 Okay, welcome everybody and I wait a few seconds as people trickle in or or or rush in as it looks like actually it's more of a flow of people welcome everybody right so welcome welcome to the what are we now we're the lawton naval unit welcome to the department of war study and to king's college london all three levels were the host of the king's maritime history seminars which are organized as many you know by the british commission for maritime history along with the support of the society for nautical research and additional support from Lloyd's register um this is the last of this term's seminars there's a fuller program for for next term in the in the works not not yet complete but i'm aiming to to restart on the seventh of january and we'll go fortnightly from there more information of course will follow and and hopefully quite shortly but for now i have a enormous pleasure of introducing professor fey ha professor of english literature at the university of glasgow whose phd i understand was in canadian literature which is my heart of of course i'm very pleased to know that um and among the many many things about which he writes and works and research is is literature and the ocean liner and that's why we invited her to speak to us today and why we're so grateful uh that she's uh come so it's with our collective thanks fey that we welcome and welcome you to the to the seminar uh and i will hand over to you thank you very much and thank you very much for the invitation i think this is certainly the first time i've been hosted by a school of security studies it seems quite far away from english literature so i'm just going to try and share my PowerPoint now that seems to be working um so this title um covers quite a broad topic and i've actually amassed quite a lot of material on this theme now um so i've just selected um some part of it that i think will make this talk hang together and fit into about half an hour um and that's a focus on the interwar liners role in the material aspects of transatlantic literary culture so i mean how did the liner affect practices of producing circulating and consuming printed text and aside from one or two slides um i haven't presented any material before so comments will definitely be very welcome so during the 1920s and 1930s um literary texts were read written printed and even published on board ship and books and periodicals were of course exported via sea routes um but also on board lent among passengers or three ships libraries and occasionally even bought and sold on ocean liners and i'm increasingly aware that some shipping lines took quite a proactive role in the transatlantic print marketplace and at the same time the liner was taking on an increasingly important symbolic value in a transatlantic imaginary so its cultural influence being felt um in all sorts of fields painting photography performance architecture and then in terms of literature which is my main field um quite a large part of the action on various in various plays and shows and novels unfolds on board an atlantic liner um and i'm just showing here a small sample of the ones i've been working on recently um and in a lot of these texts you find um scenes of readings so scenes where characters are engaged with or actually more often failing to be engaged with a book um and these can give us a lot of insight into the relationship between literary and travel culture so in this talk i'm going to use um both fictional and non-fictional sources to investigate this role of the interwar steamship in both inspiring and enacting or making it happen transatlantic literary exchange and um because of the expertise of this audience i'm not going to include any discussion of the history of the ocean liner because i think you know all that either because you're maritime historians or because you're my mates then you've been listening to me talking about it for quite a while now and so i'm going to start right away with an author margaret aya barnes an american writer who has been very much forgotten now but she was very successful um in this period and um this novel westward passage was so successful that it was made into a film the following year um the main character olivia um at the beginning of the story boards a liner in sherbrooke to return home to new york and her maid um in the quotation had established olivia in the steamer chair with seven farewell telegrams two new english biographies and three french novels vianda perreza on her lap and the five gardenia sent by that amusing boy in the paris embassy pinned to the lapel of her new mink coat olivia had not opened the books she had glanced at the telegrams and had sniffed the gardenias and thought instantly of nick so along with the flowers and the coat the books are accessories they're chosen to enhance olivia's performance of glamorous modernity and to demonstrate how up to date her tastes are and how she has this ability to read french and so on um nick is olivia's former husband um and unexpectedly to her but perhaps not very surprisingly to us as readers he's on the same ship he's on the same voyage so she feels short to avoid him um and so the second day out she confines herself to the cabin and this is her sitting in her cabin um unable to focus on reading and her inattention to the book is um a kind of um symptom of her returning feeling for nick so about five lines down into this passage a french novel was lying on olivia's lap she had cut the first 20 pages so she's just uh it's a new novel the pages are still folded and she's cut them with a paper knife and had read three but the book was dull she thought and the construction rather difficult she did not want to read it there was nothing she wanted to do um nick himself is um a famous author very popular but it was actually his dedication to this career which caused their divorce in the first place so it makes sense that olivia doesn't turn to literature for solace in this scene um she experiences her first class cabin as as narrow and restrictive there's a lot of emphasis on the smallness of the room and how much she wants to get out of it um and like so many of the books i've read this one presents only the the perspective of the wealthy passenger and it ignores for instance the far