My book closes with the sailor’s daughter’s tale, an account of maritime life told from the periphery, but one that has the potential to open up new perspectives on seafarers, travel, breadwinning, and family relations. As with other narratives of the figure of the sailor surveyed in this book, the daughter’s tale is marginal to mainstream accounts of the maritime commerce and industry that underpinned the development of global capitalism. Yet in line with Mary Louise Pratt’s theorisation of peripheral modernities that challenge the ‘centrism of the metropolitan discourse on modernity’, these marginal and domestic-focussed stories of the sea in the long nineteenth century can offer ‘relations of contradiction, complementarity, and differentiation with respect to those of the center’.¹ In this sense, my work aims to contribute to the growing field of maritime literary studies ‘from below’, and endeavours to account for the way in which the sea shaped everyday life for working people in the Victorian age through into the early decades of the twentieth century. Maritime Relations has centred on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people, with a focus on networks of family and wider kin, but it is also a study of the literary imagination, exploring how writing about the maritime sphere, in its broadest sense, and across a variety of forms, led to developments in the literary culture of the long nineteenth century beyond the remit of nautical fiction. In doing so, it has looked past a traditional corpus of sea literature, associated with writers from Frederick Marryat to Joseph Conrad, and its familiar themes of sea fever, oceanic adventure, and existential reckonings on the high seas.

While the book has traced accounts by and about ‘ordinary’ people whose lives were characterised by geographical mobility and forms of border crossings, it has also been concerned with a network of literary and nonfiction writing marked by fluid and intersecting boundaries, including a porous cross-contamination of genres such as adventure fiction, life writing, urban writing, juvenilia, across modes that range from social realism to modernism. Together, the writings that capture maritime experience demonstrate a consistent interplay between the historically constructed categories (at least in writing) of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. It is thus apt that a nineteenth-century amateur sailor and emblematic writer of sea fictions, Robert Louis Stevenson, meditated on the inherent narrativity of different forms of writing at the end of the nineteenth century, including those of nonfiction. ‘The art of narrative,’ he wrote, ‘in fact, is the same, whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or of an imaginary series.’ Like the writer of autobiography, Stevenson continued, the novelist would find in ‘every biography with any salt of life’ inspiration for his own fictitious tales and ‘many of this own methods most conspicuously and adroitly handled’.² Stevenson’s comments anticipate cultural critic Raymond Williams’s emphatic recognition of what he called the ‘multiplicity of writing’, a phrase that gestures towards the historicity and fluid border between writing held to be ‘practical’, ‘factual’, and ‘discursive’, and texts categorised as ‘fictional’, ‘imaginary’, and ‘subjective’.³ In Williams’s view, it is the ‘bourgeois theory of literature’ that has sought to control and specialise ‘the actual multiplicity of writing’, leading to a more binary and ‘residual categorisation’ of a separation between the ‘factual’ and the ‘fictional’. The development of literary forms, Williams writes, from a cultural materialist perspective, ‘is in the end a social history’.⁴

There is, after all, a telling irony that what is taken to be the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe, was a sea story and a tale that traversed a particularly fluid boundary between fact and fiction. Despite an insistence in the novel’s preface that the narrative was ‘a just History of Fact’ without any ‘Appearance of Fiction in it’,⁵ Defoe’s writing formed part of a tradition in which fabricated tales of adventure were spun into pseudo-historical accounts, ‘fiction that reads astonishingly like fact’.⁶ Indeed as Cohen describes, the entanglement of factual and fictional modes had a long pedigree within British writing about the sea, and her work shows in meticulous detail how the ‘traveling genre’ of global sea adventure fiction was bound up with nonfictional accounts by travellers.⁷ Early modern European prose fiction more broadly was indebted to narratives of travel, including sea travel, their authors ‘skilled at exploiting the uncertain boundary between travel writing and the fiction which copied its form’.⁸ In turn, travel writing was a hybrid genre, deriving in part from the repetitious cataloguing of events necessitated by the practice of keeping the ship’s log.⁹

As Chapter 2 of this book has shown, the sailor’s logbook, seemingly one of the most realist or naturalistic of forms, could provide narrative underpinning for the most outlandish of fictions, from Edgar Allan Poe’s early nautical-Gothic tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), to the fin de siècle horror of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), to Erskine Childers’s espionage novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903). Concomitantly, Victorians who recounted their ‘real’ nautical adventures deployed the realist logbook form in the structure and occasionally even the titles of their memoirs, such as Walter White’s A Sailor-Boy’s Log-Book, from Portsmouth to the Peiho (1862) and Frank Bullen’s The Log of a Sea-Waif (1899). Other retrospective memoirs of life at sea had recourse to a plethora of intertextual forms; as well as the ship’s log, there was the maritime yarn (the oceanic ‘tall story’, a hybrid of legend and lived experience), anecdotal biographies of shipmates, stories passed on by other sailors ‘learned in all the lore of outlandish life’,¹⁰ Gothic and ghost stories, shanties about port cities, as well as the modes of popular sea fiction adapted from children’s literature, newspaper reports of shipwrecks, and maritime fiction. Maritime memoirs based on ‘real-life’ experiences could sometimes prove as pacy as an adventure story. As a sailor’s pseudo-autobiography, it is worth noting that Robinson Crusoe was not just a model for the English novel, as many critics have acknowledged, but was foundational for the development of a particular mode of working-class autobiography. For as Rose has shown, Defoe’s text occupied a unique place in the cultural imagination of working-class readers, many of whom used it as a narrative framework – ‘a fable of individualism’ – from which to write their own life stories of struggle, adventure, and survival, not on desert islands, but in the modern industrial world.¹¹ If maritime adventure fiction, with its tales of the outlandish and the unexpected, and the working-class memoir, traditionally associated with locality, social realism, and routine, seem to occupy polar ends of the literary spectrum, my book has suggested that there were deep connections between these distinct modes.

In looking closely at the form and mode of expression of autobiographical texts by writers who might be defined as ‘ordinary’ or ‘amateur’, my analysis has placed an emphasis on working-class life writers’ roles precisely as writers who crafted narratives using the modes available, creatively adapting them to serve practical and imaginative needs.¹² For these authors also had important stories to tell about mobility and travel, separation and affiliation, work and precarity. Presented as narratives of self, written for descendants, or, in the case of logbooks, undertaken as a way to mark time on a long journey, these writers told ‘small stories’ that were anything but parochial; indeed the trajectories of their lives played out on a global scale in ways that even the authors themselves were liable to underestimate.¹³

Working-class forms of life writing, this book has argued, are complex, multi-layered and creative texts, and that creativity could involve a strategic form of fictionalising. For as Steven King writes of the voluminous cache of petition letters written by the eighteenth and nineteenth-century poor within the English and Welsh welfare system, even such ‘ordinary’ writers produced ‘complex documents that entangle the reporting of fact, embellishment, appropriation of the voices of others, rhetorical flourishes, half-truths, a strong emotional backbone, and acts and structures of negotiation and performance’.¹⁴ Similarly, memoirs by published and amateur working-class authors surveyed in this book also fall within the description of what King describes as ‘fictive but not necessarily fictional’: veering between constructed boundaries of fact and fiction in the course of their narratives marking maritime lives, they too produced ‘fluid stories’.¹⁵

Sailors were well-primed to be figures around whom stories developed. As the ‘hands’ that propelled global capitalist trade across oceans, they maintained a residual role as cultural archetypes, and this made them subject to deep-rooted forms of mythologisation that eluded their counterparts in the workplace of the factory, mine, or urban sweatshop. As sail ships turned to steam in the second half of the nineteenth century, new myths of the sailor arose, perhaps to compensate for the waning of the traditional sailor’s maritime ‘craft’.¹⁶ As Chapter 3 showed, this duality was not just something observed by outsiders, since seafarers were themselves aware of – and could profit from – the apparent anomaly of their mixed role as ‘manly’ men and absent breadwinners, solid citizens and tourists, archetypes and proletarian workforce. Some benefitted from this fluidity, others chafed against, or struggled to adapt to, the contradictions of their complexly classed and gendered roles. Thus the hegemonic myth of the sailor as a figurehead of nationhood could be complicated and resisted by sailors’ own forms of self-accounting, as well as through other stories that emerged from within the family circle. Families are of course well-known to be loci for forms of mythologisation and romance, but equally they can be places of debunking, demythologisation, and revisionism, as the sailor’s daughter’s accounts so amply show. From a broader perspective, this study demonstrates how, with sailors as a case study, the testimony of ‘ordinary’ autobiographies can offer counter-stories to a panoply of grand narratives that operate at the level of the nation, the locality, and even the family itself.

My survey of maritime relations – social and literary – has shown how water seeps and flows into a variety of nineteenth-century forms, from the texts of social investigators and journalists, ostensibly writing the ‘real’, but liable to slip into imaginative and creative mode as they approached the watery edges of the city, through to modernist developments of the fin de siècle and, separately, into the autobiographical realism of twentieth-century women’s writing. Far from being a poetic metaphor or site of abstraction, the sea operates as a material and complex attribute of modernity in this body of writing. It was aligned to spheres of commerce, work, travel, family, and the urban port city, all of which helped to generate new figurations and fictions of the influence of watery worlds. As Jonathan Raban puts it, the sea offers itself as a ‘supremely liquid and volatile element, shaping itself newly for every writer and every generation’.¹⁷

My introduction pointed to critical work that has foregrounded a ‘forgetting of the sea’ in contemporary life. By contrast, as this book has demonstrated, the influence of the maritime world was ever-present in cultural forms of the nineteenth century, sometimes occupying the centre-stage of fiction and memoirs, and at other times merely lapping at the edges of apparently landlocked stories. In drawing attention to watery threads and themes, this book does not call for a renewal of romantic tropes of seafaring, or a whitewashed account of a global trade that was implicated in the imperial project. It does, however, seek to draw attention to the everyday global sea of the long nineteenth century that framed and affected the lives, families, experiences – and indeed imaginative worlds – of working people and their families. This point has contemporary relevance since scholars have shown how a forgetting of the sea exists today as global capitalism forges its course through the passage of container ships bearing commodities across oceans (indeed the standardised container ship has itself become an emblem of contemporary global capitalism since its widespread adoption from the 1960s).¹⁸ Yet those anonymous, rectangular ships do not easily reveal the human stories that are bound up with these fundamental but hidden modes of labour and transportation. As Horatio Clare notes, in his memoir-travelogue of time spent on a container ship operated by a multinational seafaring workforce: ‘The crew risk their lives to carry the cargo; for cargo they leave their homes and families for months, even years, and yet most of them have no idea what is in the containers.’¹⁹ In contrast to this contemporary scene of mystification, the wealth of nineteenth-century writing about the sea, and its legacy in memoirs of the twentieth century, made visible the intimate and human stories of ‘ordinary’ working people whose lives were shaped by the opportunities and risks of a globalising world. Maritime relations offer a multifaceted, dispersed, and discontinuous story – full of gaps, silences, and irregularities – but, like the effect of light on water, it is a narrative that can refract dominant ways of seeing.