RICE UNIVERSITY Maritime Networks: The Oceanic Imaginary in the British Long Nineteenth Century by Mark Celeste A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE Helena Michie, Chair Agnes C. Arnold Professor in Humanities, Professor of English Betty Joseph Associate Professor of English Leo Costello Associate Professor of Art History HOUSTON, TEXAS April 2019 Copyright Mark Celeste 2019 ABSTRACT Maritime Networks: The Oceanic Imaginary in the British Long Nineteenth Century by Mark Celeste This project argues that maritime history and culture shape both the form and the content of the nineteenth-century British novel. Each chapter takes up a different historical genre of maritime writing—the shipwreck tale, the steamship story, the logbook, the sea chantey, and the ship surgeon’s manual—as a heuristic for oceanic reading. In recovering these maritime contexts, I track what I call the “oceanic imaginary”: not only how novels literally represent life on and around the ocean, but also how novels draw upon oceanic circulations and exchanges to imagine and craft complex literary systems. Specifically, I chart how novels incorporate historically specific maritime styles, allusions, and structures and how those texts, in so doing, register the flows and frictions of a radically networked world—a world connected and divided, more often than not, by water. As I show, we can read any novel as maritime fiction— regardless of whether the action takes place on land or at sea—if that novel registers the influence of maritime history upon its textual world. My project merges the historicist concerns of oceanic studies with the renewed critical attention to form. To track the influence of a historical maritime ethos upon literary style, I consider not only large-scale sociopolitical forms (such as the distributed network) but also sentence-level figurations (such as metonymy) that register the text’s engagement with culture and history. Maritime details and figurations provide more than just historical flavor; they serve, rather, as the formal anchors of historicity, the nodes iv that link the literary text to paraliterary movements across both land and sea. Taken together, my chapters surface how the literary marketplace overlaps with the political, social, economic, and ecological networks of the nineteenth-century maritime world. In tracing the distributed maritime networks of the oceanic imaginary, I also work to remap the literary landscape. In place of the traditional spatiotemporal divisions of Romanticism and Victorianism, I opt for a longer, wider period drawn together by water. As I see it, an oceanic nineteenth century spans multiple bodies of water, from the English Channel to the Caribbean to the Pacific to the South China Sea to the Suez Canal, and stretches from the second voyages of James Cook (1772–75) to the sinking of the Titanic (1912). Framed so expansively, an oceanic nineteenth century affords new literary historical connections—not only between land and sea, but also between certain peoples, places, goods, ideas, events, and technologies previously separated by longstanding trends in academic literary study. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For this project I am grateful for the support of the Department of English, the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Humanities Research Center at Rice: their generous travel funding allowed me to explore the archives at the British Library and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. I also would like to thank the special collections librarians at the National Maritime Museum’s Caird Library, who were always helpful (and patient) with my esoteric technical questions (“How many chronometers did the HMS St Albans have on board in 1807?”). Over the past several years I have been fortunate enough to draw upon an ever- growing network of mentors, colleagues, peers, family, and friends who have shaped my work in innumerable ways—my own “little knot of the navy,” as it were. Having now written a project about distributed webs of influence, I recognize how many lives become entangled in a single text. Here, then, I can only begin to express my gratitude to all of those who have guided me. Many thanks to my parents for so many years of love and support. Thanks, too, to Bob and Mary Evans, who welcomed me into their family with open arms, and to my grandpa for his unflagging encouragement: to this day he always reminds me to “focus on [my] studies.” And a special thanks to the furry members of my ever-growing family— Louis, Watson, and Oscar—who added so much joy to my life (even when you sat directly on what I was reading). I would not be at Rice were it not for Kevin Morrison, who first got me thinking about the archive and my own place within British nineteenth-century studies. At Rice, those intrepid souls of the Long Nineteenth Century Working Group—especially Sophia vi Hsu, Lindsey Chappell, Niffy Hargrave, Lindsay Graham, and Randi Mihajlovic—have repeatedly helped me expand my literary-historical horizons. Along with the LNC group, several others—Ryan Fong, Susan Lurie, Thad Logan, Joe Campana, and Alexander Regier, as well as Scott Pett, Clint Wilson, and Jade Hagan—helped me sharpen the style and substance of my writing. So too did working at SEL with Logan Browning and Becky Byron: I was proud to serve as a Diana Hobby Editorial Fellow for five years, and I hope that my work here reflects SEL’s high standards of accuracy, consistency, and clarity. Many of the above lent a helpful ear as I rambled on about the oceanic (and a few even laughed at my never-ending stream of maritime puns). And I never would have been able to complete this project without the support and camaraderie of Joe Carson and Evan Choate: thank you both for your wit and wisdom. I am deeply grateful for all that my committee has done for me. It was Leo Costello’s analysis of Turner’s Slave Ship that sparked my own investigation into the relationship between history and representation in Brontë’s Villette. And Leo (along with Katie White and Scott McGill) has helped keep me sane throughout the whole writing process: as both my third reader and my lead guitarist, Leo has shown me that the worlds of academia and rock ‘n’ roll are not mutually exclusive. Betty Joseph can pinpoint the weak spots in an argument like no other; her precise questions and comments have challenged me to rethink and redefine key parts of my project, and my work is all the better for it. Moreover, her enthusiasm is contagious: you have not read Robinson Crusoe until you have read Robinson Crusoe with Betty. And where would I be without Helena Michie? This project began in her “On or about 1860” course, and it has grown in many ways with her guidance. Although Helena’s name directly appears in only a few places in vii my chapters, on every page of this project I have attempted to think like Helena, to emulate her brilliant synthesis of clarity and complexity. For this project and beyond, I cannot thank Helena enough for all she has given me and taught me. She is everything that an advisor, a scholar, and a friend should be. In my first week at Rice I met the person who would make Houston home. Jane has stood by my side through the ups and downs of this project, celebrating with each archival discovery and keeping me grounded when the words just weren’t connecting as I wanted them to. She has been a sounding board for ideas half-baked, just right, and overcooked; she has remained ever patient and practical while I paced around the computer (“walking out an idea,” I called it; “procrastinating,” said Jane); and she has selflessly taken on and given up so much to keep our life together moving ahead, especially at those moments when my own head was in the clouds. I cannot thank her enough for all that she does for me and for our son. So Luke, when you read this one day, give your mama a big hug. And then I’ll teach you some sea chanteys. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgments v Figures ix Publication Notice x Introduction Toward an Oceanic Nineteenth Century 1 Chapter 1 Metonymic Chains: Shipwrecks, Slavery, and Networks in Villette 45 Chapter 2 The “Bond of the Sea”: Conrad, Coal, and Entropy 79 Chapter 3 Charting Persuasion 136 Chapter 4 Chanteying Bodies and Narrative Labor 188 Coda Ahoy! or, Looking for an Oceanic Reading 242 Bibliography 270 ix FIGURES Figure 1: the Austens’ naval network 26 Figure 2: the “bond of the sea” 27 Figures 3–5: Francis Austen, facing page entries for 29 June and 3 and 5 July 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans, AUS/3A, Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 162 Figures 6–7: Francis Austen, facing page entries for 11 and 19 July 1807, logbook of HM Ship St Albans, AUS/3A, Austen Family Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 163 Figure 8: Phiz [H. K. Browne], frontispiece to Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848), iii 222 x PUBLICATION NOTICE A modified portion of chapter 1 has been published in “The Brontës and Critical Interventions in Victorian Studies,” ed. Lauren Hoffer and Elizabeth Meadows, special issue, Victorian Review 42, 2 (Fall 2016): 343–60. 1 INTRODUCTION Toward an Oceanic Nineteenth Century This project explores how the nineteenth-century British novel not only invokes maritime history and culture in diffuse and complex ways, but also draws upon the textual networks built around the oceanic to imagine a global geopolitics.