greater confinement that would have been experienced by passengers in the lower classes of travel and especially by the crew so i've been trying to find more examples of texts that represent the experience of crew members on the lineup there are not very many um and few are still which represent their experience of reading but i do have this one um book by Humphrey Jordan um and he too has been very much forgotten but he was uh sufficiently celebrated in his day that there were about 10 um pictures of him in the national portrait galleries collection and he was the author of quite a large number of seafaring books and the story of this novel Seaway Only um is about a first officer called John Koch who is just about to become a captain and he's always accompanied by a loyal steward called Alfred Fudge um who was actually a former um seaman himself and became injured and at this start um Koch is introduced from Fudge's point of view and in this scene the steward is taking care of Koch's private quarters dusting the books followed and that was a matter of sheer pride not a great reader himself Alfred Fudge was able to admire frankly the habit in the man he served never before had Fudge come in close contact with a private library of such magnitude there were 93 volumes in the collection and the day when he would be able to spread the news around the ship that the hundred mark had been topped could not be far away so this idea of the personal library and its increase as a topic for ship's gossip is quite intriguing it seems that the possession or the accumulation of these books seems to confer a certain distinction on Koch um but it also makes him appear a bit eccentric and so he's he's increasingly respected by his crew but also seems to belong to a separate world from them and in terms of their actual content in the second paragraph of the passage now the books were almost entirely about the sea and ships mostly technical and Fudge considered with a headache to every page there was one a portly volume costing the outrageous sum of 30 shillings calling itself modern shipping which made Fudge considered almost indecent reading for a master mariner it was concerned with the way in which shipping companies could earn dividends a subject fit for owners but hardly proper for an officer so Fudge is committed to a strict division between the owners as profit makers and the crew as dedicated professionals but I think that his shock at the violation of this division by Koch's reading of this book is equaled by his shop at its price so I want to introduce the idea that of reading as investment Koch sees reading this book and buying this book as an investment so his books are not just for display like Olivia's books um continuing the quotation um yet like all the others it had been read so he has cut all the pages you know not again not like Olivia behind Koch's easy smile Fudge recognized a brain modern shipping offended him but one of the few non technical volumes Reynard the fox the illustrated edition filled him with pride he had read it it was almost the only poetry he had ever read understood it admired it he was it was his standby when he wanted to recall his childhood on the land so the steward sees books as a source of entertainment and a connection to the past rather than as a way of accessing practical knowledge so Koch's reading as part of his work and Fudge's is an escape from it and we can assume that in many voyages um crew members would not have had much time for reading and would have had to snatch moments from other duties whereas passengers would often have had long stretches of empty time to fill so I want to turn now to the book from which my title is taken um it's a kind of combination of guidebook and almanac and travel narrative um Basil Woon was a British born journalist and he emigrated to the US at the age of 16 and he worked as a foreign correspondent and a ghost writer and a quite an unreliable um celebrity biographer and he himself was quite a celebrity himself as you can see from his having been photographed by Lee Miller um but he's actually much less remembered than Aaron Douglas the Harlem artist who did the beautiful design for his book cover and actually the reason that this volume is now of interest to collectors is very much because of the cover not the contents but there's lots of interesting things inside it too so Basil Woon writes after all there is very little to do on a ship um and he talks about what he feels that he should be doing as a writer so in the middle paragraph he says one may spend one's time in the cabin reading one may even work I have never begun a voyage yet that I didn't swear to myself that I would do two things I would rest and I would work I have never done either but I've eaten too much and drank too much and played cards too much so the temptations of sensory indulgence and romance and dissipation always seem to be at war with the um the sort of travel company's construction or even the conventional construction of travel as a mode of learning and self-development again a form of investment in your own education um Basil Woon's book is addressed to first-time or potential travelers um and that's why I've put an image of a tourist third cabin advertisement here because as you know following the end of world war one the steerage section on transatlantic liners gradually became replaced with um a tourist cabin and a trip to york was increasingly within the range of let's say middle class north americans and these are the people that the book is addressed to I'm going to just turn to the opening paragraph of Basil Woon's book he starts drinks divorces and dresses are the principal reasons why americans go to europe um some few make the crossing with a view to seeing europe and often europe is more successful in seeing them so the americans become the spectacle um and Woon suggests that the trip eastward is really about opportunities for consumption and display and also escape from the restrictions of prohibition era america um even though maybe it's a spensible aim is to immerse the traveling in art and culture and history and Woon also offers a kind of typology or classification of regular atlantic travelers so he says they may be classified in four divisions