an unsuccessfulbid for Parliament, during one debate threatening to “flog” a spectator and his son to makea point about acceptable forms of corporal punishment (Lloyd 256); and he was embroiledin heated literary disputes. In 1834 he beat with a cane the young novelist William JohnsonNeale (Warner 94–96), and a few years later Marryat’s unsavory comments during a tourof the United States led citizens of Saint Louis to hang the author in effigy (Pocock 157).From 1832 to 1836 Marryat owned and served as editor of the Metropolitan, and, as will bediscussed shortly, shared his mother’s passion for flowers. Marryat’s famous connections,seemingly whimsical interests, and eccentric, sometimes violent behavior were eclipsed,however, by the spectacular success of his fiction.

Marryat has been described as “the most celebrated English novelist between JaneAusten and Charles Dickens” (Pocock 9). He wrote prolifically – publishing at least twenty-four novels between 1828 and 1848 – and autobiographically – culling much of his literarymaterial from his years at sea. He wrote in the picaresque tradition of Tobias Smollett, but heentwined the picaresque with hardboiled, episodic adventure. The results were novels suchas Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836) and Japhet in Search of a Father (1836). These popularnovels carry a similar stripe: hand-to-hand combat, clever sea maneuvers, and last secondescapes help the virtuous hero gain social status and rise through the ranks of His Majesty’sfleet.

At its best, Marryat’s prose displays a graceful swagger that resembles its picaresqueprotagonists, who are whisked into danger and just as quickly to safety in episode afterloosely related episode. Contemporaneous critics such as Thomas Carlyle and Edgar AllanPoe picked apart Marryat’s wooden characters and contrived plots.1 Nevertheless, his storiesattracted a broad readership and his books remained popular with young readers into the earlytwentieth century. Virginia Woolf said Marryat employed “language with the suggestivenessof a poet” (42) and she praised the realism displayed by his characters, even if, she added, “theintenser emotions of the human race are kept out” (43). Joseph Conrad wrote that Marryat


embodied “the time when the nineteenth century was young” (75) and he warned that if theCaptain’s novels were lost to history, then it “would be irreparable, like the curtailment ofnational story or the loss of an historical document” (73). Ernest Hemingway read Marryat’snovels and in a letter dated 20 December, 1925 he listed the Captain as one of his threefavorite authors (qtd. in Spilka 315).

On the surface, The Floral Telegraph – an exquisitely illustrated text about a secretgarden, a magical sylph, and a clandestine floral code – clashes with the rest of the Captain’smore masculine oeuvre. It opens with a whimsical introduction by an anonymous editor andfollows with Mr. Horace Honeycomb’s dedication – a rhyming ode to “the fairest of the fair,the fair of England, Ireland, and Wales” (ix). Honeycomb’s story begins on 25 June, 1835.While wandering through the grounds of a vast estate in Devonshire, Honeycomb discovers“a Time-crushed and yet a Time-embellished wall” (6) that leads to a secret garden in whichhe meets a beautiful sylph named Floribel. As a sylph “presiding genius over the GardenFlowers, more especially the Violet, the Greenhouses, and the Coquetry of this district” (37),it is Floribel’s duty to “wanton over the face of the earth, and disperse the seed . . . of herparticular care” (52), but she has been locked inside the garden for over a century due to afatal accident involving two young lovers, Lionell and Violetta.

Floribel then recites the story of how, in the early eighteenth century, Lionell and Violettafell in love and decided to elope. Unfortunately, Violetta’s father, Sir Eustace, interceptedLionell’s note with the details of their secret plan. While Sir Eustace had deep respect forLionell, the note was unsigned, and the father became outraged at the thought of someanonymous brute scheming to steal his daughter. On the night of the planned escape, SirEustace intercepted Violetta and Lionell at their rendezvous point – the flower garden whereHoneycomb now stands. When Sir Eustace saw Violetta, he snatched his daughter’s armand fired his pistol at the man in the shadows. At that moment, Violetta lunged towardsLionell and the bullet passed through both young bodies. The couple died together on a bedof flowers (which Honeycomb recognizes as the varietal “Love Lies Bleeding” (20)). SirEustace was so distraught that he sealed the flower garden and Floribel was trapped inside.

Floribel argues that the deaths of Lionell and Violetta were not caused by human erroron the part of Sir Eustace; instead, “the use of letters caused all the miseries” (111). Floribelthen unleashes a bitter attack on all forms of written communication. She laments, “whenthe Devil and Dr. Faustus . . . invented the cursed and abominable art of Printing – whenold clothes were, by their magic resuscitated into clean white paper —when ink, atramentalink, was poured forth like the poison from the fangs of some venomous monster” (117). Tocounteract the horrors of written communication, Floribel demands the adoption of anothermethod of correspondence – the Telegraph of Flowers. She teaches Honeycomb how touse the two parts of this telegraph, the Table of Flowers and the Vocabulary, explains thepracticality of her invention, and orders him, through the “mere mortal, every day, andcommon-place means” of “hateful typography,” to offer her invention to the world (166).

As the sun sets, Floribel disappears in a fragrant mist, and Honeycomb losesconsciousness. He awakes in a bed flanked by Sir Aldobrand, the current owner of the estateupon which he had been walking, and a corpulent parson by the name of Dr. Snuffletext. Atfirst, Honeycomb worries that his encounter with Floribel was merely a dream, but then hisnephew enters the room and discovers Floribel’s Table of Flowers and her Vocabulary. Thediscovery of the documents convinces Honeycomb that “I, the Author, did veritably, and inmy own person, see the things that I said I saw” (183). He sets off to publish his account


along with the Table of Flowers and the Vocabulary, which includes thousands of words andphrases and occupies the remaining 130 pages of the book.

The Reception of The Floral Telegraph

IN JUNE OF 1836, THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE, a literary journal that Marryat owned andedited, announced a forthcoming release: “the public will shortly be furnished with adelightful little work far surpassing in amusement and invention everything that has yetappeared on the subject of floral language” (16: 49). That fall, London publishers Saundersand Otley released The Floral Telegraph; A New Mode of Communication by Floral Signals(months later they agreed to buy Marryat’s stake in the Metropolitan). In December, theMetropolitan published a sparkling review of this “cleverly told, witty, and playful fiction”(Rev. of The Floral Telegraph 105). The review praises the invention of floral communicationas “a ready-made method of talking in poetry,” but also notes, “no name is found in the titlepage” (17: 105). A clue about the author’s identity appears later in the same issue under theheading “Literary News”:

A little publication on Flowers has just appeared, entitled the “Floral Telegraph”: it is an adaptationof the principle of naval signals to communications by flowers, and is susceptible of endless variety:it is said to be the production of a popular naval writer. (17: 114)

Beyond these three mentions, The Floral Telegraph did not stir much interest. The reprintof 1850 – The Floral Telegraph: Or, Affection’s Signals – was attributed to “the late CaptainMarryat, R.N.,” but the second edition also escaped popular attention. Nor has there beenmuch scholarly attention, in part likely due to the difficulty of locating the text: accordingto Worldcat.org, only six copies of the 1836 printing and ten copies of the 1850 edition arecurrently held in libraries around the world.2 Approximately twenty copies exist in microfilmformat. It has not been digitized.

Restricted access to The Floral Telegraph does not account entirely for the lack oftreatment it has received in Marryat biography and criticism. Twenty-four years after theCaptain passed away, his daughter, Florence, released Life and Letters of Captain Marryat(1872). Florence’s book offers transcriptions of private documents as well as detailedmemoirs from family and friends, but she does not mention of The Floral Telegraph. Thenext extended study of Marryat, David Hannay’s The Life of Captain Frederick Marryat(1889), also fails to mention The Floral Telegraph. The index includes a bibliographyof Marryat’s works compiled by John P. Anderson of the British Museum. Interestingly,Anderson’s bibliography does list “The Floral Telegraph; or Affection’s Signals. London[1850], 12mo.,” but does not refer to the first publication of 1836.

