Ben Burton; or, Born and Bred at Sea, by W H G Kingston.
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The story really consists of a series of nautical and shore incidents,
to do with Ben Burton and his family. During the course of the story he
goes from being born, to a senior Naval rank. Shortly after he is born
they come across a dinghy drifting with an ayah and a small white girl,
who grows up in parallel with Ben, though she is spared some of his more
martial adventures.
It's always difficult to get a timescale with books like this one, as
the years seem to go past much faster than the supply of adventures.
I was somewhat baffled by the paragraphing in this book. For most of
the book the paragraphing is as you would expect it to be, but there is
an over-supply of very long paragraphs, and some of these contain quite
complex conversations, so that one is tempted to split them up so that
passage looks more conventional and readable. I have not done so,
except in one flagrant case, because I suspect that Kingston may have
been experimenting in some way. On the other hand it may be that he had
contracted to write a book of so many pages, and this was a way of
condensing a long conversational exchange.
There were some other strange things to be noticed, such as places and
people changing their spelling (Benjy and Benjie, for instance), within
a few lines. And there were some words that Kingston spells correctly in
other books, but anomalously in this one. It's almost as though he
dictated the book to a typist, and then never actually read it for
himself. It lends weight to the theory that Kingston books were
authored by more than one person, because this one is within his rules
of style, except for the really quite numerous typographical anomalies
mentioned above.
Apart from that, the story is quite good to read or to listen to, just
as Kingston books always are.
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