Shark Alley: The Memoirs of a Penny-A-Liner (the Jack Vincent Papers Book 1), Carver Stephen

Jack Vincent used to be famous, part of a rising generation of literary authors that included Dickens, Ainsworth and Thackeray. Now hes a nobody, scratching a living as a freelance journalist writing for a penny a line. Worse, the only job he can get is on a troopship bound for the frontier wars of colonial Africa. Outed as a friend of Dickens at the captains table, Jack recounts the events that have brought him to this fallen state. It is a journey that begins in the Marshalsea debtors prison and ends in the shark infested waters of the Western Cape and his berth on the HMS Birkenhead, the Victorian Titanic.