In his introduction to The Novels of Captain Marryat (1895–1896), editor R. BrimleyJohnson argues against the ascription of 1850 and the notion of Marryat as author of TheFloral Telegraph. Johnson suggests that Marryat’s name appears on “a book called The FloralTelegraph” that “was first published in 1850 by Saunders and Otley” (x; emphasis mine).Johnson, like Anderson, overlooks the fact that Saunders and Otley first published The FloralTelegraph in 1836 and that the 1850 edition is only a reprint with a new tagline, Marryat’sname, and some seemingly inconsequential additions to the vocabulary section.3 Afteracknowledging the book’s existence, Johnson quickly concludes that The Floral Telegraph


“is probably not Marryat’s work” on the grounds that Marryat’s daughter, Florence, “knowsnothing of the book” (x). It is important to note here that Florence herself says the sketchesand transcriptions found in Life and Letters “do not profess to rank as biography” (vii).She makes no claims for scholarly authority, and it would be unfair to blame her for notmentioning each one of her father’s titles. Nonetheless, Johnson’s elimination of The FloralTelegraph from the Captain’s official collection seems premised primarily on Florence’sfailure to mention it.

The other pointed argument against the Marryat ascription appeared in 1951 as part ofthe bibliographic notes for Michael Sadleir’s collection of Victorian fiction and poetry. Inaddition to thousands of other rare pieces, Sadlier gathered first editions of all of Marryat’sworks. In his notes, he boasts that these first editions are “for the most part in excellentoriginal condition” (241). Writing about The Floral Telegraph, however, Sadleir followsJohnson’s tack and creates a separate section for works, “Attributed to Marryat.” In thissection, Sadleir includes the publication information for the anonymous publication, TheFloral Telegraph; A New Mode of Communication by Floral Signals and the second editionthat has Marryat’s name on the title page, The Floral Telegraph; or, Affection’s Signals. Then,in a divided note, Sadleir makes the following observation:

It has always seemed to be difficult to believe that Marryat had any share in this finical little work.The most masculine of authors, he cannot be imagined spending time and thought on a pretty-prettyboudoir trifle of the kind. (XIX Century Fiction 243)

The second direct argument against Marryat-as-author thus stems from a misogynisticconceit: the “most masculine of authors” could not have bothered to write a “pretty-pretty”book. Sadlier’s preconceptions of Marryat lead him to consider a strange theory about howthe Captain was linked to The Floral Telegraph. Sadleir writes:

It has been suggested to me by Dudley Massey (and I think the suggestion well worth recording) thatthe attribution to Marryat, which only appears on the later edition published after his death, was dueto a confusion between The Floral Telegraph and The Floral Calendar, a small 8vo with colouredplates, compiled by Commander James Mangles, R.N., privately printed and issued in 1839 over theimprove of F. W. Calder, Printer, 199 Oxford Street. (XIX Century Fiction 243)

Massey’s suggestion amounts to a claim that the 1850 attribution of the second edition arosefrom a mix up with a calendar published by F. W. Calder in 1839. Both Marryat and Manglesserved the Royal Navy, but a cursory examination of the two texts in question shows theunlikelihood that an employee at Saunders and Otley mistook a manuscript first publishedin 1836 by Saunders and Otley featuring hundreds of pages of orthographic text and six4×6 color prints with a 6×9 monthly calendar filled with horticulture advice published bya different company. Although The Floral Telegraph does double as a codebook, one wouldrequire a unique concept of the genre to confuse an anonymously published novel with agardening calendar. Such confusion on the part of Saunders and Otley employees in 1850 iseven less likely considering that, as well as publishing the Metropolitan, their predecessorshad bought the rights to and released six of Marryat’s other novels between 1834 and 1836.Presumably, Saunders and Otley also held the rights to The Floral Telegraph when theyprinted it in 1836.


Provocatively, J. A. Sutherland writes that Saunders and Otley sold to Richard Bentleyand Co., “seven of [Marryat’s] copyrights for £1,500 or a bit more” in the late 1830s and“the Marryat property continued to make profits for the publisher [Bentley] for twenty years”(94–95). Sutherland does not specify the seven copyrights, but six of Saunders and Otley’scopyrights to Marryat novels are undisputed: Peter Simple (1834), Jacob Faithful (1834), ThePacha of Many Tales (1835), The Pirate, and the Three Cutters (1836), Japhet in Search ofa Father (1836), and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836). The seventh to which Sutherland refersmay have been The Floral Telegraph.

Around the midpoint of the nineteenth century, these copyrights were sold from Bentleyto another publisher, Routledge (Sutherland 95). As we know, in 1850, Saunders and Otleyrepublished The Floral Telegraph with Marryat’s name on the title page. What if The FloralTelegraph was ignored in the exchange of copyrights from Saunders and Otley to Bentley,or from Bentley to Routledge? What if Marryat and Saunders and Otley agreed to publishThe Floral Telegraph anonymously, fearing the flowery satire might negatively influence the“masculine” persona his readers expected? The facts as to what happened between Marryatand Saunders and Otley are unknown and will remain up to speculation unless conclusiveevidence is found in the archive. Still, as I hope my essay has begun to demonstrate, one canlook elsewhere for clues. The handful of scholarly studies devoted to Marryat have insteadignored the issue. Oliver Warner’s Captain Marryat, a Rediscovery (1953), Maurice-PaulGautiers’s Captian Marryat: L’Homme el l’ Ouevre (1973), Louis J. Parascandola’s PuzzledWhich to Choose: Conflicting Social-Political Views in the Works of Captain FrederickMarryat (1997), and Tom Pocock’s Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer, Adventurer (2000)do not mention The Floral Telegraph. In the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literaturepublished in 2000, editor Joanne Shattock places The Floral Telegraph under a separateheading of “Attributed Works,” mentions its “doubtful authorship,” and refers to Sadleir’sdiscussion of the ascription (955–56).

Denial has not been exactly unanimous. In the first edition of the Cambridge Bibliographyedited by F. W. Bateson and published in 1941, The Floral Telegraph is listed with Marryat’s“Other Writings.” But even here the Bateson entry includes a parenthetical note: “Attributedto Marryat” (3: 386). Beverly Seaton’s study of Victorian flower books – The Language ofFlowers: A History (1995) – discusses both Captain Marryat as a “general literary hack”and The Floral Telegraph as “an amusing parody laced with standard satirical material(egotistical old men, faithless young women, and nephews waiting for their uncles to die)”(156). Seaton’s brief analysis does imply that Marryat was the author, but, as her project ismore concerned with the sincere language of flowers genre, she devotes only a few lines toThe Floral Telegraph and seems unaware of any authorial dispute.

The most telling evidence for Marryat’s authorship appears in Christopher Lloyd’sbiography, Captain Marryat and the Old Navy (1939). Lloyd spends three healthy pagesreviewing Marryat’s Code of Signals for the Use of Vessels Employed in the Merchant Service(1817) and concludes with the following triplet of sentences about The Floral Telegraph:

[Marryat’s Code of Signals] gave rise to a trivial little book entitled The Floral Telegraph; orAffection’s Signals by Mr. Horace Honeycombe [sic]. This prettily illustrated conceit enabled loversto exchange messages by tying knots in the ribbons of bunches of flowers. Whether Marryat himselfwas the author we cannot say; but it appeared in the magazine he was then editing, and it certainlyparodies his own work. (Lloyd 181)


Lloyd picks up on an important point, already noted above: Marryat was the majority owner,executive editor, and primary copywriter of the Metropolitan between 1832 and 1836. Lloydgoes so far as to suggest that the full text of The Floral Telegraph may have appeared in theMetropolitan, though I have found no evidence of this. During Marryat’s tenure as editor,the journal published the announcement of the text’s forthcoming publication, the news ofits release, and the review titled “The Floral Telegraph.”

