Retitled 'Poor Mercantile Jack' in collected editions of the series

As Basil Lubbock has noted, 'legislation in the days of sail gave absolute power into the hands of the sea-captain' ('The Mercantile Marine, 1830–65' in Early Victorian England, ed. G.M. Young, Vol. 1, pp. 387–88). The Merchant Shipping Act of 1854 tightened rather than eased the procedures by which an ordinary merchant sailor might formally complain of mistreatment by senior officers, to discourage the lodging of unfounded complaints. While the same Act devoted a small number of its sections to steps for the 'Protection of Seamen from Imposition' (17 & 18 Vict. Cap. 104, Sections 233–38), these applied only while seamen returning to the United Kingdom remained aboard their vessels, and the only penalties were small fines (£5 to £20).

      Dickens's description of the Uncommercial Traveller's enrolment in the Liverpool Police Force to 'look after Jack' on a wintry Friday cannot be positively identified with any similar experience on the author's part. The last occasions on which he is known to have been in Liverpool on a Friday were on 20 and 15 October 1858, during successful public reading engagements at the Philharmonic. No visits are recorded in early 1860, notwithstanding the internal evidence of both this [article] and ['The Uncommercial Traveller [vii]', AYR, Vol. III, 21 April 1860; retitled 'The Great Tasmania's Cargo' in collected editions of the series]. The narrative is cast as a kind of nightmarish descent into the underworld, hence the attribution of supernatural powers to 'Mr. Superintendent' and his talented officers, whose names are adapted from the Grimm fairytale of 'Fortunio.' The Dickens family had staged a pantomime version called 'Fortunio and his Seven Gifted Servants' at Tavistock House on 6 January 1855 (see Forster, Book 7, Ch. 2). Hence also imaginative referents such as the picture of the 'Norwood Gypsy' which Dickens recalls from a chapbook (see Harry Stone, 'Dark Corners of the Mind: Dickens' Childhood Reading', Horn Book Magazine, June 1963, p. 313), an illustration from Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the three witches from Macbeth. Dickens's use of a 'fairytale' motif allows him to avoid explicitly naming the kinds of vice encountered on this underworld expedition; these included both male and female prostitution, and, in the penultimate scene described, child prostitution. The euphemistic tendency partly explains Dickens's attitude towards 'Dark Jack', by whom he intends African American sailors plying the trade route between Liverpool and the cotton-growing Southern states of America. The 'Negro' master of ceremonies – counterpart to the modern 'MC' – issues the dance instructions in what seems to be a mixture of English and French (balloon say = 'balancez', lemonade = 'promenade' [?]), appropriate as the dance is a quadrille, typical of the '`Cadien' music of the American south, imported by refugees from French Canada during the Seven Years' War. That 'Dark Jack' was an important and often underestimated feature of the Atlantic economy, and, when not at sea, indulged in musical recreations such as those described here by Dickens, is attested in W. Jeffrey Bolster's pioneering study, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (1997). 
      Dickens's doubt, voiced in the conclusion to this paper, that his own 'comfortable thoughts of Seaman's Homes' would ever become a reality, was to be ironically justified by subsequent events, as the Liverpool Sailors' Home was burnt down in a suspected arson attack on 29 April, shortly after the publication of the article (Illustrated London News, 5 May 1860, p. 423, col. b).

Literary allusions

• The nickname Dickens invents for sailors of the merchant navy, 'Poor Mercantile Jack,' and the reference to the sweet little cherub who sits smiling aloft,' parodies Charles Dibdin's popular ballad 'Poor Jack;' the relevant line runs 'There's a sweet little cherub sits smiling aloft...'; 
• ''the multitudinous seas incarnadine'' Shakespeare, Macbeth (c. 1605), Act 2, Sc. 1; 
• 'Dark Jack's delight, his white (un)lovely Nan' adapts another Dibdin lyric, 'Lovely Nan,' which contains the refrain 'But, oh! much sweeter than all these,/ Is Jack's delight, his lovely Nan'; 
• to 'die in an odour of devilry' reverses the dictum of the Roman Catholic Church, that the good die 'in the odour of sanctity.'