Dr Julia Banister

Richard Glover is not known as a gothic writer. Glover forged his literary career at the end of the Augustan age, and his major work, the nine-book neoclassical epic Leonidas (1737), was praised by Augustan worthies. He remained an Augustan long after the reading public’s appetite for neoclassicism had faded: his twelve-book reworking of Leonidas (1770), like his posthumously published three-volume poem The Athenaid (1787), added little to his literary standing and much to his later reputation as one of the century’s “second-rate writers of longer poems.” Glover might have slipped from the pages of literary history altogether had he not also penned a short party political ballad, “Admiral Hosier’s Ghost” (1740). “Admiral Hosier’s Ghost” was not included in the only collection of Glover’s poetry published during the author’s lifetime in 1743, but the poem was reprinted regularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the mid nineteenth century, the literary editor Robert Chambers observed that “[a] popular vitality has been awarded to a ballad of Glover’s, while his epics have sunk into oblivion.” Nearly two decades later, Robert Inglis, editor of Gleanings from the English Poets, Chaucer to Tennyson (1862), introduced Glover’s poem even less sympathetically as the work of a “LONDON merchant, who published some elaborate poems in blank verse, which are now little known. His ballad of Admiral Hosier’s Ghost is the only piece now read.”

This book discusses the nature of masculinity in eighteenth-century literature and culture through the figure of the military man.

One month after the publication of his poem on merchant seafaring, The Shipwreck (1762), William Falconer left merchant sailing to become a junior officer in the Royal Navy. In the midcentury, many commentators believed that the Royal Navy's sailors were superior to merchant sailors. Falconer's response can be traced by contrasting his first edition of The Shipwreck with the revisions he made to the poem after joining the Royal Navy. The revisions address directly the notion that merchant sailors value only financial reward, but then focus on the notion that sailors who fight for king and country are braver than those who move cargo. In the revised narrative of the sailors’ battle with the elements, Falconer emphasizes the physical limits to their bravery, and thus suggests that merchant sailors are like Royal Navy sailors because all sailors are equally vulnerable to storms at sea.