Minor Characters: Canning, the Jew

The other as mirror in Post Captain and HMS Surprise

Which it’s the first in an occasional series on minor characters of particular fascination in the canon, inspired in this case by my recent rereading of HMS Surprise. As per usual, I am ruthless about spoilers, so if you haven’t read the novels in question you may want to give this piece a skip until you’ve finished them.

William Hogarth, Captain Sir Alexander Schomberg (1763)

Richard Canning makes his first appearance in Post Captain at “Queenie’s rout”—a party given by Jack Aubrey’s former nanny, the remarkable polymath also known as Lady Keith, and who certainly warrants a Minor Character essay of her own.¹ At this stage in his career Commander Aubrey is shipless and in debt, and going into London to attend a very public party puts him at risk of arrest. But he must take his chance, not simply because he loves Queenie but because Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty, will be there, and the chance of getting a ship to command is worth any risk. Jack is at the buffet when Queenie approaches him with another man in tow: “she was leading a big man in a sky-blue coat with silver buttons and she said, ‘Jack, dear, may I introduce Mr Canning? Captain Aubrey, of the Navy.’”

A big man in a sky-blue coat with silver buttons—this admittedly thin description could apply as easily to Jack himself. The similarities between them increase as a fuller description is given:

Jack liked the look of this man at once, and during the first meaningless civilities this feeling grew: Canning was a broad-shouldered fellow, and although he was not quite so tall as Jack, his way of holding his small round head up and tilted back, with his chin in the air, made him look bigger, more commanding. He wore his own hair—what there was left of it: short tight curls round a shining calvity, though he was in his thirties, no more—and he looked like one of the fatter, more jovial Roman emperors; a humorous, good-natured face, but one that conveyed an impression of great latent strength. “An ugly customer to have against you,” thought Jack, earnestly recommending “one of these voluptuous little pies” and a glass of Constantia. (161)

Jack’s thought about the “ugly customer” foreshadows the end Canning’s arc will come to in HMS Surprise, when Stephen Maturin will kill him in a duel over Diana Villiers. But in the immediate context Canning inspires admiration and respect, in the teeth of two unpleasant shocks. First, “Mr Canning was a Bristol merchant. The news quite astonished Jack. He had never met a merchant before… a poor thin bloodless set of creatures they seemed—a lower order; but it was impossible to feel superior to Mr Canning” (161-2). This intuition about Canning’s force of character is confirmed when Canning reveals that he “fitted out some privateers in the last war,” and was himself aboard one of them, so that he has “at least some notion of the sea.” A merchant, then, but a warrior in spirit, and a seaman. This inspires from Jack a naive question, and Canning’s subtle response:

“Was you ever in the Service, sir?” asked Jack.

“I? Why, no. I am a Jew,” said Canning, with a look of deep amusement.

“Oh,” said Jack. “Ah?” He turned, going through the motions of blowing his nose, saw Lord Melville looking at him from the doorway, bowed and called out “Good evening.” (162)

There’s a lot to unpack in this seemingly inconsequential little scene. The Jack Aubrey we know by this early stage in the series has all the conventional prejudices of a middle-class Englishman of his time. The word “Jew” makes its first appearance in Master and Commander, when Jack, having inadvertantly insulted his Irish first lieutenant James Dillon with “a few well-turned flings against the Pope” (107), tells Stephen that it was Queenie who taught him “quantities of things about the Papists,” and follows the remark up with some equal-opportunity offensiveness: “after a great deal of this damned paper-work I am quite ready to hate Papists and Protestants, too, and Anabaptists and Methodies. And Jews. No—I don’t give a damn” (108). Stephen, who has yet to reveal to Jack that he is himself a Papist, responds with forbearance, since he already understands that there is no malice in Jack, just a blundering tendency to fill the air with conventional opinions he has never before had cause to question.

