1. Henry Mayhew, The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor: The Metropolitan Districts, 6 vols (Horsham: Caliban Books, 1981), IV, p. 97.

2. Mayhew, Morning Chronicle, IV, p. 98.

3. Mayhew was sent to sea by his father around the age of 15, spending a year as a midshipman with the East India Company. See Anne Humpherys, Travels into the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), pp. 3, 6.

4. Mayhew, Morning Chronicle, IV, pp. 98–99.

5. Mayhew, Morning Chronicle, IV, p. 100.

6. Mayhew, Morning Chronicle, III, pp. 16–18.

7. Mayhew, Morning Chronicle, III, p. 16.

8. Mayhew, Morning Chronicle, III, pp. 17–18.

9. For another rare narrative given by the daughter of a black Victorian sailor, see Caroline Bressey, ‘Forgotten Histories: Three Stories of Black Girls from Barnardo’s Victorian Archive’, Women’s History Review, 11.3 (2002), 351–374.

10. Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 6. On the legacy of oceans as a ‘key component in Britain’s national mythology’ throughout the Romantic Century, see Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 72–114 (p. 75).

11. Steve Mentz, Ocean (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), p. 93. On the rise of the seascape and other aesthetic representations of oceans, see John Gillis, ‘The Blue Humanities’, Humanities, 34.3 (2013) www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-humanities [accessed 1 May 2023].

12. See Bernhard Klein, ‘Introduction: Britain and the Sea’, in Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture, ed. by Bernhard Klein (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 4. Klein cites Tony Tanner’s introduction to The Oxford Book of Sea Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. xiv. For a re-evaluation of the pervasiveness of ‘marine metaphor’ in writing of the period, see Matthew P.M. Kerr, The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language: All at Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). The limitations of the sea-as-metaphor mode are raised in: Christopher Connery, ‘There Was No More Sea: The Supersession of the Ocean, from the Bible to Cyberspace’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32 (2006), 499; Hester Blum, ‘The Prospect of Oceanic Studies’, PMLA, 125.3 (2010), 670–677; John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2011), pp. 25–26.

13. Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 152–157.

14. Stephen E. Hunt, ‘“Free, Bold, Joyous”: The Love of Seaweed in Margaret Gatty and Other Mid-Victorian Writers’, Environment and History, 11.1 (2005), 5–34; Molly Duggins, ‘Pacific Ocean Flowers: Colonial Seaweed Albums’, in The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture, ed. by Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 119–134.

15. Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction and the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 23–45.

16. Clare Rose, ‘What Was Uniform about the Fin-de-Siècle Sailor Suit?’, Journal of Design History, 24.2 (2011), 105–124.

17. Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London: 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram, 1996), p. 11.

18. Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World (London: Verso, 2021), p. 1. On the centrality of oceans to the development of modern globalisation, see also: Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), pp. 349–400; Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, From 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 8–38; Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 4–5.

19. Campling and Colás, Capitalism, p. 115.

20. Studies of the British merchant navy include: Charles Napier Robinson, The British Tar in Fact and Fiction: The Poetry, Pathos, and Humour of the Sailor’s Life (London: Harper, 1911); Peter Kemp, The British Sailor: A Social History of the Lower Deck (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1970); Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Boston: Beacon, 2014); Isaac Land, War, Nationalism and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

21. The ad hoc nature of the system was reflected in the name ‘tramp ships’, signalling the transient, opportunistic nature of merchant fleets from the 1870s onwards that ‘plied from port to port in search of odd cargoes’; Laura Tabili, ‘“A Maritime Race”: Masculinity and the Racial Division of Labour in British Merchant Ships, 1900–1939’, in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920, ed. by Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 177.

22. Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Steamship Empire: Asian, African, and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine, c. 1880–1945’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 44.1 (2009), 49–67; Ray Costello, Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012); Diane Frost, ed., Ethnic Labour and British Imperial Trade: A History of Ethnic Seafarers in the UK (London: Routledge, 1995).

23. The capacious term ‘common sailor’ is used by Marcus Rediker in ‘Toward a People’s History of the Sea’, in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), p. 199.

24. David M. Williams, ‘Henry Mayhew and the British Seaman’, in Lisbon as a Port Town: The British Seaman and Other Maritime Themes, ed. by Stephen Fisher (Exeter: Exeter University Publications, 1988), p. 114.

25. Land, War, p. 3.

26. John Peck, Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719–1917 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 3.

27. Valerie Burton, ‘The Myth of Bachelor Jack: Masculinity, Patriarchy and Seafaring Labour’, in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. by Colin Howell and Richard Twomey (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1991), p. 198.

28. This phrase originated in David Alexander’s ‘Literacy Among Canadian and Foreign Seamen, 1863–1899’, in Working Men Who Got Wet, ed. by Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St John’s: Maritime History Group, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1980), p. 32. The question of sailors’ ‘exceptionalism’ is explained by Creighton as relating to ‘whether sailors shaped a distinctive culture at sea [or] whether they differed from landsmen by virtue of their deepwater work’; ‘“Davy Jones’ Locker Room”: Gender and the American Whaleman, 1830–1870’, in Iron Men, ed. by Creighton and Norling, p. 136.

29. Robinson, British Tar, p. 153.

30. Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

31. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 341.

32. Joanne Begiato (Bailey), ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, c. 1760–1860’, Journal for Maritime Research, 17.2 (2015), 117–133.

33. The seaman’s radical potential is the subject of Linebaugh and Rediker’s Many-Headed Hydra and Fink’s Sweatshops. On concerns regarding the prevalence of venereal disease within the army and Royal Navy from the 1860s onwards, see Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 71–79 and Lesley A. Hall, ‘What Shall We Do with the Poxy Sailor?’, Journal for Maritime Research, 6.1 (2004), 113–144.

34. Christopher Thomson, The Autobiography of an Artisan (London: J. Chapman, 1847), p. 121.

35. Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

36. Gilje, Liberty, p. 6.

37. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra. See also Marcus Rediker’s account of the sailor as proletarian worker in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Rediker, ‘Toward a People’s History’.

38. Connery, ‘There Was No More Sea’, 494–511; Hester Blum, ‘Introduction: Oceanic Studies’, Atlantic Studies, 10.2 (2013), 151–155. A succinct overview of some of the defining tenets of the blue humanities is provided in Mentz, Ocean, xv–xviii. On ‘coastal history’ see: Isaac Land, ‘Review Essay: Tidal Waves: The New Coastal History’, Journal of Social History, 40.3 (2007), 731–734; Isaac Land, ‘The Urban Amphibious’, in The New Coastal History: Cultural and Environmental Perspectives from Scotland and Beyond, ed. by David Worthington (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), pp. 31–48.

39. Steinberg, Social Construction, p. 166; Connery, ‘There Was No More Sea’; Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), p. 51; Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 14. Sekula points out that Friedrich Engels’s description of the life and labour of the English working class ‘began oddly enough by standing on the deck of a ship’ as it sailed up the Thames, before his ‘maritime view’ was abandoned to ‘the closed spaces of the city’s main streets and slums’ that would form the basis of his foundational survey (Fish Story, p. 42).

40. Blum, ‘Introduction’, 151–152. See also Mentz’s list of the ways in which oceanic thinking ‘deterritorializes’ standard critical terms (including ‘field’, ‘ground’, ‘progress’, ‘landscape’, and ‘clarity’) in Ocean, pp. xv–xviii.

41. Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

42. See Cohen, Novel, and ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, Representations, 108.1 (2009), 51–75. Cohen is the general editor of the recent six-volume anthology, A Cultural History of the Sea (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), surveying historical and cultural representations of the sea from antiquity to the present.

43. On the practical and aesthetic dimensions of the sailor’s ‘craft’ and navigational ‘sea eye’, see, respectively, Cohen, Novel, pp. 15–17 and Blum, View, pp. 3–4.

44. R.L. Stevenson, letter to Henry James, March 1889, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Sir Sidney Colvin, 4 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1924), III, p. 241. According to Hyslop: ‘In the 19th century, British sailors lived truly appalling lives. Between 1830 and 1900, one out of every five British mariners died at sea – perhaps a quarter of them from drowning, and the rest from the effects of disease, exposure or malnutrition.’ Most, he adds, did not live beyond the age of 45 (‘Steamship Empire’, p. 57). Fink addresses the rates of mortality linked to so-called coffin ships from the 1830s onwards, a national scandal leading to a period of significant maritime reform, including the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876; Sweatshops, pp. 67–92.

45. Campling and Colás, Capitalism, p. 18.

46. George K. Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 1, 2.

47. See Richard Wall on the flexible ‘adaptive family economy’ in ‘Work, Welfare and the Family: An Illustration of the Adaptive Family Economy’, in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. by Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith and Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 261–294. With regard to literary fiction and its representation of adaptive and blended families in this period, see Elizabeth Thiel, The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal (New York: Routledge, 2008); Laura Peters, Orphan Texts: Victorians, Orphans, Culture and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

48. Kelly Hager and Talia Schaffer, ‘Introduction: Extending Families’, Victorian Review, 39.2 (2013), 7, 19.

49. See Carol Beardmore, Cara Dobbing and Steven King, ‘Introduction’, in Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910, ed. by Carol Beardmore, Cara Dobbing and Steven King (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 1–19.

50. Robert Burroughs, ‘The Nautical Melodrama of Mary Barton’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 44.1 (2016), 91. Klein’s collection, Fictions of the Sea, similarly aims to foreground the diversity of ‘different maritime fictions’ beyond the dominant mode of the adventure genre (‘Introduction’, p. 5).

51. Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 53. See also the methodological approach to family life as represented in working-class memoirs in Emma Griffin’s Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 8–23.

52. Blum’s study of American sailors’ writing and self-narratives, including memoirs and logbooks, has been particularly influential in showing how such texts, mined by ‘maritime, labor, social, and political historians’, also merit analysis as literary and rhetorical constructs (View, p. 12).

53. I use literature deliberately here in the broadest sense of the word, and with an awareness of the term’s changing ideological significance throughout the nineteenth century, as outlined in Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 45–54. For an excellent discussion of the category of ‘literature’ specifically in relation to British working-class autobiographies, see Cassandra Falke, Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiographies, 1820–1848 (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2013), pp. 5–12.

54. John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, 3 vols (Brighton: Harvester, 1984–1989). In defining an autobiographer as ‘working-class’, I follow the criteria of the editors of the Bibliography – ‘those who for some period of their lives could be described as working class, whether defined in terms of their relationship with the means of production, their educational experiences and cultural ties, by self-ascription, or by any combination of these factors’ (Burnett, Vincent and Mayall, Autobiography, I, p. xxxi).

55. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), p. 5. For studies of working-class education and literacy rates in this period, see John Burnett, ed., Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education, and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1982), pp. 135–170; and David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

56. For a summary of Burnett, Vincent and Mayall’s Critical Bibliography and the Burnett Archive, see Emma Griffin, ‘“Things I Can Remember about My Life”: Autobiography and Fatherhood in Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 61 (2022), 26–49; Helen Rogers and Emily Cuming, ‘Revealing Fragments: Close and Distant Reading of Working-Class Autobiography’, Family & Community History, 21.3 (2018), 180–201. A note on citations to archival autobiographies, journals, and logbooks in this book: for the purposes of accessibility, where available I have given references to page numbers according to their inscription, by either author or archivist, as they appear in the original document. Unless otherwise indicated, all transcriptions of handwritten manuscripts are my own. In general, I have reproduced the writers’ spelling and grammar, only adapting the latter for the purpose of clarity.

57. For example, collections of autobiographies in electronic scholarly archives such as Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online, ‘People’s History: Working Class Autobiographies’, as well as texts available in the public domain on Internet Archive and Google Books. On the value and challenge of working with autobiographical material in a digital humanities context, see Andrew Prescott, ‘How the Web Can Make Books Vanish’, https://digitalriffs.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-web-can-makes-books-vanish.html (accessed 9 May 2024). See also Patrick Leary’s foundational article on using digitised sources: ‘Googling the Victorians’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 10.1 (2005), 72–86. On ‘small history’ and history from below, in the context of mass digitisation, see Julia Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History, 53.4 (2020), 963–989.

58. My archival research focussed on holdings at two specialist British maritime archives: the Caird Archive at the National Maritime Museum (NMM), Greenwich, London, and the Archives Centre at the Maritime Museum (MM), National Museums Liverpool.

59. On the role of publishers and editors as gatekeepers and shapers of published working-class autobiographies, see David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 10–11; and Florence S. Boos, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women: The Hard Way Up (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 259–264.

60. Boos, Memoirs, p. 8.

61. On the advantages and challenges of using working-class autobiography as historical evidence, see David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, pp. 1–13; Humphries, Childhood, pp. 14–24; Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 10–13, 212–213; Jamie L. Bronstein, The Happiness of the British Working Class (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), pp. 1–26.

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 9.

2. Humphries, Childhood, p. 218.

3. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 41.

4. For one critic, the genre provides ‘impersonal chronology with little or no dramatic narrative or introspection. … In many of their narratives, there seems to be no plot, dialogue nor action; instead, there is an abundance of visual detail. The scene is set, but nothing happens’; Nan Hackett, ‘A Different Form of “Self”: Narrative Style in British Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiography’, Biography, 12.3 (1989), 210, 215.

5. The evidence of maritime memoirs contrasts with Jonathan Rose’s characterisation of the ‘intense localism’ of working-class lives, in which ‘little news from the outside world penetrated working-class communities’, as delineated in a chapter tellingly titled ‘The World Unvisited’; Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 341, 343. On how ordinary seafarers’ experiences have been overlooked within broader discussions of ‘globalisation’, see Alston Kennerley, ‘Global Nautical Livelihoods in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Sea Careers of the Maritime Writers Frank T. Bullen and Joseph Conrad, 1869–1894’, International Journal of Maritime History, 26.1 (2014), 3–24; Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 77–80.

6. For a summary of the tenuous model of ‘separate spheres’ in light of more complex constructions of work, see Leonore Davidoff and others, The Family Story: Blood, Contract, and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 25–31.

7. Davidoff and others, Family Story, p. 23.

8. Cohen, ‘Narratology’, 59.

9. Cohen, ‘Narratology’, 60.

10. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), pp. 20–21.

11. Julia Swindells, Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), p. 124.

12. Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Penguin, 2015), pp. xxv, xxix.

13. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, p. 64.

14. Humphries, Childhood, p. 153. See also John Winton, Hurrah for the Life of a Sailor!: Life on the Lower-Deck of the Victorian Navy (London: Joseph, 1977), p. 15. Through his encounters with ‘Thames watermen’, Mayhew provided fascinating insight into the patrilineal continuity of waterside trades in mid-Victorian London:

15. On the sailor in national myth, see Land, War; and Begiato, ‘Tears’.

16. W.H.R., [autobiographical letter], Reports from Commissioners, Local Government Board, Parliamentary Papers, XXV (1874), p. 248. Jane Humphries refers to this account in ‘Girls and Their Families in an Era of Economic Change’, Continuity and Change, 35.3 (2020), 317.

17. Walter Citrine, Men and Work: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1964), p. 13.

18. Captain Tom Diaper, Tom Diaper’s Logbook: Memoirs of a Racing Skipper (London: Adlard Coles Nautical, 2016), p. 1.

19. J. Havelock Wilson, My Stormy Voyage through Life (London: Co-Operative Printing Society, 1925), p. 1.

20. Havelock Wilson, Stormy Voyage, pp. 4–6.

21. Lawson’s characterisation of his mother is equally interesting and disruptive of Victorian gender norms. He describes her as ‘powerful in body, passionate, with a lava-heated, ungovernable temper …. She was absolutely illiterate, and a very dominant woman’. While recognising her as a ‘great mother’, she also appeared to her son as ‘a tigress who punished at times almost to the point of cruelty …. My mother was Savage by name and she was savage by nature’; Jack Lawson, A Man’s Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), pp. 18, 20.

22. Lawson, Man’s Life, p. 15.

23. Lawson, Man’s Life, p. 16.

24. Lawson, Man’s Life, pp. 9–10.

25. Strange, Fatherhood, p. 29.

26. Strange, Fatherhood, p. 127.

27. Lawson, Man’s Life, pp. 16–17.

28. Lawson, Man’s Life, p. 50.

29. A crimp was a person who entrapped or coerced sailors, usually in order to rob them.

30. Pat O’Mara, The Autobiography of a Liverpool Slummy (Liverpool: Bluecoat Press, 1994), p. 63.

31. O’Mara, Autobiography, p. 30.

32. O’Mara, Autobiography, p. 123.

33. On the vocational continuity between fathers and sons, see Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), pp. 91–94. On apprenticeships, see Humphries, Childhood, pp. 268–277.