professional men meaning writers professional women meaning actresses alimony hunters and ocean vampires society people and buyers like buyers fashion houses for example he means and then he adds um in the last sentence and whether we need to lose has anything to do with it or not most of the ocean vamps I have met are blondes so that takes me on to another text that has crucial scenes set on an ocean liner and here perhaps you're glad to see an author that you've actually heard of because the others I was using were rather obscure names um so we need to lose was a successful screenwriter when she published her first novel in 1925 um and the subtitle if you notice um in the in the small print under gentlemen prefer blondes is the illuminating diary of a professional lady so you see where Basil Woon got his reference from and this became a bestseller and it was also admired by intellectuals everyone from James Joyce to Edith Wharton to William Emson and it takes the form of Lorelai Lee's badly spelled and innuendo laden diary um Lorelai lives in New York um where her very luxurious lifestyle is funded by Mr Eisman her sugar daddy who's a button manufacturer um and Eisman sends Lorelai with her friend Dorothy on a tour to Europe which both he and Lorelai insist will be educational that's a real keyword in the text um they leave on the majestic this is one of the illustrations by Ralph Barton from the original um novel and Lorelai is soon criticizing her friend for spending her time unprofitably so Dorothy is out taking a walk up and down the deck with a gentleman she met on the steps but I am not going to waste my time going around with gentlemen because if I did nothing but go around I would not finish my diary or read good books which I'm always reading to improve my mind so this circular um pleasurable but purposeless movement around the deck is contrasted with the with linear productive processes such as reading or writing books in actual fact Lorelai is being disingenuous because her tourist journey is not really oriented towards education but towards accumulation as she tries to amass both social and financial capital and that's why she reprimands Dorothy for wasting time with men who are not rich um at the end she says I always scold her because she does nothing but waste her time by going around with gentlemen who do not have anything um whereas she had been invited on various dates by um a film magnate who could have offered her a lot more so Lorelai's references to books are always part of her discursive projects of improvement which ostensibly involves the productive use of leisure time and that was according to the ideals of the middle brow culture of her period. The rhetoric of self-improvement emphasised mental cultivation um but the real purpose of people often of people who engaged with um the cultural institutions of the middle brow so I'm thinking of things like book clubs and university extension courses was really to enhance their social and hence their financial status so Lorelai makes the hidden aims of this culture um explicit. Mr Eismann is um sends her quite a lot of books for the journey she receives from him a large book of etiquette as he says there is quite a lot of etiquette in England and it would be a good thing for a girl to learn um so she takes it on the deck to read and a few pages later the second part of my quotation I've decided not to read the book of etiquette as I glance through it which is all that she ever does with any books and it does not seem to have anything in it that I would care to know um so I will not waste my time on such a book so time spent on reading again can be considered an investment like I said um but Lorelai wants a quicker return so um she actually pays somebody not to guide her reading as those institutions like um book clubs or educational broadcasts might do um but actually to do it for her so here's one um other passage which is illustrated by um this drawing of Lorelai rather baffled surrounded by um this complete set of books that she's been giving for her birthday by a gentleman called Mr Conrad they all seem to be about ocean travel although I have not had time to more than glance through them and then she reveals her real interest in ocean travel I have always liked novels about ocean travel ever since I posed for the front cover of a novel about ocean travel because I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship so this repetitive almost automated language that um Lorelai's kind of generates points to her status as a sort of artificial construct but I also find it quite relevant to the kind of confined and circular and repetitive movements that she makes around the ship um so she's got all these novels she's just kind of sitting baffled by them so she decides um this morning I told Lulu that's her maid to let all of the housework go and spend the day reading a book entitled Lord Jim and then tell me all about it so that I would improve my mind while Jerry is away so this literal kind of offloading of the task of reading almost as if she can kind of absorb the knowledge from somebody else also draws attention to the fact that the people who ostensibly serve her are much more capable of engaging with this difficult literature um so as in um westward passage there's much more here about not reading than about reading and Lorelai presents a less benign version of Olivia's instrumental uses of books to advance her social progress so not many novels represent liner passengers actually reading but there's historical evidence to suggest that um cultures of reading have in reality been very important um on liner journeys and that print materials were extensively circulated on board um there's some really fascinating research in this field um a lot of it examines the reading of um emigrants or sailors especially in the long 19th century um I'm just going to provide a really brief summary of some of this work and I've just put um some references here so firstly liner's carried printing classes and again a lot of people will know this in this audience um from as early as the 18th century and the Vanessa Histon Roberts article explores why shipboard space was devoted to bulky printing presses and she finds that a lot of the uses were