It is quite curious that these conventional opinions should be associated with Queenie, given that it is she who will introduce Jack to the first living Jew he’s ever been inspired to respect. Jack is clearly floored by Canning’s response to his innocent question, and is just well-bred enough to try to disguise his shock. But he overcomes this response, overwhelmed by Canning’s generous offer to put Jack in charge of one of his privateers and so to make his fortune. “Full of life, intelligent, gets the point at once, interested in everything – civil, too, delicate and modest; perfectly gentlemanlike; you would swear he was an Englishman” (194)—this is how Jack later describes him to Stephen, with his usual unthinking John Bull chauvinism. And it’s true that in appearance and conduct, Canning is every inch the patriotic Englishman, a near double to Aubrey who knows less Hebrew than Queenie does: “He is about as much as a scholar as you are, Jack” (165). He is in short the very opposite of the antisemitic caricature of the frail, cunning, sinister old Jew figured by characters like Shakespeare’s Shylock or Dickens’s Fagin. James Caan circa 1976 would have been an ideal choice to play him, assuming he could do the accent.

Both Stephen and Jack come to esteem Canning as a man, even as he becomes a rival for the affections of Diana Villiers. Displays of antisemitism are left to other, minor characters, as in the amusing, telling scene when boy-crazy Cecilia Williams spots him at the party lingering in Diana’s wake:

“How beautiful he is,” murmured Cecilia.

“Colonel Colpoys?” cried Mrs. Williams.

“No, Mama, the gentleman in the blue coat.”

“Oh, no, my love,”—lowering her voice, speaking behind her hand and staring hard at Canning—”that gentleman is a jay ee double-u.”

“So he is not beautiful, Mama?” (169)

Beauty in the canon often represents a parallel morality, above or to one side of the conventional morality so fiercely defended by Mrs. Williams, who is almost literally blinded by prejudice. Canning’s grace and dash aligns him with Diana, who follows her own rules of conduct in a society quick to condemn her as a loose woman. Canning’s amusement, Diana’s biting wit—these are forms of irony, as Jewishness and femininity are forms of otherness. The Other dwells in an access of irony that takes various forms through history—the double consciousness of W.E.B. Du Bois, the camp of closeted homosexuals, etc. Canning’s wealth and force of personality overwhelm, at least for a time, the petty malevolence his society directs at him, as Diana’s intelligence and courage keep her afloat. They are in fact pretty well matched, probably better so than Stephen and Diana ever could be, and if there was not already a Mrs. Canning, they might have made something lasting together.

Instead, his arc is tragic, though it is not his Jewishness that undoes him—at least not obviously so—but his pride. In HMS Surprise, Canning changes roles, a rival to Stephen rather than a foil to Jack. Stephen is the canon’s primary figure of otherness: a bastard, a Catholic, half Irish and half Catalan, quite possibly neurodivergent.² He is also Other as a seaman—utterly incompetent aboard ship, yet prized by the crew for his medical expertise and his extensive learning. At times he seems to accept his own otherness with equanimity—he shows extraordinary self-restraint in Master and Commander whenever Jack says something insulting about Catholics. But he can also be dangerously thin-skinned, and has become an experienced duellist as a consequence. Canning too, we are told, is “of a jealous disposition” (HMS Surprise 199), though to what degree his jealousy derives from his uncertain status as a Jew is impossible to say.

When Stephen first confronts Diana in Bombay with his offer of marriage, she too is susceptible to the touchiness of the Other’s pride. When he declines one of Canning’s dressing gowns to wear, we can see (though there is only dialogue) Diana drawing herself up into her most imperious stance:

“Why? Because it is Canning’s gown? Because he is my lover? Because he is a Jew?”

“Stuff. I have the greatest esteem for Jews, so far as anyone can speak of a heterogeneous great body of men in such a meaningless, illiberal way.” (231)

Stephen is a liberal thinker in the old sense of the word: as a natural philosopher he is more careful of the individual than he is of the type.³ Too used himself to being mischaracterized by his parentage or his religion, Stephen reacts to Canning’s behavior as a man, not as a Jew. When Canning catches Stephen kissing Diana in Calcutta, Canning slaps him—and as we know from the very first pages of the series, no gentleman can turn the other cheek from a blow without losing his honor. Etheredge, the marine to whom Stephen turns to be his second in the duel, is appalled that Stephen would risk his life fighting a Jew, and argues against it in the ugliest possible terms, but Stephen remains firm in his resolution to fight Canning.⁴ There is no other way he can preserve his self-respect; at the same time, by meeting Canning on equal terms, he honors his opponent’s manhood, though it will be at the cost of Canning’s life.⁵

