Core Principles of Shantying

Although specific taxonomies vary among sailors and historians, we can divide shanties into three general categories: hauling shanties (used for pulling), heaving shanties (used for pushing), and forecastle ballads (sung for leisure and entertainment). Heaving and hauling shanties are work songs: they enforce a rhythmic discipline via a call-and-response structure, with the lead voice keeping other hands in time—a musical form influenced by and borrowing from plantation work songs and spirituals sung by free and enslaved African, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American men and women (see Hugill 13–20). When the physical work was complete, forecastle ballads, which ranged from the bawdy to the sentimental to the patriotic, strengthened homosocial bonds between crewmen.

Whether sung for labor or leisure, choral music has long served as a technology for organizing bodies in time.Footnote ¹⁴ Especially for vocal pieces, the integrity and execution of the song depends upon everyone obeying a set tempo and rhythm. Call-and-response verses and choruses, moreover, compel one voice to join in with the many through the power of narrative and the power of repetition. “All British and American … shanties had a theme or pattern telling some sort of consecutive story,” writes Hugill (32). We would expect forecastle ballads to recount a tale, but, as maritime historian Stuart M. Frank explains, even common working songs relied on the power of a story to “coordinate rhythms” and “unify efforts,” leading “ten or twenty or eighty men … in working rhythmically together.”Footnote ¹⁵ Hugill emphasizes how “strict tempo had to be kept,” especially during the choruses, wherein the men would all heave, haul, pull, pump, or march in unison (31). The chorus synchronizes the crew, who internalize the controlling tempo; with every repetition, the collective action falls on the same word or beat. In sum, the work, the rhythm, and the story all reinforce one another.

Sea shanties extend the principles of choral music to the level of biopolitics, creating a system of shipboard life that splices together song, movement, storytelling, and self-disciplinary control. In the process, shanties organize bodies not only in time but also in space. Take, for example, the classic shanty “Drunken Sailor,” which appeared in print as early as 1841.Footnote ¹⁶ What initially seems like mockery of a hungover crewmate ultimately reveals far more serious expectations about labor and community. After repeatedly posing its central question—“What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”—the shanty offers several striking options:

Another version goes even further, with punishments ranging from whipping (“Give him a taste o’ the bosun’s rope-end”), burning (“Stick on his back a mustard plaster”), and what we might call nonconsensual manscaping (“Scrape the hair off his chest with a hoop-iron razor”) (Hugill, Shanties, 110). In all such verses, “Drunken Sailor” recounts a kind of sailorly hazing: the transgressor gets roughly treated—drenched, hauled, whipped, burned, and shaved—as a means of initiation into the shipboard order. In the process, the shanty lays out some community standards for expected behavior. Comical though it may initially seem, “Drunken Sailor” offers a warning: step out of line and suffer the consequences.

Not coincidentally, the singing sailors would be literally stepping in unison as they sang, marching in tempo. “Drunken Sailor” was often used as either a “stamp-and-go” shanty or a capstan shanty. In the former, the crew grips a rope over their shoulders and collectively “stamps” (stomps) away from a pulley, hoisting whatever lies at the other end of the line. In the latter, the crew marches around a capstan, a winch on a vertical axis used to raise heavy objects (such as anchors). “Drunken Sailor,” in sum, synergizes content and form: the song that tells a story about physical discipline keeps the singers physically disciplined. In other words, narrative, movement, and control go hand in hand when shantying.

Through both storytelling and disciplinary rhythm and repetition, shanties create a composite physio-social body—a distributed biopolitical network. Consider, for instance, two verses from “So Handy,” a hauling shanty that appears in print as early as 1869:

The “story” of the shanty is the same as the work at hand; the orders to the crew become part of the song’s narrative content. The men must pull in unison, raising the yard (the vertical spar that holds the top edge of a square sail) until the sail “show[s] her clew”—her lower corners, signaling that the canvas is taut. The abundant “handy[ness]” of “So Handy” reminds us, at regular intervals, of the collective physical body at work. “Hand” is, of course, a common bodily synecdoche for laborer: factory hands, ship hands, all hands on deck.Footnote ¹⁹ Here, then, all the “hands” would join in, appropriately enough, on the “handy[s]” of the chorus. The regular—and deliberately monotonous—rhythm and repetition of the shanty thus enforces a bodily discipline: the collective hands all pull on the downbeat, every time.

As a shanty unites the hands into a collective physical body, it simultaneously prompts them to adopt a collective sociopolitical identity, to see themselves as part of a larger whole. In particular, shanties prompt sailors to perform and internalize gender roles and sexual identities via narratives of courtship and sexual exchange. “So Handy,” for instance, effects a specifically gendered understanding of shipboard labor. (An alternative title for the shanty is “Handy, Me Boys.”) The literal and figurative manpower of the song reminds us that the ship was largely a single-gendered space—a homosocial heterotopia, both mirroring compulsory heteronormativity (the men getting “hand[s]y” with the female ship) but also transforming it into a kind of homosocial-cum-homoerotic labor (a bunch of men pulling, sweating, and grunting in unison).Footnote ²⁰ (Another alternate title for the same shanty is “Handy, Me Girls.”)

