ABSTRACT
When the hero of Melville's novel Redburn came ashore eastbound on a North Atlantic voyage the youngster was already equipped with a printed guide to Liverpool and from that he took his bearings on the town.3 Redburn's shipmates disembarked with less preparation and made directly for the brothels and beerhouses of the port's sailortown. At no place in the novel was the social distance between the middle-class officer-apprentice and his shipmates quite so pointedly observed. On their coming ashore the egalitarian relations of shipboard life were fractured, and the problem as Melville saw it was that women were present in the seafarers' on-shore world. Women galvanized men's passions and were the subject of proprietorial rivalries which divided men from men. Melville took a dim view of the ordinary seaman: 'with the majority of them, the very fact of their being sailors, argues a certain recklessness and sensualism of character, ignorance, and depravity', he observed. Later he described how the respectable inhabitants of Liverpool crossed the street to avoid passing too close to a sailor on the same side.4 The Victorian novelist gave expression to the social and cultural geography of the port. Nowhere were his descriptions more vivid than in respect of its sailortown. A cameo of 'Booble Alley' was a centrepiece in the novel. It established the archetypal references for a sailortown. But seafarers' accounts of sailortown were no less important: their recollected visits to brothels, lodging places and drinking houses inspired their bawdy songs.
