Maritime Relations
Life, Labour and Literature at the Water's Edge, 1850–1914

An innovative history of nineteenth-century British maritime life as revealed in both literary and autobiographical texts.

Emily Cuming (Author)

9781009569538, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 September 2025

300 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.58 kg

Detailing the lives of ordinary sailors, their families and the role of the sea in Britain's long nineteenth century, Maritime Relations presents a powerful literary history from below. It draws on archival memoirs and logbooks, children's fiction and social surveys, as well as the work of canonical writers such as Gaskell, Dickens, Conrad and Joyce. Maritime Relations highlights the workings of gender, the family, and emotions, with particular attention to the lives of women and girls. The result is an innovative reading of neglected kinship relations that spanned cities and oceans in the Victorian period and beyond. Working at the intersection of literary criticism, the blue humanities and life writing studies, Emily Cuming creatively redefines the relations between life, labour and literature at the waterly edge of the nineteenth century.

Introduction
1. A sailor in the family: watery genealogy and the maritime memoir
2. Logbooks: life writing at sea
3. Watery city: sailors and sailortown in the urban imagination
4. The sailor's daughter: girlhood and the maritime family story
Conclusion. Fluid relations: between fact and fiction.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]