Though Lloyd treats the text only briefly, we find in his argument three pivotal factswhich give credence to the ascription of 1850: 1) The code for speaking with bunches offlowers uses the same principles as the code for flag signals, which Marryat most certainlywrote. 2) In the years leading up to the text’s original publication (1834 to 1836) Marryat hada strong working relationship with the book’s publisher, Saunders and Otley. 3) Marryat’sMetropolitan published a favorable review and suggested that the author of The FloralTelegraph was a “popular naval writer.” Here again though, Lloyd dismisses the book as“trivial” and a “prettily illustrated conceit” (181), declining to take a stance on the authorshipand implying that even if Marryat did write The Floral Telegraph, the work does not deservesustained consideration.

While the skeptics have not presented any conclusive evidence that Marryat was not theauthor, it would be difficult to locate a smoking gun to prove he was. Per Marryat’s request,most of his papers were destroyed after his death and, as Sutherland notes, Saunders andOtley exemplifies the small Victorian publisher that poses difficulties for historians because“their papers have rarely been considered worth keeping” (221). In addition to the factsalready treated – a “floral code” which spoofs Marryat’s Code of Signals, Marryat’s strongties to Saunders and Otley, and a review that he likely planted – Marryat was familiar withbeauty books, had a strong interest in flowers, and a keen sense for satire and parody.

The Officer’s Code of Signals

AS LLOYD AND SEATON SUGGEST, The Floral Telegraph parodies Marryat’s famous codebookfor merchant ships, Code of Signals. Marryat’s code was the first popular flag system toallow merchant vessels to warn one another of nearby hazards, to expedite emergency rescueoperations, and to communicate with those on shore such as family members, ship owners,and underwriters. One such underwriter was the author’s father, Joseph Marryat. Fredericklater admitted that Lloyd’s of London had asked him to write the code and thus, it seemslikely that Joseph Marryat’s position as Chairmen of Lloyd’s helped to initiate the enterprise(Warner 137). Pocock explains: “Once the new code had been accepted by Lloyd’s, all itsinsurance agents, every ship-owner, the master of every merchantman, every pilot, coastguardand excise officer and soon every warship had to have a copy” (75). Marryat’s non-fictiondebut became an instant bestseller.

Joseph Marryat’s position at Lloyd’s generated favorable winds, but the young officer’scodebook was itself seaworthy, so to speak. The system was concise, intelligible, and easyto use. Seventeen flags, each with its own colorful design, comprised the symbols. The firstten flags stood for the digits, 0–9. Five more flags directed the recipient to different sectionsof words and phrases: a list of English Men of War; a list of foreign Men of War; a list ofthe English Merchant Vessels; a list of Lighthouses, Ports, Headlands, Rocks, Shoals, Reefs,etc.; Sentences; and the Vocabulary. Each proper name, word, or phrase in the codex wasassigned a section and a digit from one to four. The sender displayed certain flags to signify


the number of the entry and placed a “directional” flag over the number to signify a certainsection of the codebook. The recipient then used this information and Marryat’s cipher todecode the signal. With seventeen flags, good visibility, and a copy of Marryat’s Code ofSignals, ships could code, send, receive, and decode thousands of commands and messages.An urgent message “Do no quit the vessel on any account, as the only chance of savingyourselves” was transmitted by showing flags “2” and “5.” Meanwhile, the more elaborate(and less time-sensitive) “I mean to keep sail set, and carry on all night, as I am anxious toget into port” was spoken with flags 4-5-7-6.

The flags of Code of Signals and the flowers of The Floral Telegraph do serve distinctdiscourse communities – merchant sailors and British ladies – but they feature similaroperating systems. Code of Signals assigns to each digit a different flag; the Table of Flowersassigns to each digit twelve distinct floral species (See Figure 7). In The Floral Telegraph,each numerical figure from 0 to 9 is signified by twelve unique plants, which are dividedinto six sections to indicate when or where to find them: Summer Flowers, Autumn Flowers,Winter Flowers, Spring Flowers, Greenhouse, and Among Wild Herbs. The six divisions aredesigned to allow the floral telegrapher to gather the units needed to communicate duringany season and in various locations across Great Britain and the Continent.

For instance, to convey, “Your beauty exceeds that of these flowers,” one consults PartIII of the Telegraph of Flowers Vocabulary and finds this particular phrase on page 317 listedas number 273. After noting the numerical code – 273 – one consults the Table of Flowersand gathers flowers to signify each number. For this example, say one collects Greenhouseflowers. The numeral “2” will be represented by the Germanium flower, “7” by Heliotrope,and “3” by Calceolaria (which is also called Lady’s Purse). One attaches the Germanium,Heliotrope, and Calceolaria to a silk thread, which is then joined at either end to resemblea lei. Three knots are then tied before and after Germanium, Heliotrope, and Calceolaria toindicate the third section of the vocabulary. Finally, as Floribel states:

When you have completed your sentence, all you have to do is to gather up the Flowers into a bouquet,and tie them with another piece of ribbon, thread, or silk; the person to whom it is sent will untie it,spread it on the table, and, by means of the Vocabulary, read your communication. (145)

This mode of communication requires securing, coding, and decoding flowers. As a result,Floribel argues, it will suffice for almost all correspondence and especially for romanticexchanges, diplomatic correspondence, and other messages that thrive on sentiment.

Based on this evidence alone, it is conceivable that another writer with intimateknowledge of Marryat’s codebook conceived of switching the seventeen flagship signalswith one hundred and twenty different plants. Yet the yarn spun around the idea of codingand decoding “nature’s affections” bears the Captain’s distinct mark.

Botany, Beauty Books, and the Language of Flowers

IN THE YEARS PRECEDING THE PUBLICATION of The Floral Telegraph, Marryat was buoyed bya constant stream of creative output. In 1832 he took over editorial control of the Metropolitan:A Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts and immediately shortened thename to the Metropolitan Magazine. He likely wrote and certainly edited hundreds of piecesfor the Metropolitan, including political opinions, travel reports, notices of new patents,


Figure 7. (Color online) A floral telegraph using Bay, Verbena, Orange Flower, Myrtle, Amaranth,Mignonette, Moss Rose, Heath, and China Rose to mean “Tomorrow night between 10 and 11.” Thecenter bouquet represents the floral telegraph tied together. The Floral Telegraph (London: Saunders &Otley, 1850), np.


meteorological charts, society gossip columns, obituaries, discussions of property values,and reviews of new works (like the review of The Floral Telegraph). With help from his co-editor and fellow veteran of the Royal Navy, Edward Howard, Marryat successfully steeredthe magazine into the more diverse and uncertain waters of “miscellany.” Along the way,his decision to write and release serial installments of his novels made him a trendsetter inthe publishing world of London. Marryat was “one of the first to recognize the aesthetic andfinancial necessity of retaining audience interest from issue to issue” (Lawrence). Friendssuch as Harrison Ainsworth, William Thackeray, and Dickens followed Marryat’s lead andbegan publishing serially in magazines, journals, and periodicals and then releasing entirenovels in book form (Lloyd 253). By 1834, the naval officer-turned-writer was makingwaves in the literary world. He developed a healthy readership for his magazine and releaseda string of bestselling novels including Peter Simple, Japhet in Search of a Father, and Mr.Midshipman Easy. The positive reaction to these works secured Marryat’s position in theranks of popular British novelists and his books, like his flag signals, dispersed across bothsides of the Atlantic. It was in the midst of this productive flurry that Saunders and Otleypublished The Floral Telegraph.

