William Clark Russell
Dates: 5/10/01,11:00 AM through 5/10/01,12:03 PM (4 postings)
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William Clark Russell
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FROM: Cathryn Smyth <[removed]@lancaster.lib.pa.us>
REC'D: 5/10/01, 11:00 AM
--
Cathryn H. Smyth
FROM: [removed]@aol.com
REC'D: 5/10/01, 11:10 AM
<<
Does anyone know of a biography for William Clark Russell? I am running
into dead ends.
TIA,
Cathryn
--
Cathryn H. Smyth
>>
If this is the William Clark Russell who was an American seaman and involved
with a famous ship disaster, then the following might be what you're looking
for, although I don't know if it's factual enough for your patron:
Russell, William Clark
THE DEATH SHIP: A Strange Story 3 vols. in 1
LC 75-46306 London,1888
ISBN: 0405081669 $70.95
William Clark Russell (1844-1911) was an American who shipped out at an early
age in the British merchant service. When he finally settled in London he
authored a long series of nautical tales of adventure. This novel combines
sea adventure with the macabre and is one of the best renditions of an
ancient myth of the seas, the Flying Dutchman.
Ayer Company Publishers
Phone: (888)-267-7323 FAX: (603)-922-3348
http://www.scry.com/ayer/victoria/4418495.htm
Found via Google.com, using William Clark Russell as a search term.
Binnie Syril Braunstein
romance novelist/former librarian
FROM: Vicki Biehl <[removed]@yahoo.com>
REC'D: 5/10/01, 11:20 AM
Vicki Biehl
Pearl River Public Library
W(illiam) Clark Russell
Also known as: William Clark Russell, Eliza Rhyl
Davies, Sydney Mostyn
Born: February 24, 1844 in New York, New York, United
States Died: November 8, 1911 Nationality: British
Occupation: Writer
Source: St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic
Writers, 1st ed. St. James Press, 1998.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYW. Clark Russell was a former
merchant seaman who achieved considerable celebrity
with an early novel, The Wreck of the Grosvenor, but
was never able fully to repeat that success. While his
striving for effect remained desperate he produced two
novels which strayed over the border into fantasy,
although he remained so parsimonious as to allow
only a single fantastic idea into each book.
The hero of The Frozen Pirate is the sole survivor of
a ship sunk by a storm off Cape Horn. The current
carries his small boat into Antarctic waters, where he
finds an old vessel embedded in an ice-floe. He is
lucky enough to find supplies preserved by
refrigeration and loot left over from the vessel's
career as a pirate. The quick-frozen bodies of the
crewmen are still present and he decides to remove
their disturbing presence by throwing them overboard,
but one awkward specimen cannot be removed from
below decks without first thawing it out. When he
builds a fire, however, the man revives. The pirate
refuses to believe that he has been in suspended
animation for half a century and his presence quickly
becomes threatening, but his revivification is
short-lived and he swiftly falls prey to an
accelerated
aging process. Although the pirate is not a pleasant
soul the novel is only on the margin of the horror
genre.
In terms of Gothic content, The Death Ship is much
the more interesting of Russell's fantasies. After
Captain Marryat's The Phantom Ship (1839)--which
presumably provided Russell with the inspiration--it
is the most significant literary development of the
motif of the Flying Dutchman. The protagonist
of the story has the misfortune to be washed overboard
after the legendary phantom ship is sighted, and his
terrified shipmates make no attempt to save him. On
being taken aboard the accursed vessel he finds that
Captain Vanderdecken, like the frozen pirate of the
earlier novel, is quite incapable of believing that he
has been lost for 150 years. Also aboard the ship
is a young Englishwoman, with whom the hero naturally
falls in love, but it is not easy to contrive an
escape--and when they finally do so, Vanderdecken's
evil influence reaches after them to dash their plans.
Russell's publishers never quite made up their minds
as to how he ought to be marketed, and he ended up on
the fringe of the "boys' book" market, although there
was far too little blood and thunder in his plots to
allow him to compete with Robert Louis Stevenson, or
even Jules Verne. His accounts of life at sea are a
trifle too realistic in their tediousness even when
they are combined with fantastic motifs, and he might
have done better to allow his imagination to run riot
rather than imposing such careful restrictions on his
use of such motifs. The Death Ship attempts to be
creepy, but the author provides so little active
menace to support the hero's paranoid anxieties that
it almost begins to seem as if his troubles are
self-inflicted. Russell could not bring himself to
conclude that the seemingly haunted vessel in his
short story "A Bewitched Ship" really was afflicted by
ghosts, although the substitution of a mischievous
ventriloquist is far more likely to annoy readers than
to satisfy them.
