Abstract
This chapter examines the diary of Katherine Mulquin, which she kept during her 1873 voyage from Liverpool to Australia on board Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s SS Great Britain. Bringing to the diary the critical perspectives of literary, feminist, and maritime studies, it seeks to explore the contributions that can be made to the historical record by a textual genre often dismissed as fragmentary and ephemeral, and also to examine the role of historical actants that are often invisible in mainstream maritime scholarship. Focusing on the diary’s record of the intersection of shipboard and devotional culture and the nature of the temporary community created by Mulquin’s journey, the essay takes particular interest in the social freedoms enjoyed by the author on account of her religious calling, while also examining the ways in which she negotiates the coexisting authorities dictating the rule of cabin and cloister.
How little I thought […] that this day would see me on the wide ocean—though for long years the innate feeling of a foreign land and grave, haunted me.
—Diary of Sister Mary Paul Mulquin, SS Great Britain, 15 November 1873
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- 1.
See Kathleen Dunlop Kane, ‘Mulquin, Katherine (1842–1930)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mulquin-katherine-7681. Last accessed 19/09/2018. All references to Sister Mary Paul Mulquin’s diary are from a paginated transcript dated 03/10/83 held in the archive of the Presentation Sisters, Victoria. I am particularly grateful to Sr Bernadette Keating pbvm, Archivist (Victoria), and Sr Rosarie Lordan pbvm, Congregational Archivist (Cork) for their assistance. The original diary is kept in the care of the Presentation Sisters in Limerick. The Brunel Institute, Bristol, UK, also holds a paginated transcript, and this has been made accessible to the public with other items relating to the 1873 voyage (see ‘Voyage Box 41’).
- 2.
For the educational mission of the Presentation Order, established by Nano Nagle in 1775 for the purposes of educating the female poor, see Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney, and Deirdre Bennett, ‘The Legacy of a Pioneer of Female Education in Ireland: Tercentennial Considerations of Nano Nagle and Presentation Schooling’, History of Education 48.2 (2019), 197–211.
- 3.
Letter from J.F. Corbett to the Reverend Mother of the Presentation Convent at Limerick’, quoted in Kathleen Dunlop Kane, Adventure in Faith: The Presentation Sisters (Melbourne: Congregation of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1974), 8.
- 4.
See Catherine Byrne, ‘“Free, Compulsory and (Not) Secular”: The Failed Idea in Australian Education’, Journal of Religious History 37.1 (2013), 20–38. For how the Presentation Order developed a model of delivering a Catholic education within a state-funded non-denominational school system in Ireland, see Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck, ‘Sisters as Teachers in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Presentation Order’, in Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950: Convents, Classrooms and Colleges, ed. Deirdre Raftery and Elizabeth Smyth (London: Routledge, 2015), 77–98.
- 5.
Stephanie Burley posits three ‘notions of empire’ in this period: ‘firstly the British, secondly that of the Catholic Church, and finally a Woman’s Empire’. See ‘Engagement with Empires: Irish Catholic Female Religious Teachers in Colonial South Australia 1868–1901’, Irish Educational Studies 31.2 (2012), 175–90, 187.
- 6.
The restored museum ship is now permanently dry-docked in Bristol harbour. The adjoining research centre and library, the Brunel Institute, currently stores nearly one hundred diaries and letters written by the ship’s passengers. See https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/ Last accessed 16/06/2020. See also Nicholas Fogg, The Voyages of the Great Britain: Life at Sea in the World’s First Liner (London: Chatham Publishing, 2002).
- 7.
See Kane, Adventure in Faith, 7–97 and Rowan Strong, Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies c.1840 – c.1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 109–73 and 201–63. As Strong notes, the religious professionals on board Victorian emigrant ships were ‘predominantly male clergy of the various British and Irish Churches’ (201).
- 8.
See ‘Terra Incognita: The Nun in Nineteenth-Century England’, Past and Present 121 (1988), 110–40 (121). For how nuns reconciled their identities as reformers and individuals with the demands of convent life, see Deirdre Raftery, ‘Rebels with a Cause: Obedience, Resistance and Convent Life, 1800–1940’, History of Education 42.6 (2013), 729–44. See also Bart Hellinckx, Frank Simon, and Marc Depaepe, The Forgotten Contribution of the Teaching Sisters: A Historiographical Essay on the Educational Work of Catholic Women Religious in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009).
- 9.