more related to the entertainment of the crew than to actually producing any practical documents secondly liner's carried libraries and according to Bill Bell um prior to the age of steamships libraries were often rather haphazard collections of books and sometimes left behind by previous passengers um or introduced by charities or authorities for the purpose of educating emigrants and even convicts um but then Susan Lubick explains that with the advent of um modern liners she says and I'm quoting now shipping companies began to more purposefully contemplate the provision of reading matter for the use of passengers as part of their facilities and she says they sometimes kept their collections up to date by having arrangements with publishers and booksellers so that sets of books could be changed at the end of each voyage and Lubick by studying extant catalogs of ships libraries has discovered lots of interesting things that the ratio of books to passengers was higher than in most land-based lending libraries and also that while fiction predominated there would also be poetry biography and travel writing commonly available um her research rate relates to routes in the Anglophone Pacific um while Simon Frost our chapter focuses on Atlantic routes and he points out that many libraries held multi-lingual collections and that was especially true on the German lines um so this evidence starts to help us capture a sense of the liner as a site of intercultural or or um literary international literary exchange and some libraries lent books for free um whereas others were run on a subscription model and so they required a payment to cover the duration of the voyage and a few such as the library on the Mauritania that's shown here offered books for sale as well as to borrow um some German ships had these wonderful vending machines you have to move the little video if it's in the way of that picture so you can see that one um thereby the important industrial designer Peter Behrens and they were introduced in 1912 by 1917 there were 2 000 of these in operation some at train stations and some on board liners and some at spas and they were in production until 1940 according to the Museum of the Recalarm Publishing House um I'll have something else to say about selling books on board in a minute um but I also want to mention that as well as lending and selling reading material um it was also printed um on board so on the 4th of June 1904 the earliest maritime daily newspaper brought out its first issue the Cunard Daily Bulletin which was produced on board um the RMS Campania one of the earliest line is to be fitted with a Marconi wireless system um so this cost five cents and consisted of eight pages and again as many many most of you know um daily wireless news sheets would soon become standard on passenger liners and they would include information about the progress of the voyage um and international news reports that were transmitted by telegraphy and these items were added onto sheets that had been pre-printed before departure with adverts and a masthead and so on so one of my fields of research is periodical studies so I'm very interested in the published publishing of an annual supplement to this daily news sheet because the kind of rhythm of daily and annual publication is so different that it's quite unusual to have an annual supplement for a daily paper um but that was produced um to provide a guide to the results which the passengers might be going to um with the advent of tourist third cabin um a new kind of collaborative onboard publication emerged and Basil Woon going back to him just for a moment actually comments on this he says that the weekly magazine is possibly the most curious in the world because of the fact that it's editors as well as its contributors change with each number um and there's an editorial board chosen from among the passengers so this cover here was consistent across all the 1925 um crossings that each the content of each um issue is um produced by the the passengers on board and mainly as you can see students and educational tour groups um the visual dimension was particularly impressive these are some linoleum cuts that were published um in one of the 1925 issues which I thought were really good and the content is quite light-hearted um this example is rules which are about passengers venturing into other classes of accommodation so um the first couple are envisaging that the students are trespassing into the first class accommodation um and the third one about slumming you might think it referred to them going down to the um fourth class or storage there was still a fourth class section um on the Leviathan in 1925 um but it might actually be an ironic reference again to the trespassing to first class because there were several references to slumming um which imply that the students felt themselves intellectually superior to the wealthy passengers so actually by going into first class they were going down in some ways um just another sample of what the magazine looked like inside um there's a poem here celebrating the joys of tourist class where you didn't need to be rich or respectable um as you would in first and second class respectively and there's also a guide for embryonic globe trotters which is rather similar to Basil Woon's um narrative um so on-board publishing extended in 1923 from periodicals to books um book length items might have been printed up to a century earlier according to that Vanessa Histon-Roberts article but there's a difference between printing and publishing so the American writer and bibliographer Christopher Morley um comments in one of his books that um he's talking about Captain David Bone of the anchor line um in based in Glasgow and he says Captain Bone published the first book um so far as I know that was ever published at sea um and it was especially imprinted for the high seas bookshop and on the publication date those copies were broken out and sold in mid-ocean as you know printing is not publication the publishing of a book means the actual vending of it to customers um so yes I have um discussed this with Marta Bellamy and I wanted to say thank you to him for pointing me towards this um so the high seas bookshop and it was an innovation of the 20s and it really enhanced the potential of the ship as a site for literary activity um and the first one was opened on the anchor line ship um Tuscania in 1922 and then subsequently won on its sister ship Transylvania and this is um Captain Bone's autobiography and he describes the excitement that this bookshop generated um among journalists who are reporting on the Tuscania's maiden voyage so he says a new stand or bookstore would have passed unnoticed for these are fugitive fixtures fixtures on shipboard as a rule only set up on sailing days and then vanishing that the quiet atmosphere of a well furnished bookshop was something refreshingly new um and the bookshop was designed not only to sell reading material but to provide a new kind of onboard space so in the second part um Captain Bone recounts his request to the chief draftsman to to design such a space we shall want a real bookshop one with cases and shelves a table perhaps and a chair or two where the customers can sit down to examine the stock and perhaps talk about books with the attendant um and the draftsman rubbed his ear in puzzlement this was clearly an odd request um gosh what kind of an attendant what does a book sailor look like anyway I like the book sailor so the attendants were serious literary figures in their own right um on the earliest journeys the shop was either kept by William McPhee who's shown here who was born at sea um of Canadian parents you'll be glad to hear um or by the Scottish journalist and critic William Matthew Parker um so these were very well connected men actually um Parker and Bone were acquainted with Joseph Conrad um whom they met on board well McPhee and Morley and David Bone um met at gatherings at the famous Greenwich Village bookshop run by Frank Shea and all of their signatures appear on the bookshop door which you can see a piece of here with Christopher Morley's name in the middle um and you can see the whole door on a website at the University of Texas where they've identified most of the members of this literary network so these professional and social networks enabled the success of the high seas bookshop and that in turn enhanced the literary careers of these this group of men um this is a sort of surviving catalog for the bookshop on the Transylvania and it features titles by all of the people I was mentioning you can see several of their names there um and it includes a section you can see here for books about the sea and sea life nautical books um and then there's miscellaneous books but there's a real bias in this miscellaneous section towards more stories of adventure and travel um yeah and the catalog makes this claim for the bookshop this is on the back the high seas bookshop has become an Atlantic exchange in the world of books through its good offices American authors not widely known in Britain have found a public and not infrequently a British publisher and then also the other way around in this unique bookshop an international agency has been established and indeed in the catalog the titles do represent a fair balance between American and British authors um although male writers outnumber um women writers by 30 to 1 which is not a good representation of the ratio of traveling passengers at this time it's more about a vision of transatlantic literature that centers on the sea itself and on tropes of adventure and discovery so I think in circulating such books David Bone performed an important function as a taste maker and I think through his different roles as author publisher bookseller host and also as ship's captain um you could see Bone as himself emblematic of this transatlantic literary exchange that I'm talking about in both its material aspects and in terms of the actual writing so I've been trying in this talk then to connect those practical and semantic aspects of the liner's role in interwar literary culture so it did provide really rich subject matter for writers and artists who are I think fascinated by the ocean liner as as a social stage as well as a site of cultural encounter and I've suggested that in fiction the passengers are frequently seen surrounded by books um but they rarely seem to actually read any whereas the historical record suggests that actually the interwar liner was very important to transatlantic cultures of reading and print um so it did use the latest technology radio technology printing its own serial publications buying and selling books and and providing these spaces which I have don't think have been discussed so much for onboard reading and discussion so I think it can be understood in effect as a media technology as well as an important agent of international literary exchange at this at the end right um good thank you very much uh for for that um I think I'm back on the screen if we're sharing the stage now if I with my choreography is working well I wonder if I could there are a couple of questions which I'll I'll relay to you um I've got an ill-formed one um if I may um start um I'm fascinated by by by all of this um and uh you know to learn about the place of books and reading and the importance of them uh on on liners as as you know a means of of of exchange but struck me was that even within the novels that you talked about themselves um it seemed to me that that reading uh there was portrayed as a as a way of um of defining you know social boundaries and and categories and um you know it was described within the novels themselves as as an important um site of of exchange and and and definition and and and and it seemed that the liners themselves the ocean liners themselves were acting like um just as a stage on which on which these these social situations were were were unfolding and and and I wondered um if if I well I assumed and and I and I wonder if it's the case that many of these same types of of of novels from from the time took the liners and and and used them more as characters you know if the liner itself was ever like a character in in in any of these things um you know bringing bringing something almost otherworldly into into the lives of these people and and complicating social relations and and and this this this sort of thing just seems to me that there's a there's an opportunity there with with the with the liner to to to