The devil’s highway

Urban anxieties and subaltern cultures in London’s sailortown, c.1850-1900

Brad Beaven

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781526177926
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526177919
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Between 1850 and 1900, Ratcliffe Highway was the pulse of maritime London. Sailors from every corner of the globe found solace, and sometimes trouble, in this bustling district. However, for social investigators, it was a place of fascination and fear as it harboured chaotic and dangerous 'exotic' communities. Sailortowns were transient, cosmopolitan and working class in character and provide us with an insight into class, race and gendered relations. They were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated and at other times clashed with one another. The book argues that despite these challenges sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban-maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• General editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Seaports and sailortowns
• 1 The curse of Ratcliffe Highway: Its reputation and its people in the nineteenth century
• 2 The imagined geography of Ratcliffe Highway
• 3 From Jolly Jack and Moll to proletarian Jack and Jill: The depictions of sailors and women in a nineteenth-century sailortown
• 4 Leisure in a sailortown
• 5 The inner world of the seafaring boarding house
• 6 Sex work and Ratcliffe Highway: Brothels, crime, and matriarchal networks
• 7 Male violence, class, and ethnicity in sailortown
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index