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.

Winner, 2026 Book Awards, European Society for the Study of English

‘Ultimately, ‘Maritime Relations’ is a book about fluidity: it traces the experiences of “ordinary people” whose lives were marked by the mobility of the seafarer’s labor and “networks of writing” marked by generic and formulaic exchange. It is fitting that a strength of this work is Cuming’s own fluidity in traversing a diverse set of archival materials within and across chapters and in methodology that combines “the blue humanities, gender studies, narratology, cultural history, and the history of emotions”. The broad scope of methods and materials helps Cuming draw insights into working-class life writing and the sea that otherwise would not be possible. At times, this volume of source material is daunting to traverse; individual chapters span from 1850–1914 and contain so many rich textual examples that it can be difficult to differentiate the various archival sources and analysis of each example. This overlapping complexity might be understood, however, as a further illustration of Cuming’s arguments about the permeability between genre and form, fact and fiction that is emphasized in her compelling charting of a watery literary history from below.’

Lisa Vandenbossche Source: Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

‘Cuming’s ‘Maritime Relations’ offers a timely and insightful intervention across the fields of literature, life writing, labour history and the gendered development of writing. Clear affirmations of the book’s original scholarly intervention are balanced with the rich detail within its assertive analytical style, offering a new angle on maritime life writing … Primary archival sources and literature are used to create a persuasive and intense story from which troubling tensions emerge, highlighting and questioning the traditionally embedded narrative and visual romantic traditions of the sea and sailors, supported by some illustrations within the book which emphasise the developing narrative. … Cuming’s insightful, thought-provoking book offers an alternative yet central perspective for anyone interested in the significance of the sea within British cultural heritage, in the social relationships and communities of shoreside families, and more widely, in the ‘blue humanities’.’

Stephanie Rickson Source: BAVS Newsletter