Mr. Midshipman Easy is an 1836 novel by Frederick Marryat, a retired captain in the Royal Navy. The novel is set during the Napoleonic Wars in which Marryat himself served with distinction.
Easy is the son of foolish parents, who spoiled him. His father, in particular, regards himself as a philosopher. By the time he is a teenager, Easy has adopted his father’s points of view to the point he does not believe in private property. Easy joins the navy, which his father believes the best example of an equal society, and Easy becomes friendly with a lower deck seaman named Mesty (Mephistopheles Faust), an escaped slave, who had been a prince in Africa. Mesty is sympathetic to Easy’s philosophizing, which seems to offer him a way up from his lowly job of “boiling kettle for de young gentlemen”; but once Mesty is promoted to ship’s corporal and put in charge of discipline, he changes his mind. In some way Mesty is the real hero of the novel, as he pulls Easy out of several scrapes the impulsive seventeen-year-old gets himself into as he cruises the Mediterranean on several British ships.
Easy becomes a competent officer, in spite of his notions. Easy’s mother dies, and he returns home to find his father is completely mad. Easy senior has developed an apparatus for reducing or enlarging phrenological bumps on the skull, but as he attempts to reduce his own benevolence bump, the machine kills him. Easy throws out the criminal servants his father has employed and puts the estate to rights, demanding back rents from the tenants, and evicting those who will not pay. Using his new-found wealth, he formally quits the navy, rigs out his own privateering vessel, and returns to Sicily to claim his bride Agnes. As he is a wealthy gentleman now, her family cannot refuse him, and he and Agnes live happily ever after.
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