This chapter explores logbooks by non-elite seafarers as a hybrid mode that combines the model of the ship’s official log with the practice of the ordinary terrestrial diary – a form that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. Bringing together original archival research into sea journals with critical approaches to the diary stemming from life writing studies, the analysis reframes the logbook beyond its traditional categorisation as a document of work, in order to position it as a more personal text that allowed for the maintenance of bonds of family and kinship across oceans. The chapter proposes that logbooks were linked to the terrestrial world in other ways too, emerging as a popular literary motif from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, through to fictions by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in the late Victorian period. Tracing their evidentiary and narrative potential, logbooks – both real and fictive – are positioned as circulating objects that travelled across social, spatial, and generic borders.

Conclusion: The book ends by reflecting on the boundaries of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of maritime writing and the range of texts that render the different forms of lived experience associated with seafaring. It restates the book’s focus on the everyday global sea of the long nineteenth century that shaped the lives, labour practices, and imaginative worlds of working-class individuals and their families.

This section sets out the key aims, argument, and methodology of the book, concluding with a comprehensive chapter summary.

William Cooper’s rise from working-class living in London was steeper than Wilson’s but followed an equally complex pattern of social mobility generated by expatriate employment. The chapter charts his career and social journey from telegram-boy in working-class Bermondsey, underlining cultural factors supporting his rise in status. He progressed to junior telegraphy work on several Persian Gulf stations, then to supervision of a station in Russian Georgia on the Black Sea, and finally in Tehran, directing his company’s entire Persian telegraph operations, acquiring elite trappings of the Edwardian gentleman abroad. Telegraph management worked around the impacts of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Persian constitutional revolution of 1905-09, bringing him into close contact in Tehran with diplomatic and Persian elites, aided by his Bermondsey wife who earned a reputation among expatriates as an accomplished hostess. His elevation to elite status was underlined by his family’s adoption of an expatriate middle-class identity, and his middle-class masculinity and fatherhood practices, marked an intimate father-daughter relationship alongside firm patriarchal rules of behaviour.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.

Chapter 1, Holywell Street Medicine, traces the pornography trade’s birth out of the collapse of revolutionary politics in the 1820s, and shows how early agents in the trade scavenged for content to fill lists of sexual material. This fostered a vibrant mid-century traffic in cheap reprints and reworkings of works on contraception, venereal disease, fertility, and midwifery alongside pornographic novels and prints, bawdy songbooks, and other sexual material, operating out of London’s Holywell Street and other thoroughfares near the Strand. While showing how these agents harnessed the expanding infrastructures of the press and the post to sell their wares works across the nation, this chapter demonstrates that they framed medical works through two different, but compatible, lenses. Following a long line of disreputable publishers, Holywell Street publishers framed medical works as titillating reading material. However, they also adapted earlier radical arguments for sex education and female sexual pleasure, marketing medical works as containers of practical information about the body that readers could apply to support safe, active, and pleasurable sex lives.

There is a strong case to be made for defining the early plays of the Dublin Trilogy as a series. A series is a sequence of related texts, and these texts occupy two states simultaneously: independence and interaction. The associated term ‘seriality’ describes the state of interaction between serial texts, and reflections on the operations of ‘seriality’ have emerged from a range of academic disciplines. This chapter examines O’Casey’s most famous writings in the context of serial narrative, serial publication, and serial consumption.

O’Casey had originally thought about writing a book about his life experiences as early as August 1926. In 1938 he completed the first volume, but the project continued to balloon, such that O’Casey eventually composed his autobiographies over the course of two decades, publishing six volumes between 1939 and 1954. This chapter puts the autobiographies in the perspective of working-class self-representation in Ireland during the twentieth century, interrogates the sense of self that can be found in the books, examines the response to the autobiographies in Ireland and beyond, and assesses the worth of O’Casey’s autobiographical writings.

“’Flung out of Space’: Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" explores the relationship between class and queer sexuality in American literary history, suggesting how neither of these histories can be understood without accounting for the other. Reading literary texts such as Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” alongside queer theory and LGBTQ history, Lecklider suggests how class structures queer literature throughout American history, particularly since the 19th century. Particularly emphasizing how labor structures desire, this chapter argues that working-class sexualities – and their intersections with race and gender – must be taken seriously in order to fully appreciate both the contributions of queer literature and the legibility of labor in American history.