The contents of the Metropolitan provide evidence that Marryat had been interestedin botany and horticulture in the years preceding the publication of The Floral Telegraph.Marryat oversaw the publication of the following articles and reviews: “A Catechism ofBotany” (Apr. 1834), “The Flower Garden” (Jun. 1834), “Love’s Botanica, A Key to theStudy of Botany” (Aug. 1834), “Flowers of Loveliness . . . with Poetical Illustrations bythe Countess of Blessington” (Dec. 1835), and “The Book of Flowers” (Apr. 1836). One ofthe most telling reviews from this period concerned Frederic Schoberl’s The Language ofFlowers; with Illustrative Poetry published by Saunders and Otley in 1834. In a statementthat resembles Honeycomb’s description of the floral code – “It gives a Language withoutWords; to soar/ Beyond the mean it teaches” (The Floral Telegraph xi) – the reviewer (likelyMarryat) says of The Language of Flowers: “It teaches the language of flowers – how toconvey by those beautiful productions of nature, wishes, hopes, and sentiments; in fact, howto become practical poets in the most pleasing manner” (Rev. of The Language of Flowers74). This new language, it is suggested, encourages speakers – especially young womenand men – to make fresh associations between their feelings and the flowers found in theirenvironment. Revealing the hidden meaning of each flower and plant and then conveyingthat meaning offers a path to spiritual awakening, a way to both illuminate and transcendhuman emotions. The reviewer of The Language of Flowers recommends that

In order to spiritualize ourselves, we should endeavor to give a sentiment to every thing – see halfconcealed and mysterious beauties in blossoms, discover ethereal revealings in the hues of a flower,and catch an inspiration from the graceful shape of a bud. (10: 74)

Similar associations between flowers, feelings, and the process of spiritualization underliethe new floral communication system of The Floral Telegraph. Floribel tells Honeycomb thatthe Telegraph of Flowers may cause “printed letters to be lost” but, “there shall be wantingno language to love, no source of beautiful expression to every feeling that enlivens, warms,and elevates the heart of mankind” (167). Floribel’s Vocabulary contains an array of angryreprimands – “You are decidedly ill-dressed” (300) – and banal commands – “Treat me with


more respect” (312) – and yet, as the subtitle of the 1850 edition suggests, the system isespecially designed to signal affections.

Marryat was aware that matching affections and flowers was an emerging trend inbook culture. Schoberl’s book borrowed heavily from Charlotte de Latour’s famous LeLanguage des Fleurs published in 1819, and, although the content was not original, Seatonwrites that Schoberl’s work with Saunders and Otley was “the first really popular Englishlanguage of flowers book” (81). The general “language of flowers” genre featured beautifullyillustrated arrangements labeled to suggest that certain flowers signified certain feelings – redroses say “love,” white lilies say “peace,” etc. The Metropolitan reviewer writes that usingnature’s floral signals to communicate is “the best method to avoid a commonplace mannerof thinking” (10: 74), but the one-to-one correspondence advocated by The Language ofFlowers may have appeared simplistic, even trivial, to the creator of what was at that timeone of the most complex codes in worldwide circulation.

Latour, Schoberl, and other authors founded their language of flowers books on historicalbeliefs and cultural conventions that varied from region to region; the author of The FloralTelegraph would base his language on a fixed, universally recognized signaling system. Thegrammar used by the language of flowers matches specific flowers to specific sentiments; theTelegraph of Flowers links flowers to digits, which are then used to signal sentiments andmany other messages. In Schoberl’s language, a bouquet of honeysuckle and pink carnationssignifies “Generous and Devoted Affection” and “Pure Love”; in the Telegraph of Flowersthese flowers signify the numbers 3–3 which convey, respectively, “All” or “Home” or “TheMusic Party” depending on how many knots are tied into the bouquet. In short, Marryat’sfloral mode not only promises to say it with flowers; it promises to say anything with flowers.

Marryat was aware of the emerging market for books about flowers and would have hada unique ability to satirize (and synthesize) the Code of Signals with the ideas underpinningthe language of flowers books. He also had an intimate relationship with Lady Blessington,one of the preeminent patronesses of “beauty book” culture.4 After drawing Marryat intoLondon’s bohemian circle, Blessington invited the Captain to contribute to the annuals sheedited – Keepsakes and The Book of Beauty (which is sometimes referred to as Heath’s Bookof Beauty). As The Floral Telegraph was about to be published, Marryat wrote in a letter toLady Blessington: “I hope the Beauty Book goes on well. I know that you and Mrs. Nortonand I are the three looked up to provide for the public taste” (qtd. in Lloyd 255–56). Wecannot tell how seriously Marryat viewed his role as an arbiter of “public taste,” but hisrelationship with Lady Blessington and his work on her annuals suggest he was literate inthe “beauty book” genre and, we also know, genuinely interested by flowers.

Marryat’s fondness for flowers was instilled by his mother and persisted throughouthis life, eventually providing part of the hook for Woolf’s essay “The Captain’s Deathbed.”Woolf’s piece opens with the journal entry Marryat composed in his “boudoir room” on theday of his death in 1848:

Augusta [Marryat’s daughter] . . . has just brought me three pinks and three roses, and the bouquet ischarming . . . I feel convinced that Christianity is true . . . and that God is love . . . It is now half-pastnine o’clock. World, adieu. (qtd. in Woolf 37)

Similar to the anonymous editor’s characterization of Honeycomb in the preface of TheFloral Telegraph, Woolf presents the Captain as a sentimental man – one who knows he


has hours to live but can still enjoy a “charming” bouquet. Florence Marryat supported thisimage as well, writing of her father’s love for flowers: “The more fancifully they were tiedtogether, the better he liked it” (qtd. in Woolf 47). Note that though Florence “knew nothing”(Johnson x) of The Floral Telegraph she clearly suggests her father enjoyed flowers that hadbeen “fancifully” tied together into ornate bouquets.

For her part, Woolf contrasts the softer image of the author writing about flowers on hisdeathbed with the blunt characters scattered throughout his hardboiled sea stories. In these“cruder” books, Woolf says, “we get closer to the art of fiction; we see the bones and themuscles and the arteries clearly marked” (42). The visibility of narrative bones, muscles, andarteries led critics to mark Marryat as a hack content to leave gaping holes in his plots andto bring characters into and out of the action at whim. Woolf offers a more nuanced critique,and concludes her essay by returning to the Captain on his deathbed: “the summer morningand the dying Captain after all his voyages stretched on the mattress in the boudoir roomdictating those last words to his daughter about love and roses” (47).

The Captain’s interest in flowers is also supported by the letters and diary entries hewrote in 1835 as he was moving somewhat aimlessly with his family through Belgium,Switzerland, and France. During this period, Marryat composed two of the early nineteenthcentury’s greatest sea-tales – Mr. Midshipman Easy and Japhet in Search of a Father – andcontinued to help edit the Metropolitan, besides keeping a detailed notebook, which waspublished under the title, Diary of a Blase. In the late spring of 1835, Marryat wrote to hismother from Spa, Belgium, to share an exciting discovery:

Since I have been here I have discovered what I fancy will be new in England, a variety of carnation,with short stalks; the stalks are so short that the flowers do not rise above the leaves of the plant, andyou have no idea how pretty they are; they are all in a bush. There are two varieties here belonging toa man, but he will not part with them. He says that they are very scarce and only to be had at Vervier,a town eight miles off. They are celebrated for flowers at Liege, but a flower woman from Liege, towhom I showed them, said that she had never seen them there; so I presume the man is correct. Haveyou heard of them? (Life and Letters 224)

The above letter shows Marryat acting like a dedicated florist in search of a specific varietal,but he was generally fond of picking flowers and of flower gardens. In a letter addressed toLady Blessington dated, 17 June 1835, Marryat recounted his restful routine while livingabroad: “I walk about and pick flowers with the children, sit on a bench in the beautiful alleesvertes, smoke my cigar and meditate till long after the moon is in the zenith. Then I lie onthe sofa and read French novels, or I gossip with anyone I can pick up in the streets” (qtd.in Pocock 123). That same month, Marryat traveled to Liege and spent a day touring thecollege and the botanical garden (possibly to continue his search for the pretty carnation).He later mused:

To the college is annexed a botanical garden. There is nothing I dislike more than a botanical garden. Iacknowledge the advantages, perhaps the necessity, of them; but they always appear to me as if therewas disarrangement instead of arrangement. What may be called order and classification appears tome to be disorder and confusion. It may be well to class plants and trees for study, but certainlytheir families, although joined by man, were never intended to be united by God. Such a mixturein one partition, of trees, and shrubs, and creeping plants, all of which you are gravely told are ofone family. I never believe it: it is unnatural. I can see order and arrangement when I look at the


majestic forest-trees throwing about their wild branches, and defying the winds of heaven, while theyafford shelter to the shrubs beneath, which in their turn protect and shelter the violets that perfumeall around. This is beautiful and natural – it is harmony; but in the botanical garden everything is outof its place. (Diary of a Blase 102)

In The Floral Telegraph, published less than a year later, the secret garden represents a similaraesthetic position. Untouched for over a century, the garden entwines the “wildness of thejungle with the rich beauties of cultivation” (13). The roses are “of a form so perfect, a sizeso magnificent” (13) despite overgrown pockets where the vines, weeds, and other foliagehave “surrounded and strangled the rightful owners of the soil with a savage barbarity” (18).Distinct from the “unnatural” botanical garden in Liege, the secret garden of The FloralTelegraph weaves emblems of high culture such as fountains and Greek statues with theunrestrained growth of nature to create a “beautiful scene of desolation” (18).5

Marryat’s letters and diary entries show that he enjoyed flowers as well as views ofmajestic, untamed nature, but The Floral Telegraph seems to mock the impulse to describethe secret garden with poetic language. Honeycomb offers to transcribe Floribel’s story“in hexameters, after the manner of Mr. Southey” (54) or in extended metaphors “afterthe fashion of Dr. Darwin’s celebrated Epic” (55). However, Floribel, the inventor of a new,orderly communication system using floral signals bluntly denies the poet, offering, “A fadednettle for your hexameters” and advising, “acquit yourself but tolerably in plain prose” (55).Ironically, Floribel, the ethereal figure most intimate with gardens and flowers views poetryas a faulty, dangerous medium with stifling conventions. Thus, Marryat places Honeycomb’sattempt to celebrate the beauty and overgrowth of the secret garden with tidy lines of poetryagainst Floribel’s suggestion of replacing lines of poetry (and all written correspondence)with bouquets of coded flowers.

Marryat seems to have wanted readers to smirk at Honeycomb’s aspirations to emulateRomantic poets, but Floribel’s system takes a jab at a deeper fissure in the language offlowers. The language of flowers assumes that equating feelings with flowers is as natural,if not more natural, than linking them with words. Floribel’s Telegraph of Flowers followsfrom this assumption, but it inserts digits into the equation. Purportedly designed to help itsusers escape the snares of printed words by using flowers to achieve a transcendent languageof love, Floribel’s system ignores the threat of shackling each species to a fixed digit – fernsmean “4,” daisies mean “9,” etc. Gathering the flowers and plants needed to communicateeven the most basic sentiments would eventually give gardens an even more rigid layerof classification than the “order and arrangement” that appalled Marryat during his visitto the botanical garden at Liege. In a text that Sadlier calls a “pretty-pretty boudoir trifle”(XIX Century Fiction 243) and Lloyd a “prettily illustrated conceit” (181), it should notbe surprising that Marryat leaves unresolved the epistemological and linguistic limitationsof coding affections (whether through dactylic hexameter or knotted bouquets); however, Ibelieve these constraints and conflicts serve to reflect Marryat’s overall tendency to challengestylistic conventions, reliable narrators, and the constraints of book publishing.

The Coy Captain

THE CONTENT OF THE FLORAL TELEGRAPH seems to correspond to the Captain’s uniqueknowledge of codes and flowers, but the playful conflicts concerning the value of poetry


or of speaking with flowers that symbolize numerals reflects his talent for genre-parodyand self-mockery. It is worth noting that Sadleir, the most outspoken critic of the Marryatascription, was also one of the first scholars to advocate that readers not take the picaresquenovelist too seriously. In 1925, Sadleir’s essay in the Yale Review advised future Marryatbiographers and archivists:

. . . take care to secure examples of Marryat’s engaging tendency to break off, to wink at the readerin a sort of breathless undertone, to confess the troubles or the shifts of authorship, gaily to boast,pertly to moralize, and then without change of countenance to take up his story once again and gorollicking on. (“Portrait” 784)

These tendencies are displayed throughout The Floral Telegraph. Take the following passagein which Floribel begins her story about the origin of flowers and the explanation of theTelegraph of Flowers (which is meant to replace all written communication) by confessingher misgivings about which style is best suited to her subject and her readership:

As Flowers are to be the subject of my theme, ought not then my style to be flowery? But there isalso mystery in my communications. I would whisper my secret into every several ear, if such couldbe – should not, therefore, my style be enigmatical? To please some, it should be lively and I wouldfain please so favourite a portion of my readers – to please others, it should be learned, for evenlearned ladies may not, perhaps, disdain to take advantage of the precepts of this little book. But, inattempting to please all, I may, perhaps, please none – this is an awkward predicament, and I musttherefore, indulge the hope that, although the opening address may not prove wholly satisfactory, theadvantages to be derived from the Telegraph of Flowers may plead for the imperfection of my style.(112–13)

This self-conscious fretting about the style of her speech and how to please her “readers”precedes a diatribe against the invention of printed words, poisonous ink, and public literacy.By the end of her rant she concludes that writing with flowers is superior to other formsof written communication because bouquets maintain secrecy, avoid libel, and are moresuited to transmitting affect than printed words. This playful parody about the troubles ofauthorship together with the pert moralizing is, according to Sadleir’s earlier estimation,typical of Marryat’s fiction. In his final judgment, the Sadleir of 1925 writes:

One may go to [Marryat] for cynical good sense; for knowledge of the world; for gaiety and laughter;for swift uproarious pantomime; for plots that ripple easily to their end or swirl over rocks or slide dan-gerously between steep banks; for vivid pictures of a vanished world; for agile simple English. (789)

In addition to these qualities, The Floral Telegraph shows Marryat’s tendency to makeoutrageous boasts – such the ability to replace all written correspondence with flowers – andto parody institutions – such as writing and publishing. The style of The Floral Telegraphis a clear match for Sadleir’s earlier description of Marryat, but Sadleir’s later image of theCaptain as “the most masculine of authors” makes it difficult to see the satire and parody inhis novel’s discussions of poetry, secret gardens, and sylphs. In other words, Sadleir, withrecent memory more vivid than past, seems to have been so impressed by Marryat’s dominantsubjects (ships, sailors, and social advance) that he could not see the garden/forest for theflowers/trees.


