Douglas R. Burgess Jr. Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagination.

Abstract

When Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s massive iron-hulled, five-funneled Great Eastern steamship was launched in 1858, with thousands of spectators looking on, the ship traveled a mere one hundred feet before grinding to a halt, not to move again for over a year. It was the largest vessel ever built, a technological triumph, and an engineering marvel. It was also “more spectacle than ship” (118), a phrase that succinctly encapsulates one of the themes of this insightful, richly textured transnational history of the cultural meanings of steamships and steamship travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following in the footsteps of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1977), Douglas R. Burgess Jr.’s Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagination excavates the complex relationship between Victorians—not only in Britain, but also in the U.S. and Germany—and their steamships. Drawing on the observations of famous travelers such as Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, and Mark Twain, as well as ordinary voyagers, both male and female, Burgess explores the many and varied meanings of steamships and steamship travel for “spectators,” “tourists,” and “imperials.” This is not a history of steamships, but of how they were experienced and understood as “spectacles,” “solipsistic void[s]” (12), “avatars of statehood” (14), “bastions of Britishness” (16), “simulacrum[s] of rage” (23), “harbinger[s] of civilization” (224), “imperial avatar[s]” (250), and above all, “floating allegories” that represented “national pride, international amity, technological superiority . . . the march of civilization, or all of the above” (119).