William Falconer

William Falconer (11 February 1732 - December 1769) was a Scottish poet, best known for his long poem, The Shipwreck.

The Shipwreck, by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), 1805. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Tate Gallery.

Life

Overview

Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh, where he was born. He became a sailor, and was thus thoroughly competent to describe the management of the storm-tossed vessel described in his poem, The Shipwreck (1762), a work of genuine, though unequal, talent. The efforts which Falconer made to improve the poem in successive editions were not entirely successful. The work gained for him the patronage of the Duke of York, through whose influence he obtained the position of purser on various warships. Strangely enough, his own death occurred by shipwreck. Falconer wrote other poems, now forgotten, besides a useful Nautical Dictionary.

Youth and education

Falconer was born 11 February 1732 (Carruthers). His father was a poor barber in Edinburgh. A brother and sister were deaf and dumb; the sister was living in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh in 1801.

Falconer appears to have had an early taste for literature, which was checked by a "freezing blast of adversity" (see description of "Arion" in Shipwreck, canto 1).

Clarke describes Falconer as 5 feet 7 inches in height, slight in frame, weather-beaten, and pock-marked. His manners were "blunt, awkward, and forbidding;" he talked rapidly and incisively; he was cheerful, kindly, and a good comrade, and seems to have been a thorough seaman, with all the characteristics of his profession. His education had been confined to English and a little arithmetic; but he understood French, Spanish, Italian, and "even German."

Career

Falconer joined a merchant ship at Leith. He was afterwards a servant, according to Currie (Burns, 1801, ii. 283), to Archibald Campbell (1767 fl.), then purser on a man-of-war, who discovered and encouraged his literary tastes. He became 2nd mate to a ship in the Levant trade, which was wrecked on a voyage from Alexandria to Venice, when only 3 of the crew were saved.

In 1751 he published a poem on the death of Frederick, prince of Wales — which is about as good as the subject requires. He contributed a few poems to the Gentleman's Magazine, and Clarke guesses, on very slight grounds, that he wrote the popular song "Cease, rude Boreas!" generally attributed to George Alexander Stevens.

In 1762 he published his chief poem, the Shipwreck, founded on his own experience and dedicated to the Duke of York, then rear-admiral. The duke advised him to enter the royal navy, where there would be opportunities for patronage.

He was rated as a midshipman on Sir E. Hawke's ship the Royal George. When the duke sailed with Sir Charles Hardy in November 1762, Falconer celebrated the auspicious event in an ode, according to his friend Hunter, "composed in a small space between the cable tiers and the ship's side." The duke is elaborately compared to "Alcmena's warlike son," tearing himself from pleasure to seek virtue.

The Royal George was paid off on the peace of 1763, and Falconer became purser of the Glory frigate. He soon afterwards married Miss Hicks, daughter of the surgeon of Sheerness yard. The Glory was laid up in ordinary at Chatham, and Commissioner Hanway, brother of Jonas, had the captain's cabin fitted up as a study for the literary purser. Here, in 1764, he wrote the Demagogue, a political satire, attacking Wilkes, Churchill, and Lord Chatham, and showing much loyalty and some power of vituperation.

In 1767 he was appointed purser to the Swiftsure. In 1769 he published The Universal Marine Dictionary, a book well spoken of, in which "retreat" is described as a French manœuvre, "not properly a term of the British marine." There were later editions in 1771, 1784, 1815, and 1830.

By this time Falconer is said to have been living in poverty in London, though the dates of his appointments seem to imply that he cannot have been long unemployed. Chalmers contradicts upon authority Clarke's statement that he had "a small pittance for writing in the “Critical Review.”’ Hamilton, the proprietor of the Review, received him hospitably, but did not employ him as a writer.

Last years

In 1768 John Murray was starting in business by purchasing Sandby's bookselling shop opposite St. Dunstan's Church. He offered a partnership in his enterprise to Falconer in a letter dated 16 October 1768 (in Nichols, Lit. Anecd. iii. 729). The offer seems to prove that Falconer was favorably known to publishers. He declined it, apparently in consequence of an offer of the pursership of the Aurora frigate, which was about to take Vansittart, Scrafton, and Ford to India as supervisors of the company's affairs. Falconer was promised the secretaryship.

He sailed in the Aurora 20 September 1769. After touching at the Cape the ship was lost. Clarke mentions but disbelieves a report that she was burnt by an accident caused by the supervisors' passion for "hot suppers" The à priori probability of such a catastrophe is small, he thinks, and is certainly not sufficient to command assent in the absence of all direct testimony.

Falconer's widow died 20 March 1796, and was buried at Weston, near Bath (Notes and Queries, 1st ser. xi. 322). Cadell, the proprietor of the Marine Dictionary, supplied her liberally, even after the "expiration of the usual period of copyright."

Writing

The Shipwreck

A 3rd edition of the Shipwreck was prepared by Falconer just before his departure. It contained many alterations, which appear from the preface to have been his own, though Clarke, who thinks them injurious, attributes them to Mallet, who died in 1765. It reached an 11th edition in 1802, and has since appeared separately and in many collections.

Falconer's Shipwreck resembles most of the didactic poems of the time, and is marked by the conventionality common to them all. But it deserves a rather exceptional position from the obvious fidelity with which he has painted from nature; and though his use of technical nautical terms is pushed even to ostentation, the effect of using the language of real life is often excellent, and is in marked contrast to the commonplaces of classical imitation which make other passages vapid and uninteresting. In this respect the poem made some mark, and Falconer had certainly considerable powers of fluent versification.

Critical introduction

by Edward Dowden

In the Gentleman’s Magazine for December, 1755, appeared a versified complaint, "On the Uncommon Scarcity of Poetry, by a Sailor". The scarcity still prevailed when seven years later a sailor — the same perhaps who had written the complaint — startled English readers by his discovery of a new epic theme. The Muse, as Falconer imagines her, visits him in no olive-grove, or flowery lawn, but in a glimmering cavern beside the sea; his lyre is tuned to

‘The long surge that foams through yonder cave,

Whose vaults remurmur to the roaring wave.’

There was largeness, and freedom and force in the subject he had chosen; and what is best in his treatment of it was learnt direct from the waves and winds. No one before Falconer had conceived or told in English poetry the long and passionate combat between the sea, roused to fury, and its slight but dexterous rival, with the varying fortunes of the strife. He had himself, like his Arion, been wrecked near Cape Colonna, on the coast of Greece; like Arion, he was one of three who reached the shore and lived. For the material of his brief epic he needed but to revive in his imagination the sights, the sounds, the fears, the hopes, the efforts of five days the most eventful and the most vivid of his life.

The Shipwreck is not a descriptive poem; it is a poem of action; each buffet of the sea, each swift turning of the wheel is a portion of the attack or the defence; and as the catastrophe draws near, as the ship scuds past Falconera, as the hills of Greece rise to view, as the pitiless cliffs of St. George grow clear, and the sound of the breakers is heard, the action of the poem increases in swiftness and intensity.

Falconer was a skilful seaman; unhappily he was not a great poet. The reality, the unity, the largeness of his theme lend him support; and he is a faithful and energetic narrator. But the spirits of tempest and of night needed for their interpreter one of stronger and subtler speech than Falconer. Nor was it possible to render into orderly couplets after Pope the vast cadences, the difficult phrases of ocean. The poet’s diction is the artificial diction of eighteenth-century verse, handled with none of that exquisite art shown by some cultured writers of the time. And into the midst of the commonplace poetic vocabulary bounces suddenly a rattling row of nautical terms suitable only for the Marine Dictionary. Phœbus and Clio must lend a hand to brail up the mizen, or belay the topping-lift.

The persons — Albert prudent and bold, the rough Rodmond, the tender Arion — are drawn in simple outlines. "Some part of the love-story of Palemon," says Campbell, "is rather swainish." But Falconer’s love-sentiment is as genuine as any other part of the feeling of his poem; and a sailor writing on gentle themes becomes perhaps naturally a swain. The seal of fidelity was set upon Falconer’s sea-poem by death — an unknown death in some unknown sea.

Recognition

Falconer's poems were used by Patrick O'Brian in his Aubrey-Maturin series. A lesser character is a nautical poet, but his poems are Falconer's.

The lines

With living colours give my verse to glow:
The sad memorial of a tale of woe!

(from The Shipwreck, Canto I) were used as a motto for Tafereel van de overwintering der Hollanders op Nova Zembla in de jaren 1596 en 1597 (1820) by Dutch poet Hendrik Tollens (1780–1856).

Publications

Poetry

• The Shipwreck: A poem in three cantos (by "a sailor"). London: privately published, printed by A. Millar, 1762, 1764; 3rd edition (by William Falconer), London: T. Cadell, 1769
  • London: J. Wren & J. Hoges, 1785; London: Booksellers in York, Leeds, Newcastle, Carlisle, &c., 1789; London: R. Rusted, 1800; London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1800; London: J. Cundee for T. Hurst, 1803; London: W. Miller, 1806; Edinburgh: J. Ballantyne for Alexander MacKay & John Murray, 1807; London: J. Cundee, 1806; London: Cadell and Davies, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Lackington, Allen & Co., J. Mawman, C. Law, & Robert Scholey, 1808.
  • Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1774; Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1788; Baltimore, MD: W. Pechan, 1796; New York: James Oram, 1800; New Bedford, MA: Abraham Shearman, 1802.
• Ode on the Duke of York's Second Departure from England, as rear admiral: Written aboard the Royal George, by the author of The shipwreck. London: A. Millar, 1763.
• The Demagogue (by "Theophius Thorn"). London: G. Robinson & J. Roberts, 1766.
• Poetical Works. London: C. Cooke (Cooke's edition), 1796.
• Poetical Works. London: J. Sharpe, 1805.
• The Shipwreck, and other poems. Chiswick, UK: Press of C. Whittingham, 1821.
• Poetical Works. London: William Pickering, 1836.
• Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer (with James Beattie & Robert Blair; edited by George Gilfillan). Edinburgh: James Nichol (Library Edition of the British Poets), 1854.
• A Critical Edition of the Poetical Works (edited by William R. Jones). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.

Non-fiction

• An Universal Dictionary of the Marine; or, A copious explanation of the technical terms and phrases employed in the construction, equipment, furniture, machinery, movements, and military operations of a ship. London: T. Cadell, 1769.
  • Falconer's Marine Dictionry. New York: A.M. Kelley, 1970.

The Shipwreck 1

The Shiprwreck 2

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Stephen, Lsslie (1889) "Falconer, William (1732-1769)" in Stephen, Leslie Dictionary of National Biography 18 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 164-165  . Wikisource, Web, Jan. 11, 2018.

External links

Poems

• Extract from The Shipwreck, Canto III
• William Falconer at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive ("Ode on the Duke of York's Departure")
• William Falconer at PoemHunter (11 poems)

Books

• William Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine (National Library of Australia)
• Works by William Falconer at Project Gutenberg

About

• Falconer, William in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica].
• Biographical Memo
• William Falconer at Electric Scotland
• William Falconer at Lives of Scottish Poets
• The Shipwreck, by William Falconer at Royal Museums Greenwich
• George P. Landow, "William Falconer and the meaning of shipwreck" at the Victorian Web

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Falconer, William (1732-1769)