Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), February 1, 1845, vol. 1, no. 5, p. ??

[page 77, column 2, continued:]

POOR JACK, Illustrated with Wood Cuts from designs by Stansfield: Farmer & Daggers, 30 Ann Street.

Poor Jack is the best of Captain Marryatt's sea stories — novels is not the right names for books like his. We have always felt exceedingly mortified to hear him abused by our countrymen, who appear to have strangely misunderstood his character. Captain Marryatt is a, genuine sailor; there's nothing about him but suffers a sea change. He must not be judged by the standards by which other men are measured. As a delineator of the sailor character, he has never been approached, but they are not sailors only that he has delineated; sailor's wives, children, tradesmen, in short, all who live by navigation, from the bum-boat women to the ship carpenter, are all presented in his pages with the truthfulness of a daguerreotype. His stories are all clumsily constructed, but we read them, not for the sake of the plot, but for the characters which they contain, as we read Shakspeare's historical tragedies.