ABSTRACT
Historians of Edwardian Britain frequently describe the centrality of the sea within the popular imagination. Yet, while scholars have looked closely at naval heroes, ceremonies, and shipwrecks in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,3 practitioners of the ‘new cultural history’ have devoted surprisingly little attention to maritime life aer 1850,4 focusing instead on the army
e editors, Kelly Boyd, Bill Luckin, and the sta at the British Library, the John Rylands University Library, Manchester and the Sidney Jones Library, Liverpool, generously provided assistance for this essay. Special thanks to James Mansell for his help identifying naval stories and to Matt Houlbrook for his perceptive comments on a dra.
