Horatio Hornblower as Popular Fiction

Its interesting to read old popular fiction.  You get a better feel for what makes popular fiction popular fiction.  (By popular fiction I mean fiction that is meant to appeal to the public taste, not necessarily fiction that sold well).

I just finished readering C.S. Forrester’s 3rd Horatio Hornblower novel.  Really good book, but also pretty informative about how such books work.

• Hornblower is opposed to flogging and hanging from the yardarm and such.  Nowadays he probably would be ok with them, because we are far enough distant from those times that it doesn’t seem real to us, so the flogging and the hanging would be pleasingly exotic.  In Forrester’s time, there was still a live sense among the public that we had blessedly escaped the barbarism of old times.  So Hornblower, the popular hero, has to more or less share the audience’s view on those things.  A few decades later you already see the Aubrey and Maturin series being less moralistic about the flogging and hanging, though still with objections raised here and there.  I imagine a contemporary sea story author would go full on with cruel floggings and hangings but have the hero be exquisitely sympathetic to the many homosexual or etc. characters that he would frequently come across.  Forrester makes a point of Hornblower being a freethinker.  The book was written in the late 30s so that says something interesting about the audience at that time.  My guess is that they were still mainly religious, but of the ‘christianity means being a decent person’ variety.  So its more comfortable for the hero to be a freethinker than anything that smacks of the popular betre noir of religious fanaticism or particularism.
• In popular fiction everything is arranged for the benefit of the hero.  Or if its supposed to be one of those grim-dark books, for the hero’s detriment: the absurd contrivances and deus ex machina erupt to keep the  hero miserable despite all the odds being against it, instead of the other way around.  Including sometimes all the other characters.  They have whatever attitudes they need to at any given moment to make the main character shine.
  • In the book Hornblower stays for a long time with an old aristocratic French count and his remaining family in their isolated chateau.  The young, beautiful widowed daughter-in-law of the count naturally falls in love with Hornblower and naturally he sleeps with her.  It is all extremely well handled–it does not seem contrived at all–but of course this is a man’s escapist literature and these things were bound to happen, the only question being how well they are put together.  The count does not know about it and the count has been extremely generous and kind to Hornblower, so there is an uncomfortable sense that Hornblower is acting in a low way and betraying trust.  In a bad book, at some point the count would have indicated to Hornblower that he knew all along and blessed the affair so the reader feels better about the whole thing.  Forrester is an extremely good writer and does not do this–it would not in any way have been in character for the count.  However, there is a larger problem that he cannot figure out a way to finesse so he simply completely ignores it.  Hornblower is sleeping with this young woman over a period of at least a a couple of months.  The chances of her getting pregnant and finding out after he’s left are high.  This will of course mean scandal and ruin.  But the issue is addressed in silence.  Perhaps a contemporary audience would have just assumed that, she being french, of course they know how to manage these things?