The gentleman in the painting at the top of this post is Captain Sir Alexander Schomberg (1720-1804), the son of a German-Jewish doctor named Meyer Löw Schomberg. Unlike Canning, Schomberg chose to renounce his Judaism and to be baptized in the English Church, so that the Test Acts would not stand between him and his worldly ambitions. Can it be a coincidence that he at one time commanded a frigate named HMS Diana, or that he ended his career as the commander of a yacht belonging to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland? The name “Schomberg” does not appear in the canon, though given his dates it’s conceivable that he and Jack Aubrey might have met. In Aubrey’s encounter with Canning at Queenie’s rout, the idea of a Jewish Royal Navy officer seems utterly remote to both parties, yet there Schomberg stands—a haunting remnant of what this minor character, as full of life as Jack Aubrey and as full of lonely pride as Stephen Maturin, might have become.

1. Hester Maria Elphinstone, née Thrale, was the daughter of Hester Thrale, the dear friend of my beloved Samuel Johnson, and signifies the deep connection between the world of O’Brian’s novels and the London of Johnson and Boswell. Her father was a wealthy brewer and she was a true bluestocking, proficient in Latin, Italian, Hebrew, and other languages, and she made a study of astronomy and geography as well. In the canon she is young Jack’s geometry teacher, which may very well have something to do with his late-blooming skills as a mathematician. She is the first of several learned women in the canon who provide a valuable counterpoint to the novels’ masculinist world, culminating in Stephen Maturin’s last love interest, the naturalist Christine Wood.

2. A claim I may follow up with a full post someday. For now, I’ll note that Holmes and Watson, along with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, set the template in western literature for male friends of opposed temperaments whose connection, though nonsexual, is as profound as marriage. Holmes’ eccentricities and impatience with social conventions have sometime led to interpretations that would seem to suggest the character is on the autism spectrum or has ADHD (in the BBC series, Martin Freeman’s John Watson openly suggests that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes may have Aspergers). Stephen, meanwhile, is often described as being in some ways inhuman—the cold, pale, “reptilian” eyes, capable of the remotest detachment from others, and taking refuge in his diary from the intense loneliness he seems to feel even, or especially, when he is living in close quarters with three hundred other men. He even becomes the father of a little girl, Brigid, who is given recognizably autistic characteristics. Of course no character of any depth, like no living person, should be reduced to a diagnosis, but what fascinates me here is Stephen’s sense of his own otherness, and the tragedy that results when it collides with an otherness of a different source.

3

The wish, that of the living whole
         No life may fail beyond the grave,
         Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,
         That Nature lends such evil dreams?
         So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere
         Her secret meaning in her deeds,
         And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,
         And falling with my weight of cares
         Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
         And gather dust and chaff, and call
         To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope. 

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam 55

‘Ain’t he a Jew? You don’t have to fight a Jew, Doctor. You must not put your life at risk for a Jew. Let a file of Marines tan his unbelieving hide and ram a piece of bacon down his throat, and leave it at that.’

‘We see things differently,’ said Stephen. ‘I have a particular devotion to Our Lady, who was a Jewess, and I cannot feel my race superior to her; besides, I feel for the man; I will fight him with the best will in the world.’

4. Against Etheredge’s hateful antisemitic pledge of pogrom, we have Stephen’s “I feel for the man”—that is Stephen Maturin at his liberal and empathic best.

5. Interestingly, it is the duel with Canning that results in Stephen’s being wounded with a pistol-ball, producing the celebrated scene in which the doctor operates upon himself, reproduced in a different context in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. In the film, Stephen is wounded accidentally by a marine who is trying to shoot a bird that Stephen is following around the deck in wide-eyed wonder. The wound, in other words, is entirely innocent, a result of Stephen’s fundamental unworldliness. In HMS Surprise, by contrast, he is wounded in the duel with Canning, after having unintentionally killed his opponent. On the operating table he refuses help from his assistant: “‘No, sir. I do this with my own hand.’ He looked at it critically, and said, more or less to himself, ‘If it could undertake the one task, it must undertake the other: that is but justice.’” In this far richer context for the scene, Stephen’s wound is fundamentally self-inflicted, a physical manifestation of the injury to his amour-propre done not by Canning but by the world at large. In the movie, it’s not clear to me why he insists on doing the job himself. Mere professional pride? The fumbling manner of his assistant, Higgins? It seems gratuitous.

That said, the operating scene from the movie is pretty baller: