Travelling by Sea in the Nineteenth Century: Interior Design in Victorian Passenger Ships
Travelling by Sea in the Nineteenth Century: Interior Design in Victorian Passenger Ships
Adam & Charles Black | 1972 | ISBN: 0713613025 | English | 184 pages | PDF | 21.3 MB
Basil Greenhill takes first-hand contemporary accounts, and numerous illustrations, many of them previously unpublished, to bring to life these hazardous early voyages. He deals principally with the development of the sailing ship and steamship in the nineteenth century, and delightfully portrays by both illustration and anecdote the gradual amelioration of facilities, accommodation and food on board. The days when the wealthy took their own furniture abroad, and the livestock, required for food on the voyage, were kept on deck, gradually change; the all-purpose saloons become libraries and music rooms, the wooden partitions give way to luxurious staterooms. And so the sailing ship becomes first a steamship, then a paddle steamer and finally a great ocean-going 'travelling palace'. By 1890 the interior decoration ofpassenger liners moved from the extravagant to the absurd. The photographs, rich in high Victoriana, have been selected from the National Maritime Museum's collection.