affect these things more uh more more directly I don't know yeah absolutely I mean I think my the idea of the liner was a stage is one kind of metaphor isn't it and as a character as another one and I think absolutely there's quite a few of the books I've read that don't name the ship at all and it's just it could be any ship you know it's it is very much just a stage for the performance of the passengers whereas there are others where it becomes quite important where they're set on a real um real historical ship rather than just an imaginary one um or where they develop a certain amount of love for it actually that um Humphrey Jordan book um the ship which Koch is given command of is a very old uh 50 years old and it's called the magnolia and he's very disappointed because he expected a better ship uh but he eventually comes to love it and he talks a lot about how beautiful it was and it's it's too small but he finds that it's perfectly formed in the end um so in that one there's this kind of three-way relationship between the captain and the steward and the ship whereas and in fact some of the others that do name Lorelai and the majestic you know you actually do get quite a lot of detail whereby she sees the majestic as the perfect setting for her because of its similarities to the Ritz hotels which we could go into more um and that one is repeatedly name checked but there are quite a few others where it the actual ship seems to rather recede into the background I'm less interested in those but I'm still interested in the comparison you know the way that being on the sea is still seen as such a um very good place to set a drama if particularly because of the confinement and the fact that you can't escape from those people who might be a threat to you right yeah so system okay I better move on we've got some some questions so um Hugh Murphy uh says hello um and he's actually seen westward passage so as as to the question posed by the movie blurb does marriage end romance probably he says in his limitable style I'm sure however in the golden age of Atlantic liner travel the shipping companies played up the romantic aspect of liner travel certainly for the higher paying passengers and you wonder if you could comment on on on that bit yes you're right because at the end of westward passage she decides not to get back together with her um former husband and go back to her current husband who's thought to be rather dull um but quite solid so yeah the um but the romance takes place in the space of the ship and when she gets back onto land it all kind of falls apart um so yeah absolutely I think in this way the literary texts and the advertising texts are working in tandem you know the amount of romantic tension that you get in these narratives of course the most famous one being in bride's head revisited um I the rhetoric is very similar to what you get in the promotional texts not just in terms of written texts but in terms of the romantic images in the advertising and the sort of well-dressed couples leaning against the rail and all the rest of it um and even the little comments in the efforts about who you might possibly meet on this journey um so yeah absolutely I think there's a way here in which even the stories of romance that ends in disaster are still playing into this whole you know promotional idea of the ship as a place for romance so definitely okay now Sarah Galtley is onto something here I think she's talking about um given your comments on the value now attached to the cover art of the frantic atlantic rather than its contents she's wondering if you found any engagement in these texts with the role of books or book covers as cultural and or status symbols for those traveling aboard ships in other words was being seen on deck with certain books just as valuable as actually reading them yeah and in fact I think yeah that's exactly what Olivia was doing in that one example she was just showing off with her french novels um and I was when I was looking around for images to illustrate this talk some of the ones that I couldn't use for copyright reasons were pictures of people on deck chairs with books just kind of lying beside them but not you couldn't find very many pictures of people with the book so yeah I mean Lorela is sitting there with her book of etiquette on the deck but there are other things that she only does in the privacy of her cabin and she talks to certain people on the deck and she talks when she's in a cabin she gets on battle with the steward um but she then ignores him when she goes on deck to talk to the powerful men and it's the same thing with her reading practices some of them are exhibited and some of them were like her writing with the diary are very private so yeah I think actually that um that has come up in quite a few of the books I've read I haven't read any particular discussion of this but I think that will be um that will be a good thing for me to emphasize in my work so yes thank you okay and now Ian Stafford's got a question about these these these libraries because presumably they weren't just you know like you find now you know people leaving the paper back they've read behind you know as an exchange there must have been people choosing the library and um and and so he's asking about that who took to choose a library and is there a difference in policy between between lines you know did some some lines have a particular type of library now here I feel that I believe Suzanne Lu because here I think she would know the answer a lot better than I would um because this is something I've only just begun to um look at and and a thing that I know so far is derived from the research of her and the other people I was um mentioning um so I would like to know the answer to this but at the current time I don't know the answer um so if there's anyone else who does if you want to um I think some of the questions and comments are coming up in the chat and some of them are yes I'll get to those and yeah maybe someone could give us some help with that question because yeah that is okay yeah if anybody doesn't know then please step back yeah so you and Grant uh is thanking you and and following on from this business of the ship as as characters what did the crews uh think of the books uh he's asking after all we're we're working I mean this is where we don't really have enough evidence I think um because well from literary texts not many of them represent the experience of crew as I was saying you have to really root around to find um Ben um in terms of archival evidence I also don't have any yet um that doesn't mean I'm going to stop looking because I and also my PhD student are both trying to find more evidence um on this point of at the moment just as we were starting to get somewhere the archives were all closed um but there is quite a lot of personal recorded material in some of the collections at Glasgow University which is you know diaries and things like that relating to passengers but where you would actually find any record of crew members reading isn't that is going to be much more difficult I think um okay well we have a related question then from Jane Bowden this one was put in in the in the chat she's noticed that there are quite a few child passengers that she spotted were there publications on board Atlantic liners for their benefit children's section there are in the magazines they do have some of them do have children's pages actually um and it's either poems or puzzles or things like that um in some of the um sort of news sheets and magazines that were distributed on board um in the catalogue that I've got there for the high seas bookshop there are not necessarily um directly children's books but there certainly are the kind of books that a lot of people would have read at quite a young age you know adventure stories for example so they would be able to find something um I've also been quite interested in the children's playrooms and some of the pictures I've seen of children's playrooms on board did have what looks like bookshelves um in them as well as toys so I'm thinking that there would have been a certain amount of provision for child readers oh I can see Susan's actually helped us out with that question what to stock in libraries she says would have been shipping company managers based on recommendations of booksellers often based on what booksellers also suggested to normal public libraries often these libraries were established at the time of the launch of the liner so yeah you can imagine that the main stock would have been there from the start and would be going back and forwards on each journey um but then I can see that's really helpful to know that the um managers would take recommendations from booksellers which might be similar to the ones that would be given to land-based libraries so yeah that's really helpful thank you very much I couldn't see that so I've lost my uh oh it's in the bottom of the Q&A all right okay oh so it is thank you thank you for that okay well here's here's what I think might be a challenging one from um from Sophie Oliver and so she's talking about not reading with respect to not reading she's wondering about not on board so in other words books that don't show the voyage despite the trip being very central so maybe you know James is the ambassador for example have you found others that don't show the voyage itself and uh she's wondering why they might not yes actually um several and I was wondering I was thinking about whether or not to be discussing those in my project and um what to say about the sort of absence or skipping over um of the journey um when that I've been looking at recently going back to my Canadian literature um Sarah Jeanette Duncan um wrote a book called A Social Departure which is about a trip around the world in 1890 um and when she gets she starts off in um the east in eastern Canada and goes across to Vancouver and then she just says um about the Pacific Ocean it is best to say as little as possible and there's a couple of sentences about how she's not going to describe that journey and then she's in Japan um so yeah you kind of feel like you're being spared the gruesome details because her story is really about the countries that she visited um and she has a little bit more to say later about the ships of the P&O when she's going on shorter journeys between different countries in Asia and suddenly discovering um the joys of traveling in some of these waters and the levels of service and so on um but there is this kind of huge gap and I've seen several other um texts that do something similar that kind of um explicitly step over the voyage of something that was too unpleasant to remember and one really interesting example is um another Harlem Renaissance figure um Claude Mackay and his novel Romance in Marseille which was written around 1930 but not published until this year um actually the the main character stows away um on a liner and he is fitting right near to a toilet and his it's so very cold that actually his legs get frozen and they have to be amputated when he arrives at the other side um so again the whole of that journey is compressed into one really horrific sentence um and the rest of it is about what happens when he gets there and his negotiation for insurance payments from the shipping company and how they won't pay because he needs to stow away and so on so it's very much about the ocean liner but nothing happens kind of on it like so yeah I think this will be a good I should probably pay more attention to these texts that lose where there's a gap I think that would be interesting thanks Sophie right okay here's a different sort of question from from Sarah Palmer who wants to know about uh the commercial motive uh that companies might have had in providing literature to passengers you know like charging for borrowing or you know that book vending machine and and and and this sort of thing maybe maybe even I don't know there may be some connections to the publishing uh houses themselves but or as she's asking was it seemed simply as a service to passengers was there commercial on the door was it just a service as far as I understand it it it was very important that um the shipping companies could show that they provided for um this kind of entertainment as in reading um and that they had libraries and they had bookstores or whatever so I think the most important thing is as a service to passengers um but also yeah I mean they there could be I think we should probably see the the charges for the libraries as more just sort of covering costs um rather than making a profit I think um but in terms of the book vending machines that would have been a kind of mutually beneficial arrangement between the publisher let's say the reclamation publisher in this case um and the shipping company because it's another service but it also makes a profit for the publishing house rather than for the shipping company um so yeah that's um I think this is a kind of collaboration really um in that case but my understanding is that with the libraries the emphasis was much more on the service um provided to passengers or in the early days as I mentioned when I was referring to these articles it might have been more of a paternalistic purpose of trying to encourage immigrants or even convicts to read um something improving right well I'm going to jump over to the Q&A box again uh where the questions were because there's a related question I suppose uh or it follows on on from that because Alexander Pickering's asking about uh literature that might have been banned from libraries and did they did they uh on the sea outside of the confines of normal society did they allow socially taboo books to flourish or or was it the the opposite I wanted to uh that's not one that I know the answer to I must say but it's a very good question I find nobody else has got any insights on that um please let me know but actually that is a really interesting question because there would have been certain types of regulations which it wouldn't have been enforceable in this context so you know who's who's national rules that these libraries belong to in as a question that arises arises in terms of other practices on board ship as well so yeah that's one I need to I need to look into actually okay there's one from Esmond Eastern Lamb who's thanking you for a fascinating presentation which I think we're all going to do pretty soon uh but um wondering uh to what extent these novels that you talk about engage with politics and contemporary events that are happening outside of the insular clothes setting of the ship in in environment or is it is the clothes environment so much the point that they they that that's a really interesting question um yeah I think that would be very different that would be a different answer for each book um some of them absolutely the enclosed environment really is the point and it is a kind of world apart from um the rules of ordinary life um so the westward passage would be a good example of that um and also gentlemen prefer blondes because Lorelai seeks to replicate that kind of closed environment wherever she goes on land so she's happiest in a setting such as the Ritz hotel and when she gets to London and to Paris all she wants to do is enclose herself in the Ritz but other books it would be a very different answer the one the Seaway only the Humphrey Jordan book there's a lot of engagement there with aspect which perhaps was suggested in the quotations but to do with finance and to do with power there's a scene set in the boardroom there's quite a lot of emphasis also on the cultures of the different countries that are visited on the voyage which again you don't get in all of these texts sometimes they never even get anywhere um and sometimes when they do you see nothing but you know the gangway um the one I mentioned a minute ago romance in Marseille in answer to Sophie's question that um is then primarily concerned with um black communities who live alongside the docks in Marseille so it's very much um engaged with those kind of aspects so yeah really different in different cases but there are some books which are completely enclosed and completely cut off from those larger issues absolutely when I think about literature and the sea I can't help but think of of Joseph Conrad and just how wonderfully is and how good a writer he is and and how he incorporates the sea and and and so forth so just as a maybe as a as a as a final question I mean just how is he the big literary giant of of of your of your world or do I have an exaggerated sense of of um you know his his his place well no I don't think it is exaggerated because I think you know the way that he was referenced in those texts I was looking at is is an indication of yeah the statue of Conrad in this area I suppose you are getting a somewhat of a different emphasis into some of the type of books I'm looking at where I'm thinking a little bit more about um the passenger experience and the kind of onboard society and these kind of aspects rather than um more of a seafaring novel if you like I suppose I'm looking more at the kind of commercial um passenger flipping and rather less at um a kind of more adventure oriented narrative but I still think that Conrad as you say is he's referenced quite a lot he's kind of there's a lot of reading of Conrad or not reading of Conrad going on um on these ships so yeah certainly crucial yes absolutely brilliant okay well that that is excellent um so thank you uh for for that um I think we've covered uh everybody's uh questions and we've certainly uh got our money's worth as it were uh from from you we certainly appreciate that fascinating look at this world of uh of literature and some amazing answers as people are saying to you in the in the chat so um I think uh it's time and and again this is this is where I want to break out into applause but I I count on my own because it's too it's too awkward but I will I will uh raise a glass and I and I hope everybody at home has an opportunity to do this uh as well and we can give you our our collective thanks I want to say thank you very much for these questions which is so helpful and I've copied all of them so I'm going to go look into some of these things more thank you and the answers that some people have given as well thank you right uh there were 32 of us Sarah Palmer wants to know uh 32 of you anyway 32 attendees tonight so uh this was uh a very popular popular talk and and you'll you'll see in the in the in the chat phase that uh people are extending their their thanks thank you to you so thank you very much thank you very much goodbye everybody and and we'll see you in the next term and I'll I'll update everybody with the uh much fuller program to come great