In 1812, Captain Philip Broke penned one of the many letters he sent to his wife during his years of naval service. Afloat in Chesapeake Bay, it was “this graceless wooden wife of mine” (44)—his ship—that kept Broke from returning to Louisa, whom he fondly imagined with his children back in Norfolk. It is a striking phrase that sums up a number of themes in Naval Families, War and Duty in Britain, 1740–1820, Ellen Gill's engaging study of eighteenth-century naval life. Far from stereotypical rogues or jolly tars, these men were sentimental, domestic, paternal, and socially responsible. Expressing a strong sense of patriotic duty, they yearned to be home again. Such were the qualities that shaped naval culture and underpinned its operation. The navy was familial in the multiple senses of intimacy, kin, and organizing principle. Naval officers were fathers and brothers, operating at long distance to influence their own households and stand as proxy in others. So in addition to “Mrs Wooden Wife” (44), naval men had sea families and sea children existing in a parallel world that exemplified the complex interconnections between personal families and national ones. As Gill ably demonstrates, naval letters, neglected too long by historians, are the surviving traces of feelings and imagination, of the patronage networks and support systems that created a distinctive set of sea manners, sea language, and personal loyalties.

In five of her seven chapters Gill focuses on officers, men from gentry and professional backgrounds. They deal with the significance of correspondence in maintaining relationships, both familial and official; men's long-distance involvement with childbirth and young children; the importance of naval networks in achieving promotion and opportunities for sons; the damaging effects that arose from a lack of patronage; and women's role in sustaining social relations. In her final two chapters she looks farther down the social scale: at the miserable experiences of a letter-writing Deptford shopkeeper who volunteered for the navy during the Napoleonic Wars; and finally, at dockyard families' petitions to the Navy Board. In both cases, naval identities and personal connections were crucial to survival, but, as so much else in the period, were conditioned by class.

Spanning a century of war and rapid military expansion, the naval correspondence Gill studies and the relationships it sustained enable her to comment on women's social labor, on the symbiotic forces of meritocracy and patronage in the navy, on the power of sentimental discourse, and changing expectations around marriage and gender. As might perhaps be expected from a study that originated in a doctoral dissertation, Gill is very careful in linking her findings to those of other scholars. Some conclusions are not particularly surprising—new cultural expectations rarely supersede previous expressions of masculine behavior and marital relations—but Gill does well to avoid binaries and assumptions about social change. Overall, this is a detailed contribution to literatures on fatherhood, marriage, occupation, social networks, letter writing, the navy, and imagined communities in the British imperial world. Gill's account of Georgian patriotism puts family loyalty and female resignation into a scholarship dominated by a noisy public culture of celebrity heroism.

Using case studies based on letter collections allows Gill to draw out subtlety and context, but doing so also has the effect of limiting discussion of the profession to around a dozen major “characters” (227). Broke's rather tormented desire to go home—but not yet—hints at psychological complexities within a broader sociological pattern. The book is strongest in its depictions of naval officers, men of a specific class. Although Gill confirms that there was no representative naval man, her study does suggest some common themes around which to organize future research. Lower-class men and army families are presented as counter examples rather than as studies in their own right, revealing the class dimensions and gender specificities of these naval worlds, plus their distinctive negotiations around money and aptitude. While army and naval circles intersected across families and social networks, the distinctiveness of the sea family, and of life and discipline at a distance emerge as the key elements in making what Gill identifies as a “naval culture”: a concept that could be developed further. Much more could be done, too, in analyzing the five illustrations, including the cover portrait of Captain Richard Grindall with his four sons in uniform. While Gill's chapters on the unhappy shopkeeper and on dockyard communities are thinnest in terms of material, they hint at a productive strategy in which historians might compare networks, hierarchies, and circulations—of information, contacts, and knowledge. What types of community existed and how do we reconstruct their spatial and social characteristics? Since it was in the early nineteenth century that the British first recognized the diseased longings of nostalgia in themselves, imagination and a yearning for home might also repay further investigation.

Given a tendency among historians of late eighteenth-century Britain to fall back on Jane Austen, Gill shows an admirable restraint, allowing a few references to friendships with Austen's naval brothers and a final nod to Persuasion. This book does however illuminate the ways in which Austen's depiction of the navy engaged with the culture and power dynamics of the period. Having read Gill's book, the significance of some familiar passages take on fresh meaning. It is a matter of reading Austen not as some historical authority but as part of a conversation we strain our ears to catch from the twenty-first century. Gill's book will aid that process and be of use to literary scholars as well as to historians. In short, this is an interesting study that enriches understanding of a particular social group. Through the lives of an apparently limited selection of men, Naval Families intersects with bigger questions about war, social change, patriotism, class, and gender.