Our Floating Commonwealth

Drawing on personal diaries, correspondence, and printed sources, this chapter offers a history of reading on seaborne journeys to emigrant destinations in the nineteenth century. It explores the distinction between official sources, such as church and emigrant recruitment agencies, and the everyday experiences of emigrants themselves, as well as the cultural and educational differences that helped define them. Examining the different conditions between classes on board emigrant ships, it offers several personal accounts of the difficulties faced by reading at sea. The publication of shipboard newspapers, in both manuscript and print, provided a means of entertainment but also assisted social order on board many voyages. The deprivations of many, contrasted with the social advantages of the few, indicate that distinctions on land could be even more marked on the high seas. Nevertheless, the use of print and manuscript by representatives of almost all classes in the nineteenth century allowed for the imagination of cultural connection and the exercise of cultural memory far from home.