34. Robert Collyer, Some Memories (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1908), p. 2.

35. Lawson, Man’s Life, p. 17.

36. Addressing his memoir to his children in the 1870s, Harvey noted: ‘I must try and get [the memoir] finished for I know the pleasure it will give you some day when perhaps your father, like my own, shall have met a watery grave’; Henry Ralph Harvey, ‘Autobiography of a Seaman, Henry Ralph Harvey: Master Mariner, Born 1832, Died 1878’, Caird Library and Archives, Royal Museums Greenwich.

37. Griffin, Bread Winner, p. 137. Griffin corroborates this point by noting how the father’s importance as breadwinner is underlined by the emphasis memoirists placed on the ‘economic significance of their father’s death’ (p. 140).

38. ‘The Life of a Journeyman Baker: Written by Himself’, Commonwealth, 13 December 1856, p. 3.

39. W.H.R., Reports, p. 249.

40. C.R. Haill, Memoirs of Life on a River Thames Tug: A True Story (Gravesend: Reporter, 1928), p. 6.

41. Haill, Memoirs, p. 6.

42. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), p. 10.

43. William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett in His Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: With Some Short Account of the Different Associations He Belonged To, and of the Opinions He Entertained (London: Trübner & Co., 1876), p. 2.

44. Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 13.

45. Hugh Miller, My Schools and Schoolmasters: Or, The Story of My Education, 14th ed. (Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, 1869), p. 2.

46. Bangor University Archives & Special Collections, Captain David Roberts, Autobiography of Captain David Roberts, Master Mariner of Bangor, BMSS/15085, pp. 1–2.

47. W.C. Steadman, ‘How I Got On: Life Stories by the Labour M.P.’s’, Pearson’s Weekly, 8 February 1906, p. 563.

48. William Parrish, This Is My Story (Wattstown: [privately printed by the author], 1966), p. 1.

49. Thomas Wilkinson Wallis, Autobiography of Thomas Wilkinson Wallis: Sculptor in Wood, and Extracts from His Sixty Years’ Journal (Louth: J.W. Goulding & Sons), p. 5.

50. Wallis, Autobiography, p. 59.

51. David Fraser, ed., The Christian Watt Papers (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1983), p. 58.

52. Fraser, Christian Watt Papers, p. 95. According to a brief notice in the Edinburgh Evening News, Watt’s son died by losing his footing between the shore and the ship docked in Konigsberg in the then Province of Prussia; ‘Boy Drowned’, Edinburgh Evening News, 24 August 1874. Watt’s husband drowned three years following their son, after being knocked unconscious while hoisting sails on a fishing boat.

53. Miller, Schools, p. 2.

54. Miller, Schools, pp. 2–3.

55. Peter Bayne, The Life and Letters of Hugh Miller, 2 vols (London: Strahan & Co., 1871), I, p. 9.

56. Miller, Schools, p. 3.

57. Miller, Schools, p. 6.

58. Miller, Schools, p. 8.

59. Miller, Schools, p. 21.

60. Miller, Schools, p. 30.

61. Bayne, Life and Letters, p. 16.

62. Michael Shortland, Introduction, Hugh Miller’s Memoir: From Stonemason to Geologist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 41.

63. Miller, Schools, pp. 24–25. Watt, who lived most of her life in a nineteenth-century Scottish coastal fishing village, similarly claimed to have received a supernatural premonition of her son’s death at sea, hearing her son’s voice calling as she prepared the ‘pottage’ on the fire on the morning of his demise (Christian Watt, p. 95).

64. Miller, Schools, pp. 81–82.

65. On material cultural depictions of the ‘sailor’s departure’ and ‘return’ see Joanne Begiato, Manliness in Britain 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 143–147. Burroughs discusses the ‘return of the sailor’ as a popular theatrical trope in early nineteenth-century melodrama in ‘Nautical Melodrama’.

66. Kerr, Victorian Novel, p. 78.

67. Kerr, Victorian Novel, p. 79.

68. On maritime wives within the US context, see Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

69. For an account of seamen’s dependency and relative powerlessness within the context of land-based family life, see Ruth Wallis Herndon, ‘The Domestic Cost of Seafaring: Town Leaders and Seamen’s Families in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island’, in Iron Men, ed. by Creighton and Norling, pp. 55–69. On the effects of work-associated injuries and chronic illness on the working-class family unit, see David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 128–162.

70. George Haw, From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, M.P. (London: Cassell & Co., 1907), p. 2.

71. Haw, Workhouse, pp. 3, 6.

72. See Humphries, Childhood, pp. 130–131.

73. W. Gifford, Introduction, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, trans. by William Gifford (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1806), p. iii.

74. Gifford, Introduction, p. iv.

75. Thomson, Autobiography, p. 47. Born in Liverpool in 1894, Allen Hammond’s oral reminiscences also capture the similar intensity of an uncanny estrangement from his returning seafaring father: ‘He’d be six months, twelve months [away], so that we used to see a man come in with a long moustache and we sort of knew it was my father and when he was going away, he used to always want to kiss us goodbye. And that was the time I used to get under the chair or anywhere. Out in the road. Anywhere. So’s he wouldn’t kiss [me]’. Burnett Archive, Allen Hammond, ‘Tomorrow Couldn’t Be Worse’, BURN/4/35.

76. Thomson, Autobiography, p. 156. For a detailed literary engagement with Thomson’s memoirs, see Falke’s chapter ‘The Not-Quite-Autonomous Artisan’, Literature by the Working Class, pp. 141–172.

77. Citrine, Men and Work, p. 15. See also Strange’s evocative reading of this father–son relationship in Fatherhood, pp. 7–13.

78. Citrine, Men and Work, p. 17.

79. Citrine, Men and Work, pp. 17–18.

80. John James Bezer, ‘The Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848’, reprinted in David Vincent, ed., Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790–1885 (London: Europa, 1977), p. 159. See also Oskar Jensen’s treatment of Bezer’s life in Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London (London: Duckworth, 2022), pp. 38–46.

81. Burnett Archive, Edward S. Humphries, ‘Childhood: An Autobiography of a Boy from 1889–1906’, BURN/1/361. Another version of this memoir (titled ‘On My Own’), accompanied by publishers’ letters of rejection and other personal items, is held at Special Collections, University of Leeds, LIDDLE/WW1/MES/050, HUMPHRIES, EDWARD S.

82. It is unclear from Edward Humphries’s account whether, as a child, he believed that his foster parents who ‘had been Dad and Mum to me’ were actually his biological parents (‘Childhood’, p. 11).

83. Burnett Archive, Edward Humphries, ‘Childhood’, p. 17.

84. Burnett Archive, Edward Humphries, ‘Childhood’, p. 18.

85. Burnett Archive, Edward Humphries, ‘Childhood’, p. 18. See Griffin, Bread Winner, pp. 228–230 on the emotional, psychologically complex and even contradictory accounts of parents as narrated by working-class writers. As she points out, the ‘autobiographies are filled with discordant voices and subversive stories, and we need to make sense of their ambiguities, evasions and silences’ (Bread Winner, p. 261).

86. Burnett Archive, Edward Humphries, ‘Childhood’, p. 38.

87. Captain Jim Uglow, Sailorman: A Barge-Master’s Story (London: Conway Maritime, 1975), p. 16.

88. Uglow, Sailorman, p. 18.

89. Uglow, Sailorman, p. 18.

90. Behlmer, Friends of the Family, p. 299.

91. ‘Orphan’, Oxford English Dictionary (OED), cited in Peters, Orphan Texts, p. 1.

92. Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Received, a Blank Child: John Brownlow, Charles Dickens, and the London Foundling Hospital – Archives and Fictions’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 56.3 (2001), 295. See also Nina Auerbach’s foundational study of the ‘figure of the wandering orphan, searching through an alien world for his home’ in ‘Incarnations of the Orphan’, ELH, 42.3 (1975), 395–419 (395).

93. Tamara S. Wagner, ‘“Like Some of the Princesses in the Fairy Stories, Only I Was Not Charming”: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel’, in Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin, ed. by Diane Warren and Laura Peters (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 56–80.

94. Thomas Archer adopted the moniker ‘water-baby’ to characterise the children of seafarers in The Terrible Sights of London and Labours of Love in the Midst of Them (London: Stanley Rivers and Co., 1870), p. 155. Waif refers to a ‘person who is without home or friends; one who lives uncared-for or without guidance; an outcast from society; an unowned or neglected child’ (OED). In legal terms it also denotes an unclaimed piece of property or jetsam, such as ‘an article washed up on the seashore’. Vague, the French word for ‘wave’, as noted by Kerr, is etymologically linked to the Latin vagus, denoting ‘wandering, inconstant, uncertain’ (Victorian Novel, p. 61) – a term that gives rise to vagabond.

95. On ‘occupational homes’ that provided care for children of particular professions, including the children of seafarers, see Peter Higginbotham, Children’s Homes: A History of Institutional Care for Britain’s Young (Barnsley: Pen & Sword History, 2017), pp. 119–129.

96. Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen: An Appeal (London: Virtue & Co., 1873), pp. 120–124.

97. Plimsoll, Our Seamen, p. 120.

98. Anderson, ‘The Seamen’s Orphanage’, Porcupine, 25 July 1874, p. 266. On melodrama as a ‘preexisting narrative structure for … philanthropic representations of child poverty’, see Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 14.

99. On institutionalised orphans’ ties to parents and communities, see Steven J. Taylor, ‘Poverty, Emigration and Family: Experiencing Childhood Poverty in Late Nineteenth-Century Manchester’, Family & Community History, 18.2 (2015), 92–93; Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, pp. 67–91. On the way in which parents used institutions such as orphanages as part of a set of survival strategies (and to gain training and education for their children), see Lynn Hollen Lees, ‘The Survival of the Unfit: Welfare Policies and Family Maintenance in Nineteenth Century London’, in Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis, ed. by Peter Mandler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 86–87.

100. Robert R. Dolling, Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1897), pp. 66–67.

101. For a useful analysis of admissions to Liverpool orphanages throughout the nineteenth century, see Marcy Kay Wilson, ‘“Dear Little Living Arguments”: Orphans and Other Poor Children, Their Families, and Orphanages, Baltimore and Liverpool, 1840–1910’ (unpublished thesis, University of Hull, 2003).

102. Burnett Archive, George Lloyd, ‘The Autobiography of “Georgie Brawd”’, BURN/3/108, pp. 8–9. In relation to Lloyd’s memoir, Megan Doolittle speculates that the father may have deserted his family in an effort to avoid the humiliation of the workhouse; ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in Late Nineteenth-Century England’, in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, ed. by Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 99.

103. Lloyd’s story is evidence of a broader historical trend by which ‘apprentices might become in effect adoptive children’: Beardmore, Dobbing and King, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.

104. Burnett Archive, Lloyd, ‘Autobiography’, p. 23.

105. Burnett Archive, Lloyd, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 23, 24.

106. [James Dawson Burn], The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (London: William Tweedie, 1856), p. 122; William Marcroft, The Marcroft Family (Manchester: John Heywood, 1886), p. 17.

107. Burnett Archive, Alexander Howison, ‘Autobiography of Alexander Howison’, BURN/1/354, p. 45.

108. See Davin, Growing Up Poor, 29–62; Steven King, ‘Configuring and Re-configuring Families in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Family Life, ed. by Beardmore, Dobbing and King, pp. 229–253; Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood’.

109. On the ‘exotic picaresque’, a mode derived from eighteenth-century sea narratives, see Casarino, Modernity, p. 7.

110. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 50.

111. On the genre of popular, often didactic, waif stories that developed from the mid-1860s to the early 1890s, see Anna Davin, ‘Waif Stories in Late Nineteenth-Century England’, History Workshop Journal, 52 (2001), 67–98.

112. The autobiography was published in collaboration with the New Zealand writer Rita F. Snowden, who based her text on Kelly’s 270-page handwritten, ‘dog-eared’ manuscript. Kelly learned to read and write just before turning 40. See Preface, R.F. Snowden, Prodigal of the Seven Seas (London: Epworth Press, 1949).

113. Snowden, Prodigal, p. 2.

114. Snowden, Prodigal, p. 5. Dick Whittington was also, of course, an orphan.

115. Snowden, Prodigal, p. 6.

116. Snowden, Prodigal, p. 114.

117. On the affiliation between the neglected Bullen and canonised Conrad, see Kennerley, ‘Global Nautical Livelihoods’.

118. Frank Thomas Bullen, With Christ at Sea: A Religious Autobiography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1900), p. 12.

119. Bullen, With Christ at Sea, p. 14. ‘Arab’ (in the sense of ‘street Arab’) was a commonplace mid-Victorian term for a ‘homeless child or young person living on the streets’ (OED).

120. In this sense, the autobiographical ocean waif mirrored the orphan of the Bildungsroman for whom a ‘lack of history and freedom from family ties is also a kind of opportunity’; Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), p. 109.

121. Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘Victorian Autobiography: Sons and Fathers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, ed. by Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 88.

122. Allan K. Taylor, From a Glasgow Slum to Fleet Street (London: Alvin Redman, 1949), pp. 8–9.

123. Taylor, Glasgow Slum, p. 24. Another escapee making the journey from the Glasgow slums to the sea was Kenneth Mackenzie, born in the early twentieth century, who was ‘determined to go to sea’ after an unhappy childhood following the death of his mother and time spent in a juvenile reformatory; Been Places and Seen Things (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 15.

124. Ben Tillett, M.P., Memories and Reflections (London: John Long, 1931), pp. 23, 25.

125. Tillett, Memories, p. 17.

126. Tillett, Memories, pp. 18–19.

127. David Hopkin, ‘Storytelling, Fairytales and Autobiography: Some Observations on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memoirs’, Social History, 29.2 (2004), 188. Mary Jo Maynes also discusses picaresque and fairy-tale modes in French and German plebian autobiographies in Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 34–37.

128. Gilje, Liberty, p. 40.

129. Propp, Morphology, pp. 25–27, 64.

130. Frederick Marryat, Masterman Ready, or The Wreck of the ‘Pacific’ (London: Blackie and Son, 1903), p. 94. See also the scene of parental leavetaking in Marryat’s Frank Mildmay, or The Naval Officer (London: Richard Edward King, 1829), p. 9.

131. Glenda Norquay, Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading: The Reader as Vagabond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 177–178. Stevenson referred to the influence of Hayward’s novel on impressionable juvenile readers in the essay ‘Popular Authors’; R.L. Stevenson on Fiction: An Anthology of Literary and Critical Essays, ed. by Glenda Norquay (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 162.

132. John Bain, Life of a Scottish Sailor: Or, Forty Years’ Experience of the Sea (Nairn: George Bain, 1897), pp. 7, 3.

133. O’Mara, Autobiography, p. 104.

134. O’Mara, Autobiography, p. 112.

135. Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, Written by Himself (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1872), pp. 39–40.

136. Cooper, Life, p. 40. Another example of a son defying his mother’s interdiction can be found in Joshua Marsden’s memoir, told in manner of a ‘conversion’ narrative: Sketches of the Early Life of a Sailor, Now a Preacher of the Gospel, in Several Letters, Addressed to His Children (Hull: s.n., [1821?])

137. Robert Hay, Landsman Hay: The Memoirs of Robert Hay, 1789–1847 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), pp. 30–31. Despite little formal education, Hay wrote his memoirs between 1820 and 1821 for his children, and as a prose-writing exercise, as explained in the foreword by his great-granddaughter (and editor of the memoir) Mavis Doriel Hay, pp. 11–14.

138. Howison, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 6, 13. Haill is another autobiographer who compares himself as a young boy seeking work to Dick Whittington; Memoirs, p. 8.

139. The ‘donor’, or ‘provider’, is a central figure in Propp’s formulation of the fairy tale: see Morphology, p. 39.

140. H.Y. Moffat, From Ship’s-Boy to Skipper, With Variations (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1911), pp. 23–24.

141. Havelock Wilson, Stormy Voyage, p. 14.

142. Havelock Wilson, Stormy Voyage, pp. 12–13.

143. Joseph A. Kestner, for example, argues: ‘Part of the attraction of the adventure genre is that it provides males a way out of and beyond the domestic and legal constraints of shore life or the home country’; Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 27.

144. Thomson, Autobiography, p. 159.

145. Taylor, Glasgow Slum, p. 29.

146. Hay, Landsman Hay, p. 241.

147. Hay, Landsman Hay, p. 241.

148. NMM, BGR/38, Autobiography of Anthony Enright, Master of the Clippers Reindeer and Chrysolite and the Royal Mail [‘Recollections of an Ancient Mariner’], p. 59.

149. NMM, BGR/38, Enright, [‘Recollections’], p. 60.

150. Agnes Cowper, A Backward Glance on Merseyside (Birkenhead: Willmer Brothers & Co., 1948), p. 57.

151. David Johnston, Autobiographical Reminiscences of David Johnston, An Octogenarian Scotchman (Chicago: [s.n.], 1885), pp. 79–81.

152. NMM, BGR/50/1, Autobiography by Frank Smith Entitled ‘The Memoirs of My Life’, 1921, p. 1.

153. NMM, BGR/50/1, Autobiography, p. 9.

154. NMM, BGR/50/1, Autobiography, p. 27.

155. NMM, BGR/50/1, Autobiography, p. 35.

156. NMM, BGR/50/1, Autobiography, p. 1.

157. NMM, BGR/50/1, Autobiography, p. 50.

158. Many of the working-class autobiographers referenced in this chapter are explicit about the fact that they learned to read and write in spite of a lack of regular, formal education. Some acquired skills of literacy through parental or sibling instruction (Moffat), night schools (Howison), dame schools (Miller, Thomson, Lowery), Sunday Schools (Crooks, Tillett), and autodidacticism (Bezer).

159. Sir James Sexton, Sir James Sexton, Agitator. The Life of The Dockers’ M.P.: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), p. 35.

160. ‘Crispin’ [Barnabas Britten], Wood-Yard to Palace (Bradford: Broadacre Books, 1958), p. 143.

161. In his survey of sailors’ reading habits, Hartley Kemball Cook quoted a retired master mariner who stated simply that he considered ‘Defoe has sent more boys to sea than any other person that ever lived’; In the Watch Below: The Books and Hobbies of Seamen ([S.I].: Dent, 1937), p. 60.

162. According to one critic: ‘From the outset, [Defoe’s] narrative is preoccupied with autobiography itself as Robinson Crusoe engages in repeated and at times almost compulsive acts of autobiography’; David Marshall, ‘Autobiographical Acts in Robinson Crusoe’, ELH, 71.4 (2004), 899.

163. Hay, Landsman Hay, p. 27.

164. Hay, Landsman Hay, pp. 28–29.

165. Robert Lowery, ‘Passages in the Life of a Temperance Lecturer’ [1856–1857], reprinted in Robert Lowery: Radical and Chartist, ed. by Brian Harrison and Patricia Hollis (London: Europa, 1979), p. 47.

166. Walter White, A Sailor-Boy’s Log-Book, from Portsmouth to the Peiho (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862), pp. 1–2.

167. White, Sailor-Boy’s Log-Book, p. 2.

168. Percival Plug, Biscuits and Grog: Personal Reminiscences and Sketches (London: John & D.A. Darling, 1848), p. 2.

169. See Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 47–70; Gregory Vargo, ‘A Life in Fragments: Thomas Cooper’s Chartist Bildungsroman’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39 (2011), 177–178. Examinations of the broader contexts of Marryat’s writing include: Peck’s attention to his presentation of distinctive maritime communities both on shore and at sea (Maritime Fiction, pp. 50–69); Carroll’s analysis of Marryat’s sailors as potentially troubling figures that unsettled hegemonic ideas of nation and empire (Empire of Air and Water, pp. 72–114); Kerr’s careful attention to the novelist’s use of narrative form (Victorian Novel, pp. 63–92); Priya Joshi’s evaluation of Marryat’s global popularity in nineteenth-century India (In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 63–67).

170. Captain Marryat, Poor Jack (London: George Routledge, 1840), p. 45.

171. Marryat, Poor Jack, p. 362.

172. Peck, Maritime Fiction, p. 65.

173. Captain Marryat, Jacob Faithful (London: Richard Edward King, 1834), p. 9.

174. Cannon Schmitt, ‘Technical Maturity in Robert Louis Stevenson’, Representations, 125.1 (2014), 56.

175. Carroll, Empire of Air and Water, pp. 102–103.

176. Margaret Cohen, ‘Traveling Genres’, New Literary History, 34.3 (2003), 483, 481.

177. Vargo, ‘A Life in Fragments’, 174.

178. Descriptions of violence and bodily mutilation are a significant feature of the following maritime memoirs: Hay, Landsman Hay; ‘William Brown’ [pseud.], A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of William Brown (York: Printed for the Author, 1829); NMM, BGR/45, ‘Recollections of by Gone Days by James Richardson’, and the anonymous The Adventures of a Ship-Boy, Written by Himself (Leith: Published for the Author, 1823); Edward Albert, ‘Brief Sketch of the Life of Edward Albert’ (n.d.), reproduced in Nathalie Prizel, ‘“The Dead Man Come to Life Again”: Edward Albert and the Strategies of Black Endurance’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 45 (2017), 293–320.

179. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 50.

180. Phillips, Mapping Men, p. 56.

181. The accession to ‘manly’ duties was not merely metaphorical. As Jane Humphries argues, cabin boys could easily find themselves engaged in the same duties as ordinary sailors and rated seamen; Childhood, p. 222.

182. According to Rose, after John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Robinson Crusoe was the most widely-stocked book in mid-nineteenth-century prison libraries, while Marryat’s works formed part of the reading diet of a more radical reading population, published in the Chartist newspaper the Northern Star, and furnishing the libraries of mechanics’ institutes; Intellectual Life, pp. 105, 36, 74.

183. Lawson, Man’s Life, p. 16.

184. Frederick Rogers, Labour, Life and Literature: Some Memories of Sixty Years (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1913), p. 311.

185. Burnett Archive, Howison, ‘Autobiography’, p. 21.

186. Burnett Archive, Howison, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 28, 37.

187. Beardmore, Dobbing, and King summarise networks of ‘fictive kin’ as ‘people related to families through contract, acquaintance, friendship, or work’; ‘Introduction’, p. 3. See also the use of the term in Janet Carsten, After Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Useful studies of family that centre the role of fictive kin include Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Hager and Schaffer’s special issue on ‘Extending Families’.

188. Studies that explore the role of fictive kin in fiction include: Holly Furneaux, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Thiel, Fantasy of Family; Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2007).

189. Hager and Schaffer, for example, describe the Victorian ‘family as a permeable, flexible, and shifting configuration’ (‘Introduction’, 7).

190. Beardmore, Dobbing and King, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. Doolittle similarly refers to the ‘flexible and porous relationships’ inherent to working-class kinship and the ‘fluid nature within the economies of poor families’ in the context of their engagement (and resistance) to forms of welfare; Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood’, p. 85.

191. On the ideological significance of the ‘blood tie’ within Victorian culture, see Nelson, Family Ties, p. 145.

192. For example, the Cornish sailor Richard Behenna (born 1833) who received the ‘fatherly’ care of captain; A Victorian Sailor’s Diary (Redruth: Institute of Cornish Studies, 1981), p. 15.

193. Peck, Maritime Fiction, p. 57.

194. Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (London: Penguin, 2005).

195. Burnett Archive, Howison, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 11–12.

196. Tadmor, Family and Friends, p. 175. Notable examples of memoirs that centre the relations of friends and mateship forged at sea include: Behenna, Victorian Sailor’s Diary; Snowden, Prodigal; O’Mara, Autobiography. On the ‘emotional communities’ of sailors at sea, see Maya Wassell Smith, ‘“The Fancy Work What Sailors Make”: Material and Emotional Creative Practice in Masculine Seafaring Communities’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 14.2 (2018) www.ncgsjournal.com/issue142/smith.html [accessed 5 January 2023].

197. O’Mara’s account of his friendship with a cook on a vessel sailing to Cuba, resulting in the latter’s ‘misjudged’ attempt to share a bunk, presents a rare exception (Autobiography, p. 123).

198. Bullen, With Christ at Sea, pp. 16–19.

199. Henry Morton Stanley, The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, ed. by Dorothy Stanley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), p. 29. Jane Humphries, however, casts doubt on whether this meeting ever took place, labelling it a ‘rather contrived coincidence’ (Childhood, p. 139).

200. Further examples include: Thomas Sanderson (born 1808) who resided for a time in a Sheffield workhouse before becoming a shipwright; Charles Chapman (born c. 1820s) whose memoir begins with an escape from a South London orphanage at the age of 9, before he enlisted as cabin boy; Joe Ayre (born 1910), the son of a merchant sailor turned dock labourer, who spent three years at the Sheltering Home for Destitute Children in Liverpool, moved to Canada as an emigrant ‘home child’, and eventually joined the merchant navy.

201. Stanley, Autobiography, p. 6.

202. Autobiographical letter (1869), quoted in Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 80.

203. Stanley, Autobiography, p. 56.

204. Stanley, Autobiography, p. 64.

205. Stanley, Autobiography, p. 64. A similar scene, in which the Liverpool docks evoke wonder in the impressionable would-be sailor seeking to escape the ‘deep, ineradicable, and everlasting’ stain of poverty, can be found in Charles Reece Pemberton, ‘The Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice’, in The Life and Literary Remains of Charles Reece Pemberton, ed. by W.J. Fox (London: Charles Fox, 1843), pp. 34, 82–84.

206. See Jeal, Stanley, pp. 34–41.

207. Peter Brooks explores the psychodrama of paternity in the European Bildungsroman, including the second stage of the ‘family romance’ – the fantasy of being an adopted child – in which gradually the ‘child accepts the actual mother but creates a phantasized, illegitimate father’ as part of his accession towards ‘personal legitimacy’; Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 64. John Paul Eakin elaborates on the autobiographical sleight of hand afforded to a certain type of memoirist: ‘Thanks to this reversible teleology … the autobiographical narrative offers a unique opportunity to affirm the godlike existence of the self – the self as a causa causans … against the threat of non-identity’; Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 39.

208. Paul Zweig, The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 70–71.

209. Zweig, Adventurer, p. 71.

210. Stanley, Autobiography, p. 219.

211. Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Received, a Blank Child’, 300.

212. Biographical gloss by Dorothy Stanley, in Stanley, Autobiography, p. 220.

213. Stanley, Autobiography, p. 124.

214. Livingstone, like Stanley, was an imperial explorer with working-class roots – he was raised in a crowded tenement in the mill town of Blantyre in Scotland, and worked in a cotton factory mill at the age of 10.

215. In his biography of Stanley, Richard Hall states straightforwardly in the opening Foreword: ‘His personality led him to conceal his “shameful origins” and romantic attachments to such an extent that his own account is untrustworthy’; Stanley: An Adventurer Explored (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 11.

216. Letter from Henry Morton Stanley to Dorothy Stanley, 30 November 1893, quoted in ‘Editor’s Preface’, Stanley, Autobiography, p. v.

217. On the figurative meaning of ‘world’, see Peter Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon, Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 4–5, and its deployment throughout Franco Moretti’s classic study, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987).

218. King, ‘Configuring and Re-Configuring Families’, pp. 247–248.

219. Alannah Tomkins, ‘Poor Law Institutions through Working-Class Eyes: Autobiography, Emotion, and Family Context, 1834–1914’, Journal of British Studies, 60.2 (2021), 287.

220. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. xiv.

221. David Vincent, ‘Working-Class Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century’, in A History of English Autobiography, ed. by Adam Smyth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 174.

222. Vincent, ‘Working-Class Autobiography’, p. 175. On the ‘patchwork’ formal properties of unpublished working-class life writing, see also Rogers and Cuming, ‘Revealing Fragments’, 187–189.

1. Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, in Typhoon and Other Tales, ed. by Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), pp. 4–5.

2. Conrad, Typhoon, p. 11.

3. Conrad, Typhoon, p. 12.

4. Conrad, Typhoon, p. 13.

5. Conrad, Typhoon, p. 19.

6. Conrad, Typhoon, p. 61.

7. Conrad, Typhoon, p. 67.

8. Conrad, Typhoon, p. 70.

9. Two foundational studies of maritime reading are Hartley Kemball Cook’s In the Watch Below, and Harry R. Skallerup, Books Afloat & Ashore: A History of Books, Libraries, and Reading Among Seamen During the Age of Sail (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974). On mariners’ reading and writing practices, see also Michel de Certeau, ‘Writing the Sea’, in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 137–149; Cohen, Novel; Blum, View; Norling, Captain Ahab; Helen Watt, with Anne Hawkins, Letters of Seamen in the Wars with France, 1793–1815 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2016); Helen M. Rozwadowski, ‘Scientists Writing and Knowing the Ocean’, in The Sea, ed. by Mentz and Rojas, pp. 28–46; Cannon Schmitt, ‘Imaginary Worlds: Sea of Ink’, in Cultural History of the Sea, V, Age of Empire (1800–1920), pp. 203–228.

10. See Hanna Hagmark-Cooper’s reflections on the use of ‘alternative sources’, including private correspondence and oral testimony, as a way of centring women in maritime history; ‘Is There a Place for Women in Maritime History’, History in Focus (2005) https://archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/Sea/articles/hagmark.html [accessed May 2022].

11. According to Blum ‘sailor writing is distinct from the standard forms of contemporary travel writing in the sense that sailors are concerned with describing the places and people they encounter only to a secondary degree; the main impetus of their narratives is to describe the local culture of the ship, as well as its material demands’ (View, p. 6). For further analysis of shipboard diaries as primarily records of work, see Eli Cumings and Laurence Publicover, ‘Shipboard Diaries as Navigational Instruments’, in Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea, ed. by Susann Liebich and Laurence Publicover (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 107–129.

12. Cohen, Novel, p. 42.

13. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Sailor Talk: Labor, Utterance, and Meaning in the Works of Melville, Conrad, and London (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), p. 9.

14. Hester Blum, The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 184.

15. The extent to which seafarers participated in cultures of literacy forms one of Blum’s central arguments in View. On sailors’ letter-writing practices at sea, see also Blum, News, pp. 198–207 and Watt, Letters of Seamen. On the ‘intensive graphic culture of the ship’, in which multiple forms of writing took place, including the production of shipboard newspapers, see Martyn Lyons, ‘Ships’ Newspapers and the Graphic Universe Afloat in the Nineteenth Century’, Script & Print, 42.1 (2018), 5. In The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c. 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Lyons argues that sea journeys turned masses of ordinary people into writers as increased emigration in the late nineteenth century propelled ‘a massive outpouring of letter-writing amongst people who were barely literate and totally unaccustomed to handling a pen’, adding that ‘[t]hrough writing, individuals worked from a distance to sustain their social identities as members of a family group’ (pp. 11–12).

16. J. Welles Henderson, Marine Art and Antiques: Jack Tar, A Sailor’s Life, 1750–1910 (Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 1999), p. 15.

17. Lyons, Writing Culture, p. 7.

18. Despite the internationalisation of merchant maritime labour from the late nineteenth century, and as far as can be ascertained, there are few, if any, private logbooks in British archives by seafarers of colour. This raises questions about practices of curation (past and present) as well as questions of historical literacy and maritime roles on ships. As Aaron Jaffer shows, while shipboard diaries provide information on lascar sailors, these observations are always filtered through the writings of captains, passengers, missionaries, or soldiers. While noting that lascars ‘left few, if any, written accounts of their days at sea’, Jaffer’s own work innovatively draws on other sources in which the experiences and sometimes voices of sailors of colour are recorded, including petitions relating to shipboard conditions and depositions given in mutiny inquiries. See Lascars and Indian Ocean Seafaring, 1780–1860 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015), pp. 21–30 (p. 21). A rare archival diary written by a nineteenth-century seafarer of colour is that of Charles Benson (b. 1830), a free Black American sailor who worked as cook and ship’s steward on merchant ships in the 1850s and 1860s, and whose diary, kept on board the Glide in 1879–1880, has survived. See Michael Sokolow, Charles Benson: Mariner of Color in the Age of Sail (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

19. For example, see Lyons, Writing Culture; Brodie Waddell, ‘Writing History from Below: Chronicling and Record-Keeping in Early Modern England’, History Workshop Journal, 85 (2018), 239–264; Steven King and others, In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022). On the historical origins of the diary, see Philippe Lejeune, ‘Counting and Managing’, in On Diary, ed. by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), pp. 51–60.

20. Laura Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 231.

21. Valerie Sanders, ‘Victorian Life Writing’, Literature Compass, 1.1 (2004), 14.

22. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 34. On the diary’s historical multifunctionality and hybridity, see also Martin Hewitt, ‘Diary, Autobiography and the Practice of Life History’, in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. by David Amigoni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 28–29; and Joe Moran, ‘Private Lives, Public Histories: The Diary in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 54.1 (2015), 154.

23. See Moran’s survey and application of these methodologies in ‘Private Lives’.

24. Ann Coats, Introduction, in Hawkins, Letters of Seamen, p. x.

25. Blum suggests that, at least in the US context, sailors were ‘a class of workers who attained an above-average degree of literacy and who participated in a robust culture of reading and writing’ (View, p. 26). On sailors’ literacy, see also Skallerup, Books Afloat, pp. 204–205; Rediker, Between the Devil, p. 158; Alexander, ‘Literacy’.

26. Mentz, Ocean, p. 56.

27. On the practice of official logbook keeping see Skallerup, Books Afloat, 216; Cohen, Novel, pp. 22–24; Blum, View, pp. 102–103.

28. Conrad, Typhoon, p. 25.

29. ‘William Brown’, Narrative, p. 152.

30. Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 14–16 (p. 14). On the purported differences between the travel diary and terrestrial diary, as well as their shared ‘structural affinities’, see Tim Youngs, ‘British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary’, in The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life, ed. by Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), pp. 179–194 (p. 189). The slippage between these forms is also apparent at the level of taxonomy. Under the primary definition of ‘log-book’ as a nautical term in the OED are its figurative uses to denote personal land-based journals; the quoted examples include James Boswell’s reference to his journal as ‘truly a log-book of felicity’ (1791), and Lord Byron’s allusion to ‘[t]his additional page of life’s log-book’ (1821) (OED).

31. Hewitt, ‘Diary’, p. 26.

32. Hewitt, ‘Diary’, p. 26. On the development of the diary as a record of modern industrial time, see Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and the English Diurnal Form 1660–1785 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). Anne McClintock locates the diary within the context of a wider Victorian ‘cult of industrial rationality’ that extended to the ordering of domestic space and routines; Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 168–173 (p. 168).

33. John Burnett, ed., Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 10.

34. Existing work on British working-class diary writing has focussed mainly on the extraordinary example of Hannah Cullwick’s personal chronicles detailing her life as a Victorian maidservant and, separately, on emigrant diaries. In his study of the latter, Andrew Hassam argues that most ‘steerage diaries’ were written by ‘mechanicals’, namely skilled workers like blacksmiths, carpenters, plumbers, or bootmakers who had undergone an apprenticeship and were more likely to be fully literate’; Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 12–13. See also Hassam’s invaluable study and collection of shipboard diaries by working-class emigrants travelling to Australia: No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries, 1852–1879 (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1995).

35. MM, DX/883, Transcript of the Diary of William Thomas, Ship’s Carpenter, on the Indian Queen, for a Voyage from Liverpool to Quebec, 22 June 1872.

36. Hewitt, ‘Diary’, p. 21.

37. Hewitt suggests that the subordinate status of the diary ‘has been challenged by work from within women’s studies which has suggested that, given the ways in which Victorian protocols effectively denied the validity of women’s lives as fit subjects for autobiographical construction, for women at least, the diary along with the letter and other more ephemeral or episodic texts, needs to be approached as a potentially complex form of writing on its own terms’; ‘Diary’, p. 21. For a useful overview of this critical literature, see Kathryn Carter, ‘Feminist Interpretations of the Diary’, in Diary, ed. by Ben-Amos and Ben-Amos, pp. 39–57.

38. Hewitt, ‘Diary’, p. 36.

39. Moran, ‘Private Lives’, 139.

40. Jennifer Sinor, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), pp. 4–5.

41. Sinor, Extraordinary Work, p. 187.

42. Sinor, Extraordinary Work, p. 89.

43. Edward Beck, The Sea Voyages of Edward Beck in the 1820s, ed. by Kenneth M. Hay and Joy Roberts (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1996), p. 56. For a detailed examination of apprentice seaman Beck’s diaries, with a focus on the text as a repository for the writer’s acquired nautical knowledge, see Cumings and Publicover, ‘Shipboard Diaries’.

44. NMM, JOD/87/2, Journal of Sidney Smith on Board the Whampoa, 1867–1868, 12 August 1868.

45. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 169.

46. NMM, JOD/87/2, Journal, 10 August 1868.

47. Bullen, With Christ at Sea, p. 15; John Brown, Sixty Years’ Gleanings from Life’s Harvest: A Genuine Autobiography (Cambridge: Printed for the Author, 1858), p. 88; ‘Crispin’ [Britten], Wood-Yard to Palace, p. 144.

48. Beck, Sea Voyages, p. 7.

49. John Bryant, ‘Work’, Leviathan, 17.1 (2015), 146.

50. Alexander Whitehead, ‘China and Back’ [1857], in Diaries from the Days of Sail, ed. by R.C. Bell (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1974), pp. 71–110.

51. Sinor, Extraordinary Work, p. 105.

52. Cohen, Novel, p. 42.

53. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 57.

54. Moran, ‘Private Lives’, p. 160.

55. For example, Lyons remarks that ‘[p]oorly educated authors were well aware of their own shortcomings, and apologised profusely for them’ (Writing Culture, p. 34). Gagnier also places an emphasis on working-class authors’ typical ‘rhetorical modesty’, citing journalist and memoirist William Adams (‘I call myself a Social Atom – a small speck on the surface of society. The term indicates my insignificance … I am just an ordinary person’); Subjectivities, p. 42 and pp. 141–142.

56. Raymond Williams, ‘Popular Forms of Writing’, in Culture and Politics, ed. by Phil O’Brien (London: Verso, 2022), p. 186. On the effort and learned ability to employ rhetorical modalities, see Lyons, Writing Culture; and Steven King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).

57. On the popularity of cheap, abridged versions of this novel among working-class American readers, see Emily Gowen, ‘Transatlantic Abridgement and the Unstable Economics of Robinson Crusoe’, American Literature, 93.4 (2021), 543–570.

58. Charles Lamb, Letter from Lamb to Wilson, December 1822, in Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by Michael Shinagel (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 269.

59. Lamb, Letter, in Robinson Crusoe, p. 269. See Schmitt’s ‘Technical Maturity’ for a persuasive examination of the readerly appeal of nautical practice (‘[j]ury-rigging, trying out multiple professions, attention lavished on tools and the technical’) that endured into the late-Victorian sea fictions of Stevenson (p. 61).

60. For comparison, see Kathryn Walchester’s discussion of the ‘travelling servants’ who accompanied their employers on tours and whose written accounts, prompted by these journeys, serve to complicate the received categories of ‘travel’, ‘mobility’, and, indeed, ‘travel writer’; Travelling Servants: Mobility and Employment in British Travel Writing, 1750–1850 (London: Routledge, 2020).

61. MM, DX/1177/1/2, Journal of William Cecil Barker, 30 April 1878, p. 43.

62. Beck, Sea Voyages, p. 5.

63. MM, DX/1135/R, Diary and Ship Log of Apprentice, George Haram, 1836–1837.

64. NMM, MSS/77/125, Uncatalogued: Williamson, John Charles (Master Mariner), 1874–1885.

65. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal Kept by John Dand, Carpenter on the Barque Sir Henry Pottinger (1858), 1 April 1858.

66. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal, 19 July 1858.

67. See Lyons’ application of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia in ‘Ships’ Newspapers’, 9–11.

68. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 170–194; John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914’, Journal of British Studies, 44.2 (2005), 339. The notion of the ‘flight from marriage’, and linked assumption that imperial quest romances might reinvigorate the waning energies of the middle-class male, is discussed in Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 81–83. Begiato usefully argues for a ‘nuancing of the thesis of the flight from domesticity, by offering more evidence of the place and role of the domestic within homosocial institutions, as well as the militarisation of the domestic environment’ (Manliness, pp. 127–128).

69. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal, 18 March 1858.

70. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal, 4 April 1858.

71. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal, 11 April 1858.

72. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal, 11 April 1858.

73. On the allotment system – by which a portion of sailors’ earnings were allocated in their absence to families – see Burton, ‘Myth of Bachelor Jack’, pp. 180–186.

74. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal, 15 June 1858.

75. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal, 28 June 1858.

76. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal, 18 April 1858.

77. On the significance of the diary’s physical properties – including ‘important sensory information such as texture, smell, nuances of material composition, and traces of use’ – see Desirée Henderson, ‘Reading Digitized Diaries: Privacy and the Digital Life-Writing Archive’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 33.1 (2018), 163. Reflecting on the haptic experience of reading her ancestor’s diary, Sinor similarly lays emphasis on the diary’s materiality, including the ‘spacing, the feel of the paper, her handwriting, the doodling – all the things that let us know a real and unprofessional writer is writing this text’ (Extraordinary Work, p. xiii).

78. 13-year-old Haram, prefaced his diary with a list of the items in his chest on the flyleaf of his journal kept as he sailed on the trading barque Jane on the coasts of Chile and Peru in 1836. It included 36 items of clothing and 27 books he presumably intended to read, among them issues of the Saturday Magazine, Principles of Geometry, ‘Franklin’s Travels and Maps’, a work of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, and both English and Spanish grammar books. MM, CX/1135/R, Diary, flyleaf.

79. The National Archives (TNA), Kew, Registers of Deaths at Sea of British Nationals, BT 159; Piece: 2. Available at www.ancestry.co.uk [accessed 26 June 2024].

80. TNA, 1881 England Census, Class: RG11; Piece: 3617; Folio: 27; Page: 48; GSU roll: 1341866, available at www.ancestry.co.uk [accessed 26 June 2024].

81. MM, DX/1167/1/1, Journal of Edward Blackie on Crofton Hall, Liverpool to Calcutta, 1884.

82. MM, DX/1167/2/1, letter from Edward Blackie to his mother, 27 August 1883.

83. NMM, JOD/87/1, Journal, 29 September 1867.

84. NMM, JOD/87/1, Journal, 24 November 1867.

85. NMM, JOD/87/1, Journal, 4 May 1868.

86. NMM, JOD/87/1, Journal, 7 May 1868.

87. NMM, JOD/87, Journal, letter from Board of Trade to NMM, 18 August 1969. He is listed as an ironmonger’s apprentice in TNA, 1871 England Census, Class: RG 10, 155, available at www.ancestry.co.uk [accessed 26 June 2024].

88. NMM, JOD/259, Log Kept by George William Mansfield on the Barque Lady Heathcote, Together with a Transcript and Information on Voyages (flyleaf and archival note).

89. NMM, JOD/259/2, Transcription of the Log Kept by George William Mansfield on the Barque Lady Heathcote, 1868–1869, p. 15.

90. NMM, JOD/259/2, Log, p. 38.

91. NMM, JOD/259/2, Log, p. 19.

92. NMM, JOD/259/2, Log, p. 22.

93. As observed by Jude Piesse, Darwin’s shipboard ‘letters are full of strange temporal disorientations and moments of uncertainty that feel giddy and vertiginous, and out of step with the local cycles he had left behind’; The Ghost in the Garden: In Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden (London: Scribe, 2021), p. 60.

94. NMM, JOD/278/2, Journal Kept by John Dand, 2 April 1858.

95. MM, DX/1177/1/1, Journal of William Cecil Barker, p. 88.

96. NMM, JOD/87/2, Journal, 24 July 1868.

97. Blum, News, pp. 91, 33.

98. Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 83.

99. NMM, JOD/87/1, Journal, 10 April 1867.

100. MM, DX/1859/1, Account of Voyage on Barque Thomas Wood, 1 January 1865.

101. MM, DX/1859/1, Account of Voyage, 20 August 1865.

102. NMM, JOD/259/2, Log, p. 96.

103. On boredom at sea in the context of British naval sailors, see Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 24–27.

104. MM, DX/1859/1, Account of Voyage (consecutive entries spanning November–December 1864).

105. MM, DX/1859/1, Account of Voyage, 22 July 1865.

106. Beck, Sea Voyages, p. 192.

107. NMM, MSS/84/052, Transcript of the Diary of Neil Smith, Carpenter on the Barque Cape Finisterre, 1876 to 1877, p. 3.

108. MM, DX/871, Voyage Diary by J. William Archer, Crew on Board Ship Lizzie Bell, 26 February 1883.

109. Beck, albeit with some irony, addresses the ship directly as an ‘old friend’ (Sea Voyages, p. 118). As Margo Culley writes in relation to the diarist’s address: ‘The importance of the audience, real or implied, conscious or unconscious, of what is usually thought of as a private genre cannot be overstated. The presence of a sense of audience, in this form of writing as in all others, has a crucial influence over what is said and how it is said’; ‘Introduction’, in A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women Writers from 1764 to the Present, ed. by Margo Culley (Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1993), pp. 11–12.

110. Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (London: William Collins, 2017), p. 91.

111. Beck, Sea Voyages, p. 217.

112. Desirée Henderson, ‘Reading Digitized Diaries’, 166.

113. Joanne Begiato, ‘Moving Objects: Emotional Transformation, Tangibility, and Time Travel’, in Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History, ed. by Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 238.

114. Sharon Marcus, Between Women, p. 35. On the recognition within literary and historical scholarship that ‘diary writing and reading practices were more social and collaborative than previous appreciated’, see Desirée Henderson, ‘Reading Digitized Diaries’, 165–166.

115. On objects as ‘elicitors of emotions’, see Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 38 and pp. 183–187; Begiato, ‘Moving Objects’.

116. Moran, ‘Private Lives’, p. 158.

117. Beck, Sea Voyages, p. 184.

118. NMM, MSS/84/052; Transcript of the Diary of Neil Smith, p. 9.

119. For example, see the collection of beautifully illustrated sea journals by an international cohort of sailors, anthologised in Huw Lewis-Jones’s The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019).

120. An archival note (misleadingly) warns the reader: ‘In many respects the journal proves rather disappointing. The writer refers only briefly to his ports of call and to the voyage in general. His main concern appears to be the welfare of his wife and two sons in Greenock and his longing to be home with them’ (NMM, MSS/84/052, Transcript of the Diary of Neil Smith, prefatory note).

121. Lyons, Writing Culture, p. 12.

122. NMM MSS/84/052, Transcript of the Diary of Neil Smith, p. 1. Subsequent references to the page number of the diary transcript are provided in the main body of the text.

123. For the way in which work was associated with the preservation and maintenance of home, see Strange, Fatherhood, pp. 25–32.

124. Sinor, Extraordinary Work, p. 121.

125. Benjamin Franklin, ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman [21 July 1748]’, Founders Online, National Archives (USA) https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-03-02-0130 [accessed 10 July 2023].

126. National Records of Scotland, Statutory registers Deaths, 564/3 942, 1876. Available at www.ancestry.co.uk [accessed 26 June 2024].

127. Francis Russell Hart, ‘History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir’, New Literary History, 11.1 (1979), 195.

128. As the editors of a special issue on life writing and death observe: ‘Death ends first-person writing, though first-person writing can survive the death of its writer’; Clare Brant, James Metcalf and Jane Wildgoose, ‘Life Writing and Death: Dialogues of the Dead’, European Journal of Life Writing, 9 (2020), 9. On the relation between diary writing and death, see also Philippe Lejeune, ‘How do Diaries End?’, Biography, 24.1 (2001), 108–111.

129. Blum, View, p. 191.

130. Horatio Clare, Down to the Sea in Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men (London: Vintage, 2015), p. 79.

131. Death notice, Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette, 22 June 1888 www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000472/18880622/032/0002 [accessed 30 August 2023].

132. 1891 Scotland Census; 1901 Scotland Census, Parish: Govan; ED: 16; Page: 20; Line: 19; Roll: CSSCT1901_324. Available at www.ancestry.co.uk [accessed 26 June 2024].

133. Sinor, Extraordinary Work, p. 36.

134. See Behenna, Victorian Sailor’s Diary, pp. 25–27. The diary was subsequently published in pamphlet form.

135. Whitehead, ‘China and Back’, p. 98.

136. Moran, ‘Private Lives’, 161.

137. NMM, JOD/259/2, Log, p. 81.

138. NMM, JOD/259/2, Log, p. 88.

139. NMM, JOD/259/2, Log, p. 89.

140. NMM, JOD/259/2, editorial note in the introduction to Transcription of the Log Kept by George William Mansfield, p. ii.