Through such enforced physical and social unity, the shanty effectively multiplies sailors’ labor power. Even landlubbers should understand that many sailors pushing or pulling in unison can heave or haul much more than an individual sailor. As Frank puts it, “a good yarn and a rousing chorus” could make “the work more efficient and lighter for all hands.”Footnote ²¹ Hugill likewise observes that a “good song was worth ten men on a rope” (30). Herman Melville demonstrates this multiplication in Redburn (Reference Melville, Raymond and Edition1849): while singing and hoisting the sails aboard a merchant ship, Redburn notes that “every man’s arms were as much relieved as mine by the song, and he could pull as much better as I did, with such a cheering accompaniment.”Footnote ²² The song improves not only the endurance and efficacy but also the mood of the sailors. In a similar later passage, Redburn surveys “a vast fleet of merchantmen,” and he hears “the deep mellow old song Ho-o-he-yo, cheerily men! as the crews catted their anchors.”Footnote ²³ An efficient, cheerful merchant crew would, in turn, produce a greater profit. Redburn implies as much with his economic language: “I am sure the song was well worth the breath expended on it.”Footnote ²⁴ Like an HR system designed to keep employees happy but also on task, the shanty wrings even more labor and profit out of the shipboard hands.

The Shantyman’s Prosthetic Networks

At the helm of this biopolitical-economic system of collective laboring bodies is the shantyman, the crewman leading the song. As Hugill notes, the shantyman “was essential to the easy working of the ship,” but unlike the officially designated captain and officers, there was no official rank of shantyman; he was, instead, “self-appointed” (30). Much like the three characters I examine in the following sections—Long John Silver, Captain Cuttle, and Silas Wegg—the shantyman simply shows up and takes control, shaping the world around him via song. Recall, too, my opening anecdote from Smith’s Music of the Waters: the shanty moves the crew “with a will.” Note the double meaning: the sailors move both enthusiastically (getting the job done “with a will”) but also subordinately (internalizing and obeying the “will” of the shantyman). A shanty thus impresses the other sailors into a spatio-temporal network—the shantyman’s sense of where, when, and how other bodies move.

I thus argue that shanties prosthetically extend the body of the shantyman. Through the disciplinary rhythm and repetition of the shanty, the shantyman gains control of multiple sets of hands—and, by extension, the associated networks of sociopolitical power, maritime mercantile profit, and heterosexual and homosexual drive. Rather than taking part in the direct physical labor, the shantyman enacts what I call narrative labor, using the power of a story to inaugurate a cascade of extended movement: he leads the song that describes the labor that unites the hands that move the ship. Such extension is inherently prosthetic, “adding, furthering, [and] advancing” the shantyman’s sociopolitical control via collective physical power.

Consider, for example, the prosthetic songs of Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Shantying enables and marks his transformation from a lowly ship’s cook to the captain of the mutineers. Near the beginning of the novel, as the crew of the Hispaniola prepares to set sail, Silver inaugurates a prosthetic chain of labor: he provides the voice that moves the hands that turn the winch that raises the anchor.

Here the able-bodied sailors of the Hispaniola, with Silver to the side directing them, gather around the capstan. Each grips a “stave,” a wooden bar slotted into sockets around the head of the capstan. Beginning on the final “ho!” the sailors push as one body, turning the winch to hoist the anchor. The passage moves from the oral to the aural to the physical, tracing a progression of voices (the two sailors, then Silver, followed by the whole crew in chorus) to a group of hands that “dr[i]ve the bars before them with a will.” Even the shanty itself gains a figurative physical presence: the passage describes how the “whole crew bore the chorus,” as if carrying a tune involves carrying actual weight. Note, too, the imbrication of song and physical labor via the double meaning of “stave,” which is both the wooden lever used to turn the capstan as well as a musical staff—the lines and spaces that organize written music. “[T]ip us a stave” thus simultaneously means “sing us a song” and “let’s get to work.” The title of the shanty similarly reminds us of the connection between profitable labor and embodiment: the “dead man’s chest” is both a treasure chest and a human torso.

Although the song itself is fictional—a melodramatic invention by Stevenson—it nevertheless incorporates formal elements of real heaving and hauling shanties.Footnote ²⁶ Heaving shanties accompanied slow work over long time spans. To fill that time, shantymen would borrow, repeat, and improvise verses, extending the song as long as needed for the work at hand (Hugill, Shanties, 32). In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins refers to “Dead Man’s Chest” as an “endless ballad” (164); he likewise observes that the shanty has “seemingly no end to it all but the patience of the singer” (163). As Frank explains, heaving shanties were “sung primarily to allay boredom and promote morale” during long, arduous tasks like heaving up the anchor.Footnote ²⁷ Such seems to be the case with the men aboard the Hispaniola: in the scene above, one sailor specifically asks for the “old one,” suggesting that “Dead Man’s Chest” is a perennial crew favorite. Shantymen also punctuated choruses with timed yells, shouts, and vocalizations to break up the monotony of capstan labor and reinforce the tempo. Hugill cites two examples from shanties that sound strikingly familiar to the “Yo-ho-ho” chorus of “Dead Man’s Chest”: “Yo ho, heave ho!” and “Yo heave ho, round the caps‘n go” (28–29).Footnote ²⁸ Richard Henry Dana Jr., in his 1840 memoir Two Years before the Mast, likewise recalls how “all hands manned the windlass” (a capstanlike winch on a horizontal axis) and “the long-drawn ‘Yo, heave, ho!’ … soon brought the anchor to the bows.”Footnote ²⁹ The repeated “ho!” of the “Dead Man’s Chest” chorus is perhaps a truncation of “hove,” the nautical verb for heaving up the anchor via the capstan (OED).

