Barbara Tomlinson's Commemorating the Seafarer examines the movement in Great Britain to create lasting monuments to naval and maritime endeavors from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. Tomlinson has a special interest in the topic as it combines her career as curator of antiquities at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and former position as the honorable secretary of the Church Monuments Society. The present work utilizes an extensive array of memorials from the National Maritime Museum database started in 1978 and her own personal site visits to memorials located throughout the British Isles. In sailing forth into this new area of cultural history, Tomlinson credits David J. Stewart's The Sea Their Graves: An Archaeology of Death and Remembrance in Maritime Culture (2011) as a significant starting point for her own work and the source of working vocabulary that frames her research. To Tomlinson, the cumulative data raises the question of why the memorials were erected in the first place and how they achieved their artistic form (xii).

Tomlinson references roughly three hundred maritime memorials and provides readers with one hundred illustrations. The majority of the memorials are sculptures done by noted artists, but Tomlinson also includes wall plaques, stained glass, and humbler tombstones and epitaphs. For each one, she establishes the historic context, a biographical summary of the individual memorialized, the process of commemoration that followed, and an artistic appraisal of the memorial. The challenge in moving from database to scholarly analysis requires her to look for patterns and influence in different time periods and areas of maritime enterprise.

Tomlinson argues (somewhat counterintuitively) that “the early eighteenth century was the golden age of the naval monument. Trade was booming and, after 1708 naval officers had improved rights to prize money. Prosperous ones were commemorated with maritime iconography appropriated from the Roman world” (21). While others connected to maritime endeavors, such as shipbuilders, merchant mariners, and fishermen, would achieve their own more modest memorials, the officers of the Royal Navy drove this movement. Perhaps more importantly, as the individuals commemorated had perished in service to their country, the families and shipmates of those officers promoted the projects. The memorials to Captain James Cornwall, RN by Sir Robert Taylor at Westminster Abbey (1747) and Captain Robert Faulknor, RN by Charles Felix Rossi at St. Paul's Cathedral (1803) were high-quality sculptures symbolizing British identity, naval power, and individual heroism. Prominently displayed at centers of national culture, they allowed for public visitation, and in Tomlinson's opinion, “these monuments were the subject of unprecedented public interest” (64)—this even before Admiral Nelson's tomb became a centerpiece at St. Paul's.

While memorials to Royal Navy officers took center stage in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Tomlinson's chapter on commemoration of maritime disasters offers some interesting commentary on class and gender in the seafaring community. Ordinary seamen who served in the thousands in the Imperial and Napoleonic Wars are largely without their own memorials, although they frequently made financial contributions to memorialize their officers. Not until 1875 did the Greenwich Naval Hospital erect a modest wall plaque that honors those sailors, explaining, “They served their country in the wars which established the naval supremacy of England and died the honoured recipients of her gratitude” (65).

Meanwhile, few women were memorialized, and the exceptions tended to be commemorated in strongly gendered ways. The sole heroine was Grace Darling, daughter of lighthouse keeper William Darling. She assisted her father in the 1861 rescue of the crew from the steamer Farfarshire, earning a Victoria Cross in the process. Her feats, Tomlinson notes, were branded with a distinct kind of feminine heroism infused with kindness and compassion (222). Far more likely, women were seen as victims of a cruel sea. An excellent example of this were the female passengers, including the captain's two daughters, who perished when the East Indiaman Halsewell broke up in a storm in 1786. Survivor accounts and prints of paintings by Robert Dodd, John Hoppner, and Thomas Stothard were widely disseminated and connected the nation to this maritime tragedy (165). Perhaps Tomlinson's next project will explore the influence of the print medium on civic commemoration and maritime memorialization.

Overall, in Commemorating the Seafarer Tomlinson compiles a wealth of knowledge regarding the maritime memorials movement in the British Isles. Situated at the intersection of cultural memory studies, art history, thanatology, and naval history, this book will be a starting point for future study regarding death rituals and collective memory of the seafarer.