Acknowledging Marryat’s penchant for parody and satire effectively underscores ourreading of Marryat as author, anonymous editor, and Horace Honeycomb, the unreliablenarrator. In his preface, the editor claims that Honeycomb is a verbose, bourgeois flaneur,“remarkable for always selecting an excellent subject – himself” (iii). Honeycomb has theendearing tendency to “make rather liberal use of the pronoun I, with its objective me,”and the editor suggests that “all who thoroughly understand him will be grateful for it”(iv). Honeycomb’s story about his encounter with Floribel will attract criticism and readersare likely to consider it, “nothing but the impressions of a long hallucination” (vi). Theeditor seems unconcerned about these protests: Honeycomb believes his “conference witha preternatural being” was real, and even if he hallucinated, the hallucination “must beacknowledged as a singular phenomenon in physiology” (vi).

The editor neither supports nor rejects the veracity of Honeycomb’s story, but he doesvouch for the existence of Floribel’s cabbalistic manuscript containing the Table of Flowersand the three-part Vocabulary. He has seen with his own eyes this “queer black letter affairupon musty parchment” (vii). As for Honeycomb’s narrative, the editor admits that his“editorial labors” have been “confined merely to the striking out of expletives, and theexpunging of digressions, particularly about himself [Honeycomb]” (viii). This is anotherinstance of Marryat’s poking fun at himself by way of Honeycomb. That the narcissisticHoneycomb’s narrative has been stripped of “digressions” is a farce – and its suggestion amove typical of Marryat.

The editor’s joke about digressions draws out like a slack sail and then catches wind latein the narrative when Honeycomb makes a rather lengthy digression (and Marryat winks at hisreaders) in addressing those who “read running” and thus skip important information in thetext (168). Honeycomb laments that no one reads carefully because they expect digressionsand, “as works are now written, a book consisting wholly of digressions would be one quiteas relevant to the subject as any that have lately appeared” (169). Digressing on the part ofthe writer and skimming or “read running” on the part of the audience leads information to bemuddled in the exchange. Honeycomb explains that his own story should be read carefullybecause it was carefully crafted by an “estated gentleman of landed property of more thanfive hundred pounds a year” (168). After clarifying why readers should pay attention to hisstory, Honeycomb does not return to his encounter with Floribel; rather, he continues bydefending digressions: “Were we always to come to the point at once, where would be all thepleasures of life? Wine and women would then immediately lose all attractions, for shouldwe not be dead drunk in four minutes, and dead dead married in five?” (170). Honeycombcontinues, blaming his tendency to digress upon current trends in fiction and arguing that hisstyle is different than that of “the authors of the present day” who are “fully imbued with thepolicy of not letting their readers come to the point at once, that they will often write youthree well printed volumes, without one single point in the whole” (170–71). Floribel finallyinterrupts the digression to remind Honeycomb that the sun is about to set. She must givehim instructions for publishing her invention, which, she laments, will require words printedon paper instead of flowers tied into bouquets.

Marryat often engaged in such charades. Parascandola observes that “authorialintrusions” can be found throughout Marryat’s novels, and “digressions in Marryat’s earlywork often concern the process of writing” (11). In this case, the narrator digresses froma story (which, ironically, describes why written correspondence should be abandoned forcoded flower bouquets) to defend writing that contains digressions and, as his own narrative


begins to wander, he attacks contemporaneous authors for not coming to the point at once.For Marryat, such satirical intrusions often opened a didactic space in which to commenton social issues and urge reform.6 The playful conflict between the editor and Honeycombstrongly resembles the ambivalent attitudes about novels and novelists found throughoutMarryat’s work. Floribel’s argument against literacy and written communication, however,is distinct.

Widespread Literacy, Poisonous Print, and the Dangers of Education

TRACES OF MARRYAT’S CONCERNS WITH writing and publishing fiction shine throughthe editor’s shifty remarks and Honeycomb’s arrogant digressions, but the most startlingreflection of the author appears in the character of Floribel. On the one hand, it is ironic thatMarryat, whom some scholars assumed was too “masculine” to write about flowers, createsa stereotyped, phantasmal female character that worries if her speech is too “flowery.” Onthe other, Floribel’s vitriolic attack on widespread literacy and written communication seemsto push past the boundaries of irony and to reflect deep misgivings, even paranoia that newpublishing practices and a broadening readership would upset social norms.7

To better understand Floribel’s hatred of written communication (and the tensionssurrounding print and literacy in the early nineteenth century), we can juxtapose her argumentwith Marryat’s non-fiction piece on the “bad effects of sensational literature” (Life and Letters184). Florence Marryat reprinted this essay in her biography and, while she does not includepublishing information, it likely appeared in the Metropolitan during her father’s tenure asowner and editor. The essay begins by noting the “many letters” Marryat received concerningthe circulation of “unstamped publications, full of ribaldry, libel, and obscenity” (Life andLetters 184). Marryat says that these “cheap and obscene periodicals” are almost exclusivelydevoured by the “lower masses” that do not have “strength of mind or principle to oppose”(187). While educated readers of works such as Byron’s Vision of Judgement will haveenough sense to rebuff its attacks on morality, the anonymous, blasphemous, and immoralpublications are harmful when directed at a more vulnerable population.

In Marryat’s essay, the shift from “obscene” periodicals to “poisonous” print mirrors ashift in tone. The masses have begun to take cheap literature in “hebdomadal doses” (118),allowing immorality to spread like an evil virus and to erode the social fabric. Marryat alertshis audience:

[The unstamped publication] is gradually and quietly at work unhinging and vitiating the mass andthe time will come when the evil fruits shall be abundant. Indeed if the evil be allowed to continueit would be better at once to stop all national education for every child that is taught to read is butprepared to receive the poison which is now so rapidly circulating. (Life and Letters 118)

Floribel’s brief analysis of speech practices and the history of communication technologiesfollows a similar trajectory from the “obscene” and horrible to the deadly and “poisonous.”Before written communication, she explains, words were like air, “carried away, where thewind listeth, until the fluid no longer vibrates with their component sounds” (114–15). Theinvention of writing on paper “ushered into the world . . . an accumulation of typical horrors”(116). Fortunately, the “labor of Manuscript writing, and the few who knew how to write, didnot allow the poison to disseminate too widely” (116). Illiteracy kept the dangers of written


communication at bay, until “the devil and Dr. Faustus put their heads together, and inventedthe cursed and abominable art of Printing” and the “atramental ink, was poured forth like thepoison from the fangs of some venomous monster” (117). The printing press was not a signof progress; it increased the possibilities for corruption and the extent to which poisonousinformation could spread.

In addition to referring to written text as poison, both Marryat’s essay and The FloralTelegraph question the value of public education. Floribel warns about, “the dangerous useof the pen, and the more dangerous universality of education, by which fathers and mothersnow know how to read” (126). The Iron Age with its widespread literacy and educationis “now at the zenith of its horrors,” and is perpetuated by “the folly to be wise, whichpervades all classes, from the universities to the infant schools” (118). While the majority ofThe Floral Telegraph is satirical, these arguments reflect popular beliefs about the dangersof mass media and the perceived futility of educating the lower class. Literate children andimproperly educated adults cannot resist anonymous, captivating, and poisonous content.Better not to teach them to read than to let them read rubbish, the argument maintains.

Marryat suggests that the problem posed by the creation of poisonous content and thedevelopment of literacy across classes is exacerbated by new modes of distribution. Floribeldraws an analogy between the circulation of bad blood through the human body and thecirculation of letters through the post office:

Out of the thousands and thousands of communications which are daily disseminated from the GeneralPost Office, that great Aorta which pours forth its mischief by its ramifications, like the arteries andveins of the human body throughout the body politic – I say only reflect a minute, and then tell me. . . how many are there out of the thousands that do not contain some unpleasant communication,some tale that were better left untold! (The Floral Telegraph 119–20)

Increased distribution multiplies those situations where individuals receive bad news fromfamily members and notes about failed business transactions. In other words, Floribel isoutraged by nineteenth-century spam. The constant barrage of negative or superfluous writingmakes those sending or receiving letters anxious and overburdened.

In the essay, Marryat seems anxious that publishers are losing control of what is written,how it is distributed, who reads it and, where it is read. He explains: “It is in secret that thevirus is spread so that no one knows the real extent of it” (Life and Letters 189). Not only isimmoral content circulated, it is impossible to know how many individuals are exposed to itand how thoroughly the “poison” has seeped into the body politic. The writers and publishersare partly to blame, but public education and other programs that promote literacy are also atfault. A populace of citizens educated for literacy (but not knowledgeable enough to discernveracity or morality) perpetuates lies and obscenities.

It is difficult to know if Marryat was actually so violently opposed to literacy, publiceducation, and sensational literature as these two documents would suggest. Marryat’s ownMetropolitan led to an expanding readership that “was to make up a large percentage ofMarryat’s audience” (Parascandola 10). His success as a novelist was closely linked tothe relatively cheap production and distribution of magazine copy and a general rise inliteracy levels across the English-speaking world. Writing a story in which one of themain characters is horrified by written communication and the other, the bumbling poetHoneycomb, has a best friend by the name of “Dr. Snuffletext” may have been Marryat’s way


of parodying sentimental literature and adventure novels while simultaneously romanticizingliterary practices like diary writing and floral codes.

Conclusion: Extended Signals in The Floral Telegraph

SHOULD MY READING BE CORRECT AND MARRYAT accepted as author of The FloralTelegraph, then scholars may uncover new perspectives on the Captain and his novels.For example, one could situate the code work of the flagship signals and the floral telegraphin relation to the “Difference Engine” (1823) and “Analytical Engine” (1837) developedby Marryat’s schoolmate, friend, and the member who brought him into the Royal Society,Charles Babbage. Or one could relate Floribel’s disgust with “poisonous ink” and “hatefultypography” to commentators’ fears that sensational literature threatened to poison the mindsof the uneducated. This would add nuance to the anxieties about democratic speech commonfrom this period and interestingly illustrated by Marryat’s American counterpart, Samuel F.B. Morse, in his paranoid outburst, “Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the UnitedStates” (1835). One could also read Marryat’s elaborate parody of the feminine flower bookgenre and Honeycomb’s complaints about “books as they are written” as an attempt to breakfree of the artistic constraints of the masculine adventure genre and the formulaic fictionthat earned the author fame and success. Of course, one following this approach could uniteMarryat’s The Floral Telegraph with another famously ambivalent sea-novelist, HermanMelville, and his provocative proto-modernist narrative, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story ofWall Street” (1853).

However, as a novel-codebook, it seems more fitting to situate The Floral Telegraphwithin – and cycle it through – another contemporaneous technology with godlike powers to“annihilate time and space” – the electromagnetic telegraph. When The Floral Telegraph wasfirst published, the electromagnetic telegraph had not yet established itself as a paradigmatictechnology. Indeed, at the time, Marryat’s code of flag signals was still one of the mostpopular forms of long-distance communication. In 1833, King Louis Phillipe conferredMarryat with the Croix d’Officer of the Legion of Honor in recognition of the flag signalingsystem, which the French called, La Langue Telegraphique Universelle and which they usedto supplement the blades and shutters of their famous semaphore telegraph line. In 1856,Samuel F. B. Morse traveled to France and received the same honor for his invention ofthe electromagnetic telegraph. Marryat created a universal system for naval communication;Morse did the same for electric communication.

The fourteen years separating the first and second edition of The Floral Telegraph sawa paradigm shift in communication technologies, from Marryat’s code to Morse’s. Duringthis decade and a half the first wave of magnetic wires proliferated through England, France,Germany, and the United States and, by the second half of the nineteenth century, as Marryat’snovels and his codebook began to fade from public consciousness, the number of Morse-coded telegraph messages written and published through electrical devices flowered into themillions.

Just as Marryat’s text blurs the boundaries between novel and codebook, satire andromance, the publication year of 1836 sits on the threshold of a revolutionary transformationin which electric wires and lines would sweep across nations and wind through landscapes likevines through an untended garden. The electromagnetic telegraph – not the floral telegraph– became the dominant mode of communication. The new telegraph promised to seamlessly


code letters and words and their corresponding affections into sputters of electricity translatedinto dot or dash, one or zero. Viewed in this context, The Floral Telegraph provides a prolepticexample, and critique, of the electric telegraphy and subsequent digital networks that arecelebrated for keeping lovers “in touch,” or scorned for failing to transmit true emotions.

Before communication went “electric,” Marryat concludes by way of a magical sylphthat the burdens of sending affections through written words – lack of secrecy, exposureto libel, and the tendency for digressions – call for a more local, organic, individualizedmedium. The floral mode was a possible answer, a way to test “the wisest point . . . whetherwe cannot, even under such disadvantages, to a certain degree, obtain security” and still shareintimate feelings (The Floral Telegraph 128). Of course, the experiment failed. Marryat didnot seriously believe in Floribel’s solution – to replace words and sentences with flowers andbouquets. Yet, historically contextualized, The Floral Telegraph offers an elegant and evenprescient assessment of the communication technologies that arose in its immediate wake,continue to proliferate, and alternately dampen and electrify transmissions of affect.

University of California, Santa Barbara

NOTES

1. Edgar Allan Poe’s assessment of Marryat was acerbic, but not without merit. He declared: “[Marryat’s]ideas are the common property of the mob, and have been their common property time out of mind. Welook through his writings in vain for the slightest indication of originality – for the faintest incentive tothought. His plots, his language, his opinions are neither adapted nor intended for scrutiny” (169). Afterfurther criticizing the lack of creativity and absence of plot in Marryat’s novels, Poe concludes withthoughts about Marryat’s whimsical novel, The Poacher (1841): “Its English is excessively slovenly.Its events are monstrously improbable. There is no adaptaduction [sic] of parts about it. The truth is,it is a pitiable production. There are twenty young men of our acquaintance who make no pretensionto literary ability, yet who could produce a better book in a week” (174). Poe was likely unaware thatMarryat may have actually written The Poacher in a week. In 1833, the Captain boasted in a letterthat he had written sixty-five “novel” pages, of his bestseller, Japhet in Search of a Father, in a singleday (Warner 100). At this approximate rate – 20,000 words a day, more or less – Marryat could havecomposed The Poacher in a five-day workweek. Mr. Midshipman Easy, one of the Captain’s mostcelebrated novels, was completed in about a month. After writing the first half of that work, Marryatwrote a letter to his editor in which he threatened to finish the whole book in eighteen days, “just to beable to say so” (qtd. in Warner 106). Marryat had no qualms about churning out novels for publicationand decades of success as a novelist did not seem to lessen his determination to be remembered firstand foremost as a courageous sailor, a virtuous Englishman, and a loving father rather than a fictionwriter.

