Epilogue: Unravelling

As we sailed down the River Itchen towards the sea on that grey, drizzly June afternoon, unaccountably cool and wet after a prolonged episode of intense heat, we passed boats moored in midstream, patched and appropriated from their former uses to create ad hoc homes, afloat, neither part of the land nor yet of the open water. They constituted an aquatic ...

Symons at the Seaside

The poet, critic and short story writer Arthur Symons (1865–1945) was an inveterate traveller who wrote frequently about the Channel and the North Cornish coasts in poetry and prose. During the 1890s and 1900s, he was at the forefront of the pre-modernist avant-garde, and was an important conduit for the dissemination of decadent and impressionist art in England. As a landscape writer, he blended the quasi-Impressionist methods of painters such as Whistler with the decadent’s concern with the privileged subjectivity of the artist. This chapter examines the implications of such practices for his treatment of Cornwall, Sussex and Dieppe – including in neglected later writings such as ‘Sea Magic’ (1920).

Marine Bizarrerie: The Imaginative Biology of the Underwater Frontier

The great variety and radical metamorphoses of aquatic life forms attracted huge fascination during the nineteenth century, in part because they defied familiar paradigms of development and progress. In this chapter, Cohen explores how writers were inspired by such marine life-cycles to try out experiments in narrative prose, focusing in particular on the influence of marine variety on the depiction of psychological experience. Starting with Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus (1855), Cohen argues that Kingsley uses the life forms of the underwater kingdom to re-energise the poetic figure of metamorphosis, which, in his treatment, depends more upon natural science than myth. Cohen then shows how Kingsley translates marine metamorphosis into narrative experiment in The Water-Babies (1862), and creates an account of psychological experience that is more hallucinatory and phantasmagorical than developmental. Cohen finally suggests that marine metamorphosis has a similar impact on other authors, including Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet, all of whom stress the disturbing and disruptive possibilities of a psychological prose inspired by aquatic biology.

Saxon Shore to Celtic Coast: Diasporic Telegraphy in the Atlantic World

Little attention has been paid to the effect of the distinctly Celtic provenance of transatlantic telegraphy: the electrical bond of sympathy between America and Britain, the two great ‘Anglo-Saxon nations’, was facilitated by a cable connecting a series of points on Greater Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’ – Porthcurno in Cornwall, Valentia Island off County Kerry, and St. John’s, Newfoundland (an island largely populated by Irish Catholic migrants). The ‘annihilation of time and space’ is one of the most persistent clichés surrounding the popular perception of Victorian telecommunications, and yet the telegraph could also enforce the remoteness and isolation of coastal cultures. This chapter explores this topic by analysing representations which run counter to the dominant narrative of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ empire, instead mingling an archaic ‘Celtic Twilight’ with machine dreams of a networked modernity, as the industrial is brought into dramatic collision with the maritime picturesque.

Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’: Coastal and Fiscal Boundaries

Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’ (1860) offers a lyrical and dramatic re-inflection of an ill-fated investment made by the poet in the early 1840s. In this chapter, Tennyson’s poem, which frames a marital colloquy about financial misdealings with a resonant evocation of coastal scenery, is contextualised by reference to the nineteenth-century literary figure of the ‘confidence man’. The sociological ‘philosophy of money’ propounded by Georg Simmel and the Benjaminian concept of ‘caesura’ inflect this reading, while attention is also paid to the poem’s evocation of place as resonating with Tennyson’s response to the local coastal features of the Isle of Wight. This neglected text, the author suggests, is marked by what Angela Leighton more generally characterises as those Tennysonian ‘drowning places, of cavern and stream, of rumours, moans and melodies’ – places which offer a potent counterpoint to the poem’s overall theme of fiscal impropriety and compassionate forgiveness.

Encounters with Capitalism on R. L. Stevenson’s Early Coasts

This chapter pursues imaginative continuities in R. L. Stevenson’s writing of the coast across different locations, times and genres – from essays to fiction, from Scotland to California to the South Seas. In doing so it approaches the historical specificities of Stevenson’s shorelines via a back-way route, through the imaginative landscape of his prose – a route that might bring together topics more often neatly demarcated. The influence of Stevenson’s chronic ill health on his writing of the shore is considered, along with his disturbed and hostile attitude to late-Victorian capitalist modernity. The chapter touches on works including ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’ (1874), ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ (1880), ‘The Merry Men’ (1882), Treasure Island (1883) and The Wrecker (1892).

The Battle of Torquay: The Late Victorian Resort as Social Experiment

This chapter considers drink and temperance in Victorian ports and resorts. Where there was drink there would invariably be temperance; the visibility of drunkenness in the major British ports made them the focus of temperance reform. Temperance also figured in smaller towns, becoming one aspect of polite society in fashionable resorts and even financing public works. But was there anything specific about drink and temperance on the coast? Rob Shields once suggested that such ‘places on the margin’ might allow heterotopic reworkings of social order. The ‘Battle of Torquay’ between well-heeled Torquay society and working-class Salvation Army members suggests the coast as a site of transformation, but also that social control could be turned on abstainers as well as drinkers, producing less progressive places on the coast as well as more liberal ones.

Henry Brougham and the Invention of Cannes

This chapter traces the origin of Cannes as a resort, particularly for English visitors, to a chance visit in 1834 by Lord Brougham, ex-Lord Chancellor in Lord Grey’s reforming parliament of 1830 to 1834. It charts the progress and prosperity of Cannes through Brougham’s adoption of the place and his attracting members of the British political and social elite. Brougham’s relations with French politics and culture are a little-known element of his extraordinarily busy career as a politician, lawyer, educational reformer and inventor. The progress of both Brougham and Cannes is discussed by means of memoirs, letters and diaries written by Brougham himself, and by some of the many observers of his career and personality – as well as numerous Punch cartoons, poems and articles of the 1840s and 1850s.

Beyond the View: Reframing the Early Commercial Seaside Photograph

This chapter provides insight into an overlooked form of demotic photography, revealing rich seams of imagery and offering fresh perspectives on Victorian coastal representations. Shepherdson examines commercial seaside photographic practice from 1860 to 1920, offering a visual exposition of the British seaside through the refracted lens of the itinerant beach photographer. Despite their humble means of production, the photographs discussed are frequently evocative, drawing the viewer into a nostalgic past shaped by visual half-truths. Photographic half-truths too readily can become amplified from a view to the view and to the experience. This chapter examines the conventions, expectations and mythologisation of what seaside portrait photography of this period should present, and how these inevitably provide a highly mediated view of the actual Victorian seaside experience.

‘Unconscious of her own double appearance’: Fanny Burney’s Brighton

Better known for her literary representations of Georgian London, Fanny Burney’s final, post-revolutionary novel, The Wanderer (1814), extends a more complex and radical geography than her earlier works. Opening on a rough sea off the coast of France, the mysterious protagonist, Ellis/Juliet, feels the gravitational pull of Brighthelmstone (Brighton), the celebrated Regency seaside town that provides the setting for most of the novel. This chapter examines the representation of Brighton in The Wanderer, a novel in which the inhabitants of Brighthelmstone quite literally turn their back on the ocean, alongside Burney’s descriptions of the town in her private writings over a number of decades. What emerges from these different genres is a double vision of Brighton that counters contemporary and popular depictions of the town in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.