Home on the waves: domesticity and discomfort aboard the overland route steamship, 1842–1862

ABSTRACT

This article develops insight into the historical connections between corporeality and mobility, focusing upon the mobilities made possible by the shipping line P&O’s steamship service to the East in the mid nineteenth century. Passenger narratives of journeys made by this service describe an idiosyncratic domesticity which evokes a distinctive attempt to discursively frame steamship mobility as a safe, comfortable, normalised experience of a journey which was often anything but. This blasé attitude emphasises the role of bourgeois material and social practices as a means for the historical agents of globalisation to come to terms with steamship travel, extrapolated through ideas of domesticity which mutate and develop through their relation to the sea and the flux of mobility. This process of normalisation centres in travel narratives upon a preoccupation with the notion of comfort. The historical constitution of comfort is articulated through the body’s constitution as a site of struggle, locating the human subject in the dichotomy of the ship interior as a stable materiality and the exterior as a problematic outside revealing that the mobility of steamships was predicated upon the violence not just of speed but the suffering of subaltern labour which reproduced the problematic social relations of empire.

KEYWORDS:

• Imperialism
• maritime
• communications
• nineteenth century
• steamships
• domesticity
• embodied mobilities

Acknowledgments

My thanks are due to the article‘s anonymous peer-reviewers, for their generous and considered feedback. This article has been developed from doctoral research which was funded by the AHRC (grant number: AH/I024704/1) and Kingston University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This and all subsequent translations are my own.

2. The small selection from Dutch authors which I have translated here (their existence a legacy of the Netherlands’ own imperial project) are often particularly instructive.

3. The use of steam meant that the company was able to employ a much shorter route to the East, travelling via Egypt rather than around the southern coast of Africa (Huber 2013, 22). During the period covered by this article, P&O’s fleet swelled from less than a dozen to over 50 steamers.

4. Specie is money in the form of coins.

5. Although at this early stage of steamship travel there was no second-class accommodation in a formal sense, an unofficial arrangement of reduced price passages existed which included the possibility of staying in the same part of the ship as the other passengers’ servants (Pfeiffer 1852, 116).

6. ‘The comfort of travelling’, Virilio writes, ‘[t]his Anglo-Saxon ideology of “well-being” is encountered in […] what was first maritime mobility.’ (Virilio 2006, 54).

7. ‘Arguand’ is presumably a reference to the then ubiquitous oil lamp patented in 1780 by Aimé Argand.

8. It is worthwhile to recall that the following year Richardson would refer to the voyage as a ‘pleasure trip’ in a more complimentary vein. As I have suggested, such an antinomy narrates a broader tension in steamship mobility’s discursive constitution.

9. This passage may seem contradictory, given that Brumund had been so effusive regarding the homeliness of his cabin. However, Brumund had been fortunate, travelling on a very quiet passage which meant he had a large cabin to himself.

10. Richardson’s reference to an ‘Indian’ would have been to an English former resident of India.