141. MM, DX/883, Diary, 27 July 1872.

142. MM, DX/883, Diary, 30 July 1872.

143. MM, DX/883, Diary, supplementary ‘Report of John Carmicheal’.

144. MM, DX/883, Diary, supplementary ‘Report’. See also ‘Wreck of the Indian Queen of Liverpool: Fourteen Men Drowned’, Dundee Courier, 11 December 1872.

145. MM, DX/906/1/1, Handwritten Logbook of the Liverpool Barque Craigmullen, 1894–1896, 2 December 1895.

146. MM, DX/906/1/1, Logbook, 24 December 1895.

147. MM, DX/906/1/1, Logbook, 25 December 1895.

148. MM, DX/906/1/1, Logbook, 5 January 1896.

149. Bercaw Edwards, Sailor Talk, p. 66.

150. MM, DX/906/1/1, Logbook, 12–16 January 1896.

151. E.G. Mann, ‘The Ship that Disappeared’, Wide World Magazine, 21 (1908), 419–423. A forensic account of the case of the Craigmullen is provided in Charles Clark, ‘Notes’, Mariner’s Mirror, 92.4 (2006), 483–484.

152. Clark, ‘Notes’, 483.

153. Clark, ‘Notes’, 483–484.

154. Clark, ‘Notes’, 484–485.

155. Blum, View, p. 102. Clark’s explanation for Mann’s ‘creative approach’ includes his possible quest for financial gain, self-aggrandisement, or indeed a need to save face by upholding over the years the tall tale he had developed (‘Notes’, 485).

156. Lejeune, ‘How do Diaries End?’, 99–112.

157. See, for example, Harrop’s manuscript, in which one of the journals appears to have been transcribed after the events took place.

158. For a discussion of Roland Barthes’s concept of the ‘reality effect’ in the context of sea fiction, see Cohen, ‘Traveling Genres’, 489–490.

159. NMM, BGR/45, ‘Recollections of By Gone Days by James Richardson’.

160. Lay’s memoir is a fairly unique document, given the author’s impoverished background. Lay lost his mother at the age of 8 after she gave birth to a daughter; the remaining children were placed in an orphanage in Aylesbury. Lay was eventually apprenticed to the master of a Grimsby fishing smack when he was 16 working his way up to a mate’s certificate before becoming master of the steam trawler Vampire in 1899 (see the archival introductory note that prefaces the manuscript; Burnett Archive, Alfred George Henry Lay, ‘Adventure’, BURN/3/211).

161. Jack and Nora Parsons, Cornish Fisherboy to Master Mariner: The Life of Henry Blewett, 1836–1891, 3 parts (Bournemouth: Bournemouth Local Studies Publication: 1994), III, p. 69.

162. NMM, JOD/247/2, Diary of a Voyage in the Roseau Barque, 3 August 1879, dedication in flyleaf.

163. Cohen, Novel, p. 210.

164. The market for published records of sea voyages had existed for several centuries. As Susann Liebich and Laurence Publicover argue: ‘Sailors’ diaries may therefore contain traces of literary ambition and financial opportunism’; ‘Introduction’, in Shipboard Literary Cultures, ed. by Liebich and Publicover, p. 13.

165. Robert Brown, Spunyarn and Spindrift: A Sailor Boy’s Log, Or, A Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-Clipper (London: Houlston, 1886), p. 2.

166. Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media’, ELH, 59.2 (1992), 471.

167. Brown, Spunyarn, pp. 227–228.

168. Culley, ‘Introduction’, p. 21. With specific reference to logbooks, Blum argues that the form provided a ‘model for many sea narratives, which adopt either the logbook’s diary-entry form, or at least its insistence on a meticulous chronological progression’ (View, p. 103).

169. William Stephens Hayward, Tom Holt’s Log: A Tale of the Deep Sea (London: Charles Henry Clarke, 1868), p. 90.

170. Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line: A Confession, ed. by Jeremy Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009), p. 79.

171. Conrad, Shadow-Line, p. 87.

172. See endnote 79 in Shadow-Line, p. 126. Other nineteenth-century narratives that contain ‘logbook’ episodes include Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). A further example of a real-life log being deployed for fictional purposes can be found in Erskine Childer’s early espionage novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903). As Schmitt comments, in relation to the tale’s mirroring of Childer’s own experience on board a converted lifeboat in 1897, ‘[n]ovel and life align so closely that sections of Riddle reproduce entries in Vixen’s log nearly verbatim’; ‘Imaginary Worlds’, p. 204.

173. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 49. On the influence of travel logs in the development of fiction, see Cohen, Novel, pp. 11–14; and Robert Markley ‘“The Southern Unknown Countries”: Imagining the Pacific in the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, in The Cambridge History of the Novel, ed. by Robert L. Caserio and Clement Hawes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 197–198. On the proliferation of documents, materials and various media in the late Victorian novel, see Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting’, 467–493; Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993).

174. Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 505.

175. See Norquay, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 182.

176. On Stevenson’s subversion of the conventions of imperial romance fiction, see Roslyn Jolly, ‘Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35 (2007), 157–173; Philip Steer, ‘Romances of Uneven Development: Spatiality, Trade, and Form in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Novels’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 43.2 (2015), 343–356; Alistair Robinson, ‘Beachcombers: Vagrancy, Empire, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide’, Review of English Studies, 70.297 (2019), 930–949.

177. Stephen Arata, ‘Stevenson’s Careful Observances’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 47 (2007) https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/016704ar [accessed 19 January 2023].

178. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker (London: Cassell, 1892), p. 183.

179. Stevenson and Osbourne, Wrecker, p. 359.

180. Stevenson and Osbourne, Wrecker, p. 358.

181. Stevenson and Osbourne, Wrecker, p. 361.

1. The significance of London and other metropolitan centres specifically as port cities is largely absent from important studies of urban modernity, including: Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993); Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); R.J. Morris, ed., The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History, 1820–1914 (London: Longman, 1993).

2. Raymond Williams repeatedly deploys the phrase ‘way of seeing’ throughout The Country and the City, his influential cultural materialist study of rural and metropolitan forms. ‘Metropolitan perceptions’ derives from Williams’s essay ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’, in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), p. 47. For the use of the phrase ‘metropolitan perception’ (in its singular form) within the context of late modernist practice, see Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 3–11.

3. Margaret Cohen, ‘The Chronotopes of the Sea’, in The Novel, ed. by Franco Moretti, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), II, Forms and Themes, p. 647. Cohen’s reference to the chronotope derives from the narrative theory of Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (1975), in which the term is used ‘to characterize the poetic dimension to the literary representation of space, and specifically its poetic dimension within narrative forms’ (‘Chronotopes’, p. 647).

4. Cohen, ‘Chronotopes’, 649.

5. See Jesse Lemisch’s early scholarly recognition of this type in ‘Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 25.3 (1968), 371–407.

6. John Marriott, Beyond the Tower: A History of East London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 94.

7. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 409.

8. H.G. Clarke, London As It Is Today: Where to Go and What to See, during the Great Exhibition (London: H.G. Clarke & Co., 1851), p. 174. On the Crystal Palace display as heralding a new world order of globalisation at the mid-century, see Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

9. Clarke, London, p. 174.

10. Charles Booth’s London (CBL), BOOTH/B/367, George H. Duckworth’s Notebook, Police District 33 [St James Bermondsey and Rotherhithe], 1899, p. 25. Available at https://booth.lse.ac.uk/notebooks [accessed 28 June 2023].

11. CBL, BOOTH/B/367, Duckworth’s Notebook, pp. 37–39.

12. Havelock Wilson, Stormy Voyage, p. 1.

13. Dorothy Scannell, Mother Knew Best: An East End Childhood (London: Pan Books, 1975), p. 24.

14. Burnett Archive, Wilhelmina Tobias, ‘Childhood Memories’, BURN/2/766, pp. 1–2. Other memoirs that provide revealing child’s-eye-view accounts of the waterfront include: Rogers, Labour; Haw, Workhouse to Westminster; H.M. Tomlinson, London River (London: Cassell & Co., 1921); Louis Heren, Growing Up Poor in London (London: Hamilton, 1973); Harry Harris, Under Oars: Reminiscences of a Thames Lighterman, 1894–1909 (London: Centerprise, 1978); Cécile de Banke, Hand Over Hand (London: Hutchinson, 1957); Ben Thomas, Ben’s Limehouse: Recollections (London: Ragged School Books, 1987); O’Mara, Autobiography; Burnett Archive, Charles Frederick Wynne, ‘Old Pompey and Other Places’, BURN/2/1048; Burnett Archive, John Edmonds, ‘The Lean Years’, BURN 2/237; Burnett Archive, Henrietta Burkin, ‘Memoirs of Henrietta Burkin’, BURN/2/118; Catherine Cookson, Our Kate (London: Corgi, 1993).

15. Cultural historical studies of sailortown include: Valerie Burton, ‘“Whoring, Drinking Sailors”: Reflections on Masculinity from the Labour History of Nineteenth-Century British Shipping’, in Working Out Gender: Perspectives from Labour History, ed. by Margaret Walsh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 84–101; Burton, ‘Boundaries and Identities in the Nineteenth-Century English Port: Sailortown Narratives and Urban Space’, in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City Since 1850, ed. by Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 137–152; Burton, ‘“As I Wuz A-Rolling Down the Highway One Morn”: Fictions of the 19th-Century English Sailortown’, in Fictions of the Sea, ed. by Klein, pp. 141–156; Robert Lee, ‘The Seafarers’ Urban World: A Critical Review’, International Journal of Maritime History, 25.1 (2013), 23–64; Brad Beaven, ‘The Resilience of Sailortown Culture in English Naval Ports, c. 1820–1900’, Urban History, 43.1 (2016), 72–95; Graeme Milne, People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront: Sailortown (New York: Macmillan, 2016); Agustina Martire and Aisling Madden, ‘The Streets That Were There Are Gone … but Sailortown’s Stories Remain’, in Everyday Streets: Inclusive Approaches to Understanding and Designing Streets, ed. by Agustina Martire, Birgit Hausleitner and Jane Clossick (London: University College London, 2023), pp. 119–138.

16. On the transatlantic import of the term ‘chinatown’, see Ross G. Forman, ‘A Cockney Chinatown: The Literature of Limehouse, London’, in China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 203.

17. Early uses of ‘sailor town’ in American newspapers include: ‘Affray’, Daily Eastern Argus, 24 August 1869; ‘Mysteries of Sailor Town: A Study of New York Low Life in the Graphic’, Springfield Republican, 4 June 1879, while examples of the use of ‘sailor-town’ and ‘sailor town’ can be found in British newspaper articles from the 1890s onwards. An early formulation of ‘sailor town’, however, occurs in Sir John Sinclair, The Statistical Account of Scotland: Drawn Up from the Communications of the Ministers of the Different Parishes, 21 vols (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1793), IX, which links the name of the parish Balmurenach as stemming from the Gaelic for ‘sailors town’ (p. 216).

18. Stan Hugill, Sailortown (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. xviii.

19. Brad Beaven, Karl Bell and Robert James, eds., Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c. 1700–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Hugill, Sailortown.

20. Sarah B. Palmer, ‘Seamen Ashore in Late Nineteenth Century London: Protection from the Crimps’, in Seamen in Society, ed. by Paul Adam (Bucharest: Proceedings of the International Commission on Maritime History, 1980), p. 55.

21. ‘Paradise Street’ was the name given to the central thoroughfare of Liverpool’s sailortown – the location of both the imposing Sailors’ Home, and a red-light district. For a description of the location of historical sailortowns across the United Kingdom, see Milne, People, pp. 1–29.

22. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 7.

23. Laura Tabili, Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841–1939 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 3. See also Isabel Hofmeyr’s compelling analysis of the littoral space and practices of the colonial port city, in Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).

24. See Land, ‘Review Essay’; Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P.M. Kerr, ‘Introduction’, in Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P.M. Kerr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 1–26; Meg Samuelson, ‘Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral’, Comparative Literature, 69.1 (2017), 16–24.

25. Beaven, ‘Resilience’, 84.

26. ‘Cosmopolite’ was a seventeenth-century coinage that was revived in the nineteenth century to mean ‘“citizen of the world”; one who regards or treats the whole world as his country; one who has no national attachments or prejudices’ (OED). In this sense it was often contrasted, both positively and pejoratively, with the idea of the ‘patriot’.

27. John Fielding, quoted in Rediker, Between the Devil, p. 11.

28. Pierce Egan, Life in London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1821), pp. 320–321.

29. Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller (London: Chapman & Hall, 1914), pp. 31–41.

30. ‘Sunday with the Sailors’, Household Words, 18 June 1881, p. 273.

31. Rev. Harry Jones, East and West London: Being Notes of Common Life and Pastoral Work in Saint James’s, Westminster and in Saint George’s-in-the-East (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1875), p. 142.

32. Jones, East and West, p. 169.

33. Jones, East and West, p. 131.

34. Jones, East and West, pp. 130–131.

35. Florence Bell, At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town (London: Edward Arnold, 1907), p. 18.

36. Fink, Sweatshops, p. 55. On the practice of crimps, useful studies include: Palmer, ‘Seamen Ashore’, pp. 55–67; Milne, People, pp. 103–137.

37. George Augustus Sala, Gaslight and Daylight: Some London Scenes They Shine Upon (London: Chapman & Hall, 1859), p. 42.

38. J. Ewing Ritchie, The Night Side of London (London: Tinsley, 1861), p. 103.

39. On the ‘ornamental’ surface presentation of sailortown, see Emily Cuming, ‘At Home in the World? The Ornamental Life of Sailors in Victorian Sailortown’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 47.3 (2019), 463–485.

40. ‘The Sailors’ Home’, Household Words, 22 March 1851, p. 613.

41. ‘Sailors’ Home’, p. 613.

42. Hugill, Sailortown, pp. 74–75.

43. Rev. George H. Mitchell, Sailortown (London: Jarrolds, 1917), p. 20.

44. Dan Walden, ‘Ships and Crypts: The Coastal World of Poe’s “King Pest”, “The Premature Burial”, and “The Oblong Box”’, Edgar Allan Poe Review, 10.2 (2009), 108.

45. Hugill, Sailortown, p. 73. ‘Damnation Alley’ was the name given to the sailor district in Plymouth; see Walkowitz, Prostitution, p. 155.

46. Merchant sailor Alfred Lay’s unpublished memoirs provide a particularly grim and notably sober account of sailortown as a place of loneliness, inhospitable lodgings, and semi-starvation in the late 1890s. In his version, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves in the Bowery dives of the ‘gayest street in New York’, but he is penniless, friendless and with no place to stay, resorting to sleeping under trees in the park. Nor did he appreciate the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the sailors’ boarding-house, describing it as the ‘worst place’ he had ever seen, filled with ‘men of all nations … jabbering away in there different languages’ (Burnett Archive, ‘Adventure,’ n.p.)

47. Bullen, With Christ at Sea, p. 59.

48. John Mack comments that ‘sea ports were amongst the first urban centres to develop cosmopolitan populations’ (Sea, p. 29). On the multiethnic and international feature of British sailortown, see also Beaven, Bell and James, eds., Port Towns; Frost, ed., Ethnic Labour; Tabili, Global Migrants; Lee, ‘Seafarers’ Urban World’; Graeme J. Milne, ‘Maritime Liverpool’, in Liverpool 800: Culture, Character & History, ed. by John Belchem (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), pp. 257–309; John Belchem and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, in Liverpool 800, ed. by Belchem, pp. 311–391; Ray Costello, ‘The Making of a Liverpool Community: An Elusive Narrative’, in Britain’s Black Past, ed. by Gretchen H. Gerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 99–117.

49. Belchem and MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, pp. 312–315.

50. Caroline Bressey, ‘Looking for Work: The Black Presence in Britain 1860–1920’, Immigrants & Minorities, 28.2/3 (2010), 167. On the significance of port cities for Black British history, see David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, 2016), pp. 451–454.

51. Belchem and MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, p. 315.

52. ‘Coloured Seamen and their Grievances’, Liverpool Mercury, 25 August 1880, p. 5.