Such shouts would often serve as cues to push or pull, synchronizing the laboring crew’s efforts and multiplying their physical power. Smith emphasizes these effects in her description of “Haul on the Bowline,” a sixteenth-century short-haul shanty that features a repetitive call-and-response chorus (“Haul on the bowline, the bowline haul!”): “At the word Haul,” writes Smith, “the tars give a tremendous jerk on the rope…. At the last word every man will throw his whole strength into the pull, all singing it in chorus, quickly and explosively, and so jump by jump, the sheet [the rope attached to the bottom corner of square sails] will be hauled taut at last.”Footnote ³⁰ Unlike the march around the capstan—a slow, steady grind—hauling shanties demand “quick and explosive” movement, with “every man … throw[ing] his whole strength into the pull.” In the same way, Silver, as the shantyman, commands “tremendous” physical power—the collective “whole strength” of the laboring hands of the Hispaniola. Smith’s example also demonstrates how the repetitive chorus synchronizes the labor: every crewman would know the cue to pull on “haul!”—so all hands could pull as one collective body. “Dead Man’s Chest” affords the same kind of synchronization: yoked together via Silver’s shanty, the able-bodied crew knows to heave on the third “ho!” of the chorus. So even though “Dead Man’s Chest” is a fictional shanty (see note 26), it nevertheless produces historically specific forms of biopolitical and prosthetic control. Through his shantying performance, Silver wields extended and multiplied corporeal power, a collective body synchronized under his command.

The narration, however, does not initially proclaim such power directly; if anything, it reinforces the deceptive nature of Silver’s control. The passage begins by calling attention to his supposed lesser status: it notes the “crutch under his arm,” reminding us of Silver’s missing leg and his supposedly diminished physical abilities. The passage also invokes his lowly position as ship’s cook (via his nickname, “Barbecue”)—a role traditionally assigned to disabled sailors, who were usually seen as unable to contribute to the physical work of the ship. Indeed, Silver does no actual bodily labor here. The passage clarifies that he is “standing by,” physically apart from the crew marching around the capstan; moreover, the specificity of this work—the marching—draws a contrast between the able-bodied crew and the one-legged, crutch-bearing cook. Yet though he lifts neither arm nor leg (nor crutch) of his own, Silver remains central to the operation. As the shantyman, he sets the tempo and coordinates the collective action; as a result, the synchronized crew function as an extension of his body—prosthesis in action. So as the men “dr[i]ve the bars before them with a will,” it is the “will” of Long John Silver.

The prosthetic power of the “Dead Man’s Chest” shanty aligns with Ryan Sweet’s analysis of prosthetics in late Victorian and Edwardian pirate adventure fiction. In these narratives, Sweet argues, peg-legged and hook-handed pirates display an exceptional degree of physical prowess; their prosthetics enable them to contribute to the vigorous (if villainous) shipboard labors. Prosthetics thus signal not loss but rather “adaptability, defiance, determination, courage, and resilience.”Footnote ³¹ Sweet also highlights how Silver’s famous interjection—“shiver my timbers”—links his wooden crutch with the larger wooden ship and, by extension, all of its associated labors: hence “this stock nautical phrase,” Sweet writes, is “implicitly tied to not just wooden-leggedness but also a capacity to work regardless of physical disability.”Footnote ³² That metonymic connection between prosthesis and labor is what enables Silver’s social mobility: Sweet points out how Silver’s extended labors help him “climb the social ladder” in the ship’s hierarchy and end the novel richer than he began.Footnote ³³

Building on Sweet, I argue that Silver’s sociopolitical and economic ascent begins with the “Dead Man’s Chest” shanty. The song inaugurates the novel’s mutiny plotline, as it grants Silver control of the larger collective body of the crew. This prosthetic networking helps launch not only the Hispaniola but also Silver’s scheme to wrest away control of the ship from Captain Smollett and company. By invoking the formal elements of shanties, “Dead Man’s Chest” speaks to the temporality and tenor of Silver’s prosthetic control: he builds a powerful mutiny slowly and steadily, winning the crew to his side over the weeks of the voyage. Even the naïve Jim Hawkins eventually spots the political reconfiguration spreading underneath and through Silver’s shantying: Silver, says Jim, “kept up one song after another, as if to conceal the discontent of the rest” of the mutinous crew (114). By the time they reach the island, Silver’s authority surpasses that of Captain Smollett. As Jim describes it, “It was as plain as day. Silver was the captain…. All the crew respected and even obeyed him” (115). The mutiny simply codifies what the “Dead Man’s Chest” shanty has already revealed: a prosthetic network built around Silver.

