Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T08:24:45.877Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

At Home in the World? The Ornamental Life of Sailors in Victorian Sailortown

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

Emily Cuming
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This article explores the representation of British sailortown and merchant sailors onshore in the context of their representation in Victorian writing and contemporary journalism. It proposes that sailortown functioned as an urban setting which offered the traveling or returning sailor an important sense of homeliness—a homeliness that was paradoxically based on the promotion of a collective and worldly belonging. This sense of “worldliness” was articulated through aspects of ornamental material culture ranging from sailortown's visual display of nautical and transnational symbols, to the interior arrangements of places of hospitality such as Sailors’ Homes, to sailors’ own forms of portable property. By thinking more closely about the relationship between the domestic and the global in the context of maritime culture, the article proposes that the ornamental features of the seafarer's life, in all its diverse manifestations, serves to reveal the paradoxes and rich ambivalences that underscore the situation of the nineteenth-century sailor onshore.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , Fall 2019 , pp. 463 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful to the editors of VLC and the anonymous reader for their helpful comments and generosity throughout the review process. My thanks also go to Joe Moran and Helen Rogers, who kindly read earlier drafts of this article and offered useful suggestions and encouragement.

References

Beaven, Brad. “The Resilience of Sailortown Culture in English Naval Ports, c. 1820–1900.” Urban History 43, no. 1 (2016): 72–95.Google Scholar
Beaven, Brad, Bell, Karl, and James, Robert, eds. Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c. 1700—2000. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Google Scholar
Begiato, Joanne. “Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, c. 1760–1860.” Journal for Maritime Research 17, no. 2 (2015): 117–33.Google Scholar
Blum, Hester. “Introduction: Oceanic Studies.” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 151–55.Google Scholar
Blum, Hester. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 670–77.Google Scholar
Blum, Hester. The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Blunt, Alison, and Dowling, Robyn. Home. London: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Bradley, James. “Body Commodification? Class and Tattoos in Victorian Britain.” In Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, edited by Caplan, Jane, 136–55. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Burton, Valerie. “Boundaries and Identities in the Nineteenth-Century English Port: Sailortown Narratives and Urban Spaces.” In Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City Since 1850, edited by Gunn, Simon and Morris, Robert J., 137–51. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.Google Scholar
Casarino, Cesare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Cohen, Margaret. “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe.” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 657–62.Google Scholar
Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
“Crimping: Who's to Blame?” The Porcupine, December 10, 1864, 291.Google Scholar
Davies, John. Sailors’ Homes: Their Origins and Progress. London: Savill, Edwards, 1868.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. London: Chapman and Hall, 1861.Google Scholar
Dobraszczyk, Paul. “Death by Ornament: The Sailors’ Home Gates, Liverpool.” Rag-Picking History, http://ragpickinghistory.co.uk/2012/05/09/death-by-ornament-the-sailors-home-gates-liverpool.Google Scholar
Dobraszczyk, Paul. Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain: Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Google Scholar
Furneaux, Holly. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Gilje, Paul A. Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Greenwood, James. In Strange Company, Being the Experiences of a Roving Correspondent. London: Henry S. King, 1873.Google Scholar
Henderson, J. Welles, and Carlisle, Rodney P.. Marine Art and Antiques: Jack Tar: A Sailor's Life, 1750–1910. Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999.Google Scholar
Hugill, Stan. Sailortown. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.Google Scholar
“Jack Ashore and Jack Afloat.” Chambers's Journal, April 4, 1868, 222–24.Google Scholar
Land, Isaac. “Tidal Waves: The New Coastal History.” Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (2007): 731–43.Google Scholar
Land, Isaac. “The Urban Amphibious.” In The New Coastal History: Cultural and Environmental Perspectives from Scotland and Beyond, edited by Worthington, David, 31–48. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.Google Scholar
“The Learned Sailor.” Household Words, July 1, 1854, 458–62.Google Scholar
Lodder, Matt. “‘Things of the Sea’: Iconographic Continuities between Tattooing and Handicrafts in Georgian-Era Maritime Culture.” Sculpture Journal 24, no. 2 (2015): 195–210.Google Scholar
Mack, John. The Sea: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion, 2011.Google Scholar
Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Vol. 1. New York: Dover, 1968.Google Scholar
Mayhew, Henry. The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor: The Metropolitan Districts. Vol. 4. Horsham: Caliban Books, 1981.Google Scholar
Melville, Herman. Redburn, His First Voyage. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849.Google Scholar
Milne, Graeme J. People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront: Sailortown. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Google Scholar
Phillips, Watts. The Wild Tribes of London. London: Ward and Lock, 1855.Google Scholar
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Modernity and Periphery: Toward a Global and Relational Analysis.” In Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization, edited by Mudimbe-Boyi, Elisabeth, 21–47. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Ritchie, J. Ewing. The Night Side of London. London: Savill, Edwards, 1869.Google Scholar
Roeger, Tyler. “The Ocean and the Urban: Poe's ‘The Oblong Box.’” Atlantic Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 227–48.Google Scholar
“The Sailors’ Home.” Household Words, March 22, 1851, 612–15.Google Scholar
“Sailors’ Homes.” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, Sept. 4, 1852, 153–55.Google Scholar
Sala, George Augustus. Gaslight and Daylight, with Some London Scenes They Shine Upon. London: Chapman & Hall, 1859.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Cannon. “Tidal Conrad (Literally).” Victorian Studies 55, no. 1 (2012): 7–29.Google Scholar
Skallerup, Harry Robert. Books Afloat and Ashore: A History of Books, Libraries, and Reading among Seamen During the Age of Sail. Hamden: Archon Books, 1974.Google Scholar
Snodin, Michael, and Howard, Maurice. Ornament: A Social History Since 1450. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Steinberg, Philip E. “Of Other Seas: Metaphors and Materialities in Maritime Regions.” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 156–69.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. 1883. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2011.Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
“Terrific Fire in Liverpool: Destruction of the Sailors’ Home, & Loss of Life.” Daily Post, April 30, 1860, 8.Google Scholar
Timmermann, Gerhard, and Winslow, Helen L.. “Seamen's Crafts.” In Art and the Seafarer: A Historical Survey of the Arts and Crafts of Sailors and Shipwrights, edited by Hansen, H. J., translated by James and Inge Moore, 251–82. London: Faber and Faber, 1968.Google Scholar
“Visit to the Sailors’ Home in London.” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, August 14, 1841. 233–34.Google Scholar
Walden, Dan. “‘A False Phantom’: The Coastscape in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot.” Studies in American Fiction 42, no. 2 (2015): 147–66.Google Scholar
Walden, Dan. “Ships and Crypts: The Coastal World of Poe's ‘King Pest,’ ‘The Premature Burial,’ and ‘The Oblong Box.’” Edgar Allan Poe Review 10, no. 2 (2009): 104–21.Google Scholar