Ocean liners

Ocean Liners became floating cities for those lucky enough to travel in an era before commercial flight was widely affordable. This book explores the technical, aesthetic, cultural and political factors that came together to define such an iconic mode of travel, from grand Victorian barges to luxurious Art Deco floating palaces and sleek Modernist post-war liners. The shift in passenger from those driven to immigrate, often by necessity, to the wealthy leisure traveller led to rapid transformations in promotion, architecture, interior design and even the engineering of the ships themselves, as companies and countries completed to provide the most luxurious, safest and fastest liners possible. Dan Finamore is Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Ghislaine Wood is Deputy Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England.