Jacob Faithful, by Captain Marryat.
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Captain Frederick Marryat was born July 10 1792, and died August 8 1848.
He retired from the British navy in 1828 in order to devote himself to
writing. In the following 20 years he wrote 26 books, many of which are
among the very best of English literature, and some of which are still
in print.
Marryat had an extraordinary gift for the invention of episodes in his
stories. He says somewhere that when he sat down for the day's work, he
never knew what he was going to write. He certainly was a literary
genius.
"Jacob Faithful" was published in 1834, the fifth book to flow from
Marryat's pen. The story tells the life and adventures of a boy who was
born and brought up on a lighter (small river-barge) on the River
Thames as it flows through London. It gives an extremely interesting
contemporary picture of life in London and on the river in the early
part of the nineteenth century.
This e-text was transcribed in 1998 by Nick Hodson, and was reformatted
in 2003, and again in 2005.
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