2. According to a search of Worldcat.org for “The Floral Telegraph” on 20 August 2012, the followinguniversities and libraries hold a hard copy of the 1836 edition of The Floral Telegraph: Universityof California, Los Angeles; Sterling Morton Library of the Morton Arboretum; University of Illinoisat Urbana Champaign; Franklin & Marshall College; University of Delaware Library; CambridgeUniversity Library; and the British Library. The 1850 edition is held in book format at the Universityof California, Los Angeles; University of Minnesota; Cornell University Library; New York University;Yale University; University of British Columbia Library; University of Aberdeen; New York PublicLibrary; and the British Library.


3. The editor of the 1850 edition added hundreds of new, mostly provocative phrases into the VocabularyPart III, for example:

87. Mamma always goes to sleep after dinner.94. You are extremely dull at a hint.97. Love me, love my dog.100. You always come too early.125. Beautiful despot, I obey you.145. You are as false as these flowers are fading.167. Where was your discretion last night?226. My passion is consuming me.262. The fiercest flame requires to be fed.273. Your beauty exceeds that of these flowers.287. Do not in future come so early.315. There is yet balm in Gilead.317. There is a snake in the grass.340. The days of chivalry are past.

4. The Countess Blessington was one of Marryat’s more infamous and extravagant companions. In the1820s, she and her husband, the Earl of Blessington, became involved in a mysterious love trianglewith the handsome dandy, Count D’Orsay. After the Earl passed away, the Lady and the Count (whowas technically married to the Earl’s daughter) took up residence together at Gore House. Marryatbefriended the couple in the 1830s, visited them regularly, and wrote to Lady Blessington often. TheCaptain’s biographers paint the controversy surrounding Marryat’s friendship with Lady Blessingonin broad strokes: “[Lady Blessington’s guests] were exclusively male, for the breath of scandalalready tainted the air” (Lloyd 255); “Lady Blessington had had a past; besides, her relationship withthe handsome Count D’Orsay was the cause of continual chatter” (Warner 136); “There was somesatisfaction in being taken up by the literary hostess, Lady Blessington, who had just written herown first novel, and the smart dilettante, Count D’Orsay – said by some to be her lover; by others,her homosexual confidant – but this only increased [Marryat’s] extravagance when visiting London”(Pocock 117).

It is possible that his relationship with Blessington had something to do with Marryat’s separationfrom his wife, Catherine “Kate” Shairp. According to third party reports, the Marryats had a tumultuousrelationship. Dickens wrote in a letter that during the 1830s the Captain, “had a hard time of it withhis wife. She had no interest whatever in her children and was such a fury . . . He suffered martyrdomwith her” (qtd. in Pocock 124–25). We might assume that the marriage was dissolving around the timeThe Floral Telegraph was published, and immediately afterward Marryat left for a two year tour to theUnited States. When he returned in 1839, an amicable split was arranged and a “deed of separation”drafted. Marryat agreed to pay Kate an annual allowance of £500 (Pocock 162). Again, Blessington’srole in the breakup is unclear, but the intimate letters she shared with the Captain and the Marryats’domestic troubles offer an interesting biographical context for Floribel’s rhetorical statement: “Howmany fracas between married couples have been created by the uncertainty of written communication,and a trifling misinterpretation of indelible black and white!” (The Floral Telegraph 128–29).

5. For more on the role of gardens in Victorian fiction see: Waters, The Garden in Victorian Literature,especially chap. six, “Floral Codes” (109–48), which discusses the language of flowers and flowerculture of the nineteenth century.

6. The relationship between digressions, satire, and didacticism in Marryat’s work is reflected in hislengthy article, “How to Write a Fashionable Novel: Part I and Part II,” which was published in the


Metropolitan in 1833. For further discussion of Marryat’s satirical writing see: Levine and Levine,“‘How-to’ Satire: Cervantes, Marryat, Poe.”

7. The widespread anxiety regarding fiction’s uncertain moral and political effects on Victorian culturehas been well documented in studies such as Taylor’s Early Opposition to the English Novel (1943) andAltick’s The English Common Reader (1963). Brantlinger’s The Reading Lesson (1998) thoroughlyexamines common tropes of anti-novel discourse and the “ways anxiety about mass literacy andthe huge, largely anonymous, ever-increasing readership for fiction affected a range of novels fromthe 1790s to the 1890s” (3). Although he does not mention Marryat, Brantlinger traces the specificmotif of literature as “poisonous” in the writing of Marryat’s contemporaries Jane Austen, WilliamGodwin, and Dickens. (In an earlier book, Rule of Darkness (1988), Brantlinger devotes an entirechapter to “Captain Marryat’s Midshipman” and the portrayal of adventure, colonialism, and slavery(47–70); however, he does not mention The Floral Telegraph or Marryat’s comments about literacy oreducation).

WORKS CITED

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Bateson, F. W., ed. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1941.

Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century BritishFiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

———. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.Conrad, Joseph. “Tales of Sea.” 1898. Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters. London: J. M. Dent, 1921.Rev. of The Floral Telegraph; a New Mode of Communicating by Floral Signals.” Metropolitan Magazine

17 (Dec. 1836): 105. Microfilm.Hannay, David. Life of Frederick Marryat. London: Walter Scott, 1889.Johnson, R. Brimley, ed. “Introduction.” The Novels of Captain Marryat. Vol. 1. London: J. M. Dent,

1895–1896.Rev. of The Language of Flowers. Metropolitan Magazine 10 (Jul. 1834): 74. Microfilm.Lawrence, Lindsay Michelle. “Metropolitan Magazine (1831–1850).” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century

Journalism. 2009. Web. 3 May 2012.Levine, Susan, and Levine, Stuart. “‘How-to’ Satire: Cervantes, Marryat, Poe.” Modern Language Studies

16.3 (1986): 15–26. JSTOR. Web. 5 Aug. 2013.Lloyd, Christopher. Captain Marryat and the Old Navy. London: Longmans, 1939.Marryat, Florence (Mrs. Ross Church), ed. Life and Letters of Captain Marryat. Vol. 1. New York: D.

Appleton, 1872.Marryat, Frederick. A Code of Signals for the Use of Vessels Employed in the Merchant Service, Including

a Cypher for Secret Correspondence. 4th ed. London: J. M. Richardson, 1826.———. Diary of a Blase. Philadelphia: E. L. Cary and A. Hart, 1836.———. The Floral Telegraph; A New Mode of Communication by Floral Signals. London: Saunders and

Otely, 1836.———. The Floral Telegraph; Or, Nature’s Affections. 2nd ed. London: Saunders and Otley, 1850.Parascandola, Louis J. Puzzled Which to Choose: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the Works of Captain

Frederick Marryat. New York: P. Lang, 1997.Pocock, Tom. Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer, Adventurer. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole, 2000.Poe, Edgar Allan. “Frederick Marryat.” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 7. Ed. Charles F.

Richardson. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1902.


Sadleir, Michael. XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record Based on His Own Collection. Vol. 1.London: Constable, 1951.

———. “Captain Marryat, a Portrait.” Yale Review 13 (1924): 774–89.Seaton, Beverly. The Language of Flowers: A History. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 1995.Shattock, Joanne, ed. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 4 vols. 3rd ed. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2000.Spilka, Mark. Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.Sutherland, J. A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London: Athlone P, U of London, 1976.Taylor, John Tinnon. Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830. New

York: King’s Crown, 1943.Warner, Oliver. Captain Marryat: A Rediscovery. London: Constable, 1953.Waters, Michael. The Garden in Victorian Literature. Cambridge: Scolar, 1988.Woolf, Virginia. The Captain’s Deathbed, and other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1950.

CAPTAIN FREDERICK MARRYAT AND THE FLORAL TELEGRAPH; OR, A FORGOTTEN CODER AND HIS FLORAL CODE

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