A barometer of Silver’s sociopolitical control is the conveniently named Israel Hands, the ship’s coxswain (steersman). Hands serves as a synecdochic figure: as part of the Hispaniola’s crew, he represents the other deckhands (as noted above, “hand” is a common synecdoche for a laboring sailor)—so Silver’s command of Hands speaks to his command over other hands aboard. We meet Hands soon after Silver’s first performance of “Dead Man’s Chest.” Hands falls in line and performs his duty (in Silver’s words) “hand over hand” (88). And later, when Hands wants to prematurely spring the mutiny, Silver rebukes him:

Silver commands Hands to stick to the plan, to maintain the steady pace of the mutiny plot. Hands and the other hands must continue their labor before the mast (“you’ll berth forward, and you’ll live hard”). Extending his bodily language, Silver draws attention to Hands’s ears: no action shall be taken until the men hear Silver “give the word.” The rebuke recalls the labor at the capstan: ever the shantyman, Silver sets the pace and vocally signals the start of movement.

The Social Networking of Shanties

A “very salt-looking man” who “had been a pilot, skipper, or a privateersman, or all three perhaps,” Captain Cuttle shares much in common with Long John Silver.Footnote ³⁴ Like Stevenson’s infamous one-legged pirate, Dickens’s hook-handed Cuttle is a disabled maritime nonprotagonist who uses shanties to organize bodies around him, creating a prosthetic social system that extends his influence within his literary world. Silver and Cuttle engage not in physical labor but rather in what I call narrative labor, knotting together plotlines and social systems. As the following section will demonstrate, the power of shantying to “move” networked characters is both literal and figurative: shanties afford not only physical control (moving synchronized sailors around a capstan) but also narrative progression (moving interconnected characters through plotlines and social systems in a storyworld). Much like how Silver’s shantying inaugurates and advances the mutiny plot of Treasure Island, Cuttle’s shantying shapes the marriage plot of Dombey and Son.

Yet Cuttle’s form of sociopolitical organization via shantying differs from Silver’s in terms of structure, affect, and genre. Whereas Silver seeks to consolidate power into a centralized network (with him at the center, wielding control over others), Cuttle functions more as a social mediator, creating a distributed network of mutually beneficial connectivity. If Silver’s influence hinges upon the literal movement that shantying affords, then Cuttle, by contrast, is more attuned to figurative movement—the development of the right kind of social storylines. Silver wants to keep all hands under his thumb, but Cuttle works to bring multiple characters into better relation with one another. These differences, I believe, stem from a difference in shantying genre: while Silver channels the disciplinary forms of heaving and hauling shanties, Cuttle invokes the sociality of the forecastle ballad. Sung during leisure hours, these songs strengthened social bonds by fostering a shared sense of identity and community. Cuttle recasts the biopolitical techniques of shanties in a positive register: his shantying affords not sweaty, disciplined bodies but rather cheerful, socially integrated ones.

This seemingly minor character thus has a hand in creating the collective social body of Dombey and Son’s multiplot world. In network terms, Cuttle functions as a high-degree social nexus, an intermediary who fosters and facilitates connections between interlinked dyads—namely, cascading character pairs: between Sol Gills and Walter, Walter and Mr. Dombey, Mr. Dombey and Florence, Florence and Mr. Toots, Mr. Toots and Walter, Walter and Mr. Carker, Mr. Carker and Rob, Rob and Florence, Florence and Bunsby, and Bunsby and Mrs. MacStinger, among others. Crucially, Cuttle also serves as an avuncular guide and guardian for Walter and Florence, presiding over their progression through the marriage plot. Cuttle often inaugurates and highlights such dyadic relationships via song. In the process, he extends his influence throughout the novel’s social world and becomes, in the words of Georg Simmel, the “Tertius Gaudens” (“the third who enjoys”), transforming dyadic ties to triadic systems of mutual relation.Footnote ³⁵ In short, Cuttle’s shantying marks the (trans)formation of social bonds and thus helps us track the novel’s processes of community formation.

When we read Cuttle not just as a sailor but specifically as a shantyman, we see how he brings those around him together in chorus. As songs form around Cuttle, so too do social bonds. This hook-handed sailor thus performs narrative labor, motivating and mobilizing other characters and thereby pulling together the social systems of the novel. When, for instance, Walter learns that he is being sent to Barbados, he seeks the counsel of Cuttle, who is described as a “powerful mediator” (233). Walter charges the captain with the care of his uncle, Sol Gills, to whom he has not yet told the news. Cuttle, says Walter, will serve as his “one friend at home who knows my real situation,” someone who can help “[i]n case any means should arise of lending me a hand” (237). Walter and Cuttle then break out into a shanty—not only to confirm the commission of care but also to quash any anxiety about Walter’s departure:

Here we see (and hear) Cuttle in his role as social and narrative catalyst. His presence prompts the shanty, which in turn registers impending changes (Walter’s departure and Cuttle’s stewardship of Gills). Although we might expect Cuttle—certainly the more nautically experienced of the two—to lead the song, his role as chorus makes sense in the context of the narrative. Cuttle, after all, is not a leading protagonist but a social intermediary—a “powerful mediator” who brings characters into communal relations. In the same scene, for instance, Cuttle’s chorus, “roared” out after Walter’s verses, moves a nearby sailor to join in:

The passage emphasizes not just the “fine effect” of the voice added to the chorus but also the “instant[aneous]” power of the song: the shanty rips the skipper out of bed and throws him into friendly relations at full volume. The concluding “ahoy!”—a “friendly greeting”—reiterates such sociality: the skipper concludes with that famous nautical welcome, signaling connection even at this moment of departure. Such connection—Cuttle’s “powerful mediat[ion]”—is what calms Walter’s anxiety; he can depart for Barbados because Cuttle, the helpful “hand … at home,” will take up Walter’s familial care (of Sol Gills) and economic duties (at the Wooden Midshipman).