53. Contemporary reflections on Black and lascar sailors are detailed in one of Booth’s notebooks on industry titled ‘Lascars & Asiatics’, in CBL, BOOTH/B/B138, Notebook: Merchant Seamen and Lightermen, pp. 49–55, available at https://booth.lse.ac.uk/notebooks [accessed 28 June 2023], and in ‘Coloured Seamen’ from the Liverpool Mercury. Scholarship in this area includes Alan Cobley, ‘Black West Indian Seamen in the British Merchant Marine in the Mid Nineteenth Century’, History Workshop Journal, 58 (2004), 259–274; Costello, Black Salt; Charles R. Foy’s ‘Britain’s Black Tars’, in Britain’s Black Past, ed. by Gerzina, pp. 63–79. See also Jensen’s exploration of three Black ex-seamen who worked on London streets in 1815–1851 and provided accounts of their life stories through balladry and a self-published pamphlet (Vagabonds, pp. 170–186). One of these subjects – the Victorian Jamaican double-amputee Edward Albert, who wrote and distributed his extraordinary story in pamphlet form – is explored in detail by Prizel in ‘“Dead Man Come to Life Again”’.

54. Raphael Samuel, ‘Comers and Goers’, in The Victorian City: Images and Reality, ed. by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), I, Past and Present; and, Numbers of People, pp. 123–160.

55. According to Beverly Lemire, from the 1600s onwards, mariners ‘were among the first large communities of men routinely dressed in ready-made garments’, resulting in a global trade in sailor garb sent to various locales across the world; ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress, c. 1600–1800’, Cultural and Social History, 13.1 (2016), 3–5. Gareth Stedman Jones also notes that the ‘earliest market for ready-made clothing had been sailors, and ready-made work had been given out to dockers’ wives as early as 1810’; Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 107. A fascinating set of first-person accounts given by Liverpudlian sailors’ wives engaged in the fabrication of ‘ready-made apparel’, including sailors’ clothes and ‘jean trowsers’, is contained in Letter VI on ‘Shirtmakers and Needlewomen: The Slop Trade and Sweating System’, in Charles Mackay, The Morning Chronicle’s Labour and the Poor, 10 vols, ed. by Rebecca Watts and Kevin Booth ([Great Britain]: Ditto Books, 2020), X, Liverpool, pp. 112–127.

56. Sala, Gaslight, p. 50.

57. Letter XV, Mackay, Labour and the Poor, p. 309.

58. Ritchie, Night Side, p. 105.

59. James Greenwood, In Strange Company: Being the Experiences of a Roving Correspondent (London: Vizetelly & Co., 1883), pp. 186, 185.

60. John Binny, ‘Thieves and Swindlers’, in Mayhew, London Labour, IV, p. 365. On the use of ‘sailor’s wife’ as a euphemism for women engaged in prostitution, see Michael Ryan, Prostitution in London: With a Comparative View of That of Paris and New York (London: H. Bailliere, 1839), pp. 189–190.

61. CBL, BOOTH/B/371, George E. Arkell and George H. Duckworth’s Notebook: Police District 46 [Greenwich], 1899–1900, p. 159.

62. Ginger Frost discusses seafarers’ proclivities for common-law forms of self-marriage and self-divorce, a relation that suited labourers whose ‘relationships were necessarily temporary, without being casual’; Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 130. The Old Bailey Proceedings Online also offer a rich source of details concerning sailors’ non-normative marriages and partnerships with women: Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘Insights into Plebian Marriage: Soldiers, Sailors, and Their Wives in the Old Bailey Proceedings’, The London Journal, 30.1 (2005), 22–38.

63. Jones, East and West London, p. 219.

64. Frost explores the ‘fluid’ situation by which, within a ‘single relationship, a couple might go from being a prostitute and a “regular”, a kept woman with a protector who visited, then a live-in mistress’ (Living in Sin, p. 153).

65. Bracebridge Hemyng, ‘Prostitution in London’, in Mayhew, London Labour, IV, p. 227.

66. Hemyng, ‘Prostitution’, p. 230.

67. Hemyng, ‘Prostitution’, p. 232.

68. Hemyng, ‘Prostitution’, pp. 232–233.

69. Joseph Salter, The Asiatic in England: Sketches of Sixteen Years’ Work among Orientals (London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1873), p. 27. Humberto Garcia offers a detailed exploration of this local and global institution: ‘The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders: Inaugurating a Hospitable World Order in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, 1.1 (2022), 81–90. In fiction, interracial relationships between sailors and women in port cities are the focus of George Nevinson’s short story ‘Sissero’s Return’ (1895) and Thomas Burke’s ‘The Father of Yoto’ (1916).

70. Walkowitz, Prostitution, pp. 29, 197.

71. Walkowitz, Prostitution, p. 192.

72. Hemyng, ‘Prostitution’, p. 233.

73. Palmer, ‘Seamen Ashore’, p. 55.

74. Sala, for example, commented on Stepney’s ‘queer little public-houses like ship-cuddies, transplanted from East Indiamen, and which have taken root here’ (Gaslight, p. 51). Hugill also observes that a ‘few of the boarding-houses had their rooms built in imitation of a ship’s fo’c’sle, to make Jack feel at home’ (Hugill, Sailortown, p. 85), while Milne notes the ‘maritime theme of decor and fittings’ and ‘nautical paraphernalia’ of these cheap and temporary lodging-places (People, p. 149).

75. ‘Visit to the Sailors’ Home in London’, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 14 August 1841, p. 233.

76. Mayhew, Morning Chronicle, IV, p. 107.

77. Jones, East and West London, p. 210.

78. ‘Terrible Fire in Liverpool’, Liverpool Daily Post, 30 April 1860, p. 8.

79. Tabili, Global Migrants, pp. 114–118, 153–154; Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen, ‘Expressions of Longing, Sources of Anxiety? The Significance of Contacts with Home for Finnish Sailors in London and Hull in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in People of the Northern Seas, ed. by Lewis R. Fisher (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), pp. 63–79; Jasper Segerink and Kristof Loockx, ‘Lodging Houses as Facilitators of Global and Local Entanglements in Harbour Districts: Evidence from the Port of Antwerp c. 1860–1910’, Urban History (2024), 1–17. For a contemporary account by the philanthropist and co-founder of several ‘sailors’ rests’, see Agnes Weston, My Life among the Blue Jackets (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1910).

80. Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (New York: Harper, 1849), pp. 168–169.

81. Dolling, Ten Years, pp. 105–106.

82. On friendship as an important and overlooked aspect of kinship, see Davidoff and others, Family Story, pp. 81–83; Tadmor, Family and Friends, pp. 167–215. Holly Furneaux provides invaluable analyses of friendship between men in Queer Dickens and Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

83. Rev. George John Hill, Hill of Ratcliff Highway: A Memoir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 64.

84. Hill, Hill, pp. 50, 64.

85. Anthea Trodd, ‘Messages in Bottles and Collins’s Seafaring Man’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 41.4 (2001), 754–755.

86. Hay, Landsman Hay, p. 190.

87. Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective (London: Thomas Bosworth, 1852), p. 96.

88. Lemire notes that sailors in port from the seventeenth-century onwards possessed significant ‘cultural capital’ as a cosmopolitan cohort who ‘were unique among labouring peoples in their extensive contacts with … new consumer items like tobacco, Indian calico, Chinese silk, tea and coffee – goods mariners routinely encountered in their travels’ (Question of Trousers, 6).

89. Begiato, Manliness, p. 35.

90. Begiato, Manliness, p. 41.

91. Bercaw Edwards provides a rich examination of the evolution of ‘sailor talk’ from its characterisation in the nineteenth-century American popular press as ‘the very dialect of hell’ to a global lingua franca (Sailor Talk, p. 86).

92. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 11.

93. See Tony Crowley, Scouse: A Social and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 94–105. Crowley’s theorisation of indexicality and application of it to the socio-spatial identity of ‘Scouse’ draws on Michael Silverstein’s ‘Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life’, Language and Communication, 23 (2003), 193–229.

94. Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, p. 56.

95. Crowley, Scouse, p. 108.

96. ‘The Riverside Visitor’ [Thomas Wright], Pinch of Poverty: Sufferings and Heroism of the London Poor (London: Isbister and Company Ltd, 1892), p. 324.

97. Lemire, ‘Question of Trousers’, p. 5.

98. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 67.

99. Indeed, Sherlock Holmes adopts the disguise of the sailor in several of his cases, including in the waterside denouement of the novel The Sign of Four (1890).

100. Mayhew, London Labour, I, pp. 241–246, 311–313, 383–385. See also Andrew Halliday’s report on ‘turnpike sailors’ in Mayhew, London Labour, IV, pp. 415–417.

101. Mayhew, London Labour, I, p. 245.

102. Mayhew, London Labour, I, p. 246.

103. Mayhew, London Labour, I, p. 384. Although, in Redburn, the narrator mentions the ruse of paupers disguised as sailors, but acknowledges that ‘Jack would see through their disguise in a moment’ (Melville, Redburn, p. 238).

104. [Felix Folio], The Hawkers and Street Dealers of the North of England Manufacturing Districts (Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1859), p. 31.

105. Mayhew, London Labour, I, p. 384.

106. Mayhew, London Labour, I, p. 415.

107. W. Jeffrey Bolster, ‘“Every Inch a Man”: Gender in the Lives of African-American Seamen, 1800–1860’, in Iron Men, ed. by Creighton and Norling, p. 139.

108. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. by R.J. Ellis (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015), p. 106.

109. Jason Finch and Jessica Kelly, ‘Disinterring Slum-Clearance London: Expertise and User Perspectives in the 1930s Maritime East End’, Literary Geographies, 7.1 (2021), 132. Other studies that have paid particular attention to the chronotope of the urban coast in fiction include: Diana Maltz, ‘Arthur Morrison, Criminality, and Late-Victorian Maritime Subculture’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 13 (2011) https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.624 [accessed 2 June 2023]; Forman, ‘Cockney Chinatown’; Cannon Schmitt, ‘Tidal Conrad (Literally)’, Victorian Studies, 55.1 (2012), 7–29; Gillian Mary Hanson, Riverbank and Seashore in 19th and 20th Century British Literature (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006); Andrew Glazzard, ‘“The Shore Gang”: Chance and the Ethics of Work’, Conrad Studies, 9 (2015), 1–16.

110. Melville, Redburn, p. 64.

111. Melville, Redburn, p. 176.

112. Melville, Redburn, p. 163.

113. On the warehouses as one example of the ‘dizzying distillations of the global into the local’, see Katie McGettigan, ‘Remapping Melville’s Liverpool’, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 22.2 (2020), 74.

114. Melville, Redburn, p. 168.

115. Melville, Redburn, p. 240.

116. Melville, Redburn, p. 170.

117. Melville, Redburn, p. 171.

118. Melville, Redburn, p. 171.

119. Melville, Redburn, p. 172.

120. Melville, Redburn, p. 171.

121. Melville, Redburn, p. 209. This echoes Charles Mackay’s regional report into conditions in Liverpool for the Morning Chronicle: ‘The Mersey swarms with ships, and the immense line of docks is so closely packed with vessels as to appear at some little distance to form a compact mass, dense as a forest of tall pines in an untrodden wilderness’ (Letter I, Morning Chronicle’s Labour, pp. 3–4).

122. Melville, Redburn, p. 235.

123. Hofmeyr, Dockside Reading, p. 5.

124. Melville, Redburn, p. 243.

125. Melville, Redburn, p. 255. Tabili’s research supports the idea that working-class communities were open towards cross-cultural marriage throughout the Victorian period, although this liberalism rapidly declined after the First World War (Global Migrants, p. 172).

126. Melville, Redburn, p. 197.

127. For a discussion of Redburn’s perception of these figures – who are in fact manacled and captured prisoners of war – as enslaved people, see Sterling Stuckey, African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 28–29.

128. Melville, Redburn, p. 240.

129. Melville, Redburn, p. 255.

130. Melville, Redburn, p. 230.

131. Melville, Redburn, p. 233.

132. Gilje, Liberty, p. 13. An example from nonfiction of such self-figuring is found in Bain’s memoir, in which he recalls how he and his fellow seafarers would deliberately change their demeanour as they disembarked in port: ‘We made a point of dressing smartly when we went ashore of an evening, so as to show no traces of the hard work we had to perform’ (Life, p. 12).

133. See Beaven, ‘Resilience’, 79.

134. For example, in his autobiography the radical reformer Samuel Bamford described his efforts to evade the pressgang on leaving a merchant ship, only narrowly managing to escape when summoned by a marine who identified him with the ominous greeting, ‘Hollo shipmate’. The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford, 2 vols (London: Frank Cass, 1967), I, p. 251. Hay also described the sartorial disguises sailors employed to escape the pressgang; on approaching the coast of Jamaica in 1811, one shipmate ‘dressed himself in greasy clothes, and blackened his face with grease and soot, with the intention of passing as ship’s cook’, while ‘with the assistance of some landsman clothes, [I] dressed like a footman, and adopted an air of flippancy, intending to pass as a steward. As the cook is usually the most useless man on board, and the steward generally no seaman, by assuming these characters we hoped the press would not think us worth removal’ (Landsman Hay, p. 177).

135. Melville, Redburn, p. 96.

136. Melville, Redburn, p. 110.

137. Melville, Redburn, p. 272. On the characterisation of Harry Bolton as a male prostitute, see James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 103–108.

138. Melville, Redburn, pp. 274–276.

139. Melville, Redburn, p. 277.

140. Melville, Redburn, p. 272.

141. Melville, Redburn, pp. 272, 279.

142. Melville, Redburn, p. 286. On the avant garde references to homosexuality in Redburn, and in Melville’s other works, see Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), p. 259; Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Hester Blum, ‘Melville and the Novel of the Sea’, in The Cambridge History of the Novel, ed. by Leonard Cassuto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2011, pp. 158–159; David Greven, ‘American Shudders: Race, Representation, and Sodomy in Redburn’, Leviathan, 16.2 (2014), 1–22.

143. Melville, Redburn, p. 299.

144. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 25.

145. Dickens, Uncommercial Traveller, pp. 210–211.

146. Dickens, Uncommercial Traveller, p. 6.

147. Dickens, Uncommercial Traveller, p. 6.

148. Terence S. Turner, ‘The Social Skin’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2.2 (2012), 486–504. On the sailor’s signifying body, see also Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 104–124.

149. Dickens, Uncommercial Traveller, pp. 12–13.

150. Dickens, Uncommercial Traveller, p. 12. This passage echoes Melville’s uncanny description of a tattooed drowned sailor, waiting to be claimed, as glimpsed by Redburn as he wandered past the makeshift morgue in the basement of St Nicholas’s Church close to the Liverpool waterfront: ‘And once, when the door was opened, I saw a sailor stretched out, stark and stiff, with the sleeve of his frock rolled up, and showing his name and date of birth tattooed upon his arm. It was a sight full of suggestions; he seemed his own head-stone’ (Redburn, p. 227).

151. For studies addressing Dickens’s deployment of seafaring figures and maritime metaphors, see Peck, Maritime Fiction, pp. 70–88; William J. Palmer, ‘Dickens and Shipwreck’, Dickens Studies Annual, 18 (1989), 39–92; Kerr, ‘The Imitable Dickens: Marine Cliché in Dombey and Son’, in Victorian Novel, pp. 93–143. On the ‘queer potential of houseboat life’ for bachelor characters in Dombey and Son and David Copperfield, see Furneaux, Queer Dickens, pp. 49–58 (p. 51).

152. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), pp. 868–870.

153. Dickens’s description of the Hexam family trade of dredging, and by implication the robbing of drowned bodies, corresponds to Mayhew’s earlier interviews with river workers: ‘Of the Dredgers, or River Finders’, London Labour, II, pp. 147–150. According to Mayhew’s enquiry, the marginal practice of dredging was directly aligned to the growth of trade, due to articles that were thrown or fell overboard from ships into the bottom of the Thames (including the occasional dead body).

154. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 5.

155. Matthew Ingleby, ‘Steamboats in Our Mutual Friend’ https://victorianeveryday.org/2014/10/22/steamboats-in-our-mutual-friend/ [accessed 10 July 2023]. Dickens had been familiar with the Limehouse area since childhood – and at least two East End memoirists recalled, perhaps apocryphally, a local character who claimed to have been acquainted with the adult Dickens as he spent time in the waterside districts that formed a key setting for Our Mutual Friend. See Haw, Workhouse to Westminster, pp. 31–32 and De Banke, Hand over Hand, p. 49.

156. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 21.

157. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, pp. 20–21.

158. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 357. As Ackroyd has observed, Dickens was fascinated by the suggestiveness of worn clothes ‘finding, in a panoply of old garments, a crowd of forgotten human beings dispersed through the community’ (Dickens, p. 25).

