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Percival Keene is a coming-of-age adventure novel published in three volumes in 1842 by Frederick Marryat. The book follows the nautical adventures of the title character, a low-born illegitimate child of a captain in the Royal Navy, as he enters service as a midshipman during the Napoleonic Wars and rises through the ranks with the help of his influential father.
Contemporaneous reviewers of Percival Keene noted its similarities to Marryat's other novel Peter Simple, saying that they both relied largely upon the same model. A review in an 1842 edition of Ainsworth's Magazine said "the hero is the same preternaturally tricksy, shrewd, successful being-always in scrapes, always on Fortune's high way, but never run over by the many untoward circumstances which travel the same road." Other reviewers from the same year were critical of the main character of the novel, with one regarding Percival as "a shrewd, knowing, getting-on fellow, with the most selfish disregard for everything below the sun, save his own interests and advancement," and another admitting "with all of Capt. Marryat's cleverness, the last of his sea-heroes is not the most engaging. We are amused with the adventures, but care nothing for the principal actor in them." Some saw the book in a more favorable light, however, noting that it "has a vein of humour and pleasantry which, with all its occasional coarseness, one cannot resist, it is full of life, it has one or two capital descriptions, and it is read through before it is laid down." Marryat's writing was notably enjoyed by many famous later writers, including Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway. Critic Mark Spilka has suggested that Percival Keene might have served as inspiration for part of Hemingway's story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. (wikipedia.org)