Cuttle’s helpful “hand” is, of course, actually a hook—and the scene directly associates the prosthesis with his extended social and narrative influence. As the captain ponders how to “arrange the future life and adventures of Walter,” he “put[s] his iron hook between his teeth, as if it were a hand” (a substitute for “bit[ing] his nails a bit”) and thereby “labour[s] with such great designs” (237–38, 240). The wording frames Cuttle’s hook as a catalyst not only for work—here the mental labor of “arrang[ing]” Walter’s future—but also for inaugurating “great designs,” Cuttle’s vision of socio-narrative systems that afford fitting “adventures” for Walter. For Cuttle, the hook is an aid, one that enables him to imagine the right kind of “design” or story in which to locate his young friend. For the reader, then, the hook is a shorthand, a symbol of Cuttle’s prosthetic power to pull in, organize, and influence bodies around him. An accompanying illustration by Hablot Browne visualizes this arrangement: we see (as the caption tells us) the “profound cogitation” of Cuttle, hook in teeth, with Walter inclined toward him (239). Although the mock-epic language of the caption humorously elevates a supposedly less-than-able mind to “profound” heights of “philosophical reflection and grave inquiry” (238), the image’s composition reminds us of Cuttle’s prosthetic power to draw the bodies around him into specific “designs”: Walter conspicuously leans toward Cuttle and mirrors the angled line of the captain’s posture. And while Walter’s eyes look up to Cuttle’s, Walter’s face is on the same horizontal plane as the hook; the prosthesis, shaded dark to stand out against Cuttle’s white shirt, occupies a prominent place in the illustration.Footnote ³⁶

In the same way that Cuttle’s chorus moves the skipper and encourages Walter to enter a wider world, Cuttle’s repeated choruses of “Lovely Peg”—his favorite ballad about a waterside romance—propel a crew of characters through the marriage plot of Dombey and Son. To be sure, Cuttle quotes (and misquotes) several actual historical working shanties and popular maritime-themed songs across the novel, including “Mariners of England” (364), “Heart of Oak” (137, 364), “Rule, Britannia” (593), “Bay of Biscay” (600), and “The Sailor’s Consolation” (745; see also 990n9). But for the purposes of my argument here, Cuttle’s repeated performances of the “Lovely Peg”—a fictional forecastle ballad, one most likely invented by Dickens—best signal his role in shaping the marriage plot. As noted above, my focus is less on the historicity of specific literary shanties and more on their socio-narrative affordances: even though “Lovely Peg” originated in Dickens’s brain rather than before the mast, the song nevertheless organizes bodies in space and time and grants prosthetic control to the singer.

Early in the novel, Cuttle fantasizes that Walter will one day marry Florence Dombey, the daughter of Walter’s employer. To transform this dream into reality, Cuttle

The “Lovely Peg” provides a blueprint for Cuttle’s narrative labor: he works to effect the “courtship and nuptials” of Walter and Florence, superimposing the narrative of this “ballad of considerable antiquity” onto their young lives. The passage notes Cuttle’s emphasis on “the word Pe-e-eg,” which is both “the heroine of the piece” but also arguably a pun on prosthetic extension and substitution (namely, a peg leg)—a double meaning punctuated by the repeated “shake” of another maritime prosthesis, Cuttle’s hook hand, at the end of “every verse.” Fittingly, Cuttle not only extends the word into three syllables here (“Pe-e-eg”) but also later attempts to substitute Florence’s name into the song (“Fle-e-eg”) (156).

The “Lovely Peg” ballad draws together additional characters as Dombey and Son progresses. In Cuttle’s subsequent performances of “Lovely Peg,” the song comes to mark the formation of strong social ties within the narrative, especially in relation to plotlines of “courtship and nuptials.” For instance, when Cuttle breaks the news to Gills of Walter’s departure (thus interrupting Walter’s supposedly destined connection with Florence), Cuttle uses “the romantic legend of Lovely Peg” to soften the blow (256). Cuttle also marks Walter’s miraculous return—and reentry into the marriage plot—with the ballad (although it gets “stuck in [the] throat” of the emotional captain) (753). Later, while singing “Lovely Peg,” Cuttle runs into the wedding party of Bunsby and MacStinger, two characters he introduced to one another (921). And at the end of the novel, celebrating the marriage of Walter and Florence that he prophesized and effected through song, Cuttle lets fly one more “prodigious roar” of the “Lovely Peg,” with Gills and Mr. Toots joining in on the chorus (947).Footnote ³⁷

Despite Cuttle’s frequent repetition of the ballad, we never learn the full lyrics of “Lovely Peg.” The song is almost certainly a Dickensian invention, blending content from multiple popular maritime-themed musical works by Charles Dibdin.Footnote ³⁸ As Trey Philpotts explains, “although Dickens often quotes real songs, at other times he conflates motifs from several songs, as in the ‘ballad of considerable antiquity.’”Footnote ³⁹ Dibdin, a composer who greatly influenced Britain’s popular maritime cultural imagination around the turn of the nineteenth century, seems a likely source of inspiration.Footnote ⁴⁰ Andrew Sanders suggests that the “Lovely Peg” alludes to “Saturday Night at Sea” (1789), Dibdin’s popular song also known as “Sweethearts and Wives.”Footnote ⁴¹ The song follows three sailors as they reminisce about their loves on shore.Footnote ⁴² “Lovely Peg” also contains elements of Dibdin’s The Waterman (1774), a comic opera about two men competing for the hand of one woman.Footnote ⁴³ The double allusion here reinforces the association between Cuttle’s “Lovely Peg” ballad and “courtship and nuptials.”

In multiple ways, then, Cuttle’s sea songs afford a kind of social networking, signaling the formation of tight-knit communities in Dombey and Son. His shantying produces a shared spatio-temporal imagination akin to what Jonathan Grossman describes in Charles Dickens’s Networks (Reference Grossman2012). In his shrewd analysis of community and transnational public transport systems, Grossman shows us how Dickens’s novels take shape alongside the rise of “an interlocking global passenger network” that relies upon shared temporality (e.g., standardized railroad timetables).Footnote ⁴⁴ Dickens’s novels, argues Grossman, channel that alignment of shared time and shared movement in order to imagine forms of community: through its “crisscrossing journeying of characters simultaneously circulating all around,” the Dickensian novel crafts a shared sense of a connected world.Footnote ⁴⁵ Cuttle’s sea songs afford a similar communal “interlock” of collective movement and shared temporality, highlighting how Dombey and Son imagines a dynamic narrative character-system always in motion.

The shantying Cuttle thus helps us think through narrative emplacement, the arrangement of characters within a literary text. In The One vs. the Many, Woloch outlines the concept of “character-space,” the “intersection of an implied human personality … with the definitively circumscribed form of a narrative.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In theory, explains Woloch, a character is a fully fleshed persona; in practice, though, that persona appears only through whatever limited space the narrative affords. Woloch calls the overlapping gestalt of character-spaces the “character-system,” the “mutually constituting interactions” of emplacement as determined by a character’s “relative position vis-à-vis other characters” (18). Even if two characters do not directly interact in a given story, their character-spaces inherently do because they share the same character-system—the narrative’s “distributed field of attention” (17). Woloch thus helps us see, as he puts it, the “social dimension of form” (18): how emplacement not only locates but also fundamentally creates characters via a relational network. Cuttle’s shantying, I believe, showcases the “social dimension of form”: in Woloch’s words, it helps “organize a large number of different characters within a unified symbolic and structural system” (14). His singing, as we have seen, functions as a technique of social and narrative emplacement: it draws together a collective body of characters, shaping their relations and movements.

Yet Cuttle’s social and narrative influence seems at odds with his supposed status as what Woloch would call a “minor” character: a nonprotagonist figure who largely “disappear[s]” into the text due to their relatively limited character-space. “[W]hat we remember about the [minor] character,” writes Woloch, “is never detached from how the text, for the most part, makes us forget him” (38). Because so many nonprotagonists must complete for limited narrative space—especially in a multiplot Dickens novel, populated by a small army of characters—they readily slip into the background of the narrative’s “distributed field of attention.” What happens, though, when a supposedly “minor” character influences the warp and weft of the larger character-system? It seems hard to “forget” Cuttle: we arguably think of this nonprotagonist in any scene with the more “major” characters of Walter and/or Florence—even if Cuttle is physically absent—because he provides the narrative framework (the marriage plot) through which we understand their actions. When we read Cuttle not just as a quirky sailor sidekick but specifically as a shantyman, then, he transcends his “minor” status. To be sure, Dickens’s multiplot novels offer other instances of nonprotagonist characters with relatively outsized social and/or narrative influence, but the shantying Cuttle provides arguably the clearest insight into the techniques that enable such extended networking by minor characters.

Given his influence upon and integration within the social and narrative systems of Dombey and Son, Cuttle also puts to the test David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of “narrative prosthesis.” Noting the fundamental connection between disability and sociality,Footnote ⁴⁷ Mitchell and Snyder observe that textual prostheses are often “transgressive,” “troubling” normative ideas of social integration in narrative worlds. Whereas real-life prostheses are designed to blend in and render physical disabilities less visible, prostheses in literary narratives often do the opposite: they call attention to a disabled character’s lack of fit into the social system.Footnote ⁴⁸ As we have seen, however, Cuttle challenges that idea. Rather than troubling sociality, the hook-handed captain actively catalyzes and enhances it. In the words of David Wills, whose study Prosthesis (Reference Wills1995) laid the foundations for that area of disability studies, “prosthesis is inevitably about belonging.”Footnote ⁴⁹ As a vector of such social “belonging,” Cuttle helps us parse the abilities of narratively networked prosthetic bodies. In a sense, everyone but the shantyman becomes disabled by a shanty: because one body becomes linked to another, the crew’s movements are restricted to a certain time and space.Footnote ⁵⁰ (Recall how Cuttle superimposes the “Lovely Peg” narrative onto the lives of Walter and Florence, impressing them into the marriage plot.) Yet, at the same time, shantying empowers the collective body: individual bodies connect until they create an assemblage capable of the task at hand. The extended body can now move and do things that an individual body could not do before. We see this prosthetic power in Dombey and Son: any narrative task—marrying Walter and Florence, for instance—requires (to again borrow Woloch’s words) “a large number of different characters within a unified symbolic and structural system.” And to organize such a collective body, we need a “powerful mediator”—a socializing shantyman like Cuttle.

Maritime Forms of the Victorian Novel

If Cuttle helps us parse the “social dimension of form,” then another disabled Dickensian nonprotagonist—Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend—helps us see the maritime dimensions of form in the Victorian novel. I recognize that the terrestrial Wegg may seem an odd choice here alongside two obviously maritime characters. But the peg-legged Wegg, just like Silver and Cuttle, signals his social integration (or, more accurately, infiltration) via shantying and seeks a similar degree of prosthetic control and sociopolitical influence.

Wegg refers to his scheme to defraud and disinherit Mr. Boffin as the “friendly move,” and he punctuates his plan with snippets of shanties—songs, as we have seen, that organize bodies in space and time and thus effect movement and control. Immediately before he proposes his mutinous plan to his accomplice Mr. Venus, Wegg inserts a modified verse of Charles Dibdin’s “The Tar for All Weathers” (ca. 1790):

Apropos to the onset of the “friendly move” blackmail plot, the song delivers commands for sailing straight into heavy weather. The technical maritime language denotes the arrangement and movement of the ship and the crew.Footnote ⁵² To sail directly into the wind, the ship is close hauled (“lay her close”), with canvas wrapped as tight as possible and the yardarms turned almost parallel to the length of the ship (“Yard arm and yard arm she lies”). The crew must labor at the ropes and rigging (“Man shrouds and grapples”) to keep the ship on course (or else “she flies”). In sum, a whole prosthetic system of “arms”—both human and nonhuman, flesh and wood—move in unison toward a shared objective. What Wegg lacks in physical mobility he makes up for in commanding allusions: he co-opts this story of “true British Oak” (299) to catalyze his own mutiny of sorts. The “Oak” here is a double entendre: it is not only a material metonym for the strength of the ship and of the sailors (recall the popular refrain to “Heart of Oak”),Footnote ⁵³ but also a nod to the literal wood of Wegg’s prosthetic peg leg.

Later, when Wegg wants to pursue Mr. Boffin, Venus holds him back; the two scuffle, and Wegg loses the physical contest. Venus lifts and throws Wegg down to the ground, knowing that “once down, [Wegg] would not be up again easily with his wooden leg” (484). To counter his physical immobility, Wegg in turn deploys another adapted maritime verse—this time from “All’s Well”—to regain the upper hand and reassert his command of the “friendly move”:

The song comes from the comic opera The English Fleet, in 1342 (Reference Dibdin1805) by Thomas Dibdin, the son of Charles Dibdin.Footnote ⁵⁴ Wegg uses the allusion to reinstate a sense of vigilance, substituting the walking sentry for his own currently prone and immobile body. In Thomas Dibdin’s original, the verse that follows moves the action from land to sea:

Wegg’s initial allusion, then, reminds Venus of who is at the helm (so to speak) of the blackmail plot: under his lone “careful watch,” Wegg will save their plan “from foes or wreck.”

Notably, the two Dibdins’ songs to which Wegg alludes are not actual working shanties; rather, they are maritime-themed ballads for popular consumption, likely to be heard as much in the music hall on land as in the forecastle at sea (see note 38). These songs exemplify what the master mariner Whall (quoted above) calls “imitations by landsmen,” secondhand commercial spin-offs designed to sound legitimately nautical. This is quite fitting, however, for Wegg’s plotline of deception, inheritance, profit, and successively newer and newer documents.

More importantly, even though they may be commercial “imitations,” these popular sea songs still afford Wegg some of the prosthetic power of actual working shanties, extending his body through the controlled movements of others. After his version of “The Tar for All Weathers,” for example, Wegg gets the more dexterous Venus to snoop around the dust mounds on his behalf (300). And later, after “asserting a proprietorship over [Boffin’s] soul and body” in the blackmail plot (643), Wegg sings another modified snippet of a commercial maritime ballad before wielding puppetlike control over Boffin, repeatedly forcing him to enter and exit the doorway of his own home:

The lyrics come from Samuel James Arnold’s “Death of Nelson,” part of John Braham’s 1811 opera The Americans. Through the song Wegg alludes to Admiral Horatio Nelson’s famous order—“England expects that every man will do his duty”—at the commencement of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Wegg fashions himself as a latter-day Nelson, a commanding naval figure who, not coincidentally, was also physically disabled. (Through combat Nelson lost most of his right arm and the sight in his right eye.) The song thus signals the level of control that Wegg sees himself having over Boffin. Corrupting the patriotic sense of Nelson’s original wording, Wegg defines Boffin’s “duty” as subservience. In a moment of free indirect discourse, blending Wegg’s and Boffin’s thoughts with the narrative voice, the text then (repetitively) describes how “the all-powerful Silas must needs claim another assertion of his newly asserted power” (646). Hence the not-so-friendly “move” that follows the song: Wegg forces Boffin to enter and exit the doorway multiple times, a display of the former’s prosthetic control over the latter. Fittingly, the passage closes with a description of Wegg “labour[ing] with a will” (646), language that recalls the heaving and hauling under actual working shanties. Compare Dickens’s phrasing here to my previously quoted lines from Stevenson’s Treasure Island (where the shantying crew “drove the bars before them with a will”) and Smith’s Music of the Waters (where the shanty “brings down the main tack with a will”).

If we consider only surface-level content, Wegg’s maritime allusions make general sense in terms of characterization. He was, after all, a streetside ballad-seller before Boffin employed him, and he would likely be familiar with popular works such as “The Tar of All Weathers,” “All’s Well,” and “Death of Nelson.” Yet, at first glance, Wegg is hardly the most maritime-minded character in Our Mutual Friend. After all, Dickens’s “foremost river novel” (as Ursula Kluwick puts it) hosts a bustling community of characters all directly connected by water: for example, Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam, Rogue Riderhood (and eventually Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wrayburn), John Harmon, George Radfoot, Abbey Potterson (and most of her clientele at the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters), and even the stuffy Mr. Podsnap (who deals in maritime insurance).Footnote ⁵⁵ Wegg, so firmly planted among the terrestrial dust heaps, seems to lie at the margins of this riparian character-system.

What happens, though, if we think about Wegg and Our Mutual Friend in terms of not just maritime content but also maritime form—specifically, the networked movements and structures that cohere around and through sea songs? If we read Wegg as a shantyman in the vein of Silver and Cuttle—a nonprotagonist character who wields prosthetic control over movement and structure—then he seems less like a marginal anomaly, less like a minor character who “disappears” (in Woloch’s formation), less like a “troubling” terrestrial outsider (in Mitchell and Snyder’s phrase), and more like a fundamental maritime-minded catalyst in the novel’s social and narrative systems.

As Bérubé says, “disability demands a story,” but Wegg—and Silver and Cuttle, too—show us that the narrative affordances of disability entail more than just stories of how a given disability came to be. None of the novels under discussion here clarify how their respective characters lost their appendages. Because Silver, Cuttle, and Wegg do not occupy the privileged textual position of protagonists or major characters, we learn little of their backstory—or, at least, we never can pin down the exact details of their backstory. Cuttle is introduced with ambiguity: the narrator describes him as a man who “had been a pilot, skipper, or a privateersman, or all three perhaps” (56). Silver tells two contradictory tales about how he lost his leg: in one version, told to impress Squire Trelawney, Silver claims that he lost it patriotically, serving under Admiral Edward Hawke in 1747 (81); in another version, told to impress his fellow mutineers, Silver boasts that his leg was “ampytated” by a famous piratical surgeon after a broadside aboard the Walrus under Captain Flint, circa 1719–20 (101).Footnote ⁵⁶ One of these versions might be true, but, given Silver’s track record of duplicity, both might also be false. This uncertainty is never resolved because in Treasure Island, much like in Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, the narration is never focalized at length (if at all) through the perspective of nonprotagonist characters. Silver, for instance, though a domineering presence, never achieves the privileged “I” of first-person narration; Jim tells Silver’s story for him. Put differently, the limited character-spaces of Silver, Cuttle, and Wegg afford little narrative room for their personal histories.

Yet, despite this seeming minorness, all three prove vital to narrative advancement. Silver, Cuttle, and Wegg spur plotlines and shape their respective social worlds via shantying, organizing bodies in space and time. The story that these disabled nonprotagonist shantymen “demand” is less about narrative replacement (filling in their own backstories) and more about narrative extension (organizing characters so as to bring literary social worlds into being). Such extension is, of course, part of that expanded definition of prosthesis I quote above: “adding, furthering, advancing, [and] giving additional power” to the body. In effect, then, the body extended via prosthesis is not only that of the shantyman character but also the corpus of the character-system, the body of text that constitutes the world of a given novel.

Sea shanties thus provide insight into the maritime forms of the Victorian novel. While networks are, of course, forms not exclusive to maritime fiction, I believe that a specifically maritime form—the sea shanty—helps us better understand the distributed biopolitical and social systems of the Victorian novel, even in supposedly “terrestrial” plotlines. In this sense, certain Victorian novels might be more “maritime” than we assume. This reconceptualization informs the structure of my article: I began with a classic Victorian example of maritime fiction—Stevenson’s piratical tale, Treasure Island—but concluded with a novel that we might not readily classify in that genre, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Such is the reconceptualizing power of a blue humanities approach. “Thinking with water”—here, analyzing the formal affordances of shanties, the maritime technologies that enabled commercial oceanic circulation and exchange—helps us expand and remap our understanding of the very boundaries of maritime fiction as a genre. When we categorize a text as “maritime fiction,” we usually base our classification on content. (Does the story take place at sea? Are the characters sailors?) But what happens when we think about the genre in terms of form? What kinds of textual structures and arrangements register the influence of a wider oceanic world?

As I recently explained in the second VLC “Keywords” issue, the oceanic is not simply a “descriptor or space” but also a mode of literary representation, a “meaning-making strategy” that posits a world both literally and symbolically connected by water. To “read the oceanic”—to understand that water-networked world—we must “pars[e] the overlapping systems of meaning … that take shape around bodies of/on/in water.”Footnote ⁵⁷ As I demonstrate in the present article, sea shanties help us engage in this wider historicist-formalist mode of reading. What might initially seem like simple maritime window dressing—having one-legged pirates and hook-handed sailors sing shanties to make them sound appropriately salty—actually reveals the warp and weft of narrative social systems. By tracking the prosthetic power of shantying, we better understand how certain Victorian novels imagine the interrelation of shared movement and structure within a narrative community.