159. For a description of unlicensed, illegal pawnshops – also called ‘dolly’ or ‘leaving shops’ – as ‘fertile hot-beds of crime’ for the receipt of stolen goods, see Binny, London Labour, IV, p. 373.

160. J. Hillis Miller addresses this form of objectification through commodification in the novel: ‘Money turns people into objects which are … valued only according to the money they are worth’; Victorian Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 72.

161. Brian Cheadle, ‘The Late Novels: Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend’, in The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. by John O. Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 85–86.

162. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 22.

163. Mayhew, London Labour, II, p. 149.

164. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 351.

165. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, pp. 352, 353.

166. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, pp. 352–353.

167. Diana Crane, ‘Clothing Behavior as Non-Verbal Resistance: Marginal Women and Alternative Dress in the Nineteenth Century’, Fashion Theory, 3.2 (1999), 242.

168. As Seth Koven points out regarding the paradoxical nature of clothing throughout the Victorian period: ‘Given the vast scale of life in London and its limitless possibilities for encounters with strangers, most had no choice but to assume that the clothes a person wore defined who a person was. At the same time, Londoners knew all too well that clothes were unreliable signifiers of identity because they could be removed as easily as they were put on’; Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 19.

169. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 360.

170. Mentz, Ocean, p. xvi.

171. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 31.

172. Kyle McAuley, ‘George Eliot’s Estuarial Form’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 48.1 (2020), 187–207. Hydrography here is defined as the ‘specific layout and movements of the different waters idiosyncratically characteristic of the area’ (187–188).

173. McAuley, ‘George Eliot’s Estuarial Form’, 200. For another analysis of water as a structuring narrative framework for the novel (in this instance Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), see Schmitt, ‘Tidal Conrad’.

174. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 751.

175. John M. Robson, ‘Our Mutual Friend: A Rhetorical Approach to the First Number’, Dickens Studies Annual, 3 (1974), 207.

176. Robson, ‘Our Mutual Friend’, 210.

177. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 378.

178. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 1.

179. Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), p. 114.

180. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects, pp. 75–76.

181. Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 282.

182. Michael Cotsell, Introduction, Our Mutual Friend, p. xxi. Sally Ledger also identifies the novel’s transitional significance, ‘caught between Mayhew’s London full of marginal workers … and a more modern conception of the Victorian city’; ‘Dickens, Natural History, and Our Mutual Friend’, Partial Answers, 9.2 (2011), 374. See also Jeremy Tambling’s discussion of the novel’s ‘post-industrial’ landscape as template for T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 200.

183. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage International, 1990), p. 622. Jennifer Levine highlights the ‘narrative’s anxiety to name’ this character, referring to Murphy 22 times as a ‘sailor’, along with 60 other variants that include ‘the globetrotter’, ‘Shipahoy’, and ‘oilskin’; ‘Tattoo Artist: Tracing the Outlines of Homosocial Desire’, James Joyce Quarterly, 31.3 (1994), 282–283.

184. Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 628, 640.

185. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 659.

186. Levine, ‘Tattoo Artist’, 283.

187. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 630.

188. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 638.

189. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 631. As well as pointing to the date of Bloom’s epic adventure (16 June 1904) in what is the sixteenth section of the book, there is a further suggestion that the figure 16 connoted homosexuality in European slang and numerology; see Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 544.

190. Levine, ‘Tattoo Artist’, 291.

191. Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 635–636.

192. This is captured in Raymond Williams’s formulation of a modernist sensibility as defined by ‘endless border-crossing’: ‘The experience of visual and linguistic strangeness, the broken narrative of the journey and its inevitable accompaniment of transient encounters with characters whose self-presentation was bafflingly unfamiliar raised to the level of universal myth this intense, singular narrative of unsettlement, homelessness, solitude and impoverished independence’; ‘When Was Modernism?’, New Left Review, 175 (1989), 50.

193. Schmitt, ‘Tidal Conrad’, p. 22.

194. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, in Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 64. On the development of ‘maritime modernism’, as it pertains to the sea novel, see Cohen, Novel, pp. 208–213.

195. Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 235.

196. Albright, Quantum Poetics, p. 22. As Nicholas Allen notes, Joyce’s ‘later works evolve their own watery forms, in which liquidity is less a metaphor than a condition of their composition’. Indeed, he suggests that the ‘liquid traditions of his writing [go] back to its beginnings in the old port city of Dublin’; Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 66, 74.

197. Alston Kennerley, ‘British Merchant Seafarers and their Homes, 1895–1970’, International Journal of Maritime History, 24.1 (2012), 119–126.

198. Fink, Sweatshops, pp. 146, 149.

199. Worpole, Dockers, pp. 79–93 (p. 79). For a discussion of Hanley’s modernism in the context of maritime industrialisation, see John Fordham, James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002).

200. James Hanley, ‘The Last Voyage’, in The Last Voyage and Other Stories (London: Harvill Press, 1997), pp. 3–44.

1. Mark A. Cheetham identifies this map as the open chart of the Irish explorer Robert McClure, who crossed the Northwest Passage and also served on the Franklin search expedition; ‘Millais’s Metapicture: The North-West Passage as Distillate of Arctic Voyaging from the Anglosphere’, British Art Studies, 19 (2021) https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-19/mcheetham [accessed 3 January 2023].

2. Phillips, Mapping Men, p. 5.

3. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Captain’s Death Bed’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 September 1935, p. 585. The emphasis on roses and flowers is less incongruous if Marryat was indeed the secret author of the 1836 novel The Floral Telegraph, as argued by Daniel Wuebben in ‘Captain Frederick Marryat and The Floral Telegraph; Or, a Forgotten Coder and his Floral Code’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 42 (2014), 209–233.

4. Woolf, ‘Captain’s Death Bed’, p. 585.

5. Florence Marryat, Life and Letters of Captain Marryat, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1872).

6. Woolf, ‘Captain’s Death Bed’, p. 585.

7. Woolf, ‘Captain’s Death Bed’, p. 585.

8. Woolf, ‘Captain’s Death Bed’, p. 585.

9. Helen Rogers, ‘In the Name of the Father: Political Biographies by Radical Daughters’, in Life Writing, ed. by Amigoni, p. 146.

10. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind (San Diego: Harcourt, 1985), p. 108. As Tosh notes in relation to Woolf’s father, ‘Leslie Stephen, with his tyranny over the household accounts and his insistence on selfless service from his children, casts a long shadow over the image of the Victorian father’; A Man’s Place, pp. 162–163.

11. Jean G. Neisius, ‘Marryat, Florence (1833–1899), novelist’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004 www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-18096 [accessed 16 December 2022].

12. ‘Augusta Marryat’, The Bibliography of Australian Literature, 4 vols, ed. by John Arnold, John Hay and Sally Batten (Kew: Australian Scholarly, 2001–2008), III, p. 309.

13. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1842), p. 104.

14. Rogers, ‘Name of the Father’, p. 145.

15. Jo Stanley, ed., Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages (London: HarperCollins, 1995); Suzanne J. Stark, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (London: Pimlico, 1996); Laurel Seaborn, ‘Gamming Chairs and Gimballed Beds: Seafaring Women on Board Nineteenth-Century Ships’, Journal of Maritime Archaeology, 12.1 (2017), 71–90; Jen Manion, ‘The Sailors and Soldiers’, in Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 68–103; Olivia Robinson, ‘Travelling Ayahs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Global Networks and Mobilization of Agency’, History Workshop Journal, 86 (2018), 44–66; Sophie Gilmartin, ‘“The Perils of Crossings”: Nineteenth-Century Navigations of City and Sea’, in The Sea, ed. by Mentz and Rojas, pp. 83–102.

16. See, Helen Doe, Enterprising Women and Shipping in the Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009); Lee, ‘Seafarers’ Urban World’, 35–43; Sara Mills, ‘Knowledge, Gender and Empire’, in Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, ed. by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (New York: Guildford Press, 1994), pp. 29–50.

17. Work in this area (which has predominantly centred on the US context) includes Lisa Norling, ‘“How Fraught with Sorrow and Heartpangs”: Mariners’ Wives and the Ideology of Domesticity in New England, 1790–1880’, New England Quarterly, 65 (1992), 442–446; Norling, Captain Ahab; Joan Druett, Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains under Sail (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Hanna Hagmark, ‘Women in Maritime Communities: A Socio-Historical Study of Continuity and Change in the Domestic Lives of Seafarers’ Wives in the Åland Islands, from 1930 into the New Millennium’ (unpublished thesis, University of Hull, 2003); Hagmark-Cooper, ‘Is There a Place’; Melanie Holihead, ‘Cut Adrift or Towed Astern: Sailors’ Wives in Mid-Nineteenth Century Portsea Island Considered in Perspective’, Journal for Maritime Research, 17.2 (2015), 155–168; Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006); Margarette Lincoln, Naval Wives and Mistresses (Stroud: History Press, 2011).

18. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994); Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Routledge, 2019); Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness; Kestner, Masculinities; Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge, 1980); Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, pp. 76–104; Don Randall, ‘The Imperial Boy as Prosthesis’, Victorian Review, 35.2 (2009), 41–44; Paul Young, ‘Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure, Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18.1 (2013), 36–53.

19. Bristow, Empire Boys, p. 41.

20. Bristow, Empire Boys, pp. 43, 21. A number of critics have sought to question the extent to which boys necessarily imbibed imperial ideology wholesale through their reading; see for example Rose’s treatment of imperial adventure fiction in the context of a working-class juvenile readership in Intellectual Life, pp. 321–322.

21. Phillips, Mapping Men, pp. 89–90.

22. Phillips, Mapping Men, p. 90. On the ‘separate characters’ (and spheres) of men and women, see John Ruskin, Sesames and Lilies (London: George Allen, 1907), pp. 107–109.

23. On this gendered ‘habit of association’, see Mary Gordon, ‘Good Boys and Dead Girls’, in Good Boys and Dead Girls: and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 17; and Janet Wolff, ‘On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism’, Cultural Studies, 7.2 (1993), 224–239.

24. Ymitri Mathison, ‘Maps, Pirates and Treasure: The Commodification of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century Boys’ Adventure Fiction’, The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, ed. by Dennis Denisoff, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 175. On the symbolic connotations of maps and mapping, see also Sally Bushell, ‘Mapping Victorian Adventure Fiction: Silences, Doublings, and the Ur-Map in Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines’, Victorian Studies, 57.4 (2015), 611–637; McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 1–4, 21–30; Carroll, Empire of Air and Water, pp. 1–14.

25. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2011), p. 41.

26. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), pp. 21–22.

27. See, for example, Phillips’s discussion of Bessie Marchant’s stories (Mapping Men, pp. 19–20, 101) and Shu Chuan Yan, ‘Geography and Working-Class Women in Mary Barton and Sylvia’s Lovers’, Gaskell Society Journal, 16 (2002), 76–84.

28. Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 102.

29. Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers, p. 102.

30. On the analogous eroticisation of the figure of the reading woman in Victorian literature and painting, see Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 4.

31. Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 180.

32. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 8. As Blum has noted, polar regions have the potential to be elusive zones on the map, as ‘oceanic spaces that frustrate imperial or national ambitions’ (News, p. 33).

33. In drawing up her lists of children’s preferred reading, Yonge was very clear: ‘[Boys’] books may be read by girls also, but most boys will not read girls’ books, therefore their literature is put separately’; Charlotte M. Yonge, What Books to Lend and What to Give (London: National Society’s Depository, 1887), p. 13. Kimberley Reynolds is similarly unequivocal in the opening of her study of juvenile reading: ‘Girls have always read more, and read more widely than boys’; Girls Only?: Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. xv.

34. Phillips, Mapping Men, pp. 89–96.

35. Edward Salmon, Juvenile Literature As It Is (London: Henry J. Drane, 1888), p. 23. Reynolds notes that girls not only read novels by Henty – who was canny enough to swiftly introduce more female characters in his fictions – but they were enthusiastic correspondents with the famous author as well (Girls Only, p. 77).

36. Salmon, Juvenile Literature, p. 28.

37. Salmon, Juvenile Literature, p. 29.

38. The vignette of the girl absorbed in reading her brother’s books (for entertainment or to pursue a vicarious form of education) recurs throughout narratives of Victorian girlhood, including in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), as well as in working-class autobiographies such as suffragette and socialist Hannah Mitchell’s The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel (London: Virago, 1997), p. 44.

39. Quoted in Bristow, Empire Boys, p. 30.

40. Marianne Farningham, A Working Woman’s Life: An Autobiography (London: James Clarke & Co., 1907), p. 20.

41. Marjory Todd, Snakes and Ladders: An Autobiography (London: Longmans, 1960), p. 43.

42. Burnett Archive, Betty Anderson, Untitled, p. 8.

43. Hayward, Tom Holt’s Log, p. 14.

44. Hayward, Tom Holt’s Log, p. 22.

45. Hayward, Tom Holt’s Log, p. 25.

46. Hayward, Tom Holt’s Log, pp. 49–50.

47. Hayward, Tom Holt’s Log, p. 58.

48. Hayward, Tom Holt’s Log, p. 342.

49. Jeffrey Richards states: ‘In a very real sense the Victorian male was puer aeternus, the boy who never grew up’; ‘“Passing the Love of Women”: Manly Love and Victorian Society’, in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. by J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 106.

50. Hesba Stretton, Little Meg’s Children and Alone in London (London: Religious Tract Society, 1892), p. 12.

51. Stretton, Little Meg’s Children, pp. 24–25.

52. Stretton, Little Meg’s Children, p. 15.

53. Stretton, Little Meg’s Children, p. 14.

54. Stretton, Little Meg’s Children, p. 120.

55. Stretton, Little Meg’s Children, p. 125.

56. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 226.

57. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, You’re a Brick, Angela! A New Look at Girls’ Fiction from 1839–1975 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976), p. 45. On the ‘new girl’ in fiction, see Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). On the relation between girls’ fiction and empire, see also Michelle J. Smith, Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

58. Green, Dreams of Adventure, p. 23.

59. Thomas Fair, ‘19th-Century English Girls’ Adventure Stories: Domestic Imperialism, Agency, and the Female Robinsonades’, Rocky Mountain Review, 68.2 (2014), 142.

60. Fair, ‘19th-Century English Girls’ Adventure Stories’, 143. See also Terri Doughty’s discussion of the story in the context of the female Robinsonade: ‘Deflecting the Marriage Plot: The British and Indigenous Girl in “Robina Crusoe and Her Lonely Island Home” (1882–1883)’, in Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840–1950, ed. by Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 60–78. The biography of Elizabeth Whittaker remains opaque. Doughty suggests that the name may have been a pseudonym, although it is unclear whether it signified ‘a male adventure story author in petticoats or a female author trying out a new brand of fiction and not wanting to risk an established name’ (‘Domestic Goddesses’, p. 61).

61. Elizabeth Whittaker, ‘Robina Crusoe, and Her Lonely Island Home’, Girl’s Own Paper, 23 December 1882, p. 184.

62. Whittaker, ‘Robina Crusoe’, p. 184. According to Fair, the impact of this genre was profound: ‘Across a seventy-two year span, the nineteenth-century female English Robinsonades challenge the chauvinistic assertions defining the feminine found in popular literature and in boys’ adventure tales in particular’ (‘19th-Century English Girls’ Adventure Stories’, 156).

63. Cadogan and Craig, You’re a Brick, p. 57. See also Michelle Smith, ‘Adventurous Girls of the British Empire: The Pre-War Novels of Bessie Marchant’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 33 (2009), 1–25.

64. See Terri Doughty, ‘Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; Or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure’, in Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. by Tamara S. Wagner (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 199.

65. Bessie Marchant, Cicely Frome: The Captain’s Daughter (Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell, 1900), pp. 7–8.

66. Marchant, Cicely Frome, p. 8.

67. According to Cadogan and Craig, Bessie Marchant’s stories of globe-travelling ‘intrepid teenagers … braced girls’ fiction for the impact of the Edwardian new woman, who was soon to follow’ (You’re a Brick, p. 57).

68. Marchant, Cicely Frome, p. 8.

69. Marchant, Cicely Frome, p. 43.

70. See Gordon, ‘Good Boys’, pp. 3–23.

71. Doughty, ‘Domestic Goddesses’, p. 200.

72. Mary Jo Maynes, ‘Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1.1 (2008), 115.

73. These are listed in chronological order of the authors’ birth: Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance; Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, BURN/1/182; Burnett Archive, M. Abbley, ‘Soul Adrift – Being the Adventures of a Queer Child’, BURN/4/1; Burnett Archive, Amy Langley, Untitled, BURN/2/466; Kay Pearson, Life in Hull: From Then Till Now (Hull: Bradley Publications & Co., 1979); Burnett Archive, Dora R. Hannan, ‘Those Happy Highways: An Autobiography’, BURN/2/357; Burnett Archive, Betty Anderson, Untitled; Burnett Archive, Burkin, ‘Memoirs’; Todd, Snakes and Ladders; Edith Evans, Rough Diamonds (Bognor Regis: New Horizon, 1982); Burnett Archive, Mrs D.M. Ponton, Autobiographical Letter, BURN/2/629; Scannell, Mother Knew Best; Rose Gamble, Chelsea Child (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1979). Other sailors’ daughters, who provide more fragmentary and mediated accounts, include Mayhew’s ‘vagrant girl’, cited in the Introduction to this book, and that of Nellie Dowell, narrated in a biographical essay by her friend and correspondent Muriel Lester: Bishopsgate Institute, LESTER/2/3/2, Muriel Lester, ‘From Birth to Death’ (c. 1923). Their relationship is the subject of Seth Koven’s The Match Girl and the Heiress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), while the interesting history surrounding Lester’s composition of the biographical essay is discussed in Match Girl, pp. 14–15.

74. Eric J. Leed, quoted in Wolff, ‘On the Road Again’, 229.

75. M. Loane, From Their Point of View (London: Edward Arnold, 1908), p. 118.

76. Loane, From Their Point of View, pp. 118–119.

77. Burnett Archive, Langley, Untitled, n.p.

78. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, Foreword.

79. Pearson, Life in Hull, p. 33.

80. Burnett Archive, Abbley, ‘Soul Adrift’, p. 4.

81. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 22.

82. Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 93.

83. On the intersection of the local and the global in the context of the maritime port community of South Shields, see Tabili, Global Migrants. Koven characterises sailor’s daughter Nellie Dowell as a ‘Cockney cosmopolitan’ brought up in a place inhabited by people who were ‘simultaneously enmeshed in vast global networks of trade as well as intensely local and insular communities of family, friends, and neighbors in East London’ (Match Girl, pp. 8, 26).

84. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

85. On theories of ‘relational’ life writing, see Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice’, in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 34–62; John Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 43–98.

86. See Davidoff, Thicker than Water, p. 35. For Davidoff, siblings have been sidelined in studies of the family because of their ‘horizontal’ rather than ‘vertical’ lines of filiation. As she explains: ‘[T]he sibling relationship is the structural basis for neither the formation of families nor their continuation. On the contrary, their presence can be potentially divisive, fragmenting material, cultural and emotional resources. In this sense, siblings occupy the boundaries between familial and the non-familial, possible strangers’; ‘Where the Stranger Begins: The Question of Siblings in Historical Analysis’, in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 207.

87. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, author preface.

88. Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36.2 (1993), 385.

89. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

90. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 13.

91. Another description of the closeness between mother and daughter in the context of an absent seafaring father is given in Betty Anderson’s account. Reflecting on childhood trips to the theatre and Winter Gardens, she observed: ‘Looking back now I think I was taken as company for Mother. Father was always at sea and she had no one to go with’ (Burnett Archive, Anderson, Untitled, p. 6).

92. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 15.

93. On the marital bed as a ‘site of dynamic gender relations, changing meaning and purpose throughout the marital life-cycle and at flashpoints in working-class marriage’, see Vicky Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 103–104. Writing of the long nineteenth-century family, Davidoff remarks on the potential for fathers to develop a sense of ‘jealousy and anxieties about abandonment’ as wives became ‘more and more immersed in the world of [their] children’ (Thicker than Water, p. 92).

94. Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 84.

95. On the way in which the sexual division of homes and families could lead to the figuration of fathers as ‘exotic creatures in domestic settings’, see Strange, Fatherhood, p. 87.

96. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 16.

97. Loane, From Their Point of View, p. 119.

98. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, pp. 3–4.

99. On paternal authority, see Tosh, A Man’s Place, pp. 145–169.

100. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 18.

101. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, pp. 17–18.

102. Griffin, Bread Winner, p. 6.

103. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 16.

104. Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 149. See also Gillis, A World of Their Own Making, p. 193.

105. Hannan also described her father returning from long naval commissions bearing crafted gifts that included ‘hand made rugs, or maybe a hand carved picture frame, worked at during the long hours at sea’. His ‘handyman’ skills came into use at home too: ‘He would never admit that a thing couldn’t be done, somehow or other he accomplished tasks which appeared impossible, seemingly making articles out of nothing.’ However, she tempered this compliment by ruefully adding: ‘The pity was that he served so much time abroad, when mother could have done with some help’ (Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 10).

106. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, pp. 20–21.

107. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 110.

108. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 59.

109. For an excellent exploration of how working-class sailors ‘navigated their landed relationships through gift-giving’, see Wassell Smith, ‘Fancy Work’.

110. Humphries, Childhood, pp. 126–127. On the expectation of sisterly self-sacrifice and selflessness towards brothers, as well as the need for daughters to provide maternal support as their mother’s ‘understudy’, see Nelson, Family Ties, p. 108.

111. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 40.

112. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

113. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, author preface.

114. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 65.

115. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, pp. 65–66.

116. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 66.

117. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

118. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

119. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 67.

120. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 67; Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

121. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 67.

122. Steven J. Taylor, ‘Poverty’, 94.

123. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, p. 70. Some degree of scepticism may be warranted here, since Harry’s claim closely echoes a strain of institutional propaganda regarding the quality of education offered by the orphanages.

124. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p. As Flint notes, ‘there is a strong argument for viewing many of the most intimate and apparently unstructured memoirs as being linked to women’s perception of their social role, for a significant number are explicitly addressed to the writer’s children, particularly her daughters’ (Woman Reader, p. 190).

125. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

126. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

127. Burnett Archive, Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

128. Agnes Cowper, Backward Glance, author’s preface; Daisy Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, n.p.

129. Catherine Cookson, the most borrowed author from British public libraries in the last two decades of the twentieth century, described her working-class upbringing in the port town of South Shields in her memoir Our Kate (1969), drawing on these experiences for her numerous fictional family sagas. Helen Forrester also grew up in impoverished circumstances in another northern British port city; she was the author of the bestselling memoir Twopence to Cross the Mersey (1974) as well as novels in the saga genre set in her hometown of Liverpool.

130. Tabili, Global Migrants, p. 119.

131. Tosh argues the late Victorian father in urban working-class families could be ‘made to feel a bull-in-a-china-shop, excluded from the emotional currents of the family’; ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994), 189.

132. Burnett Archive, Langley, Untitled, n. p.

133. Burnett Archive, Langley, Untitled, n. p.

134. Evans, Rough Diamonds, pp. 2, 72, 7.

135. Evans, Rough Diamonds, p. 11.

136. Evans, Rough Diamonds, p. 19.

137. Evans, Rough Diamonds, p. 35.

138. Burnett Archive, Ponton, Autobiographical Letter, p. 2.

139. Burnett Archive, Ponton, Autobiographical Letter, pp. 4–5.

140. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 32.

141. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 33.

142. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 33. The phrase ‘happy highways’ derives from A.E. Housman’s nostalgic late-Victorian poem ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (1896).

143. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 34.

144. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 2.

145. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 28.

146. Caroline Davidson claims that by the 1880s and 1890s ‘it was a point of pride in most families that men did not lift a finger while they were at home. … Those husbands who were caught in the act of scrubbing a floor, washing, or cooking were apt to be called derisive names such as “mop rag” and “diddy man”’; A Woman’s Work Is Never Done: A History of Housework in the British Isles 1650–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), pp. 187–188. Pejorative slang words for domesticated men testify to this point of view; see, for example, entries for the slang terms ‘Mary Ann’ and ‘Old Shawl’ in Tony Crowley, The Liverpool English Dictionary: A Record of the Language of Liverpool, 1850–2015 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017).

147. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 3.

148. Burnett Archive, Hannan, ‘Happy Highways’, p. 36.

149. Gamble, Chelsea Child, pp. 34, 36.

150. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 34.

151. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 34.

152. Gamble, Chelsea Child, pp. 34–35.

153. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 36.

154. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 36.

155. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 35.

156. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 48.

157. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 48.

158. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 101.

159. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 102.

160. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 102.

161. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 102.

162. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 12.

163. Gamble, Chelsea Child, p. 103.

164. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 10.

165. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 24.

166. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 25.

167. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, pp. 56–57.

168. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 41.

169. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 25.

170. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 25.

171. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 29.

172. On the post-Victorian view of the ‘tyrannical father’, some of whom ‘appeared almost pathologically unable to see familial relations in anything but terms of authority’, see Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 95.

173. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 71.

174. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, pp. 20, 27.

175. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 14.

176. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 19.

177. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, pp. 23–24.

178. ‘Life with Auld Daddy’, New Statesman, 26 November 1960, p. 845.

179. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 104.

180. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 86.

181. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 44.

182. A landmark account is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1987). For an analysis of this dynamic in other twentieth-century ‘scholarship girl’ memoirs, see Emily Cuming, Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 146–165.

183. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 62.

184. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 12.

185. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 176.

186. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, pp. 176–177.

187. Todd, Snakes and Ladders, p. 16.

188. Worpole, Dockers and Detectives, pp. 77–80. Worpole is referring to Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 83–109.

189. Rebecca O’Rourke, ‘Were There No Women? British Working Class Writing in the Inter-War Period’, Literature and History, 14.1 (1988), 51.

190. Burnett Archive, Grace Martin, ‘From 1906’, BURN/2/515, p. 7. For other examples of this usage, see: Florence White, A Fire in the Kitchen (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1938); Dolling, Ten Years, p. 67.

191. O’Rourke, ‘Were There No Women?’, p. 51.

192. On the exponential rise in the number of working-class autobiographies written by women across the twentieth century, see Humphries, ‘Girls and Their Families’, 313–315; Rogers and Cuming, ‘Revealing Fragments’, 191–194; Griffin, Bread Winner, pp. 14–17.

193. On this aspect of autobiographical evidence, see Strange, Fatherhood, p. 12.

194. Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell, 2000), p. 5.

195. See also the affectionate portrait of a seafaring father by sailor-memoirist Charles V. Skargon (born 1900): Burnett Archive, ‘From Boy to Man the Hard Way’, BURN/2/712. Tender and loving working-class fathers (or father figures) in Victorian fiction include Joe Gargery in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861), John Barton in Gaskell’s Mary Barton and the eponymous surrogate father-hero of George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1860). One of the most devoted seafaring fathers in literature is the elderly Captain Whalley in Conrad’s ‘The End of the Tether’ (1902), who takes on the command of a derelict steamer and ultimately sacrifices his life in order to provide economic security for his daughter.

196. Scholarship that surveys loving and domesticated Victorian fathers includes: Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers, eds., Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Strange, Fatherhood; Wassell Smith, ‘Fancy Work’; Furneaux’s Queer Dickens and Military Men of Feeling.

197. Mayhew, London Labour, III, p. 295.

198. Costello, Black Salt, pp. 126–127. This particular sailor’s daughter, Agnes Brew, was Costello’s great-aunt.

199. Harris, Private Lives, p. 79.

200. Nelson, Family Ties, p. 174.

201. Griffin, Bread Winner, p. 118. On inadequate fathers, see also Strange, Fatherhood, pp. 52–61; and Davin, Growing Up Poor, p. 26.

202. Griffin, Bread Winner, p. 229.

203. Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi and Clare Bradford, From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literature, 1840–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), p. 31.

204. Smith, Moruzi and Bradford, Colonial to Modern, p. 31.

205. As Griffin argues: ‘For men, work provided the gateway to the public sphere. It was a force far more powerful than family background’ (Bread Winner, p. 290).

206. On the redemptive qualities of fictional daughters, Dianne F. Sadoff notes: ‘The daughter in Dickens’s novels effaces origins, redeems temporality, and undoes genealogy through repetition. She represents the narrative escape, the loophole, that effaces the problematic of paternity, origin, the “symbolic debt” and self-engendering. … She transcends the worldly questions about orphanage and origin the hero-son so often asks’; Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 52. On the daughter’s ‘doubleness’, and the ambivalence of her transmittance of filial narratives, see also Hilary M. Schor, Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–16.

207. Ursula Owen, for example, vividly describes the unsettling effect of stumbling across a photograph of her father in his British Army uniform in 1951 at the age of 14: ‘Because it was odd, I looked at it closely. I was a teenager battling with an autocratic if benevolent father who very much expected his will to be done. And here was the same man, in uniform, looking uncharacteristically ill at ease, anxious, even sheepish. The expression on his face was one I didn’t recognise. After a while I realised what it was: my father looked vulnerable’; Introduction, in Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, ed. by Ursula Owen (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 9. As Sheila Rowbotham comments in relation to women’s appraisals of their fathers at a 1970s feminist consciousness-raising group: ‘Because we were not dealing with abstractions of a vaguely defined “patriarchy” but talking about actual men, a complex picture began to emerge of “manhood” and “fatherhood” and our contradictory needs and images of both’; Threads through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 94.

208. Steedman, Landscape, p. 7.

209. Like other critics, Tosh describes the First World War as a ‘watershed for masculinity’ (A Man’s Place, p. 196).

210. Steedman, Landscape, p. 79; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. by H.M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 314.

211. Tosh, ‘Masculinities’, 335.

212. On the generational construction of the Victorian parent, see Strange, Fatherhood, pp. 13–15; Griffin, Bread Winner, p. 229.

213. Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 150. On the waning of the ‘Empire of the father’, see Broughton and Rogers, ‘Introduction: The Empire of the Father’, in Gender and Fatherhood, ed. by Broughton and Rogers, pp. 1–28.

214. Laura King, ‘Hidden Fathers? The Significance of Fatherhood in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Contemporary British History, 26.1 (2012), 25–46 (26); Pat Ayers, ‘Gender, Locality, and Culture: Revisiting Masculinities in the Liverpool Docklands, 1900–1939’, in Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain: A History for the Present, ed. by Matt Houlbrook, Katie Jones and Ben Mechen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), pp. 189–207.

1. Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Modernity and Periphery: Toward a Global and Relational Analysis’, in Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization, ed. by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 26, 35.

2. R.L. Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, in R.L. Stevenson, ed. by Norquay, p. 83.

3. Williams, Marxism, pp. 146–148.

4. Williams, Marxism, p. 149.

5. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Preface.

6. J.S. Keltie (1907), quoted in Phillips, Mapping Men, p. 8. See also pp. 22–29 for the contemporary reception of Robinson Crusoe and debates surrounding its truth-status.

7. Cohen, Novel, pp. 15–58.

8. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 6.

9. Cohen, ‘Narratology’, 64.

10. Herman Melville, ‘The Encantadas, Or Enchanted Isles’, in Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, ed. by Robert Milder (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics), p. 132.

11. Rose, Intellectual Life, pp. 106–111 (p. 111). On the ‘fundamentally intertextual’ nature of life writing, see Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 5.

12. This distinction is underlined in Carolyn Steedman’s treatment of the ‘ordinary’ nineteenth-century stockingmaker and diarist, Joseph Woolley, whom she addresses ‘not simply as a working man who happened to write, but as “a writer” (as author; as creative writer) with the full cultural approbation that the term acquired during the long nineteenth century’; An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 28.

13. On ‘small stories’ and global history, see Laite, ‘Emmet’s Inch’.

14. King, Writing the Lives, p. 56.

15. King, Writing the Lives, pp. 148, 164.

16. See Cohen, Novel, pp. 179–180; Burroughs, ‘Nautical Melodrama’, 91.

17. Jonathan Raban, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Book of the Sea, ed. by Jonathan Raban (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 3.

18. See Sekula, Fish Story; Filippo Menozzi, ‘Totality in a Box: The Shipping Container from Commodity to Allegory’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 32.1 (2023), 163–197.

19. Clare, Down to the Sea in Ships, p. 53. In a literalisation of what might be termed ‘alienated labour’, Clare explains how the crew of the container ship are not given information concerning the contents of the cargo they are transporting, purportedly as a measure designed to ward against theft (p. 54). A similar process of obfuscation or historical amnesia can be noted in the development of harbours or coastlines. Where once the poor lived near the water due to the exigencies of work, now, as Sekula points out in relation to this coastal gentrification: ‘The backwater becomes a frontwater. Everyone wants a glimpse of the sea’ (Fish Story, p. 12).