This book begins with a family that does not fit. Pollie Keen was born to a Buckinghamshire washerwoman. She spent her teenage years as a servant, married a farm laborer-turned-soldier, and lived out her late twenties as a lady of leisure, flitting between tea parties, carriage rides, and dances that lasted into the early hours of the morning. In 1889, Pollie, her three children, and her husband Dick, by then a sergeant with the Royal Horse Artillery, went to India. It was once the family had settled in Sialkot in Punjab that Pollie’s social status and material world changed so dramatically. Dick wrote to his brother that the family was enjoying the “fine country” and enumerated the servants at their disposal. “I am same [sic] like gentleman. We are both in bed when the cook comes in to light the fire, lay the breakfast and all ready before we get up, and the barber taps at the door to shave me and man is waiting to clean the boots and clothes for all of us.”1 Having fires laid, shoes polished, breakfast made, and a barber at the ready were luxuries Dick and Pollie could never reasonably have hoped for in Britain. Pollie bragged to her mother that, after a lifetime of domestic labor, her only duties were dusting and changing the bed linens.2

This chapter revisits some of the individuals and families we have encountered throughout the text, following these families past their time in India. Thinking about the forces that compelled families and individuals to make these choices, or foreclosed possibilities, provides an answer to the question of what happened to popular and historical memory of the working-class Raj. Back in Britain, men and women who had enjoyed an elevated social status could find it difficult to reintegrate into their communities of origin, which reinforced conformity rather than difference. As a result, returning Britons purposefully forgot tales of Indian service and elite pretensions in efforts to manage family relations. In contrast, those men and women who settled with their families in India or other parts of the empire – or who chose to abandon their families of origin – had a greater incentive to embrace a new class status and create family histories celebrating their climb up the social ranks of the British Empire.

This chapter explores the form and practice of correspondence between Britain and India, uncovering the social and affective worlds of British non-elite families. Many of these correspondents had low levels of literacy and did not write for private audiences, but relied on others to read and transcribe their correspondence. Intimate details of private lives became public knowledge. Letters transported information about India back to Britain and spread it throughout communities of origin, far beyond the reach of a single letter. Correspondents based in India maintained ties to their communities at home as they consumed everything from family gossip to political news. Correspondence was central to maintaining the economic health of a family. But the same mechanisms that sustained families and communities could disrupt them as well. Scorned spouses shared their grievances with neighbors. Mothers relied on daughters to convey their intimate feelings to their husbands. The form of correspondence and the practicalities of writing across long distances determined how relationships were sustained or disrupted, how information about the empire was disseminated, and how the empire shaped family life.

For the past two decades, the cowboy who inhabits country music narratives has appeared with increasing frequency in a seaside setting or beach environment that appears to contradict the well-established conventions of place and space in the genre. Where rural farms and ranches, for instance, evoked codes of white, male working-class sustenance, physical labor, and pride in forging a symbiotic relationship with the land, the new beach imagery offered a different catalog of associative meaning: leisure, escape, travel away from one’s home and roots, and a sense of unbounded freedom. This chapter traces the rise of beach imagery as a setting and reference point in country music, both in song narratives and music videos, since the 1990s. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that, in spite of their ubiquity, these beach settings are only comprehensible to their audience because the underlying cultural meaning of country music has fundamentally changed.

Chapter 5 examines how, via the daily parade of summonses, a variety of actors employed local courtrooms to shape the social and cultural contours of marriage and affiliation. As in other aspects of metropolitan life, the courtroom was not merely a venue for the expression of law or norms that were constituted elsewhere or a space for the enforcement of middle-class standards of morality. Legal structures originally developed to protect patriarchal privilege could, to some degree, be co-opted by women instead. Several decades before working-class women could directly shape the terrain of formal politics, they were effectively navigating the terrain of local courtrooms and influencing both their daily practices and the meanings that emerged from them. Their engagement demonstrates how crucial working-class women were to recasting the nature of the state in this period. The adaption of the state to address familial matters occurred in tandem with the adaption of women to the mechanisms of the state.

According to many Vietnam veterans’ memoirs, John Wayne set the standard for what it meant to be a man. Yet for many young adults in Cold War America, there were other models for masculinity far from Hollywood, and among the most popular were men’s adventure magazines. Throughout the 1950s and into the mid 1960s, these magazines proved a popular cultural venue for war stories illustrating the exploits of courageous soldiers, fighting against the “savage” other in foreign lands, and defending democracy in a harsh world where the threat from evil actors always seemed lurking. Sex underscored nearly all of these tales, with pulp heroes rewarded with beautiful, seductive women as a kind of payoff for the combat victories. The magazines offered a masculine ideal to their readers, warrior heroes who were physically fit, mentally strong, and resolutely heterosexual. They also targeted a working-class white readership, the same communities that disproportionately sent their young men off to fight a long and bloody war in South Vietnam. Pulp Vietnam argues that men’s adventure magazines from the post-World War II era crafted a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish and then normalize GIs’ expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam.