Home on the waves: domesticity and discomfort aboard the overland route steamship, 1842–1862

This article develops insight into the historical connections between corporeality and mobility, focusing upon the mobilities made possible by the shipping line P&O’s steamship service to the East in the mid nineteenth century. Passenger narratives of journeys made by this service describe an idiosyncratic domesticity which evokes a distinctive attempt to discursively frame steamship mobility as a safe, comfortable, normalised experience of a journey which was often anything but. This blasé attitude emphasises the role of bourgeois material and social practices as a means for the historical agents of globalisation to come to terms with steamship travel, extrapolated through ideas of domesticity which mutate and develop through their relation to the sea and the flux of mobility. This process of normalisation centres in travel narratives upon a preoccupation with the notion of comfort. The historical constitution of comfort is articulated through the body’s constitution as a site of struggle, locating the human subject in the dichotomy of the ship interior as a stable materiality and the exterior as a problematic outside revealing that the mobility of steamships was predicated upon the violence not just of speed but the suffering of subaltern labour which reproduced the problematic social relations of empire.