Mary Heimann uses the term ‘a community apart’ in Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 100–36. Quoted by Strong, Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages, 134.
- 10.
The diary records the luxury of the saloon: ‘a beautiful lighted apartment, with mirrors all around and tables laden with every variety of viands, a range of every colour glasses suspended from the ceiling; the seats covered with crimson velvet, and everything that luxury could invent to make the meal agreeable’ (4).
- 11.
See Rebecca Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 48–51 (48).
- 12.
When first launched in July 1843, the SS Great Britain was the ‘largest (and fastest) ship in the entire world’. See Tyler Mills, ‘Size Matters: The Longest Museum Object in the UK?’, https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/about-us/blog/size-matters-%E2%80%93-longest-museum-object-uk, Last accessed 16/06/2020.
- 13.
For a classic study of ritual dynamics, namely those of separation, transition, and incorporation, see Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
- 14.
For ‘meta-emotional self-control’ as a feature of nineteenth-century diaries, see Anne-Marie Millim, The Victorian Diary: Authorship and Emotional Labour (London: Routledge, 2016), 1–26.
- 15.
All references to Robert Tyndall Bright’s diary are taken from the paginated reproduction of the hand-written document held in the Brunel Institute, Bristol, UK, Voyage Box 41. All transcriptions are my own. Bright died on board the SS Great Britain during a second voyage from Liverpool to Australia in 1875.
- 16.
This is a classic technique of European travel writing. See Richard White and Justine Greenwood, ‘Australia’, in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Carl Thompson (London: Routledge, 2016), 404–14.
- 17.
See Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 179.
- 18.
See Strong, Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages, 138.
- 19.
Strong, Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages, 241; see also 139. Given the long-standing sectarian divisions explained by Strong, it is likely that ‘Lives of the Saints’ colloquially references The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints by the Catholic priest and hagiographer Alban Butler (first published in London in 1756–59), rather than the fifteen-volume collection by the Anglican clergyman Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, whose first volumes appeared in 1872. Butler’s work was reprinted in a lavish twelve-volume edition in 1847 and regularly reprinted in Dublin and London throughout the nineteenth century.
- 20.
The website for the SS Great Britain counts 386 passengers and 143 crew for this voyage (Voyage 41), so Sister Mulquin’s estimate looks like an exaggeration. See https://globalstories.ssgreatbritain.org/_/voyage/85/ Last accessed 14/07/2020.
- 21.
See Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 22.
John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), xiii.
- 23.
See Robin Branch, ‘Handling a Crisis via a Combination of Human Initiative and Godly Direction: Insights from the Book of Ruth’, In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi 46.2 (2012): 11 pages.
- 24.
Plotz, Portable Property, 3–4.
- 25.
See ‘Rev. Blaubaum’, https://stkildashule.org.au/past-rabbis/rev-blaubaum/. Last accessed 16/11/2020. See also Hilary L. Rubinstein, ‘Blaubaum, Elias (1847–1904)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/blaubaum-elias-12802. Last accessed 16/11/2020.
- 26.
Amy L. Wink, She Left Nothing in Particular: The Autobiographical Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Diaries (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), xxv.
- 27.
See Kathryn Carter, ‘The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain’, Victorian Review 23.2 (1997), 251–67. Andrew Hassam pursues a taxonomy of ‘openness’ (based on the work of Jean Rousset) in ‘Reading Other People’s Diaries’, University of Toronto Quarterly 56.3 (1987), 435–42.
- 28.
See Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century Emigrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). See 55, 59–62, 173–5, and 89 in particular.
- 29.
See Wink, She Left Nothing in Particular, xv.
- 30.
See Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 3.
- 31.
See Plotz, Portable Property, 17 and 170–82.
- 32.
Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary, 2.
- 33.
See Simon J. Bronner, Crossing the Line: Violence, Play, and Drama in Naval Equator Traditions (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
- 34.
The ‘Grecian bend’ was an oft-satirised posture associated with the restrictive forms of the ladies’ fashions of the day: ‘an affected carriage of the body, in which it is bent forward from the hips’. See ‘Grecian bend’ in ‘Grecian, adj. and n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2021. Web. 17 May 2021.
- 35.
See Kathleen Ashley, ‘Accounts of Lives’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350-c.1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 437–53.
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Badcoe, T. (2021). Writing the Cabin as Cloister in the Diary of Sister Mary Paul Mulquin. In: Liebich, S., Publicover, L. (eds) Shipboard Literary Cultures. Maritime Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85339-6_7
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