Russell does warrant some consideration as a British
pioneer of the tradition of sea horror stories, but he
was not the man to carry it forward. That role was
left to William Hope Hodgson, whose efforts in the
literary line were much more successful--and who also
followed Russell's example in fighting with some
fervour for better working conditions for Britain's
seamen.
PPERSONAL INFORMATION Pseudonyms: Eliza Rhyl Davies;
Sydney Mostyn. Nationality:British. Born: New York, 24
February 1844; son of the British song-writer
Henry Russell. Education: Private schools, in Britain.
Family: Married;one son. Career: Merchant seaman,
1858-66; journalist, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, and
later contributor to the Daily Telegraph, London,
under
the pseudonym "Seafarer"; prolific novelist and
biographer; lived in Bath, Somerset, in his later
years, and contributed to the Boys' Own Paper
and other juvenile periodicals. Died: 8 November 1911.
__________________________________________________
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FROM: Dennis Lien <[removed]@tc.umn.edu>
REC'D: 5/10/01, 12:03 PM
From Saur's WORLD BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX at
http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/acwww25u/wbi_en/
Name: Russell, William Clark
a: Clark Russell
Dates: 1844-1911
References: Russell, Clark
Occupations: novelist; seaman; journalist
Groups: Journalists, Correspondents, Editors, Critics, Narrative
Writers, Ship Crew Members
Archive: American Biographical Archive
Fiche: I 1400,268-272; II 528,338
Title of Source: Plarr [= Short title]
Men and women of the time : A dictionary of contemporaries
/ Plarr, Victor G.. - 14th ed., revised. - London. - 1895
Title of Source: Pratt A.T.C [= Short title]
People of the period, being a collection of the
biographies of ... living celebrities / Pratt, A. T. C.. -
London. - 1897 (2 vols)
Title of Source: Nat. cyc [= Short title]
The national cyclopaedia of American biography being the
history of the United States. - New York. - 1898,92-1947
(34 vols)
Title of Source: Century cyc [= Short title]
The century cyclopedia of names: a pronouncing and
etymological dictionary of names in geography, biography
... - New York. - 1904
Title of Source: Webster [= Short title]
Webster's biographical dictionary. - Springfield MA. -
1943
Name: Russell, William Clark
c.h. Eliza Rhyl Davies; also: Sydney Mostyn
Dates: 1844-1911
References: Davies, Eliza Rhyl; Mostyn, Sydney
Occupations: writer
Groups: Authors, Book Editors
Archive: British Biographical Archive
Fiche: I 957,158-163; 955,414; II 1746,84-86,341
Title of Source: Brown/Stratton [= Short title]
British musical biography: a dictionary of musical
artists, authors & composers born in Britain & its
colonies / Brown, J. D.; Stratton, S. S.. - Birmingham. -
1897
Title of Source: Allibone [= Short title]
A critical dictionary of English literature & British
& American authors ... from the earliest accounts to
the middle of the 19th century / Allibone, S. A.. -
London. - 1859-71 (3 vols)
Title of Source: Kirk J.F [= Short title]
Critical dictionary of English literature and British and
American authors / Kirk, J. F.. - London. - 1891 (2 vols)
Title of Source: Pratt A.T.C [= Short title]
People of the period, being a collection of the
biographies of ... living celebrities / Pratt, A. T. C.. -
London. - 1897 (2 vols)
Title of Source: Men 3 [= Short title]
Men and women of the time : A dictionary of
contemporaries. - 15th ed. - London. - 1899
Title of Source: Mason [= Short title]
Encyclopaedia of ships and shipping / Mason, H. B.. -
London. - 1908
Title of Source: WWW 1897 [= Short title]
Who Was Who 1897-1916. - London. - 1920
Title of Source: Emden [= Short title]
Jews of Britain : A series of biographies / Emden, Paul
H[ermann]. - London. - [1944]
Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // [removed]@tc.umn.edu
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