Prosthetic Networks: Sea Shanties and the Maritime Forms of the Victorian Novel

In this article, I use the history and form of sea shanties—the songs of labor and leisure sung aboard merchant vessels—to parse movement and structure in the social systems of three Victorian novels. I argue that shanties function prosthetically, granting the shantyman biopolitical control over an extended network of other bodies. This prosthetic extension comes to the fore via characters with missing limbs: the one-legged Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island , the hook-handed Captain Cuttle in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son , and the peg-legged Silas Wegg in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend . I analyze how these three differently abled nonprotagonist characters use shanties to arrange and move other bodies around them. By drawing together discussions in the blue humanities, new formalism, network theory, and disability studies, I show how shanties enable differently abled nonprotagonist characters—characters who might otherwise circulate at the narrative and social margins—to integrate into and gain an extended degree of control over their narrative worlds. Through such work, I also seek to surface the textual structures and arrangements in the Victorian novel that register the influence of a wider oceanic world.